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The article examines the artisanal model of social norms and its ability to accommodate normative disagreement, contestation, and change. It addresses criticisms that the model is overly individualistic and idealized, arguing that it can account for the complexities of social norms and the role of individuals, communities, and institutions in shaping them. The author engages with comments from other scholars, highlighting points of agreement and disagreement. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of a nuanced understanding of the social world and its connection to our biological nature. [Extracted from the article]

In an increasingly polarised world, crisp labelling, dichotomisation, and the flourishing of nation- and ethnic-based prejudice hinders the finding and construction of spaces for transcending boundaries. By combining cosmopolitanism as forms of relating with networks as a social and cultural practice characteristic of our time, this special issue aims at discerning forms and situations which defy prior categorisation or bridge social boundaries. It brings together eight case studies that provide ethnographically grounded explorations of the articulation of cosmopolitan perspectives with networking practices. The articles cover a variety of ethnographic settings, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia. Bringing 'cosmopolitanism' and 'network' together points to issues that are foundational to the discipline: from the definition of the 'Other' and the definition of the anthropological object of analysis, to the definition of the social in different social formations and actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past twenty years, a persistent concern about the growing phenomenon of homegrown terrorism in the West has led researchers to study the radicalization process toward violent extremism. The potential link between ideology and behaviors is at the center of scientific debates. Some argue that adhesion to an ideology is not a necessary condition for political violence. According to this perspective, research should focus on the study of behaviors. Others argue that ideological aspects have an influence at every stage of engagement and that neglecting ideas would be a mistake in attempts at understanding radicalization. In this article, we contribute to that discussion by proposing a better way to understand the connection between ideology and behaviors. Using Raymond Boudon's general theory of rationality, we argue that engagement in violent extremism is a complex combination of actions, decisions, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs the understanding of which requires the use of a comprehensive sociological approach. Thus, we defend a theoretical perspective based on methodological individualism and we develop a general typology for radicalization processes based on this perspective. We also point out how this perspective differs from conventional rational choice theory and other theoretical perspectives used in the field of radicalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monique Deveaux's Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-led Social Movements makes a significant contribution to contemporary capability theories by challenging their individualism. Mainline versions of the Capabilities Approach (CA), including those developed by Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and Ingrid Robeyns, insist on a methodological and normative individualism. And with good reason: communitarianism most often reinscribes patriarchal power, especially within the family. Deveaux, however, argues that this individualism yields a depoliticized account of poverty as capability deprivation, thereby downplaying or even denying the agency of the poor. But poor-led social movements politicize poverty, understanding it as a social and political relation between individuals and institutions. These movements build collective political capabilities: capabilities that can be exercised only by groups or that promote collective goods. The current paper explicates, extends, and defends this powerful challenge to mainline capability theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Externalities, as both a pervasive phenomenon and a concept, lie at the centre of ecological thought and policy debates. This paper questions the adequacy of deeming of pervasive phenomena as externalities including by some authors in the (eco)socialist tradition. It critically reflects on the epistemological underpinnings of what is seen as internal and what as external, and reveals the role of methods used in economics as well as real social and economic processes characterising capitalism in configuring these so-called externalities. The roots of said externalities are traced beyond Marshall and Pigou, to whom the concept is usually attributed, and associated with political economists, especially Mill and Sidgwick. Despite all the metamorphoses in the content and implications of the concept of externalities since its birth, the constitutive role of methodological individualism as a common ground of all particular uses of externalities is demonstrated. However, externalities as a concept do not owe their existence solely to the individualistic method of mainstream economics. Real and practical processes defining capitalism are at least as important in understanding the content and function of externalities in both theoretical economics and political debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Τhe idea that social influences and social interactions play a central role in individual economic decisions has had a long presence in the history of economics. With the emergence of marginalism, this idea retreated into the background and the concept of the atomistic individual became established in mainstream economic rationality. Starting in the 1970s, there were some attempts to reintroduce non-atomistic preferences in mainstream microeconomic theory in the form of social interactions, interdependent preferences, keeping up with the Joneses, social identity, social preferences, and status concerns. Social preferences have a growing impact among mainstream microeconomics with the advent of behavioral economics, but still they are not in the hard core of the standard theory of choice. The article argues that atomistic preferences are still prevalent, especially in the form of the assumption of the representative agent. It also focuses on the role of methodological individualism and on the theoretical implications of relaxing the assumption of the atomistic individual as the main explanations for the resilience of the notion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay aims to reconstruct the 'genetic' phase of Norberto Bobbio's research on liberalism, through the theoretical confrontation he developed with some reference liberal authors, which we usually call 'classics'. The paper reconstructs, first of all, the path of Bobbio from the years of his liberal formation, which took place in the sign of the works of Benedetto Croce, to the first gradual departure from the Crocian concept of freedom during the years of the Resistance. After the end of the Second World War, also thanks to the encounter with Karl Popper's work, Bobbio's arrival to the methodological individualism took place as well as the definitive departure from the idealistic and Croce's conception of freedom. The systematic criticism Bobbio addressed to his idea of liberalism, was developed in the volume Politics and culture, a crucial work to understand what the philosophical foundations of liberalism are according to Bobbio. The interpretation he gave of Benjamin Constant's thought is important for two different reasons: firstly, starting from Constant, Bobbio anticipated as early as 1954 the famous Isaiah Berlin's distinction between negative and positive liberty; secondly, this interpretation is fundamental to highlight the particularity and the anomaly of Bobbio's liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gaming, one of the most noticeable "diseases" plaguing performance management, has attracted abundant scholarly attention. Adopting the perspective of methodological individualism, the extant literature, however, has neglected the horizontal strategic interactions among local governments. This study develops a formal game-theoretic model to investigate the bandwagon strategy, a particular type of horizontal gaming strategy, in the context of China's Energy Conservation and Emission Reduction (ECER) policy and applies spatial econometric methods to empirically confirm the existence of such a bandwagon strategy. Our findings suggest that horizontal gaming strategies should be taken seriously to improve the efficacy of performance management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its substantial influence, there is surprisingly little agreement about how to read C.I. Lewis's Mind and the World Order. Lewis has historically been read as a reductionist attempting to ground knowledge in qualia, but more recently it has become fashionable to read Lewis as a pragmatist engaged in a non-reductive, transcendental project. In this essay, I argue that while Lewis does have pragmatist leanings, the way he defines the fundamental categories of "the given," "meaning," and "concepts" ultimately commits him to a narrow reductionism. This is because he regards philosophy as an individualistic practice whose categories are verifiable only in introspection. I show how this commits Lewis to reductionism by focusing on his trouble grounding ethics and knowledge of other minds. The upshot is that while Lewis often leans towards pragmatism, his metaphysical commitments force him towards reductionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an analysis of contemporary comparative research on pedagogy, as published since 2000. It explores this sub-field of comparative education inquiry over this period, including how it has responded to new global movements, changing balances of power, and methodological advances. While these have shaped the field in recognisable ways, differing responses to these among researchers from contrasting research traditions have resulted in divergence as well as convergence. This divergence has created distinct typologies of studies that reflect particular epistemic communities of researchers, depending on how context and the purpose of research are perceived. The scoping review is based on a survey of 51 articles identified through a systematic search of 10 English-language journals in the field of comparative and international education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life history interviews from Ethiopia and Uganda, organised around experiences of wage labour, provide rich evidence on the working conditions of many poor, rural women and on what leads them to work for wages. The life histories confirm and illuminate arguments based on large-scale socio-economic surveys carried out in these two countries. Further, findings from the surveys and life histories challenge an influential literature that not only celebrates women's agency in poor rural areas, but also remains committed to methodological individualism and ideas of choice. Drawing on primary and secondary evidence from Africa (and elsewhere), we insist that violent coercion and catastrophe trump maximising rational selection among alternatives; that the social is fundamental to individual behaviour; and the non-market is key to (labour) market participation. We also provide a brief discussion of the policy implications of this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent voices in creativity research emphasize the vital role that processes of active engagement and interaction play. These distributed, interactivity-based, and ecological accounts critique the reduction of creativity to mental mechanisms and eschew the methodological individualism that underlies this view. Instead, they elevate socio-material couplings to a genuine causal mechanism, hereby explaining why others "are good to be creative with" beyond mutual inspiration or mere constraints on creativity. With improvised dance duets as our example, we introduce a micro-analysis that unpacks these mechanisms from a first-person viewpoint: We describe how the embodied communication at the sub-second scale, a continuous "give and take" between dancers, mediates the co-creation process and how reciprocal micro-actions cumulate into more complex creative effects. Secondly, we distinguish convergent and divergent co-creation dynamics, degrees of playful exploration vs. adaptive pressures, and degrees of individual creative autonomy. Thirdly, we argue that the mix of external constraints, joint exploration, and individual ideation provides a fertile mechanism for co-creation. Finally, we discuss forms of individual creative vision that respect and exploit the dynamic ecology, which can manifest in immediate micro-inspirations, but also in subtle modulations of ongoing process, and in "cultivating" the wider system in ways that benefit novelty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2015 a number of startups has emerged seeking to commercialise music AI. Two types of firm stand out. One markets services directly to consumers, in the form of adaptive music that responds to contextual and/or activity-related cues; another group markets AI-generated music to cultural producers, in the form of algorithmically-generated, royalty-free production music. Initiatives like these have generated debate among legal scholars about notions of copyright and authorship. But until recently discussion has focused on who (or what) should be awarded rights over the products of so-called 'expressive AI': Its programmers? Its users? Or the AI itself? Largely overlooked in such debates is the status of another repertoire: not the music put out by an AI, but that which is put into it, the music that constitutes the training set necessary for machine learners to learn. Given the massive datasets mobilised to train machine learners, existing copyright regimes prove inadequate in the face of the questions of distributive justice that such commercial systems raise. Specifically, commercial practices premised on the extraction of value from a special kind of common-pool resource – the shared knowledge of a given music community – demand remedies grounded not in the methodological individualism of copyright law, but commons-based responses instead. As such, the article sketches a couple of alternative models (levy-based trust funds, ownership funds) that could provide a more equitable institutional and economic framework for sustaining the musical commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Practice and practices have been increasingly discussed in theology. In these discussions, practice is often understood in relation to theory. In emergent practice theory, however, practice is understood in terms of social ontology and as an alternative to methodological individualism and methodological holism. Society, including religion, is analysed as nexuses of collective practices. This article makes a distinction between two concepts of practice, one weak and one strong, and discusses these concepts in texts by Kathlyn Tanner and Linda Woodhead. It also discusses how a strong conception of practice may contribute to theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores representations of problems regarding citizenship in changes to the syllabi of social studies and history in Swedish secondary schools between 1970 and 2017. Previous research has shown that the general educational discourse changed from an emphasis on the societal needs of committed citizens to an emphasis on the individual's ability to cope in a rapidly changing society in the end of the twentieth century. This study contributes to this research by exploring the impact of these discursive changes on individual school subjects. The study shows that changes in social studies and history syllabi even preceded changes previously seen in overall educational discourse regarding individualisation. While changes to the social studies syllabi have developed very closely to the overarching educational discourse in changing socialisation to be more suitable for an individualised society, changes to the history syllabi appear to have been more geared towards subjectification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes results from a critical co-ethnography focused on a mindfulness training for educators in an urban school district in the southeastern region of the U.S. Working across racial difference, and utilizing critical race theory and critical whiteness studies as lenses, the co-ethnographers identified individualism that subverted systemic levels of oppression, race neutral ideologies, and ways the curricula and facilitation of this mindfulness training may have missed opportunities for racial equity work. Additionally, ideologies of whiteness were present in the training despite being situated in a larger teacher residency program with a mission centered on the realization of equity and racial justice in schools. Implications for mindfulness programs and urban teacher residency models are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the interplay of normative and temporal dynamics in agent-based traffic simulations (ABM). From a media-historical perspective, it focuses on the TRANSIMS simulation system as a seminal example for an ABM 'mindset' in transportation and infrastructure simulation. ABM explicitly links traffic simulation with the broader focus of mobility studies by connecting the mere physicality of transport dynamics with a sociality of agents claiming to be descriptive of real-life structures. First, TRANSIMS elevates the examination of traffic dynamics to a meta-level of urban infrastructure design where individual timing and purposeful agent behaviors are placed at the heart of traffic systems. Second, TRANSIMS provides a 'virtual testbed' by generating traffic scenarios which eventually lead to situations that meet certain normative limits or regulatory guidelines. And third, ABM often display a strong tendency towards a methodological individualism which requires a 'theory guidance' by disciplines like sociology, media theory, or political science to challenge the oftentimes oversimplifying parameters of their 'artificial sociality'. Consequently, with regard to the scope of mobility studies, ABM can be understood as a medium which negotiates conceptual and interdisciplinary differences and thereby transcends the solely pragmatist notion of 'virtual testbeds' as unmitigated optimization tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship suggests that prison inmates who are visited may be less likely to recidivate. Questions exist, however, about whether the observed relationship is causal and, if so, whether it is consistent for different groups of inmates. To address these questions, this study employs two methodological approaches – first, conventional regression analyses and, second, instrumental variable (IV) analyses – to examine the effects of visitation in general and specifically for females, young inmates, and individuals incarcerated for the first time. Effect size estimates are similar across the two analytic approaches, but conventional regression analyses identify a statistically significant effect of visitation, whereas IV analyses do not. Subgroup analyses suggest differences between males and females and by age. Combined, the results raise questions about whether visitation exerts a causal effect on offending. Implications for theory, research, and policy of the divergent results and the potential for a generalized visitation effect are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A political epistemology that enables us to determine if political actors are likely to know what they need to know must be rooted in an ontology of the actors and of the human objects of their knowledge; that is, a political anthropology. The political anthropology developed in Power Without Knowledge envisions human beings as creatures whose conscious actions are determined by their interpretations of what seem to them to be relevant circumstances; and whose interpretations are, in turn, determined by webs of belief built from somewhat heterogeneous streams of incoming ideas. This anthropology, then, has two components. Ideational heterogeneity undermines the aspiration of technocracy to predict human behavior and the aspiration of social science to arrive at lawlike generalizations about it. Ideational determinism, however, which is less important than ideational heterogeneity to the critique of technocracy, may be more important to generating epistemological approaches to other forms of politics, all of which involve the actions of human beings who, as such, are largely at the mercy of the fallible ideas to which they have been exposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs about institutional status of visual studies and it's academic legitimacy and intellectual integrity pressured by its sheer methodological diversity and its plurality of approaches and expansiveness of analytic discipline. Topics include institutional legitimation connect to wider conflicts surrounding the neoliberalization of the university; and the retraction of public funding and the commodification of education, the modelling of institutions on corporate organization.

The article discusses how trajectories and associative evocations onto which each visitor would have the freedom to project their own imagination and personal history. It notes that the sequence of the research material visible in Beyond Borders is based on an intersubjective methodology which reflects various levels of interpretation. It adds that each participant's reading of the objects how they generously donated to the project.

It is argued in this paper that strict methodological individualism (MI) is a limit to progress in Austrian economics. It is possible to find already in Menger, in the older Hayek, and in the next generation of radical subjectivists led by Lachmann, the seeds of a distinct ontological and methodological position that may offer an interesting prospect of developing this school of thought. This alternative path suggests the replacement of strict MI with institutional individualism, compatible with the concept of emergence and all its ontological and methodological implications. It implies redefining the Mengerian project as part of the complexity economics paradigm. Lachmann is the Austrian author whose project is the most explicitly oriented toward this possibility. This paper does not aim to rediscover the relevance and originality of Lachmann's work, the second Austrian revival of the new millennium has indeed a lachmannian flavor. The aim is rather to provide a coherent framework for the dispersed recent work, which more or less explicitly links Austrian economics with complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text elaborates on the idea that Simmel's relational approach was born within his sociological works, and later on became crucial for his whole oeuvre, thus becoming his worldview, his cosmovision and metaphysical principle. His relational approach structured his three interrelated programmatic texts for the field of sociology: the essay 'The Problem of Sociology' ([1894] GSG5,1992:52-61), Sociology's first chapter 'The Problem of Sociology' ([1908] GSG11,1992:13-62), and Fundamental Questions of Sociology's first chapter 'The Area of Sociology' ([1917] GSG16,1999:62-87). A critical comparison of these three texts will allow us to trace the continuities and changes of Simmel's relational approach, which had consequences far beyond his sociological thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study argues that the supply-and-demand apparatus of the 'Marshallian cross' is an unsatisfactory representation of actual supply and demand forces, which are better characterized in the manner of the classical economists. Most particularly the rising supply function but also the conventional demand function, are shown to have no compelling general theoretical justification. There is no plausible basis for a presumption in favour of the former—other than the marginal productivity theory of factor pricing, which is itself unsatisfactory. Multiple reasons are suggested for the rise of the apparatus of supply-and-demand functions, notwithstanding its intrinsic implausibility. The classical conception of supply-and-demand is restated and reaffirmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Herut movement's social and economic alternative to the ruling Mapai party, characterised by a liberal-individualistic outlook and a general vision of converting the centralised economy to an economy in which private initiative and competition dominate. On 17 May 1977 the Herut movement became the ruling party through its Likud electoral bloc, with economic reforms quickly following. These reforms encountered difficulties: the declared 'economic turnabout' harmed the strength of the economy. Inflation rates reaching several hundred per cent, frequent devaluations, and a loss of faith in the Israeli currency threatened stability. Nevertheless, from the social perspective, Herut did indeed succeed in bettering the conditions of its loyal voters in the development towns and distressed neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marx's theory of history and his economic studies into the nature of capitalism undoubtedly build upon the work of classical economics. In completing the labour theory of value in many ways Marx also completed the project of classical economics. Yet Marx based his work upon the refutation of many key principles of classical economics. Confusion reigns over the contours of the conflict between Marx and classical economics. This confusion has been exacerbated by fluctuations in the fortunes of classical economics over recent decades. In the 1980s, Anglophone scholars tried to critically re-examine Marx's historical materialism with many methodological principles from classical economics. Among the most rigorous attempts was that made by Jon Elster in his Making Sense of Marx (1985). Elster applied his version of methodological individualism to historical materialism in an attempt to purge it of what he saw as methodologically unsound elements and extract the worthwhile explanations from it that were compatible with his methodological individualism. This article argues that Elster fails to justify the purgative imposition of his methodological individualism onto Marx's historical materialism. In addition, Marx's method is based upon an argued rejection of the core principles of methodological individualism and Elster ignores this argument. Elster's attempt is fundamentally erroneous. The only way of imposing methodological individualism onto Marx's historical materialism is by robbing the latter of its meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the popularity of rich assessment scenarios increases so must the availability of psychometric models capable of handling the resulting data. Dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) offer a fast, flexible option for characterizing student ability across time under psychometrically complex conditions. In this article, a brief introduction to DBNs is offered, followed by a review of the existing literature on the use of DBNs in educational and psychological measurement with a focus on methodological investigations and novel applications that may provide guidance for practitioners wishing to deploy these models. The article concludes with a discussion of future directions for research in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines differences in luxury value perceptions and their influence on luxury purchase intentions among collectivists and individualists. According to empirical evidence from 1,608 responses to the Brand Luxury Index (BLI), collectivists have stronger perceptions of price-controlled values (i.e., conspicuousness, high quality). Conspicuousness negatively affects luxury purchase intentions among individualists but not among collectivists. High quality positively impacts luxury purchase intentions among collectivists but not among individualists. Hedonism (a consumer-driven luxury value) plays an important role in luxury purchase intentions among individualists. Moreover, a multi-group analysis confirms the differences between the two cultural groups. The extended-self is a universal luxury-value perception on luxury purchase intentions for both groups. Additionally, subjective norms strongly influence luxury purchase intentions in both cultures. Furthermore, the results show that there is a difference in the impact of the uniqueness value on luxury purchase intentions between women and men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins in response to Tatiana Vaizer's 2014 article, also translated in this issue. It traces cases of trauma and violence through recent post-Soviet Russian poetry. Lvovsky distinguishes the generation of poets who were born in the early 1970s from those who were still children or even infants in the "traumatic" late 1980s and early 1990s, and he notes the signs of trauma being transmitted in their poetry. While challenging some of Vaisner's basis premises and assumptions, the discussion provides a rich overview of relevant work by a number of younger poets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper replies to Himmelreich's ‘The Paraphrase Argument Against Collective Actions’ [2017], which presents three putative counterexamples to the multiple agents analysis of plural action sentences. The paper shows that the argument from the first example, the discursive dilemma, fails because it relies crucially on a simplification of the target analysis, and that the others don't bear on the question because they turn out on examination to be about individual rather than group action sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Power- and achievement-values are seen to be important for productivity and societal stability. But what exact factors drive the forces to adhere to power- and achievement-values? In this study, the focus is on societal development and social stratification. Research on values in general often is not very careful in the distinction between different levels of analysis although the necessity has been outlined in several contributions to theoretical thinking in sociology. That is why this article comes from the position of methodological individualism and highlights explicitly the different levels of analysis and their assumed interrelations. It is shown that Inglehart’s scarcity hypothesis as an explaining mechanism has some weaknesses. As an alternative, the theory of social production functions is suggested that is capable to provide a framework of compatible societal- and individual-level mechanisms. The empirical analysis is based on data of the fourth round of the European Social Survey containing about 50,000 respondents in 31 countries. The comparability of power- and achievement-values across countries and across the societal and the individual level is tested by using two-level confirmatory factor analysis. The results show that comparability across countries and across both levels can be confirmed. Furthermore, opposing relations for societal development and social stratification are found: The higher the societal development, the lower the priority of power- and achievement-values; the higher the social stratification position, the more important the power- and achievement-values. Therefore, the scarcity hypothesis is rejected and the need for an alternative explanation is reinforced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we elaborate on the premises of studying problem substance use and treatment disparities among migrants and ethnic minorities. Due to the growing medicalisation of research on problem substance use and disparities in this group, policy makers, health researchers and practitioners often feel compelled to rely on epidemiological studies when grounding and understanding the link between ethnicity, problem substance use and treatment disparities. We argue that the bulk of epidemiological research suffers from crucial methodological and conceptual flaws that necessitate a reconsideration of their usefulness in policy and treatment practice. First, epidemiological research is based on static concepts of ethnicity and race as primordial analytical categories. Second, and as a consequence of the first argument, such research rarely distinguishes sufficiently between ethnic and non-ethnic determinants and mechanisms influencing problem substance use and treatment disparities. And third, these studies often depart from methodological individualism and subordinate contextual and structural determinants and mechanisms. This paper aims to re-evaluate (the factors and mechanisms mediating) the relationship between ethnicity, the nature of problem substance use, and treatment disparities, and to overcome some of the gaps in existing research methods mentioned above. More specifically, this implies (1) a critical revision of the ethnicity concept in epidemiology, (2) the inclusion of non-ethnic determinants and mechanisms by means of applying intersectional analysis and ethnic boundary making perspectives, (3) the broadening of methodological individualism in order to include all levels (from micro to macro) and loci (individual, community, society) of research in holistic research designs. Such ''doubled research'' allows researchers to analyse and have an impact on treatment disparities among migrants and ethnic minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many ways to advance our understanding of the human mind by studying different kinds of sociality. Our aim in this introduction is to situate claims about extended cognition within a broader framework of research on human sociality. We briefly discuss the existing landscape, focusing on ways of defending socially extended cognition. We then draw on resources from the recent literature on the socially extended mind, as well as the literature on collective intentionality, to provide a framework for thinking about the social dimension of individual minds. We then turn to a brief overview of the individualistic approaches advanced by Ludwig and Spaulding in this volume. And we close with a discussion of the transformative role of the social mind in individual life presented by Kern and Moll, as well as the distributed approach to interacting systems defended by Goldstone and Theiner. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I consider whether there are values intrinsic to development theory and practice that are dubious in light of a characteristically African ethic. In particular, I focus on what a certain philosophical interpretation of the sub-Saharan value of communion entails for appraising development, drawing two major conclusions. One is that a majority of the criticisms that have been made of development by those sympathetic to African values are weak; I argue that, given the value of communion, development should not be rejected because it is essentially, say, overly materialistic and scientistic, or insufficiently spiritual and local. The second conclusion, however, is that three criticisms of development are strong from the perspective of Afro-communalism and are particularly powerful when set in that context. I argue that development theory and practice are characteristically anthropocentric, individualist and technocratic, and that a reading of the sub-Saharan value of communion provides a unitary foundation for rejecting these features and for grounding an alternative, more relational approach to social progress and to what justice demands from the West in relation to Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the status of collective actions. According to one view, collective actions metaphysically reduce to individual actions because sentences about collective actions are merely a shorthand for sentences about individual actions. I reconstruct an argument for this view and show via counterexamples that it is not sound. The argument relies on a paraphrase procedure to unpack alleged shorthand sentences about collective actions into sentences about individual actions. I argue that the best paraphrase procedure that has been put forward so far fails to produce adequate results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increasing activity in the area of quality issues in education in Europe. Diverse discourses of policy for quality are encountered in daily practice. This article explores systematic quality development work in a Swedish educational setting: the leisure-time centre. By following 2 teachers’ enactments of policy in planning, organising, documenting, and evaluating the quality of a leisure-time centre and children's achievement of objectives, different logics were found. Tensions in practice that visualise pluralistic intentions in policy and educational approaches were also revealed. Planning and organising as parts of systematic quality development work reveal an emerging individualistic perspective. However, when teachers carry out documentation and evaluation, they reconstruct a social pedagogical approach grounded in the tradition of the leisure-time centre with a group-oriented focus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The view that the choices people make affect what it is fair for them to receive has widespread appeal. This very general thought has found particular and acute expression in the context of distributive justice in the form of the influential view that has become known as luck egalitarianism. In a surprising development, one of luck egalitarianism’s foremost advocates – G.A. Cohen – appeared, in one of his final papers, to reject the commitment to the fairness of chosen inequalities that defines luck egalitarianism. In opposition to the luck egalitarian view, Cohen suggests that choice merely deprives the disadvantaged of a complaint against being worse off, rather than rendering such inequality fair. Against Cohen’s revised view, Andrew Williams has argued that Cohen’s move underestimates an account of equality under which what individuals choose to do with their equal allocation affects what it is to treat them fairly. Here, I seek to show how the Williams response fails to undermine Cohen’s claims about the relation between fairness and choice. I draw on this analysis to show how the disagreement between Williams and Cohen on this issue illuminates a broader methodological divergence over how to approach questions of justice and fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper looks at the concept ofohia‘poverty’ from Akan sociocultural perspectives. It considers poverty from the Akan background and how the poor see themselves and the factors they believe are responsible for their poverty. Social, cultural, individualistic, fatalistic and religious explanations to poverty are explored within the theoretical framework of language ideology, which reflects the beliefs people have about their language and the justification and rationalisation they make about the language structure and use. It is argued that to understand the concept of poverty among the Akans one has to resort to their cultural beliefs, perception, worldview and social structures. The data for discussion is based on a song text entitledƐnneϵ mϵkɔ na maba‘Then I will go and come back’ by a renowned highlife musician Alex Kwabena Konadu. Konadu captures the concept of poverty through the image of the Akan family system. The paper uses stylistic devices like deixes, parallelism, repetition and symbolism to analyse the data. The rich imagery and symbolism in the song text highlight how the society conceptualises poverty based on their past experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent (though controversial) trend in economics has been to appeal to evolutionary theory when addressing various open questions in the subject. I here further investigate one particular such appeal to evolutionary biology: the argument that, since markets select (in a standard biological sense) firms as coherent units, firms should be seen to be genuine economic agents. To assess this argument, I present a model of firm/office selection in a competitive market, and show that there are cases where markets can select for firms/offices as collective units – and thus, as agents of their own – but also that there are cases where they do not. In this way, I try to make the evolutionary argument for the agency-based view of the firm more precise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the microfoundations programme can be understood as an implementation of an underlying methodological principle—methodological individualism—and that it therefore shares a fundamental ambiguity with that principle, viz, whether the macro must be derived from and therefore reducible to, or rather consistent with, micro-level behaviours. The pluralist conclusion of the paper is not that research guided by the principle of microfoundations is necessarily wrong, but that the exclusion of approaches not guided by that principle is indeed necessarily wrong. The argument is made via an examination of the advantages claimed for dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, the relationship between parts and wholes in social science, and the concepts of reduction, substrate neutrality, the intentional stance and hypostatisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes the standard descriptive and prescriptive uses of the phrase ‘microfoundations of macroeconomics’ as practised since the early 1970s within the discipline of economics. From a descriptive point of view, we maintain that generally this phrase is used to mean a very specific and idiosyncratic way of conceiving the relationship between individual and collective economic behaviour. From a prescriptive point of view, we argue that the requirement for robust macroeconomics that must repose on this particular approach is unjustified and dogmatic. The rapid and widespread adherence by the most influential economists and economic institutions to this approach since the early 1970s deeply transformed macroeconomics by inhibiting the systematic pursuit of alternative approaches. We claim that this extreme form of reductionism greatly restricts the empirical scope and policy efficacy of macroeconomics. We conclude that the relationship between individual and collective economic behaviour is a crucial issue that has to be pursued without any dogmatica prioriimperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background. A study of disability among the indigenous Sami people in Norway presented a number of ethical and methodological challenges rarely addressed in the literature. Objectives. The main study was designed to examine and understand the everyday life, transitions between life stages and democratic participation of Norwegian Sami people experiencing disability. Hence, the purpose of this article is to increase the understanding of possible ethical and methodological issues in research within this field. The article describes and discusses ethical and methodological issues that arose when conducting our study and identifies some strategies for addressing issues like these. Methods. The ethical and methodological issues addressed in the article are based on a qualitative study among indigenous Norwegian Sami people experiencing disability. The data in this study were collected through 31 semi-structured in-depth interviews with altogether 24 Sami people experiencing disability and 13 next of kin of Sami people experiencing disability (8 mothers, 2 fathers, 2 sister and 1 guardian). Findings and discussion. The researchers identified 4 main areas of ethical and methodological issues. We present these issues chronologically as they emerged in the research process: 1) concept of knowledge when designing the study, 2) gaining access, 3) data collection and 4) analysis and accountability. Conclusion. The knowledge generated from this study has the potential to benefit future health research, specifically of Norwegian Sami people experiencing disability, as well as health research concerning indigenous people in general, providing scientific-based insight into important ethical and methodological issues in research with indigenous people experiencing disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Game theory and rules are deeply intertwined for at least two reasons: first, in many cases rules are necessary to break the indeterminacy that surrounds most of the games; second, in the past 30 years game theory has been increasingly used as a major tool to build a theory of social rules. Interestingly, though the concept ofrulesis now part of most game theorists' tool box, none of them has explicitly entertained the important distinction betweenregulativerules andconstitutiverules. This distinction, which finds its roots in Ludwig Wittgenstein's profound discussion of ‘language games’, is at the core of modern philosophy of social sciences. This article asks whether game theory can account for constitutive rules. I distinguish between three game-theoretic accounts of rules: the rules-as-behavioral-regularities account, the rules-as-normative-expectations account, and the rules-as-correlated-devices account. I show that only the latter two are able to make sense of constitutive rules by giving up any pure individualistic understanding of game theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I explore the relationship between joint epistemic action and collective moral responsibility. Here, we need to distinguish between the genus, joint action, and an important species of joint action which I introduced in some earlier work, namely, joint epistemic action. In the case of the latter, but not necessarily the former, participating agents have epistemic goals, e.g. the acquisition of knowledge. The notion of joint action per se is a familiar one in the philosophical literature, albeit I have provided, and defended, a particular analysis of it. However, the notion of joint epistemic action is a novel one. Nevertheless, I argue that it can be given the same kind of analysis as joint action which is not epistemic in character. The other key notion in play in this paper is that of collective moral responsibility. Over the last decade or two this notion has been receiving a good deal of attention in the philosophical literature. Two influential kinds of theory are non-individualist corporatist accounts and aggregate individualist accounts. I have argued against both of these and provided and defended a relational individualist account which I make use of in this paper according to which collective moral responsibility is to be understood as joint moral responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the extent to which military officers are morally responsible for the actions of others by virtue of shared membership in various groups. I argue that career military officers share membership in morally relevant groups that include their branch of service, Department of Defense and the entire Executive Branch of Government, and I outline the circumstances under which career officers bear moral culpability for the actions of members of this group. A number of implications arise from these findings. The first and most important is that military officers have an interest in ensuring the moral rectitude of government agents specifically as it pertains to their official capacities. Additionally, military officers have a duty not only to be informed about problematic government policies but also to educate themselves on the pertinent legal jurisprudence or ethical considerations. Finally, the Constitutional Paradigm of Military Ethics may be an insufficient guide for the particular sort of moral dilemma dealt with in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

My wish is for ready adoption of methodological advances without fear of reviewer resistance or worry over the complexity of it all. In my article, I discuss the inherent problems and impediments to ready adoption and I offer a number of concrete suggestions to mitigate the current state of practice. My article is grounded on the idea that the intricacy of modern methods and their corresponding questions must be embraced if policy and practice are to be truly served. Inadequate findings derived from status-quo methods propagate mis-information and beget adoption of bad policy and practice—thereby undermining our obligations as stewards of social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Banton's paper provides fascinating insights into his long-running intellectual disagreements with John Rex, the other major post-war figure in the sociology of ‘race relations’. Published work and personal recollections are supplemented by a series of communications by letter to flesh out the precise nature of these debates. They reveal differing views on the ontological status of ‘race’, race relations and racism, as well as a number of criticisms of Rex's work. He argues that Rex was wrong to put so much faith in the ability of classical sociology to address these concerns, and that there was a disjuncture between theory, methods and substance in his empirical work. There is also a suggestion that Rex played down the significance of racism. The greatest difference between them, however, lay in their divergent views on the role of sociology and the sociologist. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigates the relationship between cultural orientation (individualistic or collectivistic culture) and consumers' attribution styles (dispositional and situational attributions) as well as the consequences of attribution styles on brand evaluation and purchase intention. The study also examines how people perceive different types of negative celebrity information (self-oriented and other-oriented negative information) and how their identification with a celebrity endorser affects their response to negative information. The findings suggest that culture influences how consumers – having been exposed to negative celebrity information – make attributions. Dispositional attributions lead to more negative brand evaluation as well as to negative purchase intention. Other-oriented negative information leads to, among Korean consumers, more negative brand evaluation. Finally, the study found that consumers highly identified with a celebrity endorser are less likely to be influenced by negative celebrity information. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Perceived organizational support plays an important role in the social exchange relationship between the employee and the organization. We propose that individual differences in collectivism affect the extent to which employee–organization relationships are based on social exchange, and that therefore collectivism moderates the relationship between perceived organizational support and organizational citizenship behaviour. Results of a survey (N = 293) assessing perceived organizational support, collectivism, and supervisor ratings of organizational citizenship behaviour supported this hypothesis. We conclude that organizational citizenship behaviour originates from social exchange processes only among employees who construe the self in relatively individualistic terms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]