The social sources of alienation

As a key concept in the social sciences, alienation refers to various mental states, often identified by such terms as ‘powerlessness’, ‘meaninglessness’, ‘anomic’, etc. Recent advances in sociological theory permit us to indicate systematically the social conditions linked to these states. A simple though exhaustive typology of the social sources of alienation’ is here presented. To illustrate the typology, examples of alienation are drawn from the writings of classical and contemporary social theorists.     

Austin on knowing

Philosophical anthropology is a broad‐gauged study of man drawing on the findings of empirical sciences and the humanities. The paper is intended as a tribute to one of the pioneers in this field. The first part outlines central features of Plessner's conception, focusing on man's instinctual deficiency and his ‘eccentric position’ in the world; man from this perspective is an ‘embodied’ creature in the dual sense of experiencing the world through his bodily organs and of ‘having’ a body and being able to reflect on his mundane situation. In social terms the perspective implies that man can find himself only through embodiment in institutional settings and role patterns ‐ settings which, however, remain open to reinterpretation and revision. Subsequently Plessner's outlook is compared and contrasted with alternative views of the human condition. According to Gehlen, man's instinctual deficiency an openness need to be corrected through institutional stability and the standardization of role structures. Reviewing leading writings of the ‘counter‐culture’, a final section explores contemporary anti‐institutional trends which see man as a fugitive from social constraints and his search for self‐fulfilment as antithetical to role patterns.     

Standing in for King Solomon: The Potential Contribution of Human Resource Management to the Implementation of the Stakeholder Approach

Abstract

Most contemporary theorists are in agreement that human resource management (HRM) has a special role to play in affecting the direction of organizational philosophy at the enterprise strategy level. Accordingly, the suggestion is made in this paper that HRM should spearhead the introduction of stakeholder management strategy concepts into organizational thinking and practices. Stakeholder management strategy can be defined as matching the organization's ‘values’ to the ‘values’ of its stakeholders and maximizing, over the long term, the net (social and economic) value added to society. The paper argues that HRM is potentially the best equipped, and strategically the best positioned, to anticipate, monitor and co-ordinate the effects of corporate policy on stakeholders' interests. It may thus serve as a major vehicle for mobilizing and maintaining the support of groups and individuals in the organization's internal and external environment who are parties to the social contract that legitimizes its continued existence and development.     

Functional foibles and the analysis of social change

Functional analysis is the major theoretical perspective of contemporary sociology. Although many fruitful studies of social structure have resulted from the application of this perspective, it has been notably sterile in coping with questions of social change. Two major shortcomings of the functionalist view of change are here examined. The first type of shortcoming might be called ‘evolutionary hangovers’. Under this heading we may include ‘functional ahistoricism’ and a ‘commitment to progress’. The second major shortcoming refers to weaknesses of functional theory per se — namely, a confusion of causal analysis with functional analysis, a lack of a theory of deviance, and an over‐emphasis on stable equilibrium models.     

Liminal Subjectivities and Religious Change: Circumscribing Giddens for the Study of Contemporary American Religion

Observers of American religion have noted significant changes in the last 50 years. Many of the current theories interpreting these changes cite the writings of the British social theorist Anthony Giddens. Such works suggest that we are living in a post-traditional, ‘late modern’ society in which self-identity, community, and the codes we live by are no longer ascribed, but reflexively made and re-made in continuous ‘projects of the self’. This article seeks to circumscribe late modernity theory for the study of contemporary religion, examining its usefulness and limitations. I argue that the disembedding structures of late modernity—while uneven in their effects on individuals from different social locations—create ‘liminal subjectivities’ among certain classes and groups. This state of being ‘betwixt and between’ social locations places individuals into new and sometimes ephemeral social networks, which in turn may result in them seeking out and experimenting with new religious groups, beliefs, and practices.     

Variations on the concept of traumatism: Traumatism,traumatic, trauma1

In this paper, the author outlines Freud's fundamental hypotheses concerning the concept of traumatism, then goes on to differentiate three notions (French being a particularly apposite language for such a venture): ‘traumatism’, ‘traumatic’ (in a substantive sense) and ‘trauma’. These three terms correspond to the three turning points in Freud's theory with respect to the concept of traumatism (1895‐97, 1920, 1938). The author evokes also the developments that are due to Ferenczi, particularly in his later writings (1928‐33), where he defi ned and discussed the question of ‘trauma’ in contemporary clinical practice; the author goes on to explore the different variations on this theme as regards mental functioning. He then defi nes, from a metapsychological point of view, the differences between ‘traumatisms’ that have been ‘worked over by secondary processes’, organised and governed by the pleasure‐unpleasure principle (‘traumatism’) and ‘early’ or ‘primary traumatisms’, which interfere with the process of binding the instinctual drives (‘trauma’); states of mind infl uenced by a traumatic imprint (‘traumatic’) are looked upon as belonging to both categories of the above mentioned traumatisms. The author illustrates his hypotheses with a clinical example.     

Social cognition: learning about what matters in the social world

Social‐cognitive principles underlie people's learning about what matters in the social world. The benefits of these social‐cognitive principles reveal essential aspects of what it means to be human. But these social‐cognitive principles also have inherent costs , which highlight what it means to be ‘only human’. Social cognition is ‘social’ because what is learned concerns the social world, and where the learning takes place is in the social world. This paper reviews the benefits and costs of both sides of social cognition: (1) the cognition of social psychology principles of organization, explanation, knowledge activation and use; and (2) the social psychology of cognition principles of shared reality role enactment, social positions and identities and internal audiences. The fact that there are inherent costs of the same social‐cognitive principles for which there are essential benefits affords a new perspective on social‐cognitive costs that is different from either the classic ‘conflict’ perspective or the more current ‘limited capacity’ and ‘dual‐process’ perspectives. This ‘trade‐off’ perspective deepens both our understanding of the true nature of these principles and our appreciation of our common humanity. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

变革公平研究评述

个体导向取代系统导向逐步成为组织变革研究的新焦点, 变革公平为个体导向研究提供了新的视角。变革公平反映了人们对组织变革事件推进过程公平性的认知。变革公平受到变革事件属性、变革领导、个体人格和个体的社会支持方面因素的制约, 并影响了员工对变革、组织以及工作的反应。变革公平的未来研究应着重本土化研究、前因变量和调节变量的探索以及开展纵向研究。     

Is culture a problem for social psychology?

Culture has been regarded as an anathema to psychology as an empiricist research tradition. Despite the explosive growth of research on culture and psychology over the last decade of the 20th century and its importance in Asian social psychology, the ontological and epistemological tension between psychology as a science and psychology as a cultural/historical discipline introduced in the writings of the thinkers of the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment still lingers on in the contemporary discourse of psychology. Clifford Geertz once ominously suggested that cultural psychology may have chewed more than it can. In the present paper, the interpretive turn in social science as exemplified by writings of Charles Taylor and Paul Ricoeur is reviewed and how it may impinge on the practice of Asian social psychology as an empirical science in methodological, epistemological, and ontological respects is discussed. It is argued here that the current practice of Asian social psychology is largely, though not entirely, free of the challenges mounted by these theorists, and that Asian social psychology has an advantage of not being encumbered by this traditional tension due to a monist ontology that is prevalent in Asia.     

组织情境中腐败的研究进展

随着公司各类丑闻和腐败事件的不断曝光,腐败受到管理学领域的广泛关注。本文基于腐败的定义,对个体腐败和组织腐败的影响因素加以回顾,从动态和多层次的视角总结了腐败从个体现象演变成群体或组织现象的过程模型,主要包括腐败常规化模型、道德推脱模型、社会认同模型和情绪诱发模型。最后,从探索其他影响因素及交互作用、对群体腐败提出假设并检验、进一步构建腐败理论三个方面对该领域的未来研究方向做出展望。     

Media and Metanoia: Documentary ‘Impact’ Through the Lens of Conversion

How do contemporary understandings of religious conversion and formation shed light on the “impact” and “effectiveness” of social change media? This paper evaluates three case studies, public television documentaries produced in the mid-1990s, to reflect on their social effect. Contemporary conversion theory provides a nuanced perspective with which to interpret the nature and circumstances under which social documentary—media created specifically so as to have a social effect—may in fact be said to have an “impact.” Innumerable media theorists have discredited market models where the uncritical television viewer gets off her couch straightaway and goes out to join a social movement in the same manner as she might buy a new brand of toothpaste, and yet an expectation of being able to demonstrate (often quantifiable) “results” insistently follows documentarians and public television outreach professionals. This “high-impact” model may be seen to be analogous to a “Road to Damascus” view of instant and permanent religious conversion, likewise discounted yet tenacious. It is an illuminating exercise to consider the operations of documentary media from the perspective of developmental conversion theorists such as Rambo, Tippett, Fowler, Lovland and Stark, and others. In this light, it is possible to understand both how these documentary case studies did create certain very particular kinds of change, as well as why most social documentaries, in truth, do not.     

分配不公正下的退缩行为：程序公正和互动公正的影响

以160名中学教师为被试,采用2×2的完全随机设计,以模拟故事（scenarios）的方法呈现刺激,研究了在职称评定中分配不公正的前提下,程序公正/不公正,互动公正/不公正对教师的退缩行为（消极怠工、拒绝帮助、离职、对校长的消极态度）的影响。结果表明,在分配不公正条件下：（1）程序公正、互动公正均影响教师的消极怠工程度;（2）程序公正、互动公正均影响教师的拒绝帮助行为程度,而且交互作用显著;（3）互动公正影响教师对上司的消极态度,程序公正无显著影响;（4）程序公正和互动公正对离职意愿影响均不显著     

The courage to stay in the moment

In 1934, James Strachey wrote that the active ingredient of psychoanalysis was the mutative interpretation. Even at this early date, Strachey observed that a relatively small proportion of the analytic literature was concerned with the mechanisms for change implicit in the analytic model.

In this paper, the author proposes two modifications of Strachey's ideas. One is that it is a moment, an event, and not an interpretation as such that creates change. The author terms this the ‘mutative moment’. The other modification is the proposal of an unconscious internal group matrix as an image of the structure of self. This is a self that is at one and the same time, internal and external, individual and social.

Building upon Freud, the object relations theorists, Kohut and the work of group analysts, the author pinpoints where and how change occurs in both individuals and in groups. The active ingredient of change is the focus on the here-and-now, a perspective common to both therapists and counsellors. As an understanding of the meaning of this focus develops, it becomes apparent that it takes courage to stay in the moment.     

Function and Functional Explanation in Social Capital Theory: A Philosophical Appraisal

Social capital is frequently offered up as a variable to explain such educational outcomes as academic attainment, drop-out rates and cognitive development. Yet, despite its popularity amongst social scientists, social capital theory remains the object of some scepticism, particularly in respect of its explanatory ambitions. I provide an account of some explanatory options available to social capital theorists, focussing on the functions ascribed to social capital and on how these are used as explanatory variables in educational theory. Two of the most influential writers in this field are Coleman and Bourdieu. I explore their commonalities and differences, both in respect of their writing and in respect of some of the many theorists they have influenced. I argue that social capital theorists have made substantial progress in responding to sceptically minded critics, but that significant questions remain, especially about the success of the more ambitious explanatory variants as these apply to educational outcomes—functional explanation in particular. Functional explanation, and its association with Bourdieu, is discussed in ‘Bourdieu and functional explanation’; thereafter I discuss the more modest ambition of identifying the functions associated with social capital. In ‘Coleman, intergenerational closure and educational outcomes’ I show how Coleman provides resources for revealing how social structure features in social explanation in an educational context, and in ‘Inequality, class and ethnicity’ I suggest that some of the questions raised in his account are most satisfactorily responded to by educational theorists who adopt Bourdieu’s emphasis on social class and inequality.     

A Typology of Ideological Attitudes Towards Social Solidarity and Social Control

Research on ideological attitudes has identified two main dimensions that refer to two fundamental features of group organization: social solidarity and social control. In response to prior research that has studied their relationship mainly from a correlational perspective, this paper introduces a social reality model based on psychological functionality of ideological attitudes. Social position variables (education, income and material vulnerability) and insecurity variables (fear of crime and distrust) are used to predict the interplay between ideological attitudes towards social solidarity and social control. Using K‐means cluster analysis, a typology with four patterns of support for solidarity and control (‘socials’, ‘repressives’, ‘minimalists’ and ‘social‐repressives’) was created, on the basis of representative survey data for the UK, France and Germany (N = 7034). Results from logistic regression analyses show that the proposed social reality model explains membership in typology categories, with similar results across the three countries. Overall, the model underscores the social origins of ideological attitudes as functional responses to perceived social reality. The paper illustrates how the social psychological study of ideological attitudes may be enriched by a typological approach that examines patterns of attitudes rather than single dimensions. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Representing disability in charity promotions

Social psychological research in relation to charity advertising in the area of disability has attempted to distinguish between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ images and the way in which these are related to their fundraising potential. In the light of the critique of charity advertising offered by a number of disability theorists, it is suggested that this perspective would be enhanced by consideration of the attitudes of disabled people to charity advertisements. A study is reported that compares the attitudes of disabled and non‐disabled people to two charity advertisements. Differences between these two groups are reported and in the light of the nature of these it is suggested that what are considered to constitute ‘positive images’ is unlikely to be consensual. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Defining the term new in new employee research

Researchers and managers use the term ‘new’ to describe organizational members who have recently joined an organization, but how long are arriving recruits considered ‘new employees’, and what factors drive this new‐to‐old transition? In this paper I hypothesize that co‐worker perceptions of an individual's ‘newness’ in the organization are a function of (1) the individual's relative position in the firm's tenure distribution and (2) the frequency of interaction between the rater and the individual. To evaluate these hypotheses I conducted a sociometric survey among four entrepreneurial organizations (N = 200), asking respondents to evaluate the newness of their co‐workers. The results support both hypotheses, but suggest that relative tenure (defined as a member's percentile rank in the firm's tenure distribution) is the strongest predictor of organizational newness perceptions. More specifically, ‘new employees’ are the 30% of the organization with the lowest tenure. This means that organizational growth and turnover have a major effect on how long arriving recruits are considered new employees, which in turn has implications for new employee research in areas like socialization, mentoring, training and career development.     

Neglected perspectives in work and organizational psychology

In this editorial we suggest that work and organizational psychology has tended to overlook the insights to be gained from ‘alternative’ perspectives such as interpretivism, critical theory and postmodernism, in favour of a focus on more normative and positivist studies of organizational life. While paradigmatic conformity is argued by some to have the benefit of providing a coherent knowledge base, we argue that it may also lead to an overly restrictive viewpoint and constrained practices. In any case, such a focus may be partly a default option rather than a conscious choice, fostered by assumptions of what constitutes ‘good’ research which may not be appropriate to (and even discriminate against) other perspectives. As a consequence, this special section aims to illustrate the insights to be gained from adopting such ‘alternative’ perspectives on topics of contemporary interest to work and organizational psychologists, such as retention of women in the workforce, collaborative (cross‐agency) work, advanced technological change and stress at work.     

‘A higher degree of scholarship’: Pagans and the language of scholarly authority

Through an exploration of the intellectual history and contemporary writings of the Pagan movement, this study will examine the lineage of ‘knowledge-based’ authority in contemporary Paganism. In particular, it will illuminate how the intellectual lineage of Pagan writings helped contemporary writers respond to a moment of crisis in Paganism, and it will provide an explanation for the traditionalised use of the rhetorical modes of scholarly authority among Pagan writers.     

Beyond sensorimotor segregation: On mirror neurons and social affordance space tracking

Mirror neuron research has come a long way since the early 1990s, and many theorists are now stressing the heterogeneity and complexity of the sensorimotor properties of fronto-parietal circuits. However, core aspects of the initial ‘mirror mechanism’ theory, i.e. the idea of a symmetric encapsulated mirroring function translating sensory action perceptions into motor formats, still appears to be shaping much of the debate. This article challenges the empirical plausibility of the sensorimotor segregation implicit in the original mirror metaphor. It is proposed instead that the teleological organization found in the broader fronto-parietal circuits might be inherently sensorimotor. Thus the idea of an independent ‘purely perceptual’ goal understanding process is questioned. Further, it is hypothesized that the often asymmetric, heterogeneous and contextually modulated mirror and canonical neurons support a function of multisensory mapping and tracking of the perceiving agents affordance space. Such a shift in the interpretative framework offers a different theoretical handle on how sensorimotor processes might ground various aspects of intentional action choice and social cognition. Mirror neurons would under the proposed “social affordance model” be seen as dynamic parts of larger circuits, which support tracking of currently shared and competing action possibilities. These circuits support action selection processes—but also our understanding of the options and action potentials that we and perhaps others have in the affordance space. In terms of social cognition ‘mirror’ circuits might thus help us understand not only the intentional actions others are actually performing—but also what they could have done, did not do and might do shortly.