China has undergone a rapid process of modernization since 1949. The modernization process has accelerated with the development of the market economy and rural-to-urban migration after the 1980s. Nevertheless, Chinese regions still exhibit substantial differences in terms of individualist/collectivist cultural orientations. The rice theory and the climato-economic theory have attempted to explain this variation by analyzing provincial-level data. Based on a quantitative analysis of more granular, county-level variables spanning from the early 1990s until 2010, we offer an alternative account of (...) this cultural variety based on lineage development in different Chinese regions. Using the ArcGIS geographic information system, we first present the regional distribution of individualism/collectivism indicators at the county level through descriptive statistics and spatial analysis. We also run a regression model to analyze county-level data on individualism/collectivism that includes three periods. Our multi-level analysis shows that lineage development is a critical variable that explains more regional variation of culture in China when compared to other variables. While rice farming, the key variable of the rice theory, is a significant variable, its explanatory power is less than the lineage variable. Finally, our analysis shows that the climato-economic theory fails to explain the regional variation of culture. (shrink)

Fourteen subjects were tape‐recorded while they undertook to find a law to summarize numerical data they were given. The source of the data was not identified, nor were the variables labeled semantically. Unknown to the subjects, the data were measurements of the distances of the planets from the sun and the periods of their revolutions about it—equivalent to the data used by Johannes Kepler to discover his third law of planetary motion.Four of the 14 subjects discovered the same law as (...) Kepler did (the period varies as the 3/2 power of the distance), and a fifth came very close to the answer. The subiects' protocols provide a detailed picture of the problem‐solving searches they engaged in, which were mainly, but not exclusively, in the space of possible functions for fitting the data, and provide explanations as to why some succeeded and the others failed.The search heuristics used by the subjects are similar to those embodied in the BACON program, computer simulation of certain scientific discovery processes. The experiment demonstrates the feasibility of examining some of the processes of scientific discovery by recreating, in the laboratory, discovery situations of substantial historical relevance. It demonstrates also, that under conditions rather similar to those of the original discoverer, a law can be rediscovered by persons of ordinary intelligence (i.e., the intelligence needed for academic success in a good university). The data for the successful subjects reveal no “creative” processes in this kind of a discovery situation different from those that are regularly observed in all kinds of problem‐solving settings. (shrink)

This paper will first introduce the development of professional ethics of counseling and psychotherapy in mainland China. Ethical awareness is often limited due to variations in training experiences. Aligning with ethics codes can also bring challenges due to nuances within Chinese culture. Furthermore, the authors discuss the ethical challenges regarding the principles of multiple relationships, informed consent, and confidentiality in the context of Chinese culture. These ethical issues are often discussed within an individualistic cultural frame and presentation from a collectivist (...) culture offers a unique perspective in the ethics literature. (shrink)

Empirical studies have suggested that language-capable robots have the persuasive power to shape the shared moral norms based on how they respond to human norm violations. This persuasive power presents cause for concern, but also the opportunity to persuade humans to cultivate their own moral development. We argue that a truly socially integrated and morally competent robot must be willing to communicate its objection to humans’ proposed violations of shared norms by using strategies such as blame-laden rebukes, even if doing (...) so may violate other standing norms, such as politeness. By drawing on Confucian ethics, we argue that a robot’s ability to employ blame-laden moral rebukes to respond to unethical human requests is crucial for cultivating a flourishing “moral ecology” of human–robot interaction. Such positive moral ecology allows human teammates to develop their own moral reflection skills and grow their own virtues. Furthermore, this ability can and should be considered as one criterion for assessing artificial moral agency. Finally, this paper discusses potential implications of the Confucian theories for designing socially integrated and morally competent robots. (shrink)

Contextualism and Disagreement This paper argues that attributor contextualism is in conflict with ordinary language methodology. Attributor contextualism has at its center the thesis that, the truth-values of knowledge attributions vary with the conversational contexts. This thesis entails that if two speakers in similar contexts make conflicting knowledge attributions, at least one of these attributions is false. One important argument for attributor contextualism depends on ordinary language methodology, a methodology that places great trust in ordinary speakers and prevents judging a (...) substantial group of ordinary speakers' simple knowledge attributions false. I argue that there is strong empirical evidence that ordinary speakers do extensively disagree in similar contexts. My conclusion is that one cannot coherently hold the attributor contextualist thesis and use ordinary language methodology, because the lesson we learn from the empirical evidence is that using the methodology would prove the thesis false. Since prominent attributor contextualists explicitly adopt the methodology, and that the methodology is what distinguishes attributor contextualism from its main rival, invariantism, the conflict with the methodology is a problem for attributor contextualism. (shrink)

The computer distance teaching system teaches through the network, and there is no entrance threshold. Any student who is willing to study can log in to the network computer distance teaching system for study at any free time. Neural network has a strong self-learning ability and is an important part of artificial intelligence research. Based on this study, a neural network-embedded architecture based on shared memory and bus structure is proposed. By looking for an alternative method of exp function to (...) improve the speed of radial basis function algorithm, and then by analyzing the judgment conditions in the main loop during the algorithm process, these judgment conditions are modified conditionally to reduce the calculation scale, which can double the speed of the algorithm. Finally, this article verifies the function, performance, and interface of the computer distance education system. (shrink)

Because of difficulty processing the electronic medical record data of patients with cerebrovascular disease, there is little mature recognition technology capable of identifying the named entity of cerebrovascular disease. Excellent research results have been achieved in the field of named entity recognition, but there are several problems in the pre processing of Chinese named entities that have multiple meanings, of which neglecting the combination of contextual information is one. Therefore, to extract five categories of key entity information for diseases, symptoms, (...) body parts, medical examinations, and treatment in electronic medical records, this paper proposes the use of a BERT-BiGRU-CRF named entity recognition method, which is applied to the field of cerebrovascular diseases. The BERT layer first converts the electronic medical record text into a low-dimensional vector, then uses this vector as the input to the BiGRU layer to capture contextual features, and finally uses conditional random fields to capture the dependency between adjacent tags. The experimental results show that the F1 score of the model reaches 90.38%. (shrink)

While historical cultural materials inform users of the past, they may also contain language that perpetuates long-entrenched patterns of discrimination. In organizing and providing access to such materials, cultural heritage institutions must negotiate historical language and context with the comprehension and perspectives of modern audiences. Excerpted from a larger project exploring representation and access around historical terminology and personal identity, the present work offers insight into how knowl­edge organization systems may be used to help modern users confront and make sense (...) of past, discriminatory language in the archive. Using keywords drawn from the titles of 19th and 20th sideshow performer photographs, this work details the construction of a mapping dictionary that brings together corresponding terminology from several vocabulary sources along with annotations designed to explain historical terms to modern audiences. The development of this dictionary revealed several major types of problematic and potentially discriminatory language including historical euphemisms, misnomers, outdated terms, and sensationalist monikers. The finished dictionary offers opportunities to address these through explanatory annotations and to provide a richer, multi-perspective approach to subject analysis for these and other historical materials. (shrink)

Statistics show, that even though an ethical respect for nature is both widely advocated by current mainstream environmental philosophy and is increasingly publicly accepted, this is not enough to ensure the needed practical actions to protect and preserve the natural world and its living beings. This reflects a disconnection between the related intellectual or theoretical appreciation of the integrity or value within the natural world and the sorts of practices needed to heal or to motivate the actions needed for ecological (...) integrity and sustainability. Awareness of this disunity or disconnection calls for a philosophical examination of this disconnection. This paper argues that the disunity between knowledge and practice reflects a “blind spot” in those sorts of mainstream environmental philosophy that attempt to establish a rational basis for an ethical respect for nature and humans’ ethical responsibility to the environment. This paper shall reveal that blind spot and its origin by examining and building on Ed Casey’s analysis and phenomenological description of an original and authentic directly lived ethical response to the environment that he calls the “first moment of ethical response.” Casey’s description of this “first moment of ethical response,” rooted in his phenomenological horizon, allows him to break away from the horizon of current mainstream environmental ethics and uncover a field of original and authentic ethical experience that opens an area of investigation closed to current environmental ethics. In this way Casey’s work can reveal the limitations of the scientific horizon of mainstream environmental ethics and has great value in the overcoming of the blind spot and its ill effect. (shrink)

This study examines whether and how board gender diversity can affect corporate wage inequity by drawing on diversity theory and gender socialization and ethicality theories. Building on an exogenous relaxation of China’s one-child policy (OCP) in 2013, which led to a substantial decline in the female labor force participation rate. Our empirical analysis suggests that board gender diversity is negatively associated with corporate wage inequity. This result is robust to various endogeneity and sensitivity analyses. We find that the OCP relaxation (...) only increases average executive pay; it does not affect employee pay. One potential mechanism driving our results is that the decline in board gender diversity caused by the OCP relaxation reduces supervision, restriction, and fairness within the firm, which increases executives’ pursuit of personal interests and ultimately leads to the rise of wage inequity. Our findings are particularly significant for firms in capital-intensive industries, firms with a low level of employee bargaining power, and large firms. (shrink)

The author establishes an elementary system AS which contains functions +, ≐ and a constant 0 and then proves the semi-completeness and the decidability of AS, using the theory of systems of inequalities.

In response to the COVID-19 outbreak in many parts of the world, online education has become a more viable option. Some studies have assessed undergraduate students’ readiness for online learning, while others examined students’ anxiety about online learning at home. The relationship between readiness and anxiety about online learning is, however, not well explored. This paper has two purposes: to develop a new and valid instrument—the Home-based Online Learning Readiness Questionnaire —to measure students’ readiness to study online at home based (...) on a theoretical framework of self-regulated learning. As a replacement for the previous readiness scale, this new instrument adds a section on learning strategies and updates and develops new items. to investigate the relationship between readiness and anxiety in online learning. In order to explore those issues, 527 undergraduate students in China were surveyed in this study. The results indicated that HOLRQ was validated in the following six domains: motivation, self-efficacy, information technology skills, resource management, learning strategies and help-seeking. Chinese undergraduate students were more prepared in resource management, motivation, and help seeking, but less prepared in learning strategies, information technology skills, and self-efficacy. However, the regression analysis showed that readiness did not predict online learning anxiety. It means even highly prepared self-regulated learners may experience anxiety when learning online from home. The findings provide insights for instructors and administrators to determine how students really feel about learning from home with online education. (shrink)

TikTok has one of the most advanced algorithm systems and is the most addictive as compared to other social media platforms. While research on social media addiction is abundant, we know much less about how the TikTok information system environment affects users’ internal states of enjoyment, concentration, and time distortion, which in turn influences their addiction behavior. To fill this gap, this study collects responses from 659 adolescents in China aged between 10 and 19 years old, and the data is (...) then analyzed using Partial Least Square. We find that the system quality has a stronger influence than information quality in determining adolescents’ experience with TikTok and that the flow experience has significant direct and indirect effects on TikTok addiction behavior. Notably, this study finds that TikTok addiction is determined by users’ mental concentration on the medium and its content. Several theoretical insights from the stimulus–organism–response model and the flow theory are used to explain the findings. (shrink)

Drawing on the transactional model of stress, we propose that organizational identification and positive affectivity moderate the relationship between abusive supervision and proactive behavior. In Study 1, we collected data from a sample of 165 dentists and 41 supervisors in two Chinese hospitals. In Study 2, we used a sample of 226 employee-supervisor dyads from a large Chinese transportation company. The results of two studies showed that the interaction between abusive supervision and organizational identification on proactive behavior occurred only when (...) positive affectivity was high. We discuss theoretical and managerial implications and indicate future research directions. (shrink)

The current piano curriculum, according to conventional wisdom, is a product of the western music education system, which accords Chinese traditional culture with less importance. Most of the methods and tools used in today's collegiate piano programs are Western-based, often ignoring traditional musical traditions. However, it is widely acknowledged that piano music plays a key role in the culture of music and that it is closely related to traditional culture and art. Examining the impact of Chinese traditional philosophy on collegiate (...) piano instruction and performance is the main objective of the present research. The study makes use of an empirical method by conducting a survey and gathering information using a questionnaire. 174 students from six Chinese institutions participated in the current research. Students were split into two groups as a result of the training methodology. 87 students in the experimental group studied using a previously developed curriculum to advance Chinese traditional music culture, whereas 87 students in the control group took piano lessons using the standard curriculum. We used the student’s t-test and Chi-square test for statistical analysis. Since it demonstrates how traditional Chinese philosophy is successfully promoted in educational contexts, the present study is significant from both an academic and a practical standpoint. (shrink)

There is little doubt that China's reform can be seen as a special case in the history of humanity, of modernization, and even in the relatively short history of economic transition. In terms of market-oriented choice, reform in China is not different from that in most countries in the world. With respect to the transition from a command to a market-based economy, comparable countries could be narrowed down to most of the former communist states that bear similarity. When taking into (...) consideration the circumstances in which the ongoing corporatization and/or privatization take place under the conditions of a regime that is nondemocratic in both polity and, to a large extent, resource allocation, however, the matching number of countries would be further reduced to a few, such as Vietnam and some autocratic small nations. Again, among these few, China's reform has its own specific features. (shrink)

Foresight of development of science and technology.

Developmental and neuroscience works have demonstrated that the moral judgment is influenced by theory of mind, which refers to the ability to represent the mental states of different agents. However, the neural and cognitive time course of interactions between moral judgment and ToM remains unclear. The present event-related potential study investigated the underlying neural substrate of the interaction between moral judgment and ToM by contrasting the ERPs elicited by moral judgments for self and for others in moral dilemmas. In classic (...) moral dilemmas, the agents must choose between the utilitarian choice and the non-utilitarian choice. The ERPs were recorded from participants who made moral judgments for self and for others when the agent made utilitarian or non-utilitarian choices during the dilemma. The results revealed that the moral judgment for others elicited a larger frontal late positive component than that for self when the agents made utilitarian choices, while no difference was observed on early components of N1, P2, and N2. Moreover, individual differences in mentalizing ability were negatively correlated with the LPC amplitudes. These findings suggested that ToM modulated the late controlled process but not the early automatic process during moral judgments. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that engineering ethics education does have moral implications. More specifically, practices in engineering ethics education can lead to negative moral consequences if not conducted appropriately. Engineering ethics educators are often passionate about teaching students ways to examine the ethical implications of engineering and technology. However, ethics educators may overlook the moral significance of their instructional classroom practices. In this paper, we discuss two issues: First, we discuss the moral impacts of ethics curriculum and pedagogies on (...) students’ learning experiences. Then we discuss the professional responsibilities of educators who are involved in designing ethics learning experiences for engineering students. The reflections presented in this paper will serve as catalysts for more comprehensive discussions regarding the impact of engineering ethics education on the ethical development of engineering students. (shrink)

In this work, a virtual submerged floating operational system based on parallel and serial robotic platforms is proposed. The primary aim behind its development lies in carrying out simulated underwater manipulation experiments in an easier and safer way. This VSFOS is consisted of a six-degree-of-freedom parallel platform, an ABB serial manipulator, an inertial sensor, and a real-time industrial computer. The 6-DOF platform is used to simulate the movement of an underwater vehicle, whose attitude is measured by the inertial sensor. The (...) ABB manipulator, controlled by the real-time industrial computer, works as an operational tool to perform underwater manipulation tasks. In the control system architecture, software is developed to receive the data collected by the inertial sensor, to communicate and send instructions. Furthermore, the real-time status of the manipulator is displayed in this software. To validate the proposed system, two experiments have been conducted to test its performance. In the first experiment, the test is carried out to check the communication function of VSFOS, while in the second one, the manipulator is intended to follow the movement of the parallel platform and perform simulated operational task in the space. The obtained results from these two experiments show clearly the effectiveness and the performance of the proposed VSFOS. (shrink)

Various studies have recognized the importance of humility as a foundational aspect of virtuous leadership and have revealed the beneficial effects of leader humility on employee moral attitudes and behaviors. However, these findings may overestimate the benefits of leader humility and overlook its potential costs. Integrating person–supervisor fit theory and balance theory with the humility literature, we employ a dyadic approach to consider supervisor and employee humility simultaneously. We investigate whether and how the congruence of supervisor and employee humility influences (...) employee citizenship and deviance behaviors. We conducted a multilevel, multiphase, and multisource field study to test our hypotheses. The results of cross-level polynomial regression analyses revealed that when supervisors and employees were incongruent in humility, employees experienced higher levels of negative affect toward supervisors. Also, compared to those in low–low congruent dyads, employee negative affect toward supervisors was lower in high–high congruent dyads. The results further revealed asymmetric incongruence effects: employees experienced the highest levels of negative affect toward supervisors when their own humility was lower than their supervisors’. In addition, we found that employee negative affect toward supervisors mediated the impacts of supervisor–employee congruence in humility on employee organizational citizenship behavior and counterproductive work behavior. (shrink)

Total factor productivity is not only the core of high-quality economic development but also a core indicator for measuring the quality of economic development. Improving total factor productivity is one of the most critical points in building a modern economic system. Firstly, this paper uses the DEA-Malmquist index method to measure and decompose the total factor productivity of China’s 30 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions from 2001 to 2017 and analyzes the characteristics of its temporal and spatial changes. From a (...) spatial perspective, the regional gap is relatively large. Secondly, we construct the index system of five dimensions and use this index system to comprehensively evaluate the improvement degree of China’s modernized economic system. The results show that the overall level of the improvement degree of China’s modernized economic system is relatively low, and the differences between provinces are great. Thirdly, this paper uses static and dynamic spatial econometric models to empirically analyze the effect of total factor productivity on the improvement degree of the modern economic system. The results show that the improvement degree of the modern economic system in China has obvious characteristics of time spillover and space spillover. Finally, we put forward countermeasures and suggestions on how to perfect the modern economic system. (shrink)

Technology has a pervasive and profound effect on the contemporary world, and engineers play a central role in all aspects of technological development. In order to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public, engineers must be morally committed and equipped to grapple with ethical dilemmas they confront.

Transformational leadership impacts on project and organizational success are well established. However, many underlying factors that make TFL effective are still missing. Therefore, we formulated hypotheses and tested the mediating role of trust and job satisfaction in linking TFL to project success. A time-lagged methodology was used to collect quantitative data using a structured questionnaire from 326 project manager-team member dyads working in Pakistan’s public sector. Our results showed that TS, JS, and TFL significantly impacted project success. Moreover, we found (...) that TS and JS mediate the relationship between TFL and PS. These findings highlight the importance of trust and job satisfaction as mechanisms that translate TFL into the success of projects for organizations. (shrink)

Previous studies on the effects of emotional context on memory for centrally presented neutral items have obtained inconsistent results. And in most of those studies subjects were asked to either make a connection between the item and the context at study or retrieve both the item and the context. When no response for the contexts is required, how emotional contexts influence memory for neutral items is still unclear. Thus, the present study attempted to investigate the influences of four types of (...) emotional picture contexts on recognition memory of neutral words using both behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measurements. During study, words were superimposed centrally onto emotional contexts, and subjects were asked to just remember the words. During test, both studied and new words were presented without the emotional contexts and subjects had to make “old/new” judgments for those words. The results revealed that, compared with the neutral context, the negative contexts and positive high-arousing context impaired recognition of words. ERP results at encoding demonstrated that, compared with items presented in the neutral context, items in the positive and negative high-arousing contexts elicited more positive ERPs, which probably reflects an automatic process of attention capturing of high-arousing context as well as a conscious and effortful process of overcoming the interference of high-arousing context. During retrieval, significant FN400 old/new effects occurred in conditions of the negative low-arousing, positive, and neutral contexts but not in the negative high-arousing condition. Significant LPC old/new effects occurred in all conditions of context. However, the LPC old/new effect in the negative high-arousing condition was smaller than that in the positive high-arousing and low-arousing conditions. These results suggest that emotional context might influence both the familiarity and recollection processes. (shrink)

This paper begins by reviewing dominant themes in current teaching of professional ethics in engineering education. In contrast to more traditional approaches that simulate ethical practice by using ethical theories to reason through micro-level ethical dilemmas, this paper proposes a pragmatic approach to ethics that places more emphasis on the practical plausibility of ethical decision-making. In addition to the quality of ethical justification, the value of a moral action also depends on its effectiveness in solving an ethical dilemma, cultivating healthy (...) working relationships, negotiating existing organizational cultures, and achieving contextual plausibility in everyday professional practice. This paper uses a cross-cultural ethics scenario to further elaborate how a pragmatic approach can help us rethink ethical reasoning, as well as ethics instruction and assessment. This paper is expected to be of interest to educators eager to improve the ability of engineers and other professional students to effectively and appropriately deal with the kinds of everyday ethical issues they will likely face in their careers. (shrink)

The article ‘Aesthetic culture’ was written in 1908. Although it is in the same period as Soul and Form, in essence, the ideas expressed in this article go beyond the pure philosophy of life and the theory of form, which is different from the idealistic tendency of Lukács in this period. Moreover, ‘Aesthetic culture’ and History and Class Consciousness have ontological and epistemological consistency in subject–object relation and class consciousness. This was the first Marxist reflection of Lukács, and also a (...) reliable sign that he was to join the Hungarian Communist Party 10 years later and turned to Marxism. By criticizing the paradox of aesthetic culture itself, Lukács tried to construct a culture as a whole as a category, and tried to solve the deep contradiction between the freedom of consciousness and the passive form of the subject in modern society. This kind of culture as a whole would be based on the class consciousness of the proletariat itself and take life as the main category, so as to provide the proletariat with practical theoretical conception to expand their space for living in bourgeois culture. (shrink)

To investigate the effects of left-behind children’s empathy and coping styles on school adjustment, 605 left-behind children in the third grade from three rural elementary schools in Suzhou, Anhui Province were selected to complete the Chinese version of the Interpersonal Reaction Index Scale, the Coping Style Scale, and the School Adjustment Behavior Scale for Primary and Secondary School Students. The results showed that emotional empathy positively predicted children’s social competence, and negatively predicted children’s antisocial behavior; cognitive empathy positively predicted children’s (...) social competence; the role of positive coping styles mediated the relationship between cognitive empathy and social competence, and that between cognitive empathy and antisocial behavior; negative coping styles mediated the relationship between cognitive empathy and antisocial behavior; both positive and negative coping styles mediated the relationship between emotional empathy and social competence, and that between emotional empathy and antisocial behavior. The findings of the study are valuable for understanding the relationship between empathy and school adjustment, which also helps to enhance the school adjustment of left-behind children. (shrink)

Research has revealed that child abuse experience can increase pathological Internet use; however, few studies have focused on the influence of child abuse experience on pathological Internet use. This study examined the mediating roles of security and maladaptive cognitions in the association between child abuse and pathological Internet use. A total of 918 Chinese university students participated in the study, with measurements of child abuse, security, maladaptive cognitions, and pathological Internet use being employed. Structural equation modeling results indicated that child (...) abuse could positively predict pathological Internet use, pathological Internet use through the mediating role of security, pathological Internet use through the mediating role of maladaptive cognitions, and pathological Internet use through the chain mediating role of security and maladaptive cognitions. These results indicated that security and maladaptive cognitions were the primary factors in the association between child abuse and pathological Internet use. (shrink)

In this paper, we mainly investigate the coordinated tracking control issues of multiple Euler–Lagrange systems considering constant communication delays and output constraints. Firstly, we devise a distributed observer to ensure that every agent can get the information of the virtual leader. In order to handle uncertain problems, the neural network technique is adopted to estimate the unknown dynamics. Then, we utilize an asymmetric barrier Lyapunov function in the control design to guarantee the output errors satisfy the time-varying output constraints. Two (...) distributed adaptive coordinated control schemes are proposed to guarantee that the followers can track the leader accurately. The first scheme makes the tracking errors between followers and leader be uniformly ultimately bounded, and the second scheme further improves the tracking accuracy. Finally, we utilize a group of manipulator networks simulation experiments to verify the validity of the proposed distributed control laws. (shrink)

Computer aided modeling and simulation of nanomaterials can describe the correlation between the material’s microstructure and its macroscopic properties quantitatively. In this paper, we propose an integrated modeling, simulation, and visualization approach for designing nanomaterials. Firstly, a fast parametric modeling method for important nanomaterials such as graphene, nanotubes, and MOFs is proposed; secondly, the material model could be edited adaptively without affecting the validity of the model on the physical level; thirdly a preliminary calculation for nanomaterials’ energy is implemented based (...) on the theory of surface fitting; finally, an integrated framework of nanomaterials modeling, simulation, and visualization is designed and implemented. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is feasible and effective. (shrink)

Der Aufsatz diskutiert die zentralen Gedanken Niklas Luhmanns über die Individualitätsbildung und Freiheitslage der Menschen in der segmentär, stratifikatorisch und funktional differenzierten Gesellschaft. Die Individualität und mithin die Freiheit der Menschen wird in den ersten beiden Differenzierungsformen durch Inklusion in Familien, Haushalten, Stämmen, Ständen etc. ermöglicht, also von außen bestimmt. In der modernen funktional differenzierten Gesellschaft muss man hingegen seine Individualität selbst bilden, weil man von den Funktionssystemen nur durch Anpassung an ihre Forderungen inkludiert werden kann, was heute vor allem (...) durch einen Karriereverlauf möglich ist. Als Individuum hat man aber auch die Freiheit, sich dem zu widersetzen und sich zurückzuziehen. Ferner zeichnet sich die moderne Gesellschaft dadurch aus, den Individuen die Freiheit einzuräumen, Ansprüche an sie zu stellen, damit sie ihre eigenen Strukturen dementsprechend aufbauen kann. Luhmanns Beschreibung der modernen Verhältnisse hat auch für die „Nachzügler“ der Modernisierung wie z.B. China Relevanz. (shrink)