Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour最新文献

Efforts to challenge mental health-related stigma have been limited by an insufficient conceptualization of the problem space. As is common in health communication, practitioners have neglected the multiple tacit understandings the public embody in everyday life. Using the example of our recent research into the public’s social representations of mental health and illness, in this paper, we will work through the theoretical-methodological considerations involved in how we approached expanding the problem space. Using social theory, we tailored thematic analysis and natural language processing techniques to examine the public’s polyphasic sense-making processes. The approach is novel, as it diverges from standard methods in understanding health communication and the possibilities for behaviour change. Instead, we root our approach in a dynamic and relational epistemology to iteratively reveal in greater complexity some of the contents and processes that sustain mental health-related stigma.

It is argued that the model of frame selection as a specific version of the dual-process perspective provides a clear theoretical conceptualisation of the mechanisms by which cultural orientations such as values, attitudes, and internalised norms influence social behaviour. In particular, the model of frame selection allows the derivation of two fundamental action-theoretical principles. According to the principle of catalysation, situationally relevant cultural orientations have a greater impact on social behaviour, if the behaviour comes about in an intuitive rather than a reflective manner. The principle of suppression states that external factors of the objective situation, which lack salience with respect to situationally relevant cultural orientations, have a greater impact on reflective rather than intuitive behaviour. These two principles can be combined with the so-called logic of mode selection to derive a multitude of empirically testable hypotheses regarding the question of how motivational factors such as thinking dispositions and feeling of rightness as well as cognitive resources such as time for reflection and availability of working memory moderate the influence of cultural orientations on behaviour.

This paper aims at analyzing the communicational dynamics activated by the dissemination of fake news on social media in moments of collective mobilization, in the frame of the dialogic approach of social representations. In order to establish a comparative analysis, three focus groups were created with voters of candidates Fernando Haddad and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who discussed the content of purposely selected Facebook posts. The study extrapolated the conversational exercise to the dynamics of a social media, concluding that digital ecosystems, in moments of collective mobilization, behave as representational fields guided, from the psychosocial point of view, by relations of identity tension and, from a rhetorical or communicational point of view, by a phenomenon called diatopic tension, characterized by the coexistence of four interdependent variables: (1) topological divergence; (2) situational heteroglossy; (3) affective intensity and 4) apparent perception of factual control.

This article addresses the agency-structure issue from the evolutionary perspective. Rather than treating it as something unique to human society, the article examines this issue in the broad context of how different species of social organisms, with humans being one of them, influence the constitution of their societies. The main finding of this analysis is that social organisms of different species all exert influence on their societal formations, but the impact varies depending on the level of agency the organisms possess, particularly their perceptual capabilities. Social organisms with higher perceptual ability play a bigger part in shaping the structure of their societies. A fundamental difference between humans and nonhuman social animals in the agency-structure relations lies in the fact that humans are the only species on earth known to be capable of constructing institutional rules for societal regulation. This capacity is attributable to the syntactic language and reflective self-awareness humans possess. Within human species, however, there is considerable variation in the exercise of this capacity among individuals, groups, and societies. It is therefore important to examine species and intra-species level differences in addressing the agency-structure issue in human society.

In this paper, I examine what it means for culture, in both its personal and public forms, to be implicit. I begin by considering a recent attempt to develop a descriptive taxonomy of other people's views of practices developed by Stephen Turner. A key result is that a specific combination of claims about the properties of practices yields an ontologically problematic category, which is a candidate for elimination. Following Turner's lead, I provide my own refurbished taxonomy of practical culture that does not contain ontologically problematic members. Another key result of the initial analysis is that implicitness is a relational property presupposing at least one agent with awareness (or unawareness) of the cultural element in question. This epistemic dependence implies that only personal culture internalized by people can be coherently thought of as 'implicit' (to them). Finally, I conclude that using mentalistic versions of implicitness to characterize public culture, such as texts, language, monuments, tools, and classifications on paper, yields the same ontologically incoherent category eliminated in the first step. Following from this, I argue that it is desirable to conceptualize 'implicit' in a way that makes sense for public culture without stirring up the ghosts of collective minds and related conundrums. I propose one such (weak) version of implicitness when speaking of public culture that does not run afoul of this issue. I then return to personal culture, considering whether 'implicitness' is a unitary property of this kind, answering in the negative. This conclusion requires us to develop a principled taxonomy of the distinct ways personal culture can be ‘implicit,’ yielding personal culture that is implicit because it acquired 'automatic' status, versus personal culture that is implicit because it lacks (access) consciousness.

This paper engages with the theme of individual disenchantment, that is, the process of falling out of love with something that once gave pleasure and purpose. Drawing on the conceptual tools of Pierre Bourdieu, it sketches the process by which individuals become ‘enchanted’ with the stakes of different fields, the phenomenology of enchantment and disenchantment and several ideal typical modes of genesis of disenchantment. Attention is given to intra-field dynamics but also, going beyond Bourdieu, inter-field dynamics too. The final section considers the epistemological consequences of constructing trans-field objects of inquiry.

Rights and obligations—sometimes referred to as deontology or deontic powers—are key to most contemporary conceptions of social ontology. Both Cambridge Social Ontology and the dominant analytic conception associated, most prominently, with John Searle, place rights and obligations at the centre of their accounts. Such a common emphasis has led some to consider deontology to be a point of similarity between these different theories. This is a mistake. In this paper, I show that a distinctive conception of rights and obligations underpins Cambridge Social Ontology and its social positioning theory. Moreover, I argue that a fuller understanding of the account of rights and obligations defended in Cambridge in fact reveals that it can be differentiated from other conceptions and, most importantly, Searle's, by its recognition that a practical dimension is always involved in social constitution.

This paper aims to introduce the mimetic theory of René Girard to explore the connection between culture and religious violence to deal with some critical problems in international affairs. It challenges the narrow conceptualization of the issue of religion and violence as an issue of religious violence. As often as the issue of religion and violence is structured in such a manner, allegedly to pick religion seriously without considering politics or culture seriously. The conception is limited because, as an idea, religion is always contested, negotiated, and developed socially, culturally, or politically. It is a biased interpretation of a world actuality, which under certain conditions grounds violence. Furthermore, this narrow definition of religion suits what critical scholars describe as a problem-solving strategy to theory. This study demonstrates mimetic theory challenges and reconfigures the conventional interpretation of the issue of religious violence and critically analyse the causes of the hidden, exposed violence as well as the scapegoat mechanism that functions in both domestic cultures as well as in international affairs, maintaining political and cultural order of any society.

Defining clear concepts and constructs is a prerequisite for all forms of validity in management and organization studies. This paper extends the existing recommendations on construct clarity and builds a method on systems thinking and abduction to help scholars with providing clear definitions in cases of (1) the constructs and concepts that come to academia from practice (2) the constructs and concepts on which there is no agreement among scholars, and (3) the constructs that were coined in the past eras but are mapped to the transformed observables in the new era. Moreover, we rethink the terms ‘concept, ‘construct’, and ‘variable’ and introduce six clarity criteria to be used in the process of concept refinement in management and organization studies, and other disciplines of social and behavioural sciences.