There is growing interest in the concept of ‘‘mechanism’’ across many areas of the social sciences. In the field of program and policy evaluation, a number of scholars have also emphasized the importance of causal mechanisms for explaining how and why programs work. However, there appears to be some ambiguity about the meaning and uses of mechanism-based thinking in both the social science and ...

From the analysis of its epistemological status, the article focuses on the philosophical fundament of bioethics, stressing the need for an authentic anthropology as a reference or starting point. Being an applied ethics, the first fundament of bioethics is in ethics. It shows how only personalistic ethics, which takes as reference the nature or essence of man, can offer objective and universal...

Strategic alliances developed and propagated as formalized interorganizational relationships, particularly among firms in international business systems. These cooperative arrangements seek to achieve organizational objectives better through collaboration than through competition, but alliances also generate problems at several levels of analysis. Theory and research have likewise proliferated ...

Few but mentionable studies have been conducted in typifying the Online Social Media (OSM) users. Studies on innovations taking place within the OSM environment are also very much found. But gaps are present in linking OSM innovations and adoption of innovations by the OSM users. Precise and objective studies to put the OSM users in an adoption spectrum are close to nil, though such studies mig...

A nonsecular medical anthropology insists on the ways medicine and science have constituted 'the secular' itself through the 'secular self'-how medical knowing has been used to craft the secular political subject. As James Boon noted, too often in social theory, "religion gets safely tucked away-restricted theoretically to 'meaning' rather than power" (1998:245). The authors of the six articles...

I provide a typology of social capital, breaking it down into seven more fundamental forms of capital: information capital, brokerage capital, coordination and leadership capital, bridging capital, favor capital, reputation capital, and community capital. I discuss how most of these forms of social capital can be identified using different network-based measures. JEL Classification Codes: D85, ...

Since publication of the Brundtland Report in 1987, the notion of sustainable development has come to guide the pursuit of environmental reform by both public and private organizations and to facilitate communication among actors from different societal spheres. It is customary to characterize sustainable development in a familiar typology comprising three pillars: environmental, economic, and ...

This paper is concerned with a bio-cultural/bio-social approach to the study of human variability. The basic premise is that the bio-cultural approach is essential for anthropological study of the survival and well-being ofhuman populations in the 21 century. The chapter is delimited to two basic questions: What and why is bio-cultural approach? How is to go about it? Addressing the first q...

To discuss reflexivity in anthropology is not a new approach. The purpose of this article is to examine the meaning of reflexivity for the hermeneutical or confessional anthropology, which has been endemic in social sciences ever since the publication of Malinowski’s diaries and the onset of the recurrent and persistent crisis of objectivity that haunts modern scholarship. We have determined th...