Democracy as a Way to Social Compromise

In modern society, democracy as a symbol of social civilization and progress is cherished. Any government or organization, whether truly democratic or not, will claim that it is democratic while its opponents are not. However, as a historical notion, democracy does not possess the quality of absoluteness. In my view, democracy, in its original meaning, should be understood as a way to social compromise, whose aim is to guarantee a relatively fair political life. Translated from New Eyesight, 2004(3) by Dong Lihe     

Social Constructionism as a Sociological Approach

This essay concerns itself with a detailed presentation of the contents of two works on the construction of reality in society. One is Berger and Luckmann’s well-known book (The social construction of reality. Penguin Book, Harmondsworth, 1966); the other is the somewhat less known book on the same subject by Holzner (Reality construction in society. Schenkman Publishing Company, Cambridge, 1972; orig. 1968). These works deal with the social construction of shared symbolic and cognitive universes of meaning, and partake of the same theoretical sources, namely, Symbolic Interactionism and Schutz’s phenomenological sociology. They differ in their theoretical pursuits, however. Berger and Luckmann deal with what is necessary for the construction of a shared symbolic world, as society is endowed with both an objective and a subjective reality. Holzner is more interested in the social distribution and control of reality construction, and in the different types of reality constructs.     

World Government,Social Contract and Legitimacy

Abstract

The notion of world government is anathema to most political theorists. This is the case due to the arguments that a world government is infeasible, undesirable and unnecessary. This threefold argument is partly predicated on the assumption that in world politics the larger a geographical and political entity is, the greater the chance of it becoming unstable, ungovernable and, ultimately, illegitimate. On the one hand, if this assumption is correct, then a world government is likely to be illegitimate. On the other hand, if the assumption is wrong, then it is not far-fetched to consider a world government to be legitimate. Considering a world government that emerges from a global social contract, this paper contends that the legitimacy or illegitimacy of a world government and the extent to which it is legitimate or illegitimate depends on the kind of social contract that produces it and the extent to which it fulfils or fails to fulfil the conditions of the social contract.     

Feminism,Adaptive Preferences,and Social Contract Theory

Feminists have long been aware of the pathology and the dangers of what are now termed “adaptive preferences.” Adaptive preferences are preferences formed in unconscious response to oppression. Thinkers from each wave of feminism continue to confront the problem of women's internalization of their own oppression, that is, the problem of women forming their preferences within the confining and deforming space that patriarchy provides. All preferences are, in fact, formed in response to a (more or less) limited set of options, but not all preferences are unconscious, pathological responses to oppression. Feminist theory therefore requires a method for distinguishing all preferences from adaptive or deformed preferences. Social contract theory provides such a tool. Social contract theory models autonomous preference‐acquisition and retention at both the external level of causation and the internal level of justification. In doing so, social contract theory exposes preferences that do not meet those standards, acting as both a conceptual test that identifies adaptive preferences and as a practical tool for personal and social clarification. A social contract approach helps persons and societies to identify and to confront preferences rooted in unconscious response to oppression.     

Perceptions of and Attitudes toward Plagiarism and Factors Contributing to Plagiarism: a Review of Studies

The abundance of information technology and electronic resources for academic materials has contributed to the attention given to research on plagiarism from various perspectives. Among the issues that have attracted researchers’ attention are perceptions of plagiarism and attitudes toward plagiarism. This article presents a critical review of studies that have been conducted to examine staff’s and students’ perceptions of and attitudes toward plagiarism. It also presents a review of studies that have focused on factors contributing to plagiarism. Our review of studies reveals that most of the studies on perceptions of plagiarism and attitudes toward plagiarism lack an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the perceptions of plagiarism and other contextual, sociocultural and institutional variables, or the relationship between attitudes toward plagiarism and students’ perceptions of various forms of plagiarism. Although our review shows that various factors can contribute to plagiarism, there is no taxonomy that can account for all these factors. Some suggestions for future research are provided in this review article.     

Iranian Academia: Evolution after Revolution and Plagiarism as a Disorder

Recently, a few of scientific journals raise serious questions about scientific ethics and moral judgment of some of the Iranian government’s senior executives in their papers. Plagiarism, under any circumstances is not justified, and we do not intend to justify it in this note. However, we find it useful in understanding why otherwise respected, responsible individuals may engage in plagiarism by terse review of the history Iranian academia.     

The Abecedarian Approach to Social,Educational, and Health Disparities

This paper places the Abecedarian Approach in theoretical and historical context and reviews the results from three randomized controlled trials that have tested an experimental protocol designed to prevent cognitive disabilities and their social consequences. Results affirm that cognitive disabilities can be prevented in early childhood and subsequent academic achievement enhanced via a multipronged comprehensive approach that contains individualized and responsive early childhood education starting in early infancy, coupled with pediatric health care, good nutrition, and family-oriented social services. Additional important findings reveal that the most vulnerable children benefited the most and that cognitive gains were not at the expense of children’s socioemotional development or relationship to family. In general, mothers derived benefits in education and employment and teenage mothers especially benefited from their children participating in the early education treatment group. On the whole, the overall pattern of results supports a multidisciplinary, individualized, and long-term longitudinal perspective on human development and prevention science. Recent structural and functional brain imaging in the fifth decade of life shows persistent effects of intensive early educational treatment. Independent recent cost–benefit analysis in adulthood reveals a 7.3:1 return on investment with a 13.7% average annual rate of return. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications of the Abecedarian Approach to today’s high-risk population in the USA     

The Social Roles Questionnaire: A New Approach to Measuring Attitudes Toward Gender

Innovative research is constrained by instruments that assume gender to be captured by dichotomous categories. This article presents the results of two studies that document the psychometric properties of the Social Roles Questionnaire (SRQ), a new measure of gender role attitudes. A social constructivist perspective guided the development of the instrument that was designed not only to capture the diversity in people’s thinking about social roles for men and women, but also to identify attitudes that transcend binary categories. The article details the process of assessing reliability and validity based on data from 414 undergraduates. Findings revealed the SRQ is reliable and valid and that women were more likely than men to endorse egalitarian and gender transcendent beliefs. Additional possible uses of the SRQ are discussed.     

Multiculturalism as a Generic Approach to Counseling

According to a broad definition of culture, the multicultural perspective applies to all counseling relationships. According to this broad definition, multiculturalism may be described as a “fourth force” in counseling from its own theoretical perspective. The broad definition of culture is discussed and applied to the field of counseling. The advantages of defining culture broadly and of understanding multiculturalism as a generic approach to counseling are discussed and supported along with the consequences of alternative perspectives. La perspectiva multicultural se aplica a todas las relaciones consejeriales según una definición amplia de cultura. De esta manera el multi-culturalismo, desde su propia perspectiva, se puede describir coma “la cuarta fuerza” en la consejería. Se trata de la definición amplia de cultura y se aplica esta definición al campo deconsejería. Se discuten las ventajas de definir cultura de esa manera y de entender el multiculturalismo como una vía genérica a la consejería junto con las consecuencias de perspectivas alternativas.     

Implicit Motives as a Way to Understand Cognitive Processes

Interest in implicit processes is at an all-time high in psychology. Research on individual differences in implicit motivation has been conducted for decades and offers an important conceptual and empirical foundation for the growing interest in cognitive processes outside awareness. In this article, we review the past findings on the influence of implicit motivation on both basic and complex cognitive processes in the stages of attention and encoding as well as rehearsal, organization, and retrieval. Data from narrative essays as well as experimentally controlled studies demonstrate that individual differences in implicit motives have an influence on each step of learning and memory processes. Implicit motives influence the cognitive processing of motive-related information to facilitate desired affective end states.     

富民战略:通往社会公平之路

考察人类社会发展的历史进程 ,根据我国现处阶段和全面建设小康社会的奋斗目标 ,走向富民之路与通往社会公平之路具有高度的一致性 ,平等致富、公正致富和事后补偿三原则从起点到终点贯穿于实施富民战略和实现社会公平的全过程。本文阐述了实施富民战略的政治意蕴 ,并结合现实提出了有利于实现富民战略目标的政策选择     

A New Social Contract: Substituting the Neoliberal Public Policy Paradigm with a Participatory Public Policy Paradigm

Peter Hall introduced the concept of paradigm shifts into the public policy discourse. His account explains the seismic transition the world experienced in the 1980s. With this neoliberal paradigm the former social contract between the public leadership and the people unraveled and the future of humanity has been put at risk. To steer humanity back in the direction of a sustainable future, the author argues for a participatory public policy paradigm instituted as a reinvention of Rousseau’s social contract theory with tree distinct features that respond to the complexity of life in modern times.     

A Capability Approach to Justice as a Virtue

In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen argues for an approach to justice that is comparative and realization-based rather than transcendental and institutional. While Sen’s arguments for such an approach may not be as convincing as he thought, there are additional arguments for it, and one is that it provides a unique and valuable platform on which an account of justice as a virtue of social and political actors (including institutions and social movements) can be built. Hence new dimensions of comparison are opened up: some actors are better disposed and more successful than others at leading social change in the direction of greater justice. The main objective of this article is to use the capability approach to construct such an account. Six dimensions of acting justly are identified: (1) reducing capability shortfalls; (2) expanding capabilities for all; (3) saving the worst-off as a first step towards their full participation in economy and society, (4) which is also to be promoted by a system of entitlements protecting all from social exclusion; while (5) supporting the empowerment of those whose capabilities are to expand; and (6) respecting ethical values and legitimate procedures. I conclude by sketching some underlying moral psychology.     

关系研究的新取向：社会网络分析

社会网络分析（Social Network Analysis, SNA）是用社会实体之间的关系来描述、解释和预测社会现象的一种研究取向。SNA提供了深入探究社会环境特征及其对个体心理发展影响的一种方法。本文基于SNA的发展历程,依次介绍了中心性分析、小团体分析、位置分析、QAP以及统计模型法。SNA在社会学研究中得到了较多应用,近年来在心理学研究中开始受到重视。     

A Social Psychological Approach to Enduring Rivalries

The recent scholarly work on the concept of enduring rivalries offers a promising way to examine strategic interaction among dyads of states over extended periods of time. A focus on rivalry, and on the mechanisms that provide for such interaction, may offer a way to bridge existing theories of international relations that rely exclusively on structure or process. Unfortunately, the potential for theory-building has not been fully realized because research into rivalry has tended to be inductive. This paper seeks to rectify that problem by situating the rivalry concept within a social psychological approach to international relations. The rivalry concept is appropriately located in a theoretical approach that views the international system as a social system where actors are conditioned by mechanisms of competition and socialization.