This article examines how individuals are reflexive beings who interpret the world in relation to things that matter to them, and how charitable acts are evaluated and embedded in their lives with different degrees of meaning and importance. Rather than framing the discussion of charitable practices in terms of an altruism/egoism binary or imputing motivations and values to social structures, the article explains how reflexivity is an important and neglected dimension of social practices, and how it interacts with sympathy, sentiments and discourses to shape giving. The study also shows that there are different modes of reflexivity, which have varied effects on charity and volunteering.
Scientific thought is characterized in general as methodical and rational. I would like to present here an opposing view, which treats science as a non-systematic activity, where serendipity, tinkering and imitation, rather than so-called rational thought, characterizes it. All these kinds of acts, which are considered to be a-rational, are related to an evolutionary view of science. Here I deal with a version of evolutionary epistemology as applied to science, integrated with the concept of ‘meme’. Richard Dawkins, who coined the term, treats memes as units of information that propagate in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain. Memetics is the counterpart of genetics in the cultural arena. In its application to science, it deals with the manner in which memes/ideas spread in scientific communities. Memes (ideas) replicate through imitation. Examples of this phenomenon in science are illustrated by some historical cases. In particular, I deal with the evolution of theories of ‘internal symmetries’ in particle physics.
Social media are said to offer seemingly endless ways of connecting with people in a variety of online spaces. The mediated form that such communication takes has re-opened many theoretical debates regarding the status of relationships that are organized and managed online. In this article we seek to explore these issues through the lens of topological thinking, and particularly through the work of Kurt Lewin (1890–1947). Lewin’s topological psychology has recently featured in the social sciences as a way of overcoming some of the, frankly unhelpful, dualistic thinking that features commonly in psychology (e.g. subject–object, mind–body, individual–social). Topological thought focuses on the spatial distribution of psychological experience, and therefore offers a social perspective not reliant on traditional notions of internalized psychological states and traits. The kind of spatiality at work though is not one that relies on Euclidean fixity, but one that draws out notions of stretching, moulding, bending and flexing. Space is seen not as a fixed property, but rather the form that psychological activity takes through connections and relations with others. In this article we seek to explore the potential value in characterizing social media activity topologically. This involves analysing people’s experiences with social media, and how topological concerns of boundaries, connections and thresholds work (or not) in and through social media. Furthermore, the focus is not only on extensive properties of social media, but rather on how intensive processes are actualized and distributed in and through mediation.
Recent developments in the service sector have led sociologists to suggest that customers are increasingly encouraged to ‘work’ for service organizations. This article develops the hypothesis that the clients who work in this service sector may experience an emotional dimension to their work. In support of this hypothesis, a revision of the notion of ‘emotion work’ is proposed on the basis of a study on the problematic usages of a phone interface service supplied by a telecommunications operator. The study made use of a group of genuine calls that were transcribed and coded; utterances were described objectively regarding pitch and intensity; finally, a statistical method for detecting sequential patterns was applied. The results suggest that clients respond emotionally to usability problems, and that their emotions unfold according to a recurrent sequential structure. Goffman’s ‘remedial interchange’ provides the point of reference for the interpretation, which leads to the suggestion that the emotional patterns revealed are of a social origin, though not socially situated.
Information systems (IS) may not improve organizational and/or companies’ performance if they are not used by stakeholders. Understanding why people continue or discontinue use of IS is crucial in increasing users’ acceptance. This article aims to analyze what is needed to perpetuate use of Facebook as a social media channel. Factors such as confirmation, perceived usefulness, social influence, satisfaction and attitude were tested for their impact on continued use intention in relation to Facebook. The inter-relations between the aforementioned constructs are tested with empirical data collected from 732 European university students. We found that social influence essentially had no effect within the model, so it seems that intention to continue using Facebook is affected mainly by stakeholders’/users’ attitude toward using this platform. Although we based the research on the IS Continuance Model, this article has extended its dimensions by incorporating (1) social influence and (2) attitude, offering the first investigation of continued use intention in relation to Facebook by testing the inter-relations between the aforementioned factors.
In the French-language literature on education, the notion of the inheritor, popularized by Bourdieu and Passeron’s 1964 book, is still commonly used to evoke the ideal-typical student from the most socially advantaged backgrounds. But does it truly capture what is at stake today in the reproduction of social inequalities at school? Several societal and educational changes prompt us to take a new look at the theories and concepts used to explain and interpret the modes in which social inequalities reproduce themselves. To condense and evoke what characterizes today’s privileged student, we have extended the metaphor of the ‘insider’, asking ourselves what are the adjustments this new language would suggest for the theory of social reproduction. The issue of access to elite institutions in France is an empirical illustration of the heuristic potential of such an approach.
We argue that critical evaluation achieves the reflexivity needed to facilitate collaboration by proposing boundary-negotiating artefacts to configure a joint action domain. Those objects become mediators for innovation by triggering controversies, conceived preventatively via an organized extension of what Boltanski calls ‘truth tests’ to ‘reality tests’ so that they dynamize ongoing affairs. However, critical evaluation must also anticipate actors’ reappropriation of boundary-negotiating artefacts in the effort to protect their rights, stakes or room for manoeuvre. Three scenarios commonly arise: avoidance or utopian projecting, enactment of inverted reality tests, and disavowal through role exchange. The article develops these propositions through the reconstruction of a modified theory-based evaluation of a collaborative research programme. The programme set out to explore how evidence from health research could be used rapidly and effectively in the context of practical problems and organizational challenges, so an internal evaluation was set up to facilitate learning during the process. What ensued, however, was a loss of trust between partners, resolved only by repositioning the evaluation as a reflective academic study, reducing its reflexive capacity to intervene on the level of activity and organizational integration. We conclude that doing successful critical evaluation and, more generally, achieving political pertinence for social scientific discourses depends on creating the conditions in which actors are able to take the risks and share the costs associated with the enhanced level of reflexivity necessary to engage in collective action as well as knowledge production.
There is general consensus in the study of science, and especially research policy studies, that a wave of profound change has struck academic science in the past decades. Central parts of this change are increased competition, growing demands of relevance and excellence, and managerialism reforms in institutions and policy systems. The underpinning thesis of this article is that, if seen from the perspective of individual scientists, these changes are exogenous and lead to greater environmental complexity and uncertainty, which in turn induces or forces individuals towards strategic planning and organizing in order to maintain control over their own research programs. Recent empirical studies have made various worthy contributions to the understanding of the macro-level (institutions, policy and funding systems, and broader epistemic developments) and the micro-level (individual and group behavior) developments of the social system of science, but there is a lack of comprehensive conceptual tools for analysis of change and its effect on individual scientists. This article takes the first steps towards developing a conceptual scheme for use in empirical studies of the (strategic) response of individual scientists to exogenous change, based on an adaptation of Resource Dependence Theory (RDT). The intended theoretical contribution builds on conceptualization of the individual researcher as crucially able to act rationally and strategically in the face of potentially conflicting demands from a growingly unpredictable environment. Defining a basic framework for a broad future research program, the article adds to the knowledge about the recent changes to the academic research system and calls for renewed interest in organizing in science and an analysis of the complex social system of science from the perspective of its smallest performing units: individuals.