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Explaining the evolution of helping behaviour in the eusocial insects where nonreproductive ("worker") individuals help raise the offspring of other individuals ("queens") remains one of the most perplexing phenomena in the natural world. Polistes paper wasps are popular study models, as workers retain the ability to reproduce: such totipotency is likely representative of the early stages of social evolution. Polistes is thought to have originated in the tropics, where seasonal constraints on reproductive options are weak and social groups are effectively perennial. Yet, most Polistes research has focused on nontropical species, where seasonality causes family groups to disperse; cofoundresses forming new nests the following spring are often unrelated, leading to the suggestion that direct fitness through nest inheritance is key in the evolution of helping behaviour. Here, we present the first comprehensive genetic study of social structure across the perennial nesting cycle of a tropical Polistes—Polistes canadensis. Using both microsatellites and newly developed single nucleotide polymorphism markers, we show that adult cofoundresses are highly related and that brood production is monopolized by a single female across the nesting cycle. Nonreproductive cofoundresses in tropical Polistes therefore have the potential to gain high indirect fitness benefits as helpers from the outset of group formation, and these benefits persist through the nesting cycle. Direct fitness may have been less important in the origin of Polistes sociality than previously suggested. These findings stress the importance of studying a range of species with diverse life history and ecologies when considering the evolution of reproductive strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally males have been regarded as the more aggressive sex. However, recent research in several countries has challenged this notion by considering different forms of aggression. This paper provides an overview of a qualitative investigation of teenage girls' indirect forms of aggression (e.g., exclusion from the group, spreading false stories). Focus groups and pair and individual interviews were used to collect data from adolescent girls and their teachers in two schools. The study provides some clear insights into the nature of teenage girls' indirect aggression. The predominant indirectly aggressive behaviors include talking about others and excluding peers from the group. Key explanations for these behaviors concern a desire to create excitement and a range of friendship and group processes centered on girls' needs for close personal relationships and to be a part of the peer group. The girls described the devastating effects of indirect aggression, particularly on girls with certain characteristics that predispose them to victimization. The girls were pessimistic about the potential of interventions, although peer mediation processes may be a way forward. Aggr. Behav. 26:67–83, 2000. © 2000 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a content analysis of church sermons in terms of social class distinctions in the memberships of two Southern Baptist churches. The major finding is that there is a relationship between social class and sermon content. The data for this analysis were obtained by the transcription of forty Sunday morning sermons. The results are interpreted as suggesting that lower class church members search for consolation while upper class congregations search for justification for and continuation of their elevated social status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I begin from the assumption that the social groups within which people acquire subjective attributes belong to two different orders. Those of the first order follow the model of organized, closed structures that define fixed places. Examples are social institutions, the state, and the oedipal structure. The groups of the second order are ad hoc groups whose life and consistency depend on the emergence of a problem that must be solved and, therefore, on a doing together. I call these groups communities. This approach to the matter of globalization responds to a way of thinking linkage organization that privileges different ontologies and a characteristic topology for each of them. We should ask ourselves whether solidarity requires an ontological definition; whether it constitutes an ethical problem (commitment), a moral problem (behaviour or obligation), an action/doing based on a previous knowledge of one of the parties, a practice created in connection with an emerging problem, a psychic mechanism, and so on. To answer these manifold questions, I travel a path – one among many possible paths – that involves understanding solidarity as a resource and a practice referred to psychic suffering, especially in present-day Argentina. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons. Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments evaluated the effect of commitment on paper recycling. Using an ABA design, Experiment I asked 24 individuals in a retirement home to sign a 4-week group commitment pledge to recycle paper. During this intervention, the subjects recycled 47% more paper than they had during baseline. They continued to recycle at this level during a 4-week follow-up period, when the group commitment was removed. Experiment 2 evaluated the relative effectiveness of group commitment, individual commitment, and token reinforcers on paper recycling in a college dormitory. The students in all three experimental conditions recycled from three to five times more paper than those in the control group during the 4-week intervention. However, in the 3-week follow-up period, when the treatments were removed, only the individually committed subjects continued to recycle significantly more paper than the controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses about rural development in different social, economic and political contexts bringing together the analysis of European and Third World situations and tendencies. The article analyses the characteristics and outcomes of contrasting types of rural development policy. The analysis of policy issues requires that people take account policy content, administration means which concerns the organization of implementation and the social, economic, and political consequences of the policy, under different local conditions and as experienced by different social groups. There should be study of the differential responses to change and to programs of development shown by different social groups or classes of a rural population. The emphasis on differential responses is particularly important because it acts as a corrective to centralist views on development that interpret changes in the organization and activities of local populations simply as to externally initiated change and recognizes the heterogeneity of rural communities. A further issue concerns cultural and ideological dimensions. The exploration of these dimensions brings back to the importance of State policies that affect the rural sector.

Collective consciousness is "baked into" the architecture of the human mind—it is at the foundation of a uniquely human psychology, wherein homo sapiens have the intent and the capacity to cooperate with beings that are living and dead, human and otherwise. I discuss the psychological contours of collective consciousness and its effects on human cognition, affect, motivation, and behavior. Integrating across three major theoretical papers and dozens of empirical papers, I argue that the psychological structure and function of collective consciousness are intertwined; the former giving rise to the latter. I also discuss two varieties of collective consciousness—collective reality and collective psychology—that enable individual and group success in human society. I will end by describing how the psychology of collective consciousness can enhance our understanding of mutual trust and cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate‐smart agriculture (CSA) serves as a credible mechanism to simultaneously address food security, climate change, and agricultural productivity. Despite the widespread adoption of CSA approaches across West Africa, many countries have still not been able to resolve the problems of food insecurity and rural poverty. This systematic review evaluates published evidence on the types of CSA practices, the determinants and benefits of adoption, and the barriers confronting the adoption of CSA practices across West Africa, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta‐Analyses statement checklist. Articles published in English from January 2010 to March 2023 investigating the benefits of and barriers to the adoption of CSA practices in West Africa were retrieved from ScienceDirect, Web of Science, and Scopus databases. The methodological quality of studies was assessed using Joanna Briggs Institute critical appraisal tools for use in systematic reviews. The themes emerging from the articles were extracted, and a summary was provided to illustrate each theme. After applying the eligibility criteria, 12 articles were included in the final review. The studies reviewed revealed that farmers used more knowledge‐, water‐, carbon‐, and nitrogen‐smart practices, compared to weather‐ and energy‐smart practices. Across the reviewed papers, factors such as the education level of farmers, age, gender, household size, membership of a social group, agricultural extension services, and access to credit/financial resources influenced CSA adoption. The reviewed studies identified that farmers who used CSA practices reported benefits such as improved soil fertility, higher yield, improved household income, climate resilience (such as overcoming the effects of drought and extreme temperatures), and food security. Some farmers adopted CSA practices to reduce the effect of droughts and high temperatures on their crops, and thus increase their resilience to climate variability and change. However, farmers' adoption is confronted with challenges related to the technicality of some CSA practices, high cost of labor for CSA implementation, lack of credit and government support, limited access to weather and climate information, limited information about CSA options, high illiteracy level of smallholder farmers, and incompatibility of some practices with farmers' crop of interest. Our findings show that most CSA practices in the studies we reviewed are not well targeted to meet farmers' crop of interest, and that governments should provide more practical training to enhance farmers' understanding of CSA practices, especially those related to weather‐ and energy‐smart initiatives. There should also be more robust financial and institutional support to improve the adoption and usage of CSA practices at all levels. Additionally, socio‐cultural factors such as values, customs, and beliefs should be properly integrated into CSA plans as they influence the adoption of CSA practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins by reviewing rational choice institutionalism's explanation of how political institutions incentivise patronage networks emphasising ethnic cleavage. Acknowledging the limits of rationalist institutionalism in explaining societal norm constructions and mass behaviour, the paper then adopts discursive institutionalism to analyse the social affects of institutional design. The case study of violence against Amharas deemed 'settlers' in Ethiopia's contemporary ethnic federation highlights how new cleavages create new norms and new historical narratives, influencing group dynamics. These dynamics result in group‐based mass violence when rents‐based orders and patronage networks collapse during times of institutional instability or change. Thus, precipitated by the discursive effects of hyper‐ethnicised institutional design, mass violence against Amhara in different ethnic regions in Ethiopia emerges as an unexpected outcome of regime change and democratic transition in the country. These incidents of targeted violence are not simply explained by institutions, but rather by the socio‐political climate effected by the interaction between institutions and discourse under ethnic federalism. In short, this study demonstrates how institutions go beyond incentivising or constraining elite behaviour, producing discursive markers that normalise violence during periods of institutional 'lapse', when formal provisions of social order temporarily collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the books on family relations. It presents book abstracts and book review essays. A book abstract is a brief summary of a book. A book review essay, however, centers around issues raised in two or more books: Book review essays are peer-reviewed and subject to revision, request for resubmission, and rejection. Book abstracts and book review essays are based on books published within the past two years. These books are based on following topics: Adolescence; Aging; Communication; Cross Cultural Issues; Families and Religion; Families Around the World; Marriage and Family Therapy; Parent-Child Relationships; Parent Education; Public Policy Effects on Families; and Sexuality. Names of some of these books are: "Adolescents After Divorce"; "Social Networks and Social Influences in Adolescence"; "Adolescent Health: The Role of Individual Differences"; "Teenagers: An American History"; "Research on Family Resources and Needs Across the World"; "Family Scripts"; and "Pathways to Manhood: Young Black Males Struggle for Identity."

This paper explores the motivations and barriers behind the decision of economically disadvantaged Moldovans to refrain from migrating for better economic prospects. Drawing on 30 qualitative interviews with voluntary stayers, it uncovers a range of individual‐level characteristics that impede migration aspirations. These findings highlight the heightened sensitivity of lower‐wage stayers to their perceived social status abroad, their limited adaptability to new cultures and environments and their lower willpower to endure the challenges of long‐term gains. Moreover, this paper sheds light on their contentment with modest material gains and their aversion to migration risks. At the structural level, it emphasizes how social inequalities act as barriers for specific social groups, particularly the economically disadvantaged. These empirical insights challenge prevailing assumptions about the dominance of economic costs and network abroad in migration decision‐making, offering a fresh perspective on the social factors and costs shaping stayers' choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The status of women in Indian society has been paradoxical emanating from a deeply embedded socially construed gender‐based exploitation owing to historical and sociological reasons. Moreover, the intersectionality of gender and caste has made them one of the marginalized social groups who experience discrimination, exclusion, and exploitation. Plethora of Bollywood movies, and regional cinema narrate the humiliation and exploitation of women in various spheres of their life. Some of the recent Bollywood and regional cinema has successfully attempted to highlight the gender‐based exploitation and exclusion. Therefore, drawing upon an Amazon web series 'Dahad' and a movie 'Kathal‐a jackfruit mystery' the paper tries to explore the struggle, exploitation, discrimination, aspiration, and assertion of women against existing social oppression. Taking the inferences from these two movies, the paper endeavors to seek the answer to the following questions: What are the nature and pattern of gender and caste‐based humiliation of women? How gender and caste intersect in their humiliation and social exclusion? How are women making their own struggle against gender oppression and exploitation in society? What is the tactic they use to negotiate gender discrimination? How are they asserting against gender‐based discrimination? How are they asserting their 'agency' in patriarchal and hierarchical society? What aspire and motivate them to fight for their dignity? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the changing nature of the English and Swedish states between 1800 and 2020 from the perspective of ordinary citizens. We identify 13 typical life situations and then describe the types of citizens who interacted with the state, the number and types of public officials with whom they interacted, and where those interactions took place. We distinguish among three typical social groups: the poor, the middle, and the rich. We find, among other things, that the poor became objects of government policy much earlier than other groups, but they also remained in a world of parochial poor relief even as the middle and the rich began to interact with a more functionally differentiated, professional bureaucracy. These findings have important implications for scholarly debates on when the state began to interact directly with the civilian masses and the unevenness of state activities and capacities within countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether new technologies will have a positive impact on how societies experience nature depends on how particular devices and populations come to interact.This paper reviews two bodies of work that have sought to understand and influence these interactions with reference to the smartphone.The first is associated with a group of researchers interested in how smartphone apps might help people to engage with their surroundings in beneficial ways.The second comes from a set of scholars hoping to learn from the analysis of the social media datasets associated with smartphone interactions outdoors.After comparing these how these two bodies commonly see the social world, the paper considers how other approaches might augment these endeavours.We argue for more studies that explore what different social groups have to say about life with the smartphone and how norms of technology use emerge.We also suggest that this area of research might engage more fully with wider academic work on how smartphones are reshaping our societies. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 30 years, governments have sought to give citizens greater choice and control of the public services they utilise. As a result, we have seen the creation of various forms of public sector markets, including through contracting and tendering processes and, more recently, by utilising individualised or 'personalised' care budgets. Under the latter, individuals are given money to purchase services that meet their needs. There is growing evidence that personalisation schemes may actually be entrenching administrative burden, due to their unprecedented emphasis on individual skills and advocacy. Moreover, reviews internationally have found that such schemes tend to be administratively complex. This paper uses a systematic review of existing research to explore experiences of administrative burden within the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). We found that the scheme is administratively cumbersome overall, and that burdens are exacerbated for particular social groups. We apply concepts of habitus and capital from Bourdieu to theorise why burdens are experienced differently by different groups, and how to address this in practice. In doing so, we can see that addressing exclusion within the NDIS requires us to move away from problematising individuals to including those individuals in different stages of the design and implementation of administrative systems. There is growing evidence that personalisation schemes may actually be entrenching administrative burden, due to their unprecedented emphasis on individual skills and advocacy. This paper uses a systematic review of existing research to explore experiences of administrative burden within the NDIS, using concepts from Bourdieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this issue of the Journal, our regular "Clinical and Theoretical Practice" strand brings together papers that revisit the foundational work of Winnicott and Segal, providing an opportunity to deepen our thinking around key texts in the field, and perhaps too to consider our individual practice afresh. Next, Patrick Casement, in a wide-ranging inaugural lecture prepared for the inaugural conference of the Japanese Winnicott Association in 2019, draws a distinction between "using" - or applying - Winnicott's ideas, and "finding" Winnicott in our clinical work, suggesting that it is 'at those times of finding Winnicott that his ideas most vividly come alive to us'. Then, R.D. Hinshelwood offers a searching paper that extends his recent discussion of Segal's theory of symbol-formation in the BJP (Hinshelwood, [2]). [Extracted from the article]

This paper examined British children's (8‐ to 10‐year‐olds) and adolescents' (13‐ to 15‐year‐olds, N = 340; Female N = 171, 50.3%) expectations, evaluations and reasoning about a bystander peer who challenges the social exclusion of an immigrant or non‐immigrant peer by a peer group of non‐immigrant students. Participants read a hypothetical scenario in which a peer was excluded from an afterschool club by the peer group. The scenarios were either intergroup or intragroup contexts. Participants' expectations of a peer bystander challenging the social exclusion by the peer group, their perception of how the peer group would evaluate the challenger, and their reasoning around their expectations were measured. Adolescents were less likely to expect a peer bystander to challenge exclusion compared to children. Participants' perceptions of how the group would evaluate the challenger were significantly lower in intergroup compared to intragroup contexts. In intergroup contexts, adolescents with low expectations of challenging favoured group dynamics and group repercussions reasoning over moral reasoning, while children did not use group repercussions reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over recent decades, the growing research on social diversity at country level has striven to explain several outcomes such as the differences in income across countries and the origins of civil conflicts. The literature employs a wide range of indices to measure social diversity that hinders the comparison of the results with respect to their effects on socio‐economic performance. This paper intends to disentangle such a variety of indices and their applications. To achieve this goal, we have collected the social diversity indices used in cross‐country studies, and have ascertained not only their similarities and differences, and the relationships between them, but also their main applications. Studies at country level have been selected that construct their own indices and that make their databases available. We show that the dimension and the index chosen to measure social diversity, the level of disaggregation of the social groups, and the geographical unit of analysis explain the tangle of indices and the mixed results achieved by the literature focused on socio‐economic outcomes of social diversity. This paper enables the suitable evaluation and comparison of the effects of social diversity and the selection of the appropriate index depending on the analysis to be carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including clinical commentaries on the patients; implications for disabled people of any change in the law on assisted suicide; and threats to health provision from instrumentalism and linear thinking.

Research on equality, diversity and inclusion in the Chinese context is insufficient. This paper fills part of the research gap by examining the role of the institutional actors in shaping the equality and inclusion discourse, policy and reality in contemporary China. In particular, it highlights the crucial role of the state, and the emergence and maintenance of privileged social groups. This is because the construction of public discourse on inequality and inclusion is necessarily a political and social process, with social policy implications. Public discourse not only reflects the political ideals and moral standards of the nation at a given time, but also impacts the vested interests of different social groups, and their acquisition and maintenance of power. This paper reveals the entrenched, disadvantaged positions of rural migrant workers and other lower social groups, and of women and persons of disability at workplaces, and calls for policy and management intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how innovation teams can be optimally configured to yield the best possible performance at different stages of a certain technology's life cycle, which correspond to different levels of environmental complexity. To conduct our analysis, we have employed computational simulations of communities searching NK landscapes at varying levels of complexity. We studied how the relative proportion of exploring agents to exploiting agents in a community impacts the evolution of scores over time, and conducted additional investigations into the role of specialization (i.e., the agents' propensity to take their preferred action) and density (i.e., the expected width of social groups within the community). We discover that majority‐explorer teams are to be preferred when complexity is high and over the long run, whereas majority‐exploiter teams are more effective in the short run and at low complexities. Furthermore, we show that higher levels of specialization yield better results at higher complexities, and that majority‐explorer teams benefit the most from higher levels of density. We conclude that different team compositions are to be preferred at different stages of maturity, and that selecting a time horizon for operations is of crucial importance when designing an innovation team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When does a group justifiedly believe that p? One answer to this question has been developed first by Schmitt and then by Hakli: when the group members jointly accept a reason for the belief. Call this the joint acceptance account of group justification. Their answer has great explanatory power, providing us with a way to account for cases in which the group's justification can diverge from the justification individual members have. Unfortunately, Jennifer Lackey developed a powerful argument against joint acceptance accounts. She argues that these accounts lead to epistemically arbitrary reasons and therefore justification at will. Group justification loses the necessary connection to the world to be truth‐conducive. In this paper I develop a new form of a joint acceptance account that can deal with Lackey's examples: the anchored joint acceptance account of group justification. I argue that properly understanding the role of epistemic expectations can help us form the best version of a joint acceptance account. While justification is only generated by joint acceptance of evidence, the evidential expectations towards a group are anchored in the group members. This anchoring guarantees that groups cannot manipulate their ultima facie justification illegitimately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of I Ratio i concerns the practical application of concepts and theories developed in philosophy of language. Three of the papers in this issue, by Derek Ball, Timothy Endicott, and Teresa Marques, were presented at the 2019 I Ratio i conference. The other five papers, by Endre Begby, Ashley Feinsinger & David Friedell, Kathryn Lindeman, Eliot Michaelson & Robert Simpson, David Plunkett & Alexis Burgess, were commissioned for the special issue. [Extracted from the article]

Mixed‐species groups are usually explained by foraging advantages and reduced predation risk for at least one of the participating species. Given that animals trade‐off foraging and vigilance, the optimal level of vigilance of individuals in mixed‐species groups depends partly on the vigilance levels of both conspecifics and heterospecifics. However, the benefits and costs of being part of a mixed‐species group do not need to be evenly distributed between the species in a group. In this paper, we modeled the evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) for the optimal level of vigilance of an individual in a mixed‐species group influenced by the effects of "many eyes," "dilution" and "attraction," and unequal costs and benefits between the species. Our model illustrates under what conditions associations with other species may facilitate reduced predation risk for at least one of the participating species. We show that vigilance of individuals in mixed‐species groups becomes a social game, and that the ESS of these vigilance games may predict the individual's adaptive level of vigilance. This paper provides the first step in the development of a predictive theory for the numerous empirical studies on mixed‐species groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the politics of life and death in Bolsonaro's Brazil during the COVID‐19 pandemic. It is argued that while this administration, and the president himself, have long supported violence against individuals and social groups they did not see as fully human, their response to the pandemic marked a public transition from valuing certain kinds of lives as opposed to others, to a general contempt for human lives. The paper explores this transition by discussing the reification of the economy to the detriment of the people who produce and consume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present the first estimate of the full income distribution in pre‐industrial Sweden (including present‐day Finland). We draw on the schedule and the individual assessments devised by the authorities to distribute the 1613 Älvsborg ransom taxation to estimate income inequality, as well as the income shares of the top quantiles and of various social groups. We find that Sweden was relatively equal compared with other early modern European societies, for two main reasons: first, because the nobility, the clergy, the burghers, and other middle‐rank social groups all held relatively small shares of the total income, and second, because the landless groups were less numerous in Sweden than in other societies. This resulted in a large share of the total income going to the relatively homogeneous group of landed peasants, who made up the majority of the population. Our study thus speaks to the political historiography of early modern Sweden, within which negotiation and collaboration between the landed peasantry and the state has been seen as pivotal to the state formation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a general method for analysing the sentiments expressed in the language of judicial rulings. We apply natural language processing tools to the text of US appellate court opinions to extrapolate judges' sentiments (positive/good vs. negative/bad) towards a number of target social groups. We explore descriptively how these sentiments vary over time and across types of judges. In addition, we provide a method for using random assignment of judges in an instrumental variables framework to estimate causal effects of judges' sentiments. In an empirical application, we show that more positive sentiment influences future judges by increasing the likelihood of reversal but also increasing the number of forward citations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the problem of assessing the homogeneity of the disease transmission process in stochastic epidemic models in populations that are partitioned into social groups. We develop a classical hypothesis test for completed epidemics which assesses whether or not there is significant within‐group transmission during an outbreak. The test is based on time‐ordered group labels of individuals. The null hypothesis is that of homogeneity of disease transmission among individuals, a hypothesis under which the discrete random vector of groups labels has a known sampling distribution that is independent of any model parameters. The test exhibits excellent performance when applied to various scenarios of simulated data and is also illustrated using two real‐life epidemic data sets. We develop some asymptotic theory including a central limit theorem. The test is practically very appealing, being computationally cheap and straightforward to implement, as well as being applicable to a wide range of real‐life outbreak settings and to related problems in other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between the gender power balance, changes in the consumption of alcohol and changing social interdependences. The empirical setting is Ireland circa 1900 up to the present. Drawing from the works of Norbert Elias, I explain how a lessening of the power inequality between men and women was more moderate and limited up to the 1960s. The effect of this was that emancipatory changes around drinking were mainly confined to women from specific social cohorts. As the reduction in gender power inequality accelerated post 1960 it initially increased tensions between the genders, reflected in new power struggles over the social spaces in which drinking occurred and in the type of glass one should drink from. Despite the emergence of less unequal power relations, men continued to have a model setting function in relation to alcohol consumption. A central contention of the paper is the need to give greater consideration to the nature of social interdependences for they can generate a lessening of power inequalities for some social cohorts while failing to generate such a dynamic for other similar social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That technologies may raise ethical issues is now widely recognised. The 'responsible innovation' literature – as well as, to a lesser extent, the applied ethics and bioethics literature – has responded to the need for ethical reflection on technologies by developing a number of tools and approaches to facilitate such reflection. Some of these instruments consist of lists of questions that people are encouraged to ask about technologies – a methodology known as the 'Socratic approach'. However, to date, these instruments have often not adequately acknowledged various political impacts of technologies, which are, I suggest, essential to a proper account of the ethical issues they raise. New technologies can make some people richer and some people poorer, empower some and disempower others, have dramatic implications for relationships between different social groups and impact on social understandings and experiences that are central to the lives, and narratives, of denizens of technological societies. The distinctive contribution of this paper, then, is to offer a revised and updated version of the Socratic approach that highlights the political, as well as the more traditionally ethical, issues raised by the development of new technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Has any school or movement in all of Western philosophy made a permanent contribution, permanent in the sense that it will last as long as philosophy does? More narrowly, has there ever been put forward a thesis that has achieved lasting consensus? After carefully defining "philosophical thesis" and "consensus," so as to forestall uninteresting answers, this paper argues that the ancient Greeks made one or two such contributions, and the Analytic philosophers (ca. 1890–1960) made a few, but there have been no others. Moreover (a) the Analytic contributions were more empirical than philosophical, and (b) they were almost entirely negative. So, the basic short answer to our question is "no." The paper concludes by asking in what way(s) there has been progress in philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper theorizes a general political‐social condition of stateless peoples, which is particularly manifested in East Asia, where traditional empires and peoples have been broken apart by imperialism, nation‐states, Japanese invasion, communist revolutions and the Cold War. Based upon such observation, the paper develops a political account of people, self‐determination and intervention. It argues against the two current major accounts, primary right theories and remedial right only theories. Both accounts fail to speak to the political‐social reality faced by stateless peoples. To develop its thesis, the paper pursues two questions: Who should be recognized as a people among stateless groups? When does such a people acquire the right of self‐determination that legitimizes intervention? For the first question, the paper draws upon Iris M. Young's concept of social group and Hannah Arendt's notion of power to elaborate a 'power' account of people. A right of self‐determination is understood as a people's right to international protection of their self‐protective power. The paper then expounds a Lockean condition that triggers the right of intervention to protect that power. It briefly uses the cases of the Rohingya and Hong Kong to illustrate its argument. A right of self‐protection indeed looks like a self‐contradictory term. It is not a right to direct protection but a right to the protection of a people's self‐protective capability. But if a people has the power of self‐protection, why does it need the right to others' protection? The answer given above is violence. Violence enhanced by technology always vanquishes power and brings down all human joint endeavors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a social network perspective to the study of strategic alliances. It extends prior research, which has primarily considered alliances as dyadic exchanges and paid less attention to the fact that key precursors, processes, and outcomes associated with alliances can be defined and shaped in important ways by the social networks within which most firms are embedded. It identifies five key issues for the study of alliances: (1) the formation of alliances, (2) the choice of governance structure, (3) the dynamic evolution of alliances, (4) the performance of alliances, and (5) the performance consequences for firms entering alliances. For each of these issues, this paper outlines some of the current research and debates at the firm and dyad level and then discusses some of the new and important insights that result from introducing a network perspective. It highlights current network research on alliances and suggests an agenda for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A ruler who does not identify with a social group, whether on religious, ethnic, cultural, or socioeconomic grounds, is confronted with a trade‐off between taking advantage of the out‐group population's eagerness to maintain its identity and inducing it to "comply" (conversion, quitting, exodus, or any other way to accommodate the ruler's own identity). This paper first nests economists' extraction model, in which rulers are revenue‐maximizers, within a more general identity‐based model, in which rulers care also about inducing people to lose their identity, both in a static and an evolving environment. This paper then constructs novel data sources to test the implications of both models in the context of Egypt's conversion to Islam between 641 and 1170. The evidence supports the identity‐based model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's testimonial learning often occurs in epistemic collaborations with others. In this paper, we will discuss ways in which cultural learning emerges in social and interpersonal contexts, and is intrinsically supported and guided by children's collaborative capacities. Much work in cultural learning has focused on children's examination of speaker and model characteristics, but more recent research has investigated the interactive aspects of testimonial exchanges. We will review evidence that children (1) participate in the interpersonal commitments that are shared in testimonial transactions by way of direct address and epistemic buck passing, (2) participate in social groups that affect their selective learning in nuanced ways, and (3) may detect epistemic harms by listeners who refuse to believe sincere and accurate speakers. Implications for conceptualizing children's testimonial learning as an interactive mechanism of collaboration will be discussed. Children's testimonial learning often occurs in epistemic collaborations with others, which enable distinct forms of trust to operate that grant them access to information about the world. By examining children's conversational practices, their group‐based biases and assumptions, and their sensitivity to epistemic harms, we suggest that children evaluate speakers in terms of their epistemic credentials and social characteristics while at the same time holding them interpersonally responsible for their claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antisemitism has been a persistent and growing prejudice for millenniums against the Jewish people. This paper offers a general theory of group hatred appliable to antisemitism and other religious or racial prejudices. Theories of prejudice tend either to postulate an internal psychic template of hatred that is projected or postulate a social origin of hatred that is internalized. Rather there is a dialectic where there is a reciprocal movement between internal and external. The tendency to hate and project is a part of the human psyche, here called internal racism. Anxieties which cannot be contained internally can be stabilized by large‐group identity. When internal racism cannot be contained or the external social groups are weak, the result is pathological large‐group formations. A distinction can be made between personal antisemitism in which the hatred is projected onto a known person and impersonal antisemitism in which hatred is projected into groups. A fairy tale by the brother's Grimm, "The Jew among Thorns" is used to illustrate a number of personal antisemitic attitudes. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a forged document that appeared in pre‐revolutionary Russia, is used to illustrate impersonal antisemitism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paternal incarceration (PI) is recognised as a severely stigmatising event that undermines social connections leaving affected children isolated and vulnerable. However, few studies have explored social group membership as a potential mediator of positive outcomes. This paper analysed data from two national contexts, Scotland and the United States, to examine the potential for social group membership in childhood to mediate the association between PI and child behavioural and emotional outcomes. Study 1 reported on cross‐sectional data from the Growing Up in Scotland dataset of children aged 12 years. Study 2 used longitudinal data from the Fragile Families cohort study (USA) of children aged 9 years and then 15 years. Children and parents completed measures of PI, children's group membership, as well as positive functioning. In Study 1, a mediated indirect effect of PI on prosocial behaviour via children's group membership was observed. In Study 2, children's reported social group membership mediated the effect of PI on positive adolescent functioning longitudinally. Whilst experiences of PI at age 9 were linked with lower group membership at age 15, group membership was associated with higher levels of positive adolescent functioning. This has implications for the support families receive when a parent is incarcerated to avoid children serving sentences for 'the sins of their fathers'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded upon the group dynamics and the human capital literature, this paper proposes that the presence and conditions of female directors on a board substantially affect the acquisition decision. In detail, it argues that female board representation decreases the acquisition premium offered. It also examines the effects of female directors are contingent upon their conditions. When the females are inside, rather than outside, directors, their influence is greater. When the female directors have more prior acquisition experiences than male directors, the negative impact on premiums is strengthened, particularly when their acquisition experiences are those accumulated at acquirers rather than at targets. Empirical analyses on a sample of 1750 acquisitions made by US public firms in 2003–2013 provide evidence to support our predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As organizations continue to expand their implementation of Lean practices, business schools and corporate training organizations have developed numerous games and simulations aimed at teaching Lean concepts in manufacturing settings. However, simulations have lagged behind the most recent adaptations of Lean outside of the factory in services, and more specifically, in office settings. In this article, we present a Lean simulation game, referred to as "Computer Solutions, Inc." that provides participants with hands‐on experience in applying Lean principles in a nonmanufacturing setting. The simulation takes place in the order‐quote department at "Computer Solutions, Inc.," a company that specializes in designing customized computer solutions for small businesses. The order‐quote process is purely office‐based and involves such activities as collecting information, processing information, filling out documents, and forwarding those documents to different parts of the organization. This simulation is implemented as a "pencil‐and‐paper" exercise that can be performed by students in the classroom. Our simulation brings some unique benefits that are often missing from current Lean manufacturing‐based simulations. It involves multiple rounds of Lean improvements that can span several weeks, providing students a chance to identify wastes and to make a thoughtful application of Lean tools and techniques. Students also get to experience the challenges of group dynamics that are often present in team‐based improvement efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines promising avenues for empirical research on quantified control in healthcare work. A review of key insights from accounting, organization studies, and the emergent sociology of quantification indicates that numbers are productive as well as deceptive and seductive, that they enable control but can be evaded, and that they typically have unintended effects. It remains to be further explored how multiple forms of measurement and quantified control play out in everyday healthcare work. Other questions worth probing concern the limits and capabilities of numbers as a shared language, the differential and disciplinary effects of numbers on social groups, the use of numbers for impression management, and how people manage to resist or mobilize numbers for different purposes. Calling for additional qualitative, close‐up studies, the paper proposes a research focus on everyday practices and the interactions of diverse control measures. It sets out several fruitful methodological pathways, both the well‐established approaches of ethnography and Actor‐Network Theory and the more novel approaches of investigating numbers as communicative acts or as dramaturgical performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The paper provides tentative empirical evidence against Robert D. Putnam's claim that ethnic diversity is a threat to collective civic action, and finds support for Robert J. Sampson's proposition that established organisations foster collective civic action. The aim of this paper is twofold: to describe: (i) the ways in which volunteers and professionals make sense of and understand the multicultural neighbourhood; and (ii) how that impacts on collective civic action in the neighbourhood. The paper takes a small scale mixed‐methods approach (9 semi structured interviews and a small scale quantitative survey (N = 39)), comparing two neighbourhoods with similar characteristics in terms of ethnic diversity and socio‐economic problems. The findings show that problems associated with ethnicity are not the most pressing ones for recent migrants. Instead they struggle with work, housing, a lack of supportive networks, unfamiliarity with the educational system, and language problems. The paper concludes that the multicultural discursive framework is a salutary one for those working and living in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the choice of group identity, which is comprised of characteristics and commitments to these characteristics, in a network formation model where links costs are shared. Players want to link to the largest group given that linking costs for players of the same (different) characteristic are decreasing (increasing) in their commitments. The equilibrium concepts used are Nash equilibrium as well as one that looks for stability allowing for bilateral negotiations. Conditions are shown under which the endogenous choice of characteristics and commitments allow for multiple groups with segregated or connected networks. When group identity is partly endogenous, such that characteristics are fixed and players only choose commitment, it is shown that the equilibrium population commitment profile dictates whether the resulting network is segregated or connected.Whengroup identity is fully endogenous, it is shown that multiple groups and segregated networks are possible equilibrium outcomes but such outcomes are not stable unless the group size additionally affects the costs of link formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here's the three-word version of this paper: dogwhistles aren't dogwhistles. Let's add to the definition of dogwhistles, then, that their secondary content isn't necessarily a secret shared by the ingroup, it's just a violation of an egalitarian norm to which the ingroup is less committed than the outgroup. Even dogwhistles that function as ingroup handshakes celebrate ingroup membership at the expense of the outgroup. The category of "explicit intentional" dogwhistle, which Saul (2018) uses to analyze some of the standard dogwhistles, is a clear case of the secret code account, but Saul defines three other kinds of dogwhistles as well, and these other varieties allow for explaining dogwhistles in other ways. What all these definitions share, crucially, is the idea that political dogwhistles typically work like literal dogwhistles and secret codes: in general, only the ingroup hears a coded meaning. [Extracted from the article]

Summary: This paper investigates output sign‐consensus of multiagent systems over directed signed graphs. In signed graphs, the sign of each edge stands for either hostile interaction (associated with positive sign) or antagonistic interactions (associated with negative sign) among agents. Agent dynamics are heterogeneous, allowing coexistence of distinct agent dynamics in one group. Heterogeneity in this paper also implies that the states of different agents may have different dimensions, but their outputs should have the same dimension. Distributed control laws are designed for both fixed and switching graph topologies. For fixed topology, the graph is assumed to be eventually positive. For switching topology, the graph needs to be jointly eventually positive, which extends the well‐known concept of joint connectivity by taking dwell time into consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the Cape York Welfare Reform Trial (CYWRT), which has been running in the remote Aboriginal towns of Aurukun, Hope Vale, Mossman Gorge and Coen since 2008, Family Responsibilities Commissioners have the unprecedented ability to quarantine welfare payments. Critics claim these "BasicCards," which cannot be spent on alcohol, tobacco, pornography or gambling, brings shame to Aboriginal people – marking them as dependants, deemed incapable of responsible spending. Evaluations of the CYWRT paint a more complicated picture. While many of the "spectators" of the CYWRT report "welfare reform stigma," the "subjects" themselves are more positive. This paper draws on ethnographic research in Hope Vale to argue that these categories overlap with loosely defined, porous social groups that developed during the town's mission past, described as the "engaged" and "embedded" Hope Valers, respectively. The engaged group tends to be more aware of and sensitive to the views of the dominant society and to subscribe to its "ideology of respectability." Meanwhile, the latter group tends to adhere to a more egalitarian "ideology of relatedness," and do not experience the shame, even when their own welfare is quarantined, because the behaviours that trigger quarantining are normalised within their highly circumscribed domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author explores the ways in which a supervision group can be a source of ruptures in the supervisory alliance. Furthermore, the group's involvement in repair of the supervisory alliance is examined. The author draws upon empirical material from supervision sessions with a supervision group consisting of one supervisor and four novice psychotherapists conducting psychodynamic psychotherapy at a university clinic. Based on the work of W.R. Bion, the paper argues that, in group supervision, the supervisory alliance cannot be separated from the group processes in which it is embedded. The author concludes that a supervision group can affect the supervisory alliance negatively through group dynamics, or the alliance can be ruptured by other alliance formations that constitute themselves in group supervision. However, a supervision group can contribute to the repair of the supervisory alliance by supporting the supervisee, compensating for the supervisor's imperfection and supporting the supervisor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the social sciences there is a long standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behavior. Structurationists like Giddens think of individuals' agency and collective features as two sides of the same coin while emergentists including Archer and Elder‐Vass claim that structurationists are blurring an important ontological distinction——they argue for effective social analysis, we should think of structures and individuals as different things because emergence happens when the properties of the collective are not reducible to the properties of the parts that constitute them. This paper contributes to the agency‐structure debate by showing how production and reproduction of emergent properties of social groups sharing same normative commitments (norm circles) can be empirically studied using two behavioral game theory experiments, adding a previously neglected insight that strategic uncertainty can lead to coordination failures of individual behaviors within norm circles, manifested as unintended outcomes of interdependent actions that are difficult to predict. Here the synchronic relation between the unpredictable collective outcomes of each game round and agential reactions of the participants to them defines emergence——the previous outcomes are diachronic inputs but they appear in the new outcome only through their effects on the individual decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In social psychology, stereotypes have generally been viewed as overgeneralized beliefs about social groups in society. Although stereotypes—especially those that are negative— tend to be recognized as contributing to prejudice and discrimination of marginalized communities, they are often conceptualized as containing a “kernel of truth.” Meanwhile, there has been relatively little consideration of the historical and cultural origins of racial stereotypes. This is an important oversight given that stereotypes have and continue to be used as a means to excuse and reinforce the systemic oppression of communities of color. Thus, the current paper uses a historical framework to review major stereotypes that have targeted communities of color throughout U.S. history, with a focus on stereotypes of Black people. In doing so, we conceptualize racial stereotypes as propaganda that have historically functioned to support oppressive societal systems in the U.S. by both (a) shaping public perceptions and expectations and (b) by influencing the thoughts and behavior of members of stereotyped groups. By situating stereotypes within their historical and cultural frames, readers can recognize the way stereotypes reinforce systems of oppression. We conclude with research implications and encourage stereotyping scholars to foreground the social construction of stereotypes and the function that  they serve by contextualizing their work in the social and historical context in which stereotypes emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite increased research on 'multiple hazards' and 'cascading effects', ambiguity remains concerning terminology. This paper reviews the literature to explore how these two concepts are defined in relation to critical infrastructures and their vital societal functions. Next, it investigates how the concepts are operationalised in Swedish disaster risk management. Findings indicate that regardless of a wealth of methodologies assessing multiple hazards and their cascading effects, these are rarely used by local planners, suggesting a gap between scientific approaches and practical implementation. Research mainly captures multiple hazards and cascading effects through technical parameters related to the severity of a hazard or the direct physical impacts on infrastructure. Less focus has been placed on the wider or knock‐on effects across sectors and how these translate into societal risk. Future research should move beyond traditional understandings of social vulnerabilities as only pre‐existing, to analyse how cascading effects on infrastructure and services can put new social groups at risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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