Research on social learning in animals has revealed a rich variety of cases where animals--from caddis fly larvae to chimpanzees--acquire biologically important information by observing the actions of others. A great deal is known about the adaptive functions of social learning, but very little about the cognitive mechanisms that make it possible. Even in the case of imitation, a type of social...

The aim of this paper is to show that there is a reciprocal dependency relationship between social cognition and social ontology. It is argued that, on the one hand, the existence conditions of socially meaningful objects and of social groups are about sucjets’ social cognitive processes and interactive patterns and, on the other hand, social cognitive processes and interactive patterns are mod...

We consider the social relationships between autonomous principals, assuming that each principal is represented in a computational multiagent system via a unique agent. Work on commitment protocols [1, 7] has shown that the meaning of interactions may be expressed in terms of (social) commitments [3]: C(x, y, p, q) represents an expectation of y (creditor) that x (the debtor) will bring about q...

It is claimed that social justice is firmly on the political agenda and is a major concern of numerous policy documents, think tanks and research units. However, ̳social justice‘ can be seen as a poorly defined ̳motherhood and apple pie‘ term. Virtually everyone is in favour of ̳social justice‘ but their interpretations of the term vary widely (there are many different varieties of apple!). We ...

This paper explores the role of social capital in human resources management. We suggest that the recent interest in social capital has neglected the possibility that social networks may contain negative ties, and that attention to these negative ties may provide additional insights into understanding relationships and social networks in organizations. Research focusing on the antecedents and c...

MY INTEREST OVER the last ten years has moved from the study of smaller social units to that of larger ones, from greater concern with conceptualization to an emphasis on the social relevance of social science, and from a fair segregation of the role of the sociologist and the active citizen to a greater effort to articulate the two. In so doing, I believe my work reflects trends which affect s...

the welfare policies and programs in the iran had started to establish modern state in iran since 1925.this paper deals with the relation between oil revenues and social welfare in iran before 1978(1357) revolution. why developmental activities within welfare policies and programs couldn’t maintain their stability and continuity? the bureaucrats and redefined groups were became the main target ...