Postface: Brokerage as social practice

2021 ◽  
pp. 092137402110340
Author(s):  
Thomas Bierschenk
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Ideal Type ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Classical Definition ◽  
Equal Distance ◽  
Social Type ◽  
Strong Concept

This postface argues for a narrow and analytically strong concept of brokerage, which is oriented towards the classical definition by Boissevain. His ideal type emphasises the agency of brokers who actively pursue their own interests and act at an equal distance to the groups between which they mediate. Furthermore, the text argues for thinking of brokerage as a bundle of social practices instead of as brokers in the sense of a social type. While few social actors are fully-fledged brokers, many of them engage in brokerage.

scholarly journals Why Collaborative Robots Must Be Social (and even Emotional) Actors

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 270-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerstin Fischer ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Expression ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Collaborative Robots ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Emotional Displays ◽  
Emotional Display

In this article, I address the question whether or not robots should be social actors and suggest that we do not have much choice but to construe collaborative robots as social actors. Social cues, including emotional displays, serve coordination functions in human interaction and therefore have to be used, even by robots, in order for long-term collaboration to succeed. While robots lack the experiential basis of emotional display, also in human interaction much emotional expression is part of conventional social practice; if robots are to participate in such social practices, they need to produce such signals as well. I conclude that if we aim to share our social spaces with robots, they better be social actors, which may even include the display of emotions. This finding is of empirical as well as philosophical relevance because it shifts the ethical discussion away from the question, how social collaborative robots should be, to the question, what kinds of human-robot collaborations we want.

scholarly journals Practices of Piety: An Alternative Approach to the Study of Islamic Movements

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 520
Author(s):  
Aaron Rock-Singer
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Gender Segregation ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Islamic Movements ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Do So

This article challenges the dominant organization-centered focus of the study of Islamic movements, and argues for a turn towards social practice. To do so, it traces the rise and spread of Egypt’s leading Salafi movement, Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya (e. 1926) and its role in popularizing a series of distinct practices between 1940 and 1990. Based on the full run of this movement’s magazine, al-Hadi al-Nabawi (the Prophetic Guide, 1936–66) and al-Tawhid (Monolatry, 1973–93), the article explores the conditions in which practices such as praying in shoes and bareheaded, gender segregation and the cultivation of a fist-length beard were both politically viable and strategically advantageous. In doing so, it not only casts light on the trajectory of this movement, but also shows how and why the articulation and performance of distinct social practices are central to how Islamic movements shape society.

scholarly journals Renewal Paradigm of the Ldii Community in Kediri

Al-Albab ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Hilmi Muhammadiyah
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Organizational Identity ◽  
Community Organizations ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Social Actors

This article attempts to explore the dynamics of the Lembaga Dakwah Islam Indonesia (LDII) or Indonesian Islamic Da'wah Institution community in Kediri of East Java, Indonesia in maintaining its existence, transforming and seeing the processes, patterns, and strategies that developed by the LDII. The article elaborates how social actors of the LDII carry out social practices continuously so that LDII can continue to survive, develop, and reform the doctrine and religious identity paradigm and its organizational identity thus being accepted by people in the region. The role of the actors as the agent in changing the character of the movement is discussed in this work. They have made strategies including building closeness to the authorities, building attitudes of openness, changing the image of the organization, strengthening identity, establishing dialogue and public cooperation with the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI – Majelis Ulama Indonesia) that positioning LDII as a heretical and splinter organization, and establishing cooperation with Religious Community Organizations (Ormas) that are considered mainstream, such as NU (Nahdatul Ulama) and Muhammadiyah. This work attempts to provide materials and considerations in dealing with the issue of raising between the flow of splinters and established groups.

From discursive event to discourse événement: A case study of political–religious discourse in Argentina

2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 677-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Eduardo Bonnin
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Political Field ◽  
Strategic Goals ◽  
The Government

This article analyses the interplay between religious and political discourse in Argentina, departing from a case study located in the transition towards democracy in April 1987, and conveying military, political and religious discourse within the conflicts that surrounded the government of President Raúl R. Alfonsín (1983–9). It involved a well-established discourse genre, the homily, within an historical social practice, the Catholic mass; but it also included the violation of one of its main features, namely the monopoly of talk by priests. By challenging the bishop’s monologue, questioned by the homily, President Alfonsín settled a different ground, neither religious nor political, an événement that required urgent recontextualization. The mass media, as privileged agents representing contemporary social practices, recontextualized it through the multimodal attribution of genericity (Adam and Heidmann, 2004) in two main different ways, ascribing the event to either a religious or political field. In both cases, as we will see later, the actions and actors involved were consistently opposite, responding to different ideological motivations and with different strategic goals. The underlying theoretical point is that genres are not fixed in events, but rather represent ways of dealing with the exceptionality of événements that bring out ideological or political tensions.

Holism and individualism in history and social science

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajeev Bhargava
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
Individual Actions

Methodological individualists such as Mill, Weber, Schumpeter, Popper, Hayek and Elster argue that all social facts must be explained wholly and exhaustively in terms of the actions, beliefs and desires of individuals. On the other hand, methodological holists, such as Durkheim and Marx, tend in their explanations to bypass individual action. Within this debate, better arguments exist for the view that explanations of social phenomena without the beliefs and desires of agents are deficient. If this is so, individualists appear to have a distinct edge over their adversaries. Indeed, a consensus exists among philosophers and social scientists that holism is implausible or false and individualism, when carefully formulated, is trivially true. Holists challenge this consensus by first arguing that caricatured formulations of holism that ignore human action must be set aside. They then ask us to re-examine the nature of human action. Action is distinguished from mere behaviour by its intentional character. This much is uncontested between individualists and holists. But against the individualist contention that intentions exist as only psychological states in the heads of individuals, the holist argues that they also lie directly embedded in irreducible social practices, and that the identification of any intention is impossible without examining the social context within which agents think and act. Holists find nothing wrong with the need to unravel the motivations of individuals, but they contend that these motivations cannot be individuated without appeal to the wider beliefs and practices of the community. For instance, the acquiescence of oppressed workers may take the form not of total submission but subtle negotiation that yields them sub-optimal benefits. Insensitivity to social context may blind us to this. Besides, it is not a matter of individual beliefs and preferences that this strategy is adopted. That decisions are taken by subtle strategies of negotiation rather than by explicit bargaining, deployment of force or use of high moral principles is a matter of social practice irreducible to the conscious action of individuals. Two conclusions follow if the holist claim is true. First, that a reference to a social entity is inescapable even when social facts are explained in terms of individual actions, because of the necessary presence of a social ingredient in all individual intentions and actions. Second, a reference to individual actions is not even necessary when social facts are explained or understood in terms of social practices. Thus, the individualist view that explanation in social science must rely wholly and exhaustively on individual entities is hotly contested and is not as uncontroversial or trivial as it appears.

“Presenting Our Perspective”: Recontextualizing Youths’ Experiences of Hypercriminalization Through Media Production

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 296-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Smirnov ◽  
Wan Shun Eva Lam
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Racial Profiling ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Media Production ◽  
Youth Of Color ◽  
Multimodal Literacy ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Men Of Color

In this study, we examine how youth use media production to represent, (de)legitimate, and reimagine their experiences of hypercriminalization—the pervasive complex of social practices such as racial profiling that position young men of color as “always-already criminal.” We analyze two clips from a youth-produced news show called POPPYN, specifically a 2014 episode focusing on youth and the criminal justice system, using tools from recontextualization analysis and multimodal semiotics, which together allow us to index the substitutions, deletions, rearrangements, and additions of component elements of social practices. Through investigation of linguistic and multimodal processes that represent social actors, actions, and constructions of their legitimacy, this study demonstrates ways that media making can serve as a tool for youth of color to process and rewrite persistent hypercriminalizing positionings in more agentive and hopeful ways. We end by proposing implications for multimodal literacy practices and pedagogies.

scholarly journals Literacy, Learning and Health – A social practices view of health literacy

2009 ◽  
pp. 19-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uta Papen
Keyword(s):  
Health Literacy ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Individual Performance ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
North West ◽  
Education Practice ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
The North ◽  
Speakers Of Other Languages

In this paper, I use a social practices view of literacy to challenge dominant conceptions of health literacy. Health literacy is frequently defined as an abstract skill that can be measured through individual performance tests. The concept of health literacy as a skill neglects the contextual nature of reading and writing in health care settings. It risks ignoring the many ways in which patients access and comprehend health information, make sense of their experience and the resources they draw on. The paper presents findings from a study of forty five literacy and ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) students’ health-related reading and writing practices in the north-west of England. I suggest that health literacy needs to be understood as a situated social practice and that it is a shared resource frequently achieved collectively by groups of people, for example families. I conclude with some reflections on the implications of my research for adult education practice.

scholarly journals Social Learning and Transdisciplinary Co-Production: A Social Practice Approach

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (18) ◽  
pp. 7511
Author(s):  
Kimberley Slater ◽  
John Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Transformative Change ◽  
Social Practice Theory ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
Practice Approach ◽  
Neighbourhood Scale ◽  
Constituent Elements

To address the challenge of achieving social learning in support of transformative change to sustainability, this paper develops an analytical framework that applies a social practice theory (SPT) lens to illuminate the constituent elements and dynamics of social learning in the context of transdisciplinary coproduction for sustainability transitions. Adopting an SPT approach affords a means of interpreting concrete practices at the local scale and exploring the potential for scaling them up. This framework is then applied to a real-world case at the urban neighbourhood scale in order to illustrate how social learning unfolded in a grassroots transdisciplinary coproduction process focused on climate action. We find that a social practice perspective illuminates the material and nonmaterial dimensions of the relationship between social learning and transdisciplinary coproduction. In decoupling these properties from individual human agency, the SPT perspective affords a means of tracing their emergence among social actors, generating a deeper understanding of how social learning arises and effects change, and sustainability can be reinforced.

Remembering as Social Practice

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Middleton ◽  
Helen L. Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Learning Difficulties ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Community Based ◽  
The Social ◽  
Story Work ◽  
Provision Of Care ◽  
Subjective Representation ◽  
The Way

This work represents the development of two lines of interest, one in the study of social practices of remembering and the other concerning issues of identity in the care of people with profound learning difficulties. We examine of the way life story work is used as a resource in providing for continuities in the experience of people with profound learning difficulties when moved from hospital to community based care. Our concern is the way carers attend to issues of identity in their relationships with people who are unable to speak on their own behalf. We discuss how identities are accomplished as part of the social practice of remembering in the construction of life story books designed to resource continuities of identities across changes in the provision of care. Identities are not examined in terms of some subjective representation of coherence across time and space. We examine the way social organisation of remembering in life story work makes visible identities in terms of continuities of participation in the social practices that make up the conditions of living of the recipients of care and the working practices of those who provide it.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document