Purpose This paper is concerned with the place of human rights in the process of technological development but specifically as this process is situated within the corporate-technological complex of modern digital communications and their derivatives. This paper aims to argue that expecting and institutionalizing the incorporation of human rights in the process of technological innovation and production, particularly in the context of global economic actors, constitutes a necessary act if we want to navigate the immediate future of artificial intelligence and (...) ubiquitous connectivity in ways that protect democracy and human dignity. Design/methodology/approach The discussion presents the case for defending human rights through a social control perspective, which assumes the conscious quest for impacting change and cartographing a path of actions and intentions. The authors approach the problem from James Ralph Beniger’s theory of the Control Revolution to explain the emergence of a new social order and to outline the main challenges brought particularly by media and information and communication technology corporations as global actors of power. Findings Ethics initiatives, considering human rights as an ethical framework for media and ICT businesses, can be based on social control perspectives to regard the more complex variables interacting in the formation of effective policy making. It is the right to participate in the construction of knowledge in society and, informed by this knowledge, help manage or control democratic issues, including influencing on the regulation of technology and other cultural formats of control. Knowing social control tools enable citizens to lead their destinies, plan their freedom and the change what they wish in the societies they live in. Originality/value Social control is often understood as a term taken for granted and many times faced as representing malignant and anti-democratic forms. Here, the authors try to build a theoretical ground where both sides – the benign and the malignant – can be taken in consideration to bring awareness to the need to discuss social control as a democratic endeavor, and consider human rights as part of this and not something apart and idealized. The practice of human rights is directly associated with social control forms and is from within these practices individuals must understand its role on social control and act. (shrink)

Political thought, from Aristotle to Lefebvre, has placed importance on the control of space as an activity of political power. Extraordinary measures taken by global policy-makers since the early 2020s as part of efforts to to combat the pandemic have included mass lock-downs, closed borders, social distancing and other forms of spatial control. Importantly, spaces dedicated to religious worship (churches, etc.) were subjected to extraordinary regulation. In the exercise of this new control of space, social (...) control has played an important role (obligation to declare one’s health condition, incitement to denounce offenders...) fostered by the authorities through various means of new social education, generating new social habits in terms of the management of space. Religious freedom and the autonomy of the Church thus faced new challenges as a result of the extraordinary control of religious space by civil power and the pressure of social control. The new forms of control incorporated into our habits deserve to be critically reviewed in our search for true spaces of freedom that are not sacrificed in the name of supposed science. (shrink)

Humans have developed the capacity to approve or disapprove of the behavior of their children and of unrelated individuals. The ability to approve or disapprove transformed social learning into a system of cumulative cultural inheritance, because it increased the reliability of cultural transmission. Moreover, people can transmit their behavioral experiences (regarding what can and cannot be done) to their offspring, thereby avoiding the costs of a laborious, and sometimes dangerous, evaluation of different cultural alternatives. Our thesis is that, during (...) ontogeny, the evaluative communication (approval/disapproval) between parents and offspring is substituted by other evaluative communications among peers, like individuals of the same generation. Each person belongs to a reference social group with individuals that interact more intensively. Humans have developed psychological mechanisms that enable cultural transmission by being receptive to parental advice as well as their reference social group. The selective pressure that promoted these new evaluative interactions arose to facilitate the establishment of efficient cooperative relationships. In short, the social control of behavior is essential to understand human cultural transmission. (shrink)

Key ideas in the work of Michel Foucault are explored and applied to the organized pursuit of knowledge in higher education. His association of power and knowledge accounts for deeply rooted practices in higher education that would need to be mediated or overcome for there to be a revolution in inquiry to occur, such as the one advanced by Nicholas Maxwell. Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power and bio-power, and how they act to manage the behavior of free citizens, are described. (...) These concepts are then applied to free inquiry, to show how the activity of individual inquirers is managed and how critical inquiry is controlled. The management of inquiry involving four norms, two of them intrinsic to inquiry and the other two extrinsic, is explained. The potential of Foucault’s concept of discursive formations is introduced as a means of reconceiving inquiry to overcome these impediments to a revolution in inquiry. (shrink)

The key to this study lies in my own identity as a researcher who specializes in the fifteenth century and Franciscan reforms, especially the confrontation in eastern Central Europe between the theory of the via media based on a return to the Martianian Constitutions, and the Observance sub vicariis brought by Giovanni of Capistrano when he crossed the Alps in 1451.2 The major aspect of this is a view on the “pre-history” of the Libellus ad Leonem, which was written in (...) 1513 by Paolo Giustiniani and Pietro Quirini in preparation of the Fifth Lateran Council. This “pre-history” concerns a century of transformations of the links between the Observant reforms, humanist culture and the.. (shrink)

Postmodernity has brought new forms of social control which are exercised through new forms of communication. Paradoxically, however, postmodernity also seemed to be heading towards the exaltation of the individual in their absolute freedom. The 20 th century pushed, in the name of science and progress, the secularization of Western societies, often distancing people from their traditional community ties, including ties to the ecclesial community. Thus, the postmodern individual initially appeared free of ancestral community pressures. However, subtle new (...) forms of social control have replaced traditional ones. Mechanisms such as social media, new forms of work and sexual exploitation, or the impossibility of maintaining privacy in the face of the power of private and public corporations, thus expose the individual to the asocial elements. Frequently, these new social control mechanisms (a clear example being the leadership of the WHO in the policies implemented worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic) are presented to us not as repressive, but scientifically and paternally protective. In this context, the vindication of religious freedom and the community experience of faith represent decisive touchstones for the vitality and validity of a social and political order in which the personal being is truly the highest value. The authors of this monograph are professors, some of them with twenty or thirty years of university teaching, others halfway between Generation X and Y, but all with a deep vocation as teachers called to understanding the world around them. A vocation to collaborate with their students so that the seed of love for the knowledge of reality and the joyful experience of contact with the truth may bear fruit in them. Such an experience only makes sense as a shared experience. And this is what the authors of this monograph usually do: share their concerns, worries, and research. In formal terms, this shared experience has been developing in recent times under the mantle of research projects such as the one that forms the basis of this issue of _Scientia et Fides_: “Social Control, Postmodernism and Political Community” (COSOPOC). Sharing the results of their research is also a way of inviting the specialized public to this experience without forgetting that the first circle of this community work is formed by the students themselves, whom this monograph aims to serve as a stimulus in their personal trajectories as students, as future professionals and, above all, as people in charge of their actions and responsible and capable of facing the worrying challenges that face us all. (from the Editorial). (shrink)

The article is focused on social stigma in informal social control of drug abuse. Social stigma is considered as the three related components: negative stereotypes, prejudices, and discrimination. The discrimination as a behavioral result of stigma manifests itself in capability deprivation, compulsion and segregation. According to this scheme, informal social control is shown on the example of the four Russian grassroots initiatives, which can be observed at the present time. They are implementing various approaches. (...) As empirical data we used self-posted materials of these initiatives on the Internet. The textual data was analyzed by combination of content analysis and critical discourse analysis. We conclude that the spectrum of social stigma in sphere of informal control is quite wide: from its correction to its significant gain. And the gain of social stigma could not be marked as negative unambiguously. In case of some grassroots initiatives the effectiveness and potency of social control may be also based on strengthening the social stigma of people who use alcohol and drugs. The last conclusion is connected with some data from other countries. (shrink)

In saying this he had reference to practical activities such as medicine and law . In these the practitioner is in constant contact with the facts of life ...

Efforts to institutionalize ethics in corporations have been discussed without first addressing the desirability of norm conformity or the possibility that the means used to elicit conformity will be coercive. This article presents a theoretical context, grounded in models of social control, within which ethics initiatives may be evaluated. Ethics initiatives are discussed in relation to variables that already exert control in the workplace, such as environmental controls, organizational controls, and personal controls.

After describing the three European strategies focused on social control, this essay will first demonstrate that the first two strategies try less to protect societies than to enforce efficient tools of governance. Additionally, they reinforce stereotypes harming Muslim immigrants. I show that diverse approaches in policing can make a difference in the communities where police forces operate. The third strategy, that of prevention requiring the cooperation of the citizens, may be more sustainable in the long term as it (...) facilitates communication among local politicians and involved actors. Finally, I point out that the interplay of interests, ideas and institutions matter a great deal to the comparison. (shrink)

This article shows to what extent the new situation in our late-modern societies can see a further deepening of the social control typical of soft totalitarianism we experience in our globalised democracies, through the mechanisms already denounced by Arendt in her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951): the promotion of rootlessness and superfluity. In particular, the paper focus on what Eliot (1927) called the hollow man or what philosophy and sociology have called the one-dimensional man, the absent subject or (...) the saturated self, which the technological, social, cultural and economic environment in which we live so favours. The article diagnoses the reasons and means by which the alienation of the subject occurs, but proposes narrative and testimony as ways of combating social control of a psychopolitical kind [1]. [1] Investigación financiada por el proyecto del Banco de Santander – CEU titulado “Control social, posmodernidad y comunidad política” (COSOPOC) con código B920PR02 // FUSPBC-PPC14/2018. (shrink)

The mastery of contemporary scientific and technological revolution is both a consequence and a condition of the purposeful control of social processes. Bourgeois social sciences failed to elaborate a comprehensive theory of social control since they ignore the social subject of the cognition and control of social processes. The scientific concept of social control arises due to the Marxist-Leninist analysis of the subject-object dialectic in the historical process with the formation (...) of the advanced socialist society. (shrink)

This paper deals with the concepts of science and social control to be found within interwar institutional economics. It is argued that these were central parts of the institutionalist approach to economics as the key participants in the movement defined it. For institutionalists, science was defined as empirical, investigational, experimental, and instrumental. Social control was defined in terms of the development of new instruments for the control of business to supplement the market mechanism. The concepts (...) of science and social control were joined via John Dewey's pragmatic and instrumental philosophy. These ideas provided important links to the ideals of foundations, such as Rockefeller, and thus to access to research funding. Institutionalist concepts of science and social control were, however, displaced after World War II by Keynesian policy and positivist ideas of scientific methodology. (shrink)

This article draws on historical material to examine the co-evolution of economic science and business education over the course of the twentieth century, showing that fields evolve not only through internal struggles but also through struggles taking place in adjacent fields. More specifically, we argue that the scientific strategies of business schools played an essential—if largely invisible and poorly understood—role in major transformations in the organization and substantive direction of social-scientific knowledge, and specifically economic knowledge, in twentieth century America. (...) We use the Wharton School as an illustration of the earliest trends and dilemmas (ca. 1900–1930), when business schools found themselves caught between their business connections and their striving for moral legitimacy in higher education. Next, we look at the creation of the Carnegie Tech Graduate School of Industrial Administration after World War II. This episode illustrates the increasingly successful claims of social scientists, backed by philanthropic foundations, on business education and the growing appeal of “scientific” approaches to decision-making and management. Finally, we argue that the rise of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago from the 1960s onwards (and its closely related cousin at the University of Rochester) marks the decisive ascendancy of economics, and particularly financial economics, in business education over the other behavioral disciplines. We document the key role of these institutions in diffusing “Chicago-style” economic approaches—offering support for deregulatory policies and popularizing narrowly financial understandings of the firm—that sociologists have described as characteristic of the modern neo liberal regime. (shrink)

I argue in this essay that the phenomena we classify as "mental illness" result largely from the refusal of socially authorized "experts" to recognize - and thus to constitute - the Other as a subject. I suggest that Institutional Mental Health refuses to do this not merely because it seeks to aggrandize its own power but also because it fears to acknowledge that we are all participants in a process of historical development. It denies this because it is historically conditioned (...) by its own moment of origin in the project of the Enlightenment, It is conseqently wed to an ethos of rationalized order that does not accomodate, much less support, the unpredictable creative power of the Other and that sustains instead the project of mastery, of domination, of disovering eternal laws that will enable Reason to master history and to master the Other. For this reason Institutional Mental Health and its diverse ideologies, ranging from the pyschoanalytic to genetic defect models, constitute a major obstacle to the evolution of humanity. (shrink)

This article focuses on the everyday practices that make the place of the neighbourhood – social control, legitimacy and support, while also looking at how gender is produced in everyday life in the neighbourhood. In doing this, the discussion underlines the tremendous social and cultural influence of neighbours and the neighbourhood and argues that neighbourhoods need to be seen as a social formation as important as caste, class, ethnicity or religion. This is particularly important given that (...) a strong focus on identities in recent decades has tended to eclipse social formations such as the neighbourhood. This ethnographic discussion is based on fieldwork carried out in neighbourhoods in two towns in India, Thalassery in Kerala, South India and Bikaner in Rajasthan, North India. (shrink)

This article focuses on the everyday practices that make the place of the neighbourhood – social control, legitimacy and support, while also looking at how gender is produced in everyday life in th...

The book provides a comparative analysis of the criminal justice systems in the post-Communist 'transitional' countries of Eastern Europe and examines the underlying value-matrix for changes in the various aspects of these systems.

With an interest in origins, it is proposed that conflict within the group can be taken as a natural focus for exploring the evolutionary development of human moral communities. Morality today involves social control but also the management of conflicts within the group. It is hypothesized that early manifestations of morality involved the identification and collective suppression of behaviours likely to cause such conflict. By triangulation the mutual ancestor of humans and the two Pan species lived in pronounced (...) social dominance hierarchies, and made largely individualized efforts to damp conflict within the group, exhibiting consolation, reconciliation, and active pacifying intervention behaviour. It is particularly the active interventions that can be linked with social control as we know it. It is proposed that when this process became collectivized, and when language permitted the definition and tracking of proscribed behaviour, full-blown morality was on its way. Because early humans lived in egalitarian bands, a likely candidate for the first behaviour to be labelled as morally deviant is not the incest taboo but bullying behaviour, of the type that egalitarian humans today universally proscribe and suppress. (shrink)