This paper is about the ways in which psychologists categorise themselves into collectivities. It reports a study of the use of the categories 'mechanist' and 'humanist' in the transcript of an international psychology conference. The analysis documents: (1) the flexibility of category definition with respect to the subject matter, research methods and metaphysical assumptions of the putative membership; (2) the involvement of categories in practical tasks of criticism and evaluation; (3) some of the procedures used to warrant these categories as (...) 'natural'features of psychologists' social worlds. Problems for traditional historical, philosophical and sociological accounts of the development and nature of psychology raised by these findings are discussed and some of the pragmatic motivations for category discourse are assessed. (shrink)

This article demonstrates that Alfred Schutz’s theory of _typification_ and _relevance_ together have a great potential to conceptually clarify certain aspects of self-categorisation theory. More specifically, it focuses on the motivational bases of stereotyping, one of the core mechanisms underlying the categorisation of people into groups. Social psychologists have found that stereotyping of out-group members is motivated by factors, such as uncertainty reduction, or the enhancement of the self-esteem of in-group members. What categories and corresponding stereotypes are (...) being activated and applied is ultimately a function of the goals and pragmatic interests of the perceiver in any given situation. The article argues that this phenomenon can be explained, and accounted for, by Schutz’s tripartite system of relevances. To illustrate the theoretical issues at hand, the last section draws on the case of migrants arriving in Hungary and provides a potential explanation for why the ideal type of the _Gypsy_ was triggered and facilitated the way in which migrants have been attended and understood. (shrink)

Facial race and sex cues can influence the magnitude of the happy categorisation advantage. It has been proposed that implicit race or sex based evaluations drive this influence. Within this account a uniform influence of social category cues on the happy categorisation advantage should be observed for all negative expressions. Support has been shown with angry and sad expressions but evidence to the contrary has been found for fearful expressions. To determine the generality of the evaluative congruence (...) account, participants categorised happiness with either sadness, fear, or surprise displayed on White male as well as White female, Black male, or Black female faces across three experiments. Faster categorisation of happy than negative expressions was observed for female faces when presented among White male faces, and for White male faces when presented among Black male faces. These results support the evaluative congruence account when both positive and negative expressions are presented. (shrink)

During the course of this article, we examine the use of membership categorisation practices by a high-profile celebrity public social media account that has been understood to generate interest, attention and controversy across the UK media ecology. We utilise a data set of harvested tweets gathered from a high-profile public ‘celebrity antagonist’ in order to systematically identify types of antagonistic formulation that have generated different levels of interest within the social media community and beyond. Drawing from classic (...) ethnomethodological studies of banner headlines and other means of generating public interest and ‘making sense’, we respecify high-profile antagonistic tweets as category formulations that exhibit particular and regular membership category features that are reflexively bound to potential antagonistic readings, interest and controversy. In conclusion, we consider how such formulations may be understood to represent resources that constitute ignition points within antagonistic flows of communication and information that can be metaphorically understood as ‘digital wildfires’. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Contained in the face is a vast body of social information, both fixed and flexible. Across multiple lines of converging evidence it has become increasingly clear that face processing is subject to one of the most potent and best understood of social cognitive phenomena: social categorization. This article reviews this research at the juncture of social psychology and face perception showing the interplay between social categorization and face processing. It lays out evidence indicating that (...) class='Hi'>social categories are extracted easily from faces, suggesting that the effects of social categories can occur quickly and unintentionally. Recent evidence that social categories can affect perception of both invariant and variant facial characteristics is discussed. Finally, the article summarizes recent evidence indicating that the motivational consequences of social categories can affect which faces are remembered and how faces are processed. (shrink)

Scholars have revealed how moral evaluation is woven into formal administrative processes. While research examining these dynamics tends to assume that a person’s naturalized identity (such as race and gender) precedes administrative processing, we argue that social categorization by administrators is the tacit precondition upon which further processing takes place. We make this argument by looking at a set of unusual cases: parole hearings where prisoners fall outside of, conflict with, or move between categories of gender, sexuality, race, and (...) ability. We find that categorization acts as a prerequisite to moral evaluation. When administrators cannot easily categorize a prisoner, they resolve this uncertainty by denying parole. Yet, social categorization can also serve as a pathway to moral approval and administrative allocation. In certain situations, administrators encourage prisoners’ identification with a new social category as proof that they are deserving of parole. In both cases, successful administrative categorization occurs through a combination of what we call narrativization, or crafting a narrative around one’s identity that aligns with administrators’ presumptions, and authorization, or marshalling official evidence from prior classification moments to support identity claims. These insights extend our understanding of classification, moral evaluation, and the administrative reproduction of inequality. (shrink)

Ethnomethodology research has systematically investigated discursive practices of categorisation, looking at the various ways by which social actors ascribe both themselves and others to identity categories to accomplish various kinds of social actions. Drawing on a data corpus of oncological visits collected in an Italian hospital, involving both native and non-native patients, the present work analyses how participants in these intercultural medical encounters invoke and make relevant social identity categories by the marking of collective pronouns in (...) their talk. Our results showed that whilst institutional identities prevailed, categorial formulations related to cultural or linguistic identities were rarely displayed in interactions with non-native patients. Conversational participants made very little of their linguistical or cultural background and when they did so, their cultural and linguistic identities were deployed for rhetorical and pragmatical aims, such as testing and negotiating common knowledge and epistemic authority. This study shows how even speakers’ minimal lexical choices, such as marked pronouns, impact the negotiation of meanings and activities in life-saving sites such as oncological visits. (shrink)

This paper investigates links between social capital and symbolic capital and responsible entrepreneurship in the context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The source of the primary data was 144 ‘Business Profiles’, written by the owner-managers of small businesses in application for a Small Business Awards competition in 2005. Included in each of these narratives were claims relating to the firms’ contributions to wider society, relationships with customers, employees and stakeholders. These narratives were coded and classified in a framework (...) drawn from Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s (1998, Academy of Management Review 23(2), 242–266) categorisation of social capital. The analysis revealed a range of strategic orientations towards the development of social and symbolic capital, along a conceptual continuum ranging from being responsible for oneself to being responsible for others. Overall, the evidence demonstrates the significance of the power inherent in the social relations of SMEs as a force for ethical behaviour, and suggests that normative theories of the development of social capital may provide ‘competitive advantage’ through responsible behaviour for small business in the global economy. (shrink)

This article investigates how age categorisation and prejudicial use of age are mobilised in talk by job applicants during job interviews and how recruiters affiliate with these. The institutional goal of recruitment is to ensure an unbiased process and evaluation, nevertheless, ageism against older workers emerges as unchallenged and culturally acceptable in authentic job interviews. In line with the discursive psychology (DP) approach, the analysis focuses on -isms as discursively constructed and categories as resources to accomplish social actions. (...) A case study is conducted based on video recordings of 24 real job interviews held at an Italian staffing agency and analysed through membership categorisation and conversation analysis. The analysis provides evidence of how job applicants resort to age co-membership with recruiters to achieve affiliation – or remedy misalignment – by complaining about older workers. The study contributes to DP’s re-specification of prejudices as interactional practices and links microanalysis to macro phenomena, such as ageism, through categorisation practices. (shrink)

We amplify possible complications to the tidy division between early vision and later categorisation which arise when we consider the perception of human faces. Although a primitive face-detecting system, used for social attention, may indeed be integral to “early vision,” the relationship between this and diverse other uses made of information from faces is far from clear.

Several authors assume that evaluative conditioning (EC) relies on high-level propositional thinking. In contrast, the dual-process perspective proposes two processing pathways, one associative and the other propositional, contributing to EC. Dual-process theorists argue that attitudinal ambiguity resulting from these two pathways’ conflicting evaluations demonstrate the involvement of both automatic and controlled processes in EC. Previously, we suggested that amplitude variations of error-related negativity and error-positivity, two well-researched event-related potentials of performance monitoring, allow for the detection of attitudinal ambiguity at the (...) neural level. The present study utilises self-reported evaluation, categorisation performance, and neural correlates of performance monitoring to explore associative-propositional ambiguity during social attitude formation. Our results show that compared to associative-propositional harmony, attitudinal ambiguity correlates with more neutral subjective evaluations, longer response times, increased error commission, and diminished error-related negativity amplitudes. While our findings align with dual-process models, we aim to offer a propositional interpretation. We discuss dual-process theories in the context of evolutionary psychology, suggesting that associative processes may only represent a small piece of the EC puzzle. (shrink)

Debates concerning principles of justice need to be attentive to various types of social process. One concerns the distribution of resources between groups defined as talented and untalented. Another concerns the social mechanisms by which people come to be categorised as talented and untalented. Political philosophers have paid considerable attention to the former issues, much less to the latter. That, I shall argue, represents a significant oversight.

The two aims of the paper were to systematically review and critique social science and linguistic text analyses of nursing records in order to inform future research in this emerging area of research. Systematic searches in reference databases and in citation indexes identified 12 articles that included analyses of the social and linguistic features of records and recording. Two reviewers extracted data using established criteria for the evaluation of qualitative research papers. A common characteristic of nursing records was (...) the economical use of language with local meanings that conveyed little information to the uninitiated reader. Records were dominated by technocratic‐medical discourse focused on patients’ bodies, and they depicted only very limited aspects of nursing practice. Nurses made moral evaluations in their categorisation of patients, which reflected detailed surveillance of patients’ disturbing behaviour. The text analysis methods were rarely transparent in the articles, which could suggest research quality problems. For most articles, the significance of the findings was substantiated more by theoretical readings of the institutional settings than by the analysis of textual data. More probing empirical research of nurses’ records and a wider range of theoretical perspectives has the potential to expose the situated meanings of nursing work in healthcare organisations. (shrink)

Debates concerning principles of justice need to be attentive to various types of social process. One concerns the distribution of resources between groups defined as talented and untalented. Another concerns the social mechanisms by which people come to be categorised as talented and untalented. Political philosophers have paid considerable attention to the former issues, much less to the latter. That, I shall argue, represents a significant oversight.

What makes the categorisation of a human collective morally relevant? How does the categorisation of individuals into groups affect their social status and treatment? This article provides an account of the moral relevance of social categories and assesses the status of “childhood” within this framework. It distinguishes morally relevant social categories (labelled as social groups) through three conditions: first, individuals are externally ascribed to the social category; second, the properties of the social (...) category are reified through the social construction of its definition; and, third, the social category predetermines the normative treatment owed to the individuals ascribed. The existence of these three characteristics in the construction of a social category entails that the individuals ascribed may be affected by unjust constraints and restrictions on their lives and choices, thus, requiring a re-evaluation of how their social grouping frames their status and treatment. The article claims that the “childhood” social category complies with the three conditions (ascription, reification, and normativisation). This implies that individuals categorised as “children” may suffer from unjust constraints and restrictions based on their social categorisation. (shrink)

Past research demonstrates that emotion recognition is influenced by social category cues present on faces. However, little research has investigated whether holistic processing is required to observe these influences of social category information on emotion perception, and no studies have investigated whether different visual sampling strategies (i.e. differences in the allocation of attention to different regions of the face) contribute to the interaction between social cues and emotional expressions. The current study aimed to address this. Participants categorised (...) happy and angry expressions on own- and other-race faces, and male and female faces. In Experiments 1 and 2, holistic processing was disrupted by presenting inverted faces (Experiment 1) or part faces (Experiment 2). In Experiments 3 and 4 participants’ eye-gaze to eye and mouth regions was also tracked. Disrupting holistic processing did not alter the moderating influence of sex and race cues on emotion recognition (Experiments 1, 2, 4). Gaze patterns differed as a function of emotional expression, and social category cues, however, eye-gaze patterns did not reflect response time patterns (Experiments 3 and 4). Results indicate that the interaction between social category cues and emotion does not require holistic processing and is not driven by differences in visual sampling. (shrink)

Based on an ethnographic fieldwork the article analyses the experiences of 8-10 year old children in three different institutions. It is shown how the children create and maintain different social landscapes in each setting. This means that children's experiences are related to the position they have in the landscape. The notion social identity is used to discuss and explain these findings. With this notion identity is explained as an interplay between internal and external factors: between group-identification and (...) class='Hi'>categorisation. Children's different identities in different settings are not created by children themselves, but must bee seen in relation to the categorisation used by the adults to classify children. The professional categorisations of children are a central part of the social space in relation to which children act, talk, and play. (shrink)

Previous research has found a rich lexicon of shame and guilt terms in Chinese, but how comparable these terms are to “shame” or “guilt” in English remains a question. We identified eight commonly used Chinese terms translated as “shame” and “guilt”. Study 1 assessed the Chinese terms’ intensities, social characteristics, and action tendencies among 40 Chinese speakers. Testing term production in the reverse direction, Study 2 asked another Chinese-speaking sample (N = 85) to endorse emotion terms in response to (...) eight eliciting scenarios generated using each term’s social characteristics from Study 1. A native English-speaking sample (N = 83) was also included to examine the production of English emotion terms and compare motivational tendencies cross-culturally. Using this cross-referencing method, we found that some of the Chinese terms shared similar social-functional characteristics to their English translation, but some had distinct profiles. The two large shame-like and guilt-like term categories yielded in Study 1 were replicated in Study 2’s Chinese term-production task where larger-scale correspondences between categorised elicitors and term clusters were found. Meanwhile, English speakers’ term use provided further evidence for the equivalence between some Chinese terms and “shame” or “guilt” both in terms of their social and motivational characteristics. (shrink)

The challenge of intercultural relations has become an important issue in many societies. In spite of the claimed value of intercultural diversity, successful outcomes as predicted by the contact hypothesis are but one possibility; on occasions intercultural contact leads to intolerance and hostility. Research has documented that one key mediator of contact is perspective taking. Differences in perspective are significant in shaping perceptions of contact and reactions to it. The ability to take the perspective of the other and to understand (...) it in its own terms is a necessary condition for successful intergroup outcomes. This paper sheds light on the processes involved in intercultural perspective taking by elaborating the notion of the point of view based on social representations theory. The point of view provides a theory of social positioning that can analyse cultural encounters between social actors, and identify the conditions for positive relations. Insights are drawn from a study of public views on the relative merits of science and religion, following a documentary by Richard Dawkins in which it was suggested that religion is a source of evil. The findings demonstrate that the point of view may be categorised according to a three-way taxonomy according to the extent to which it is open to another perspective. A point of view may be monological—closed to another's perspective entirely, dialogical—open to the possibility of another perspective while maintaining some percepts as unchallengeable, or metalogical—open to another's perspective based on the other's frame of reference. (shrink)

This paper wishes to problematize the foundations of production governance and offer an analytical perspective on the interrelation between agents’ preferences, strategic choice, and the public sphere . The value is in the idea of preferences being social in nature and in the application both to the internal stakeholders of the organisation and its impacts on people outside. Using the concept of ‘strategic failure’ we suggest that social preferences reflected in deliberative social praxis can reduce false beliefs (...) and increase individual wellbeing. From this approach, the paper offers a taxonomy of production organisations, based on social preferences about two variables: the governance form other strategic decisions that characterize the management of a company at a more operational level, once its fundamental legal form has been chosen. Each dimension is then categorised alongside two basic preferences: towards inclusion or exclusion of ‘publics’ that have no substantial access to decision power about these variables. Our framework explains governance heterogeneity by contrasting exclusive and inclusive social preferences in cooperatives, social enterprises, as well as traditional corporations. A discussion of the evolution of social preferences and organizational forms is addressed through examples and regional experiences. (shrink)

In this text Hasse presents a new, inclusive, posthuman learning theory, designed to keep up with the transformations of human learning resulting from new technological experiences, as well as considering the expanding role of cyborg devices and robots in learning. This ground-breaking book draws on research from across psychology, education, and anthropology to present a truly interdisciplinary examination of the relationship between technology, learning and humanity. Posthumanism questions the self-evident status of human beings by exploring how technology is changing what (...) can be categorised as "human". In this book, the author applies a posthumanist lens to traditional learning theory, challenging conventional understanding of what a human learner is, and considering how technological advances are changing how we think about this question. Throughout the book Hasse uses vignettes of her own research and that of other prominent academics to exemplify what technology can tell us about how we learn and how this can be observed in real-life settings. Posthumanist Learning is essential reading for students and researchers of posthumanism and learning theory from a variety of backgrounds, including psychology, education, anthropology, robotics and philosophy. (shrink)

We examine recent evolution in corporate responsibility in the forest industry, an important natural-resource-based industry which is under rapid internationalisation and structural change under challenging financial pressures. We address two recent trends in corporate communication: corporate disclosure, that is the adoption of consistent external reporting standards [namely the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) ], and the growing awareness of engagement with and impact on local communities through philanthropy, generation of prosperity, communication and the social impact of core activities. This study (...) uses a comparative qualitative case approach to forest industry multinational enterprises (MNEs) based on a combination of secondary (reporting, company newsletters and other documentation) and interview data. Three large-scale multinational forest industry firms, all pursuing different strategies in terms of internationalisation and geographical and product diversification, were chosen for the study: Stora Enso, SCA and Sappi Ltd. Our results show that the overall quality of sustainability reporting has improved in these companies from 2005 to 2009 with the adoption of GRI. However, based on our fourfold categorisation of social impact, the core social impact indicator in GRI (SO1) has been interpreted very differently in these MNEs, and the adoption of GRI has not actually much improved the comparability of the reports or transparency of practices. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe social content of affective stimuli has been proposed as having an influence on cognitive processing and behaviour. This research was aimed, therefore, at studying whether automatic exogenous attention demanded by affective pictures was related to their social value. We hypothesised that affective social pictures would capture attention to a greater extent than non-social affective stimuli. For this purpose, we recorded event-related potentials in a sample of 24 participants engaged in a digit categorisation task. Distracters (...) were affective pictures varying in social content, in addition to affective valence and arousal, which appeared in the background during the task. Our data revealed that pictures depicting high social content captured greater automatic attention than other pictures, as reflected by the greater amplitude and shorter latency of anterior P2, and anterior and posterior N2 components of the ERPs. In addition, social content also provoked greater allocation of processing resour... (shrink)

According to some philosophers and social scientists, mainstream economic theories currently play an unprecedented role in shaping human societies. This phenomenon can be linked to the dissemination of methodological individualism, where common goods are interpreted as reducible to aggregates of individuals' well-being. Nonetheless, some emergent difficulties of economics in coping with global institutional issues have encouraged some authors to revise that paradigm. In the last three decades, there has been a parallel growing philosophical interest in investigating social sciences' (...) epistemological and ontological foundations. Unfortunately, these two research trends have often not communicated systematically enough to understand the specific ontology of collective aims. It is still unclear whether some irreducible social goods exist and how the answer to this question can set up a consistent understanding of cooperative actions. This dissertation addresses this issue, drawing on philosophical investigations about collective intentionality. It claims that a coherent ontological taxonomy of irreducible and reducible social goods is theoretically viable and can reframe prevailing approaches to collective action dilemmas influenced by the traditional economic categorisation of goods. The research begins by analysing how the influential theory of public goods has paved the way for some social and moral impasses. Furthermore, some theoretical proposals suggesting the existence of relational goods and common-pool resources are scrutinised. Hence, a refutation of the ontological reduction of all social goods to individual ones is developed, arguing that a specific form of cooperation, grounded in we-intentions and we-reasoning, shows the plausibility of the existence of some kinds of irreducible collective goods. Expanding on that view, a refinement of this categorisation of social goods is put forward by underlying the function of some relational entities, such as trust and shared sensemaking processes, in making cooperation robust in uncertain environments. Finally, by applying the taxonomy to collective action gridlocks regarding climate change, digital information, and public education, the consistency of this hypothesis is tested, showing that a pluralistic ontological account of social goods might improve the moral understanding of current social dilemmas. (shrink)

We examine recent evolution in corporate responsibility in the forest industry, an important natural‐resource‐based industry which is under rapid internationalisation and structural change under challenging financial pressures. We address two recent trends in corporate communication: corporate disclosure, that is the adoption of consistent external reporting standards [namely the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) ], and the growing awareness of engagement with and impact on local communities through philanthropy, generation of prosperity, communication and the social impact of core activities. This study (...) uses a comparative qualitative case approach to forest industry multinational enterprises (MNEs) based on a combination of secondary (reporting, company newsletters and other documentation) and interview data. Three large‐scale multinational forest industry firms, all pursuing different strategies in terms of internationalisation and geographical and product diversification, were chosen for the study: Stora Enso, SCA and Sappi Ltd. Our results show that the overall quality of sustainability reporting has improved in these companies from 2005 to 2009 with the adoption of GRI. However, based on our fourfold categorisation of social impact, the core social impact indicator in GRI (SO1) has been interpreted very differently in these MNEs, and the adoption of GRI has not actually much improved the comparability of the reports or transparency of practices. (shrink)

Capacities for abstract thinking and problem‐solving are central to human cognition. Processes of abstraction allow the transfer of experiences and knowledge between contexts helping us make informed decisions in new or changing contexts. While we are often inclined to relate such reasoning capacities to individual minds and brains, they may in fact be contingent on human‐specific modes of collaboration, dialogue, and shared attention. In an experimental study, we test the hypothesis that social interaction enhances cognitive processes of rule‐induction, which (...) in turn improves problem‐solving performance. Through three sessions of increasing complexity, individuals and groups were presented with a problem‐solving task requiring them to categorize a set of visual stimuli. To assess the character of participants’ problem representations, after each training session, they were presented with a transfer task involving stimuli that differed in appearance, but shared relations among features with the training set. Besides, we compared participants’ categorization behaviors to simulated agents relying on exemplar learning. We found that groups performed superior to individuals and agents in the training sessions and were more likely to correctly generalize their observations in the transfer phase, especially in the high complexity session, suggesting that groups more effectively induced underlying categorization rules from the stimuli than individuals and agents. Crucially, variation in performance among groups was predicted by semantic diversity in members’ dialogical contributions, suggesting a link between social interaction, cognitive diversity, and abstraction. (shrink)

One of the core insights from Eleanor Rosch’s work on categorization is that human categorization isn’t arbitrary. Instead, two psychological principles constrain possible systems of classification for all human cultures. According to these principles, the task of a category system is to provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort, and the perceived world provides us with structured rather than arbitrary features. In this paper, I show that Rosch's insights give us important resources for making progress on the 'feasibility question' (...) in conceptual engineering: the question of how we can implement conceptual engineering projects in ways that are practically feasible. Specifically, I show that one overlooked upshot of Rosch's work is that naming practices play an extremely important role in the construction of perceived similarities within and dissimilarities between categories, and, correspondingly, the dissemination of social stereotypes that serve as markers between different categories that are otherwise similar. Thus, naming practices will be a crucial constraint for the feasibility of certain ameliorative projects. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPeople high in social anxiety experience fear of social situations due to the likelihood of social evaluation. Whereas happy faces are generally processed very quickly, this effect is impaired by high social anxiety. Mouth regions are implicated during emotional face processing, therefore differences in mouth salience might affect how social anxiety relates to emotional face discrimination. We designed an emotional facial expression recognition task to reveal how varying levels of sub-clinical social anxiety related to (...) the discrimination of happy and fearful faces, and of happy and angry faces. We also categorised the facial expressions by the salience of the mouth region. In a sample of 90 participants higher social anxiety was associated with a reduced happy face reaction time advantage. However, this effect was mainly driven by the faces with less salient closed mouths. Our results are... (shrink)

The objective of this study is twofold: to examine the patterns that govern social reporting with reference to an Islamic framework and to identify the moral legitimacy factors that influence them. We select 146 publicly listed Sharia‐compliant companies and classify the disclosures in their annual reports according to an Islamic framework that categorises items as either Required, Expected or Desired to indicate the degree of importance each item carries from an Islamic perspective. Based on this framework, we then analyse (...) moral legitimacy factors, specifically the type of Sharia screening body and the proportion of Muslims in the population, that may influence the prioritisation of the different categories of social reporting. We find that disclosures that fall into the Required category of our framework—especially those that relate to companies’ involvement in “haram” activities (activities not permissible in Islam)—are still few among the companies studied. Our research also reveals that both moral legitimacy factors under investigation influence the three categories of social reporting, although in different ways. This research contributes to the existing literature by empirically examining how organisations prioritise their disclosure of virtues and the moral legitimacy factors that influence that prioritisation. (shrink)

Economics plays a significant role in decision-making in contemporary western societies, but its role is increasingly questioned. A recurring topic among the challenges raised by critics is that economics as a discipline lacks sufficient pluralism. That is, it fails to enable, encourage, and respect the use of different ontologies, methodologies, theories, and/or schools of thought to study economic reality. Has this been a productive critique? Does talk about pluralism help identify genuine problems in the discipline? Pluralism in economics could draw (...) support from the current consensus in philosophy that pluralism in science is a good thing. I argue, however, that the claim that economic research is insufficiently pluralist is unlikely to convince economists who believe economics is already pluralist enough and that it does not offer unambiguous recommendations for change. This is because there are too many legitimate ways to interpret how pluralism maps to practice. There are numerous variables that pluralist ideals might focus on—the things that they seek multiple rather than one of—and different interpretations of how many of those variables economics has in practice. Yet, as I go on to argue, this does not mean that talk of pluralism is entirely beside the point, since the reasons pluralists offer for their ideals do help to identify genuine problems in economics. The social epistemic strategies that arguments for pluralism recommend point us to three concrete issues in the way economic research is organised: gender imbalances, a steep internal hierarchy, and a dismissive attitude to outsiders. I show that economic research could be more progressive, representative of the interests of those in society, accepted, and legitimate and less likely to fall into bias if the discipline alleviated its gender imbalances, if it were less hierarchical, and if it had a healthier relationship with outsiders. -/- In chapter 1, I outline the debate about pluralism in economics and explain how my thesis utilises a novel approach to social epistemology to offer a way out of the impasse in which that the debate presently resides. In chapter 2, I explain the different philosophical arguments for pluralism in science and categorise them using the variables they focus on and the reasons they give for pluralism. In chapter 3, I argue that interpreting pluralism as a particular arrangement of variables for economics to attain does not lead to unambiguous recommendations for change because it leaves too much open. Yet, I go on to argue, in chapter 4, that drawing on the reasons for pluralism can provide a set of heuristics for piecemeal evaluations of the social epistemic practices in economics. In chapters 5, 6, and 7, I apply these heuristics to economics. I provide evidence that [a] women are outnumbered in economics and face an adverse environment in the discipline, that [b] economics is steeply hierarchical, and that [c] economists form an in-group that assumes superiority and frequently dismisses outside voices. I argue that these three features of economic research block avenues for productive forms of feedback (mechanisms that help to challenge, justify, and refine scientific knowledge), block the interests of certain perspectives being heard, and block public scrutiny of the decisions made by economists. (shrink)

Se presentan los resultados de un estudio que explora la gestión de la responsabilidad social en trece hospitales de la Red Sanitaria de RS. Las conclusiones revelan que estos hospitales gestionan la RS profesionalmente y con criterios de calidad, orientados al cumplimiento de los ODS, en el marco del plan estratégico de cada hospital. Aunque, todavía se detectan déficits en su implantación departamental, su planificación, y la evaluación de sus impactos. Y debilidades como la falta de recursos y de (...) liderazgo. Para superarlos, el apoyo directivo del hospital resulta determinante. La Red Sanitaria de RS constituye un modelo de colaboración. (shrink)

Cet article interroge les rapports collectifs à l’environnement naturel du point de vue de l’anthropologie sociale, de son origine chez Émile Durkheim à ses prolongements actuels chez Philippe Descola. Il prend pour point de départ l’impasse à laquelle semblent être parvenues les controverses théoriques au sujet de l’idée de nature : on ne sait plus, en effet, s’il faut voir en elle une réalité substantielle, contraignant l’homme du dehors, ou le produit de constructions sociales contingentes amené à se dissiper avec (...) l’histoire. L’hypothèse avancée, qui émerge de notre lecture de l’anthropologie, est que la nature est un fait social d’un genre particulier. Par là, on entend que la formation des rapports sociaux est indissociable des structures de catégorisation et d’action qui portent sur elle. Cette hypothèse permet de reformuler l’inquiétude actuelle au sujet de nos rapports à l’environnement. (shrink)

Three studies address the role of social consensus on evaluative standards in different comparative contexts. Previous research has documented that self-categorisation at the individual or group level changes social comparison effects in terms of assimilation and contrast. With regard to self-ratings of physical attractiveness, the present studies show that people who focus on group membership can benefit from including outstanding others in their reference group, whereas people who focus on their individual attributes run the risk of self-devaluation. (...) It is argued that high consensus strengthens the association between evaluative standards and group membership and renders the inclusion of outstanding others more likely. Study 3 shows that the need to protect self-esteem moderates the influence of perceived consensus. Stressing the individual self led participants who received negative feedback to exclude outstanding others when consensus was low. Stressing the social self, however, led participants to include outstanding others when consensus was high. (shrink)

First published in 1984, this is a study of categorization practices: how people categorize each other and their actions; how they describe, infer, and judge. The book presents a sociological analysis and description of practical activities and makes a cogent contribution to the study of how the moral order actually works in practical communicative contexts. Among the issues dealt with are: collectivity categorizations, the organization of lists and descriptions, moral attribution and inferences, and the relationship between standards of morality and (...) standards of rationality. (shrink)