First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The study “Psychoanalysis—its image and its public” intimates that common sense is increasingly informed by science. But common sense asserts its autonomy and, in turn, may affect the trajectory of science. This is a process that leads to many differentiations—in common sense, in scientific innovation and in political and regulatory structures. Bauer and Gaskell's toblerone model of triangles of mediation provided a distillation of their reading of “La Psychanalyse.” Here it was argued that representations are multi-modal phenomena necessitating the (...) use of multiple methodologies .In this paper we briefly summarise these arguments and elaborate ways in which social representation theory can be considered a progressive research programme. “Progressive” because as the theory has developed it has extended the range and depth of its conceptual basis; it provides a new synthesis for the social scientific understanding of the phenomena of common sense and of representation; it acts as an antidote to the reductionism of public opinion and, finally, it is a stimulus to depart from disciplinary silos. However, there remain unresolved issues: how to segment the relevant social milieus and how to close the feedback loop from common sense to science? (shrink)

Biotechnology is one of the fastest-growing areas of scientific, technical and industrial innovation and one of the most controversial. As developments have occurred such as genetic test therapies and the breeding of genetically modified food crops, so the public debates have become more heated and grave concerns have been expressed about access to genetic information, labelling of genetically modified foods and human and animal cloning. Across Europe, public opinion has become a crucial factor in the ability of governments and biotech (...) industries to exploit the new technology. This 2002 book presents the results of a unique cross-national and cross-disciplinary study of the relationship between the development of new biotechnology and public perception, media coverage and policy formulation. It outlines a conceptual framework for understanding these issues and contains a number of empirical studies including studies of the international controversies surrounding the cloning of Dolly the sheep and GM Soya. (shrink)

Based on Moscovici’s classical study on the cultivation of psychoanalytic ideas in France in the 1950’s and our own research on modern biotechnology, we propose a paradigm for researching social representations. Following a consideration of the nature of representations and of the ‘iconoclastic suspicion’ that haunts them, we propose a model of the emergence of meaning relating three elements: subjects, objects, and projects. The basic unit of analysis is the elongated triangle of mediation : subject 1, object, project, and subject (...) 2, captured in the image of a ‘Toblerone’. Such social units cultivate, that is produce, circulate and receive representation which may be embodied in four modes–habitual behaviour, individual cognition, informal communication and formal communication–and in three mediums–words, visual images or non-linguistic sounds. We propose an operational definition of a ‘social representation’ as the comparison of four characteristics of communication systems: the content structures , the typified processes , and their functions , within the context of segmented social milieus. Seven implications for research on social representations are outlined: content and process; segmentation by social milieus rather than taxonomies; cultivation studies within social milieus; multi-method analysis; time structures and longitudinal data; the crossover of cultural projects and trajectories; the disinterested research attitude. This ideal type paradigm leads to an operational clarification to identify new research questions, and to guide the design and evaluation of studies on social representations. (shrink)

Anthropological Theory for the Twenty-First Century presents a critical approach to the study of anthropological theory for the next generation of aspiring anthropologists. Through a carefully curated selection of readings, this collection reflects the diversity of scholars who have long contributed to the development of anthropological theory, incorporating writings by scholars of colour, non-Western scholars, and others whose contributions have historically been under-acknowledged. The volume puts writings from established canonical thinkers, such as Marx, Boas, and Foucault, into productive conversations with (...) DuBois, Ortíz, Medicine, Trouillot, Said, and many others. The authors also engage in critical conversations surrounding the "canon" itself, including its colonial history and decolonial potential. Updating the canon with late twentieth century and early twenty-first century scholarship, this reader includes discussions of contemporary theories such as queer theory, decolonial theory, ontology, and anti-racism. Each section is framed by clear and concise editorial introductions that place the readings in context and conversation with each other. Posing thoughtful questions to students, and including a glossary to facilitate reader comprehension, the authors have also designed a dynamic companion website to recommend additional resources, including multimedia materials, supplemental readings, links to author websites, and more. (shrink)

The study of social values has its origins in the study of both cross cultural and within cultural differences in latent or manifest definitions of the right social order to achieve the good life. To this extent, the social scientific literature is replete with references to them. Yet, researchers either use the term values Social values are often used interchangeably with that of attitudes or treated as a post-hoc explanatory concept. When values are the focal research point, such endeavours predominantly (...) depart from universal and reductionist understandings of their functions, meanings and structures. Through tracing the roots of key theoretical and empirical investigations in values, originating in the work of Charles Morris, Gordon Allport, Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck, Milton Rokeach and Shalom Schwartz, we reveal the common as well as the different tenets underpinning their work. It will be shown that these accounts have lost sight of the importance of plurality and context. We claim that a renewed program of research in values is needed, which should be characterised by methodological pluralism in order to investigate a) value plurality, b) value specificity and c) values as properties and as processes. (shrink)

This book brings together a distinguished group of scholars from music, drama, poetry, performance art, religion, classics and philosophy to investigate the complex and developing interaction between performance and authenticity in the arts. The volume begins with a perspective on traditional understandings of that relation, examining the crucial role of performance in the Poetics, the marriage of art with religion, the experiences of religious and aesthetic authenticity, and modernist conceptions of authenticity. Several essays then consider music as a performative art. (...) The final essays discuss the link of authenticity to sincerity and truth in poetry, explain how performance, as an authentic feature of poetry, embodies a collective effort, and culminate in a discussion of the dark side of performance - its constant susceptibility to inauthenticity. Together the essays suggest how issues of performance and authenticity enter into consideration of a wide range of the arts. (shrink)

Il libro di C., che costituisce il quinto volume della nuova promettente collana diretta da E.V. Maltese, nella quale sono già apparsi importanti contributi ed altri sono annunciati, comprende l'edizione critica e il commento di una parte delle poesie anacreontiche giunte sino a noi nella ben nota raccolta tramandata, mutila, come dimostra l'indice antico dei ff. 1-7, dal codice Barb. gr. 310, e più precisamente i componimenti classicheggianti sopravvissuti nella prima parte del manoscritto, con l'esclusione delle anacreontiche di Sofronio di (...) Gerusalemme, tutte già ripubblicate in edizione critica nel 1957, e dell'anacreontica di Michele Sincello, riedita in anni recenti. Anche i poemetti dei cinque autori scelti da C. — Elia Sincello, Ignazio Diacono, Leone Magistro, Giovanni di Gaza e Giorgio Grammatico — sono stati, per la verità, già pubblicati (e taluni tradotti in italiano) una o più volte, e forse, almeno da un punto di vista utilitaristico, sarebbe valsa la pena di ripubblicare tutta la sezione di anacreontiche classicheggianti della Silloge. Tanto più che questa nuova edizione ha soprattutto il merito di consentire al lettore italiano, anche non bizantinista, una uniforme consultazione di testi complessi ed eterogenei, degli apparati, della traduzione a fronte, accompagnata da note di commento; sebbene l'indice generale del volume, poco dettagliato, e non preceduto da un indice dei nomi, non aiuti il lettore nell'individuazione immediata dei testi e degli argomenti. (shrink)

La Vita di Filareto il Misericordioso, un testo agiografico di grande interesse storico e letterario, oggetto di riscritture e traduzioni, fu edita per la prima volta nel 1900 da Vasiliev, dal Paris. gr. 1510 (V). Nonostante la maggiore antichità del codice (X secolo), quella di V risultò in seguito una versione secondaria rispetto alla versione edita nel 1934 da Fourmy e Leroy, tratta dai codici Genuensis Urbanus 34 (G) dell'XI secolo e Paris. gr. 1608 (P) del XIV secolo, e riedita (...) ora da Lennart Rydén, recentemente scomparso. Le altre versioni dell'opera sono oggetto di uno studio, di cui è annunciata la pubblicazione, da parte di Jan Olof Rosenqvist. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 109 Heft: 2 Seiten: 1451-1452.

Neuroenhancement involves the use of neurotechnologies to improve cognitive, affective or behavioural functioning, where these are not judged to be clinically impaired. Questions about enhancement have become one of the key topics of neuroethics over the past decade. The current study draws on in-depth public engagement activities in ten European countries giving a bottom-up perspective on the ethics and desirability of enhancement. This informed the design of an online contrastive vignette experiment that was administered to representative samples of 1000 respondents (...) in the ten countries and the United States. The experiment investigated how the gender of the protagonist, his or her level of performance, the efficacy of the enhancer and the mode of enhancement affected support for neuroenhancement in both educational and employment contexts. Of these, higher efficacy and lower performance were found to increase willingness to support enhancement. A series of commonly articulated claims about the individual and societal dimensions of neuroenhancement were derived from the public engagement activities. Underlying these claims, multivariate analysis identified two social values. The Societal/Protective highlights counter normative consequences and opposes the use enhancers. The Individual/Proactionary highlights opportunities and supports use. For most respondents these values are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that for many neuroenhancement is viewed simultaneously as a source of both promise and concern. (shrink)

The United Kingdom’s approach to encouraging environmentally positive behaviour has been three-pronged, through voluntarism, incentives and regulation, and the balance between the approaches has fluctuated over time. Whilst financial incentives and regulatory approaches have been effective in achieving some environmental management behavioural change amongst farmers, ultimately these can be viewed as transient drivers without long-term sustainability. Increasingly, there is interest in ‘nudging’ managers towards voluntary environmentally friendly actions. This approach requires a good understanding of farmers’ willingness and ability to take (...) up environmental activities and the influences on farmer behavioural change. The paper aims to provide insights from 60 qualitative farmer interviews undertaken for a research project into farmers’ willingness and ability to undertake environmental management, particularly focusing on social psychological insights. Furthermore, it explores farmers’ level of engagement with advice and support networks that foster a genuine interest, responsibility and a sense of personal and social norm to sustain high quality environmental outcomes. Two conceptual frameworks are presented for usefully exploring the complex set of inter-relationships that can influence farmers’ willingness to undertake environmental management practices. The research findings show how an in-depth understanding of farmer’s willingness and ability to adopt environmental management practices and their existing level of engagement with advice and support are necessary to develop appropriate engagement approaches to achieve sustained and durable environmental management. (shrink)

The concept of organizational justice is important to understanding and predicting organizational behavior. A significant development in the research literature has been the separation of distributive and procedural justice. While much of the research has focused on negative outcomes, this research attempted to verify the presence of both forms of justice in the context of positive outcomes. Subjects completed an instrument designed to measure their perceptions of distributive and procedural justice. The subjects also reported their satisfaction and sense of fairness (...) with their salary increases, their belief that the procedures to award the increases had been followed, and their level of information and agreement regarding the salary program. These measures, along with size of salary increase and gender were examined to determine their impact on the subjects' perceived level of justice. The data support the existence of the two distinct forms of justice, but suggest that procedural justice may, in turn, branch out into two aspects. One category involves being informed, and a second appears to deal with acceptance of procedures. A series of relationships are then considered. Significant gender effects were non-existent. (shrink)

A social representations approach offers an empirical utility for addressing myriad social concerns such as social order, ecological sustainability, national identity, racism, religious communities, the public understanding of science, health and social marketing. The core aspects of social representations theory have been debated over many years and some still remain widely misunderstood. This Handbook provides an overview of these core aspects and brings together theoretical strands and developments in the theory, some of which have become pillars in the social sciences (...) in their own right. Academics and students in the social sciences working with concepts and methods such as social identity, discursive psychology, positioning theory, semiotics, attitudes, risk perception and social values will find this an invaluable resource. (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)

Most words in English are ambiguous between different interpretations; words can mean different things in different contexts. We investigate the implications of different types of semantic ambiguity for connectionist models of word recognition. We present a model in which there is competition to activate distributed semantic representations. The model performs well on the task of retrieving the different meanings of ambiguous words, and is able to simulate data reported by Rodd, Gaskell, and Marslen‐Wilson [J. Mem. Lang. 46 (2002) 245] (...) on how semantic ambiguity affects lexical decision performance. In particular, the network shows a disadvantage forwords with multiple unrelated meanings (e.g., bark) that coexists with a benefit for words with multiple related word senses (e.g., twist). The ambiguity disadvantage arises because of interference between the different meanings, while the sense benefit arises because of differences in the structure of the attractor basins formed during learning. Words with few senses develop deep, narrow attractor basins, while words with many senses develop shallow, broad basins. We conclude that the mental representations of word meanings can be modelled as stable states within a high‐dimensional semantic space, and that variations in the meanings of words shape the landscape of this space. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: 1 2 3 4 5 6.

The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics brings together the views of 75 leading researchers in psycholinguistics to provide a comprehensive and authoritative review of the current state of the art in psycholinguistics. With almost 50 chapters written by experts in the field, the range and depth of coverage is unequalled.

This chapter contains sections titled: Respecting Sacred Objects: Some Difficulties Alternative Grounds for Respect: The Historical and Aesthetic Properties of an Object.

It is the aim of this article to put questions of maintenance and repair in the history of science and technology under scrutiny, with a special focus on technologies and methods of transportation. The history of transportation is a history of trying to avoid shipwrecks and plane crashes. It is also a history of broken masts, worm-eaten hulls, the flat tires of cars, and endless delays at airports. This introductory article assesses the technological, scientific, and cultural implications of repairing and (...) maintaining transportation networks. We argue that infrastructures for maintenance and repair played just as important a role in the history of transportation as the wharves and factories where ships, cars, trains, and airplanes were originally built. We also suggest that maintenance and repair are important sites of knowledge production, and a historical account of these practices provides a new, decentered narrative for the development of modern science and technology. (shrink)

Some chapters revisions of works previously issued 2004-2016.

A number of recent studies have examined the effects of phonological variation on the perception of speech. These studies show that both the lexical representations of words and the mechanisms of lexical access are organized so that natural, systematic variation is tolerated by the perceptual system, while a general intolerance of random deviation is maintained. Lexical abstraction distinguishes between phonetic features that form the invariant core of a word and those that are susceptible to variation. Phonological inference relies on the (...) context of surface changes to retrieve the underlying phonological form. In this article we present a model of these processes in speech perception, based on connectionist learning techniques. A simple recurrent network was trained on the mapping from the variant surface form of speech to the underlying form. Once trained, the network exhibited features of both abstraction and inference in its processing of normal speech, and predicted that similar behavior will be found in the perception of nonsense words. This prediction was confirmed in subsequent research (Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 1994). (shrink)

With contributions from the fields of psychology, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, attention, genetics, development, and neuropsychology divided into five themed sections, this new edition of The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics is unparalleled in its breadth of coverage.

O presente artigo objetivou relacionar dois teóricos que, conquanto pertencessem a momentos históricos distintos, suas ideias guardam relação e compõem a trajetória do pensamento jurídico e político da Modernidade; um, figurando como um precursor; o outro, como representante do ápice do positivismo jurídico moderno. A partir da análise dos pontos de encontro entre tais teorias, é possível refletir, de forma mais ampla, sobre a autoridade e coação do Estado exercidas pela sanção diante das tendências do pensamento jurídico atual, denominadas pós (...) positivistas. (shrink)