Collective Behavior

Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical perspective in sociology that addresses the manner in which society is created and maintained through face-to-face, repeated, meaningful interactions among individuals. This article surveys past theory and research in the interactionist tradition. It first provides an overview of three main trajectories in symbolic interactionist thought, focusing on the work of Herbert Blumer (the Chicago School), Manford Kuhn (the Iowa School), and Sheldon Stryker (the Indiana School). A brief summary of each figure's general perspective on symbolic interactionism is given, followed by a discussion of the research methodology that defines and distinguishes each. The article then reviews and assesses the empirical research that has emerged from these trajectories over the past decades, beginning with the classical studies of the mid-twentieth century and culminating in research programs that have emerged in the contemporary era. Specifically, this article surveys significant contributions to the symbolic interactionist literature in areas such as dramaturgy, cultural studies, postmodernism, gender/status/power, self and identity, collective behavior and social movements, and social context and the environment. It concludes with a discussion of future directions symbolic interactionists should take in continuing to develop the field.

This research, conducted by the author when a Senior Researcher at Newcastle University, UK, was funded by a UK governance organisation to help them assess, integrate and improve their understanding of the governed population.

ABSTRACT: Governance organisations have been urged to develop more holistic evidence-based approaches with partners to better deal with issues affecting the governed population. This presupposes an understanding of the population, yet there has been little research work addressing how governance organisations come to understand their governed population, nor how this understanding can be improved upon within such organisations.

This case study examined in-depth how understanding of a governed population was developed within one UK local governance organisation and it explored how such understanding might be developed and improved through more holistic and evidence-based organisational learning within the organisation and its governance partnerships.

The research methodology involved placement within the governance organisation, participant observations on several projects and innovative initiatives, observations within, across, and outside the organisation, and also interviews with varied key stakeholders.

The study examined:

- stakeholder engagement and networks
- current and varied understandings of the population
- mechanisms actually used for developing understandings
- the influence of context on organisational learning

and analysed these to arrive at a recommendations to improve organisational understanding of the governed population.

In the case studied, significant strengths were found: including innovative past learning trials for development, extensive ongoing networking activities, and many varied and accumulating quantitative datasets available across partnerships.

However, entrenched organisational approaches and practices constrained the development of holistic evidence-based understanding, for instance: the absence of systematic maintained collective learning processes; weak recording and forgetting of understandings; methodological exclusion of stakeholders from the development of understanding; the relative neglect of qualitative data, explanations, investigations, interpretations, and reflexivity; and also implicit organisational acceptance of such limitations and low aspirations.

Nonetheless, untapped opportunities existed to enable change including: latent practitioner knowledge and innovative management champions, the desire for improvement and raised aspirations within learning networks, and the development potential of alterative learning approaches.

It was concluded that more holistic evidence-based understanding was possible, but required new learning approaches beyond those then in use in both local government or academia.   

Recommendations are made to utilise and develop improved organisational learning approaches trialed and reported in the case study.

It is argued that the case study findings, conclusions, and recommendations may be applicable to other similar local governance organisations and partnerships that seek to better understand local populations, services and interventions.

The work was also submitted for, and awarded, an MPhil (at Newcastle University, supervised by Prof. Patsy Healy)

This article argues for the analytical potentials of the concept of spontaneity in our effort to understand critically the socio-spatial dynamics of Athens, but especially the contemporary collective protest actions in the city. Such critical understanding emerges as a significant task given the current urgency to grasp the capitalist crisis and the collective reactions to it. However, taking into account the re-configuration of extreme-Right violence in the streets of Athens, the article attempts to revisit the Marxist dichotomy between spontaneity and non-spontaneity. Via an anthropological critique of this distinction, the paper suggests an additional point of focus beyond spontaneity.

The chapter discusses the process of industrialization, development, and modernization in the margins of Europe, by comparing practices of governmentality and the nation-building projects of Romania and Norway. The theoretical framework draws on Freudian psychoanalysis, feminist psychoanalysis, Michel Foucault, Benedict Anderson, Actor-Network Theory, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory.

"Corruption has become one of the most popular topics in the social scientific disciplines. However, there is a lack of interdisciplinary communication about corruption. Models developed by different
academic disciplines are often isolated from each other. The purpose of this paper is to review several major approaches to corruption and draw them closer to each other. Most studies of corruption fall
into three major categories: (i) rational-actor models where corruption is viewed as resulting from cost/benefit analysis of individual actors; (ii) structural models that focus on external forces that determine corruption; and (iii) relational models that emphasize social interactions and networks among corrupt actors. Focusing on actors’ behavior and the social context, this article explains corruption concepts taken from sociology, economics, organization studies, political science, social anthropology, and social psychology."

While Social Network Analysis (SNA) has become an accepted research tool in historical studies in the last decades, actual theoretical foundations for the approach to depict and analyse past social realities in the form of nodes and ties have remained as many-voiced and sometimes under-determined as in other fields of network analysis. A theoretical framework from which historical network analysis may benefit is the systems theory established by the sociologist Niklas LUHMANN (1927–1998). In Luhmann´s theory, social systems are systems of communication; in modern society, Luhmann identified several differentiated communication systems such as politics, religion or economy. For the analysis of Byzantine society, we combine Luhmannʼs framework with the concepts of SNA: we understand ties between nodes as potential channels of communication which can pertain to any communication system. And while communications between individuals in a specific institutional framework such as state administration or the church may primarily pertain to one system, we have to account for “multiplex” ties of communication and an overlap of various communication systems on the same set of nodes (who, in Luhmannʼs theory, are not per se part of any of these social systems, which only consist of communications). This approach also enables us either to examine communication ties (their density, distribution patterns, etc.) of one system separately or to concentrate on the structural position of individuals within the general social framework. Thus, we demonstrate that Luhmann can provide a coherent and at the same time flexible framework for historical network analysis.

The aim of this paper is to review and critically evaluate relevant archaeological evidence regarding recent claims about the social complexity of Late Neolithic societies in the Central Balkans. Theory suggests that the relevant evidence should be related to population size, economic intensification, ranking, and craft specialisation. It is concluded that, although there are indications
that inequalities existed and also demographic potential for organisational complexity, there is no unambiguous evidence that institutionalised inequality in the form of complex polities such as chiefdoms or states ever developed.

“Fifty Baha’i Principles of Unity: A Paradigm of Social Salvation.”
Christopher Buck

Baha’i Studies Review 18 (2012): 3–44. (Published June 23, 2015)
(2017 update, with original Persian & Arabic primary sources added.)

[Presented at Princeton University (February 21, 2014).]

ABSTRACT
The Baha’i Faith, a young world religion, offers principles of unity—from family relations to international relations—as a paradigm for social salvation. These principles may be studied within the analytic prism of an ‘illness/cure’ approach to religious soteriologies—a conceptual model in the phenomenology of religions popularized by Stephen Prothero. World religions are systems of salvation, liberation or harmony. Their respective offers of salvation, liberation or harmony respond directly to the human predicament, as defined by each religion. If humanity is plagued by sin, then Christianity’s redemptive offer of salvation from sin makes perfect sense. Early Buddhism’s offer of liberation—from the fundamental problem of suffering—also fits perfectly in this model. In the Baha’i religion, the plight facing the world is profound estrangement at all levels of society. Therefore the social salvation that the Baha’i religion offers are precepts and practices that augment unity and harmony, as Baha’u’llah proclaims: ‘The distinguishing feature that marketh the pre-eminent character of this Supreme Revelation consisteth in that We have … blotted out from the pages of God’s holy Book whatsoever hath been the cause of strife, of malice and mischief amongst the children of men, and have … laid down the essential prerequisites of concord, of understanding, of complete and enduring unity’. After reviewing Raymond Piper’s typology, fifty (50) Baha’i principles of unity are enumerated and briefly described: types of unity propounded by Baha’u’llah in the Tablet of Unity (Lawḥ-i Ittiḥād); types of unity forecast by ‘Abdu’l-Baha in the ‘The Seven Candles of Unity’; and types of unity articulated by Shoghi Effendi—a splendid array of understudied elements of the Baha’i social gospel. Since the present study is a first extended survey—of the notion of unity vis-à-vis the Baha’i Faith, based squarely on authenticated primary sources—results are preliminary, not definitive.

* This updated version (1 November 2017) is dedicated to the loving memory of the present writer’s eldest son, Jason Buck (b. August 20, 1978), who—suddenly, but peacefully—passed away on 26 October 2017, at the young age of 39. See https://www.facebook.com/jason.buck.180.

A. Testa, “Doing Research on Festivals: Cui Bono?”. In Journal of Festive Studies (ISSN 2641-9939), n. 1/1, 2019, pp. 5–10

With this opinion piece, the author highlights certain methodological and thematic patterns characterizing his ten-year-long research into festivals, public rituals, and collective events, completing such recapitulation with a statement of ongoing commitment as well as with ideas about possible further scholarly developments. His final aim is to show how research about festivals, festivities, and festive events has benefited and still benefits from being conducted on the basis of a methodology involving critical comparison, intensive and in-depth ethnography, and a thorough study of historical sources.

„There are few theoretical approaches to which historian respond so negatively as to the explanation of historical processes by such theories“, the German historian Rainer Waltz states most accurately in his study on „Theories of Social Evolution and History“; there he also presents two main causes for this rejection: a moral one, the perversion of evolutionary thinking in so-called Social Darwinist theories in the 19th and 20th centuries, and a scientific one, the fear of a biologistic interpretation of human history by adopting evolutionary models (Walz, 2004). This distinguishes historical studies from other social sciences and humanities such as anthropology or sociology and even other historical disciplines such as archaeology, where evolutionary models have become part of the methodological toolkit (Renfrew & Bahn, 2008; for a rare example from the field of history of literature cf. Moretti, 2009).
Although most historians are reluctant to adopt evolutionary models (yet alone in their mathematized or sociobiologist form) for the interpretation of human past (respectively the larger or smaller period of time they are specialised in), terms such as “evolution” and concepts of evolutionary thinking such as “adaption” or “selection” are used in numerous descriptions of historical events and processes, albeit often in a metaphorical way (Walz, 2004). At the same time it is evident that major developments in human history such as the emergence of the human kind itself, of human culture and of complex social structures such as states as well as phenomena of long duration (up to the scale of “Big History” from the Big Bang until present times as it has been attempted in the last decades, Spier 2010) cannot be explained without the help of evolutionary concepts (cf. Blute, 2010; Voland, 2009); but again, these subjects refer mainly to the fields of evolutionary biologists and psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists or (prehistoric) archaeologists (cf. Yoffee, 2004). Some specialists from these disciplines have also tried to adapt such concepts for the entire human history beyond its “beginnings”, but have equally found mixed reception among historians, especially if they try to demonstrate some kind of progress in the development of humanity as for instance Steven Pinker has done most recently in his study on “Why Violence has declined” (Pinker, 2011; see also Atran, 2002; Boyd & Richerson, 2005; Morris, 2010).
In contrast to this (non)-use of evolutionary concepts for historical studies, we intend to demonstrate the benefit of a complex evolutionary approach for the analysis of a specific period of late medieval/early modern history between 1200 and 1500 CE, which has been attributed central importance for the so-called “Rise of the West”, since it saw the beginning of European overseas expansion at its end (cf. Goldstone, 2009; Morris, 2010).
In the “calamitous” 14th century, as Barbara Tuchman called it (1978), the medieval world entered a period of severe crisis in demography, economy, politics and religion. This crisis took hold in all regions, ranging from China in the East to England in the West. Even before the catastrophic pandemic of the Black Death (1346-1352), deteriorating climatic conditions had ended the period of demographic and economic expansion that began in the 10th century (Behringer, 2007; Atwell, 2001; Benedictow, 2004; Brook, 2010).
The local and regional impacts and consequences of these general crisis-laden conditions may have differed; outcomes ranged from actual societal collapse to the emergence of powerful new polities. But these conditions provide a framework for global perspective on this period and allow us to use the 14th century-crisis as a field of “natural experiments of history”, as Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson have called them (Diamond & Robinson, 2011); accordingly, we analyse how similar crisis phenomena influenced the development of societies with different (or similar) traditions, religions, institutions, geographies or ecologies (cf. also Borsch, 2005). In particular, we will analyse and compare five polities in the “Old World”, England, Hungary, Byzantium, Egypt and China, of which three disappeared around the end of this period due to the expansion of the most successful newly emerged Ottoman Empire (Byzantium in 1453, Mamluk Egypt in 1517, Hungary in 1526/1541; cf. also Preiser-Kapeller, 2011).
In order to be able to capture variations and complexities within this sample, we adopt concepts and tools provided by the field of complexity science. We understand complex systems as large networks of individual components, whose interactions at the microscopic level produce “complex” changing patterns of behaviour of the whole system on the macroscopic level. In the last decades, historians and social scientists also tried to use concepts of complexity theory for the description of phenomena in their own fields, but again often only in a “metaphoric” way (Gaddis, 2002; Hatcher & Bailey, 2001). Less frequently, though, historians have tried to make use of the mathematical foundations of complexity theory or of quantitative tools provided by this field (Kiel & Elliott, 1997; Preiser-Kapeller, 2012). Recent scholarship has implemented some of these tools especially for the construction of macro-models of socio-economic development (Goldstone, 1991; Turchin, 2003; Turchin & Nefedov, 2009).
In addition, we combine complexity theory with the analytical framework of “systems theory” developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) in order to capture the interdependencies between politics, economy and religion within a polity and with the political, economic and ecological environment (Luhmann, 1997; Becker & Reinhardt-Becker, 2001; Becker, 2004). Luhmann´s theory is valuable for our analysis in various aspects; it makes us aware of the reduction of environmental and social complexity which is reflected in our historical sources, and it provides a framework to approach complex mechanisms within and the dependencies between various social spheres and their environment. Its evolutionary aspects have also been analysed by Walz (2004). In addition, we employ methods and tools of network analysis, which allow us to capture, analyse and model linkages and cause-effect correlations in society, economy, politics and religion on the macro- and micro-level down to groups and individuals (Gould, 2003; Lemercier, 2005).
Overall, our analytical approach allows us to capture the “diversité véritable” without losing track of essential commonalities (the “strange parallels”, as Victor Liebermann has called them, 2009) with regard to the transformation of polities and societies and their adaption to this “first world crisis”. Thereby, the value of a framework of evolutionary dynamics for the exploration of human history will be demonstrated

References
Atran, S. (2002). In Gods We Trust. The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Atwell, W. S. (2001). Volcanism and Short-Term Climatic Change in East Asian and World History, c. 1200–1699. Journal of World History 12/1, 29-98.
Becker, F. & Reinhardt-Becker, E. (2001). Systemtheorie. Eine Einführung für die Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag.
Becker, F. (Ed.). (2004). Geschichte und Systemtheorie. Exemplarische Fallstudien. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag.
Behringer, W. (2007). Kulturgeschichte des Klimas. Von der Eiszeit bis zur globalen Erwärmung. Munich: C. H. Beck.
Benedictow, O. J. (2004). The Black Death 1346–1353. The Complete History. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Blute, M. (2010). Darwinian Sociocultural Evolution. Solutions to Dilemmas in Cultural and Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Borsch, St. J. (2005). The Black Death in Egypt and England. A Comparative Study. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Boyd, R. & Richerson, P. J. (2005). The Origin and Evolution of Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brook, T. (2010). The troubled Empire. China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Cambridge (Mass.), London: Harvard University Press.
Diamond, J. & Robinson, J. A. (Eds.). (2011). Natural Experiments of History. Cambridge (Mass.), London: Harvard University Press.
Gaddis, J. L. (2002). The Landscape of History. How Historians map the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldstone, J. A. (1991). Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goldstone, J. A. (2009). Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History, 1500–1850. New York: Mcgraw-Hill Higher Education.
Gould, R. V. (2003). Uses of Network Tools in Comparative Historical Research. In: J. Mahoney & D. Rueschemeyer (Eds.). Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (p. 241-269). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hatcher, J. & Bailey, M. (2001). Modelling the Middle Ages. The History and Theory of England´s Economic Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kiel, L. D. & Elliott, E. (Eds.). (1997). Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences. Foundations and Applications. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Lemercier, Cl. (2005). Analyse de réseaux et histoire. Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 52/2, 88-112.
Lieberman, L. (2009). Strange Parallels. Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830. Vol. 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Luhmann, N. (1997). Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. 2 Vols., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Moretti, F. (2009). Kurven, Karten, Stammbäume. Abstrakte Modelle für die Literaturgeschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Morris, I. (2010). Why The West Rules For Now: The Patterns of History and what they reveal about the Future. London: Profile Books.
Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of our Nature. Why Violence has declined. London: Viking.
Preiser-Kapeller...

"Mots clés : métropolisation du temps, rythme social, rendez-vous collectif, urbanise temporaire, urbanité événementielle
Si la métropole est polychronique, l'isolement d'un de ses rythmes permet de nuancer les théories de la modernité liquide et de la ville en continu. A travers l'étude diachronique de trois événements festifs métropolitains à Paris et Bruxelles, nous proposons une lecture de l'histoire des villes par ses temps partagés, une description des mécanismes par lesquels les rythmes sociaux émergent et une analyse du rôle qu'ils jouent dans la production de l'espace et de la société.

Réinterrogé par le concept de rendez-vous collectifs, les rythmes sociaux urbains apparaissent comme une co-production entre un urbanisme temporaire et une urbanité événementielle. Ces deux éléments forment le couple explicatif du rôle spatial et social des rythmes événementiels dans la métropole. Les institutions municipales instrumentalisent l'urbanisme temporaire pour signifier des unités du temps social qui permettent d'organiser le rassemblement et de produire matériellement du lieu. L'urbanité événementielle est le résultat collectif des interprétations individuelles des événements comme signe temporel. Elle produit du lien social et construit un sens commun des lieux. La répétition calendaire de la rencontre entre l'urbanisme temporaire et l'urbanité événementielle provient d'une part, de la décision politique de maintenir et d'instrumentaliser le rendez-vous dans l'organisation de la métropole, d'autre part de la synchronisation rythmique des individus qui organisent leurs temps sociaux pour participer au rassemblement. La rationalité axiologique qui anime les participants est motivée par la valorisation des interactions de face-à-face et la production de liens sociaux associatifs, dans une société interrogée par la différenciation et la désynchronisation des modes de vie quotidiens. L'individu ne se passe toujours pas de rassemblements rituels, dans des lieux précis et selon des temporalités saisonnières.

En dépit de leurs racines historiques profondes, ces rythmes collectifs sont adaptés à la métropole, à la complexification de ses territoires, à l'hybridation de ses représentations culturelles et à l'individualisation de ses temporalités sociales. Au-delà, le concept de rythme est une théorie de morphologie sociale qui rend compte du fonctionnement des sociétés de façon multiscalaire et dynamique. Cette approche rythmique s'inscrit dans les théories sociologiques intermédiaires qui lient l'individu et le collectif, l'usager et l'habitant des villes et ses institutions, la morphologie spatiale et temporelle de groupements humains de toutes tailles. Le fait métropolitain, influençant et influencé par l'individu et le global, constitue une échelle mésociale heuristique pour l'analyse des sociétés modernes.

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Keywords: metropolization of time, social rhythms, planned gatherings, temporary urbanism, event sociability

The city is polychronic. We qualify liquid modernity theory and the twenty-four hour city model by isolating one of its rhythms. Based on a diachronic study of three festive urban events in Paris and Brussels, we propose a new reading of urban history through planned gatherings, a description of the mechanisms by which social rhythms emerge and the role they play in building urban space and society. The planned gathering concept is applied to urban social rhythms, which are seen as the product of an interaction between temporary urbanism and event sociability. Institutions instrumentalise temporary urbanism to signify units of social time, and implicitly plan gatherings by producing a conducive physical place. Event sociability is the collective result of individual interpretations of this sign, which produce social ties and create a corresponding social place. These places become periodic through political decisions to reproduce the sign, as well as individuals' efforts to organize and synchronize their time to participate. The resultant planned gatherings are in turn instrumentalized to organize the metropolis.

In a society whose groups are increasingly differentiated and desynchronized, face-to-face interaction and the production of discretionary social ties are highly valued. Individuals apply value rationality and thus continue to participate in ritual, seasonal gatherings at fixed places and times. Despite historical continuities, these rhythms are specifically modern in that they have adapted to the contemporary city's territorial complexity, cultural hybridization, and idividualized temporality. Using the semantic duality of rhythm (flowing / periodic) we outline a more general theory of social morphology which provides a multiscale, dynamic account of societies, covering interactions between the individual and the collective, inhabitants and institutions, the spatial and temporal patterns in human groups of varying size. The mesosocial metropolitan scale is situated between the indivual and the global."

In this chapter, we review the study of emotions in social movements. We begin by situating the absence of emotions in Social Movement studies in relation to Sociology as a field more broadly. Then we review how scholars have theorized emotions in relation to social movement mobilization, commitment, and demobilization. Following this, we draw from studies within the field of Social Movements and the field of Sociology of Emotions to provide some useful ways to distinguish emotions analytically. Next, we draw from Cognitive Social Science, particularly literature on grounded cognition, to emphasize the need for situated analyses of emotion. Finally, we close with a few fruitful paths forward in the study of emotion in Social Movements.

This is the pre-print working paper version, see the full printed version: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/v025/25.3.onuch.html

The protests that began in Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv on 21 Novem- ber 2013 and became known as the EuroMaidan took even seasoned observers of East European politics by surprise. By December, around 800,000 “ordinary” Ukrainians were demonstrating in Kyiv and other cities across the country. The rapid rise of mass protests, especially at a time when the world’s established democracies are struggling with growing political apathy and declining voter turnout, appears as what Timur Kuran has called one of those moments “when out of never you have a revolution.”1 These episodes may help the cause of democ- racy, but they can also destabilize countries by polarizing citizens and boosting extremists. In order to gauge what a protest outbreak will mean for a country’s democratic prospects, it is crucial to understand who the bulk of the protesters are and what goals they hope to achieve. Here follows original survey data that may help to shed light on Euro- Maidan protest participation and its implications for democratic hopes in Ukraine.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the analysis of human groups as distributed cognitive systems, and to examine the related question of whether socially distributed cognition (SDC) amounts to group level cognition. In my discussion, I first break down the complex notion of SDC into a ‘joint’, a ‘distributive’, and a ‘shared’ aspect. Then, I highlight organization-dependence, novelty, and autonomy as central features associated with the ‘emergent’ qualities of SDC. Finally, I survey five theoretical ‘stances’ that have been invoked to identify the presence of cognitive organization at the group level, and thus bridge the suggested inferential gap between SDC and group cognition: (i) the intentional stance, (ii) the information processing stance, (iii) the computational stance, (iv) the ecological stance, and (v) the dynamical stance.

A perennial concern in frame analysis is explaining how frames structure perception and persuade audiences. In this paper, we suggest that the distinction between personal culture and public culture offers a productive way forward. We propose an approach centered on an analytic contrast between schemas, which we define as a form of personal culture, and frames, which we define as a form of public culture. We develop an “evocation model” of the structure and function of frames. In the model, frames are conceived as material assemblages that activate a network of schemas, thereby evoking a response when people are exposed to them. We discuss how the proposed model extends, and clarifies, extant approaches, and consider new directions for future research.

A consideration of ethnographic data, computational model results, and archaeological data suggest that changes in family-level economics coincident with subsistence intensification contributed to the emergence of social complexity among prehistoric hunter–gatherers in eastern North America by creating the conditions for a “rich get richer” scenario. Ethnographic data are used to construct a general computational model representing key person- and family-level behaviors, constraints, and decisions affecting the size and composition of hunter–gatherer families. Results from model experiments suggest that lowering the age at which children make a significant contribution to subsistence (e.g., through the broadening of the diet to include the kinds of mass-harvested, “low quality” foods that were increasingly exploited during the Archaic and Woodland periods) relaxes constraints on family size and makes large, polygynous families economically viable. Positive feedbacks between the productive and reproductive potentials of larger families produce right-tailed distributions of family size and “wealth” when the productive age of children is low and polygyny is incentivized. Size data from over 800 prehistoric residential structures suggest right-tailed distributions of family size were present during the Late Archaic through Middle Woodland periods. These distributions would have provided variability in family-based status that permitted the emergence of hereditary social distinctions.

Edited version of published paper presented at 'Is Black and Red Dead?' Conference, Centre for the Study of Social and Global and Justice (CSSGJ) University of Nottingham, 7-8 September, 2009

https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/110943

This paper, which engages with the critical lines of feminism and sociolinguistics and employs interviews as its central methodology, introduces readers to the ways Palestinian proverbs reinforce a contemporary Palestinian ideology of gender difference based on subjugating women to men’s authority. The paper analyses Palestinian proverbs about women alongside contemporary Palestinian practices including: arranged marriage; objectifying women in the marriage market; the silencing of women’s voices and honour killing. It is argued here that the Israeli occupation perpetuates the production and consumption of the masculine construction of gender roles as a marker of difference and adherence to familial and national belonging. Feminist views of gender equality espoused by feminist activists, NGO personnel and younger generations are taken to signify immoral symbols of imperial and Western cultures, incompatible with national and religious discourse.

‘What I miss the most’, I hear my friend saying from across our table, ‘is the ability we once had to imagine. I feel this has been taken away from us, you know?’ It is an unusually cold Athenian morning in the early winter of 2011, two-and-a-half years from the moment when the IMF, the EU and the ECB came to the rescue of the rapidly faltering Greek economy. Ever since, the landscape surrounding us has kept changing beyond recognition. Excruciating austerity measures, a seething political scene and anger mingled with despair on the everyday level now constitute a reality mostly alien to what any of us would have been used to only a few years ago. This fluidity, one could be forgiven for expecting, should have allowed people’s imagination to run wild. And yet more and more people seem to find themselves in my friend’s position, with the militant optimism during and after the December 2008 revolt seemingly giving way to the cold realisation of an unprecedented series of consecutive dead-ends. Why is this happening?

Paper presented at 'Practicing Theory - ASCA International Workshop and Conference 2011', Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, 2nd-4th March 2011 https://asca.uva.nl/programme/archive-conferences/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory.html?1583659550967

Garland, C. (2014) ‘As Barriers Fall, Contingency Becomes Possibility: Protest Resisting and Escaping Containment and Categorization’, Part II Identity, Embodiment and Categorisation in Eds. Lamond, I. and Spracklen, K. 'Protests as Events: Politics, Activism and Leisure (London: Rowman & Littlefield International) Hardback ISBN/9781783480760 Paperback ISBN/978-1-78348-077-7 eBook ISBN/978-1-78348-078-4 

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783480760

The present paper proposes an integrative account of social forms of practical irrationality and corresponding disruptions of individual and group-level emotion regulation. I will especially focus on disruptions in emotion regulation by means of collaborative agential and doxastic akrasia. I begin by distinguishing mutual, communal and collaborative forms of akrasia. Such a taxonomy seems all the more needed as, rather surprisingly, in the face of huge philosophical interest in analysing the possibility, structure and mechanisms of individual practical irrationality, with very little exception, there are no comparable accounts of social and collaborative cases. However, I believe that, if it is true that individual akrasia is, in the long run, harmful for those who entertain it, this is even more so in social contexts. I will illustrate this point by drawing on various small group settings, and explore a number of socio-psychological mechanisms underlying collaborative irrationality, in particular groupthink. Specifically, I suggest that in collaborative cases there is what I call a spiralling of practical irrationality at play. I will argue that this is typically correlated and indeed partly due to biases in individual members' affect control and eventually the group's with whom the members identify.

[Published version now available (open access).] In this paper I want to introduce and defend what I call the "subject mode account" of collective intentionality. I propose to understand collectives from joint attention dyads over small informal groups of various types to organizations, institutions and political entities such as nation states, in terms of their self-awareness. On the subject mode account, the self-consciousness of such collectives is constitutive for their being. More precisely, their self-representation as subjects of joint theoretical and practical positions towards the world – rather than as objects of such positions – makes them what they are. Members of such collectives represent each other as co-subjects of such positions and thus represent the world from the point of view of the collective.

People constantly talk about past experiences. Burgeoning psychologi- cal research has examined the role of communication in remembering by placing rememberers in conversational settings. In reviewing this work, we first discuss the benefits of collaborative remembering (trans- active memory and collaborative facilitation) and its costs (collaborative inhibition, information sampling biases, and audience tuning). We next examine how conversational remembering affects subsequent memory. Here, we address influences on listeners’ memory through social conta- gion, resistance to such influences, and then retrieval/reexposure effects on either speaker or listener, with a focus on retrieval-induced forget- ting. Extending the perspective beyond single interactions, we consider work that has explored how the above effects can spread across networks of several individuals. We also explore how a speaker’s motive to form a shared reality with listeners can moderate conversational effects on memory. Finally, we discuss how these various conversational effects may promote the formation of collective memories.

This paper analyses the way that figures were used to support two kinds of accounts of the riots of August 2011 prevalent in media coverage and in pronouncements by government ministers. The first of these accounts suggested that the rioters were typically characterised by uncivilized predispositions. The second kind of account suggested that damage to property was typically irrational or indiscriminate. These accounts echo discredited ‘convergence’ and ‘submergence’ explanations in early crowd psychology. We show that the ‘convergence’ explanation – that the rioters were typically ‘career criminals’ or gang-members – was based on arrest figures, treating as unproblematic the circular way that such data was produced (with those already known to the police most likely to be identified and arrested). The ‘submergence account – the suggestion that violence was typically indiscriminate or irrational – was based in part on grouping together attacks on properties in different districts; those areas where 'anyone and anything' was attacked were affluent districts where the target was the rich district itself. Like their academic counterparts, the two types of accounts of the riots of August 2011 are profoundly ideological, for they serve to render the riots marginal and meaningless rather than indicative of wider problems in society.

Social scientists and folk views have long had it that there is an association between religiosity and prosocial behaviour, but hard evidence for such a relationship is limited. Studies show that religiosity is correlated with self-reported prosociality, however this relationship is not very clear when it comes to observed prosocial behaviours. Experimental studies reveal a link between religious priming and prosocial behaviours, and remarkably such effects hold irrespectively of degrees of religiosity. Building on and combining the strengths of previous field designs, I report here the results of a field experiment in Mauritius examining the effects of religious environments on cooperation in a naturalistic setting. These results were consistent with previous findings that religious cues may increase cooperation. Importantly, this effect was not dependent on degrees of prior religiosity. Plausible interpretations of such effects are discussed.

Autores (p.o. de firma): Páez, D., Fernández, I. y Martín Beristain, C.
Título: Catástrofes, traumas y conductas colectivas: Procesos y efectos culturales
Ref.  0revista : 0  Libro: C. SANJUAN (Coord.) Catástrofes y Ayudas de Emergencia.
Clave: CL Volumen: Páginas, inicial: final: Fecha: 2001
Editorial (si libro):  Icaria                                                                     
Lugar de publicación: Barcelona


Autores (p.o. de firma): Páez, D., Fernández, I. y Martín Beristain, C.
Título: Apoyo Social en las catástrofes: Implicaciones prácticas
Ref.  0revista : 0  Libro: C. SANJUAN (Coord.). Catástrofes y Ayudas de Emergencia
Clave: CL Volumen: Páginas, inicial: final: Fecha: 2001
Editorial (si libro):  Icaria                                                                     
Lugar de publicación: Barcelona

"Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that “the good [that] men do separately is small compared with what they may do collectively” (Isaacson 2004). The ability to join with others in groups to accomplish goals collectively that would hopelessly overwhelm the time, energy, and resources of individuals is indeed one of the greatest assets of our species. In the history of humankind, groups have been among the greatest workers, builders, producers, protectors, entertainers, explorers, discoverers, planners, problem-solvers, and decision-makers. During the late 19th and early 20th century, many social scientists employed the notorious “group mind” idiom to express the sensible idea that groups can function as the seats of cognition, intelligence, and agency in their own right (Allport 1968; Wilson 2004). In their quest to stress (rightly) that group phenomena are something “over and above” the sum of individual contributions, a fondness for vitalist metaphors led them to believe (wrongly) that genuine group cognition must be the result of tapping into individualistically inaccessible, “holistic” forces. Today, inspired in part by historically unparalleled forms of mass collaboration enabled by the internet, it has once again become popular to speak of collective intelligence, group agency, or even the emergence of a “global brain” (cf. the wiki-edited MIT Handbook of Collective Intelligence).

In this chapter, I review some contemporary developments of the idea of group cognition, defined broadly as the collaborative performance of cognitive tasks such as remembering, problem-solving, decision-making, or verbal creativity for the purpose of producing a group-level outcome. My discussion serves a two-fold purpose. First, by discussing how the idea of group cognition can be operationalized, I seek to show that we can retain some central theoretical insights of the “group mind” thesis without succumbing to its eccentric metaphysical overtones. Second, by providing a useful array of generalizable taxonomic resources, I hope to foster greater degrees of mutual awareness among insufficiently integrated areas of research on group performance."

At first the EuroMaidan, seemed like something we have seen before: the ‘Orange Revolution’. We were brought back to 23 November 2004, when observers of Ukrainian politics were shocked when they witnessed a sea of ‘ordinary’ Ukrainians, joined activists and opposition party members in a moment of mass mobilization. While Ukraine had previously experienced several smaller protest events, such as the 1986 Chornobyl disaster protests, the 1991 Revolution on the Granite, and the 2001 Ukraine Without Kuchma protests, the sheer size of the 2004 protests and the fact that participation quickly shifted to a majority made of ‘ordinary’ Ukrainians was unprecedented (Onuch 2014a). First heralded as a democratic awakening and the first step to Europeanization, but after the election of Viktor Yanukovych (the villain of the ‘Orange Revolution’) as president in 2010, academics agreed that for a variety of reasons, including protest fatigue, Ukraine would not see another mass-­‐‑mobilization any time soon (Meirowitz and Tucker 2013). Thus, when the November 2013 protests grew to 800,000, political scientists had to go back to the drawing board. It was happening again, and again they did not see it coming. While it seemed like déjà vu, it was very different and not least because it was happening with the events of 2004 as the precedent. This chapter’s aim is to analyse and contextualizes the EuroMaidan as a critical case of mass protest, by placing it in comparative reference to the ‘Orange Revolution’. First, the chapter will briefly outline the data used. Second, the chapter will highlight some key writing on mobilization and activism in Ukraine and identify potential contributions of this analysis to the literature. The majority of the text will assess the EuroMaidan mobilization. Employing interview and focus groups data collected by the author, we will be able to contrast and compare the parameters and trajectories of two protest waves (duration, location, and geographical diffusion); the central actors involved in the mobilization process and their main claims. At each step highlighting the convergence and divergence between the 2004 and 2013/14 mass mobilizations. Finally, once the main boundaries of the mobilization have been mapped out, the chapter will address the recent focus among the media and social scientists alike on: the rise of the right, the rise of violence, and the ‘new’ role of social media in the EuroMaidan mobilizations. This initial analysis seeks to provide a blue print for larger studies of the EuroMaidan mobilizations and in the conclusion will highlight key hypotheses for future testing.