When agents use informal interaction to exchange knowledge, their production relations may develop as emergent properties of their social relations and may exhibit homophily. The Saliyar community cluster in India is an archetype of this. A preceding study by Cowan and Kamath (2012) had shown how, by a study of this community, the conceptual understanding of social embeddedness needed to be exp...

Preliminary results from an experimental study of readers’ perceptions of lexical cohesion and lexical semantic relations in text are presented. Readers agree on a common “core” of groups of related words and exhibit individual differences. The majority of relations reported are “non-classical” (not hyponymy, meronymy, synonymy, or antonymy). A group of commonly used relations is presented. The...

Information is understood as a mediated construction, the Sign, which is a cohesion of meaning, both material and conceptual, derived from the measurement within spatial and temporal parameters of energy/matter by six predicate relations. Three predicate relations enforce states; three predicate relations enforce dynamics. The Sign is understood as a triadic cohesion of three predicates.

Lexical cohesion is a property of text, achieved through lexicalsemantic relations between words in text. Most information retrieval systems make use of lexical relations in text only to a limited extent. In this paper we empirically investigate whether the degree of lexical cohesion between the contexts of query terms' occurrences in a document is related to its relevance to the query. Experim...

Conviviality is usually considered a positive concept however, as it becomes an instrument at the service of power relations, a darker side emerges. In this survey paper we raise the question: Which definition of conviviality can be used and operationalized for digital cities? We propose a two-fold definition of conviviality as (1) a condition for social interactions and (2) an instrument for t...

This review presents studies in various world regions. Each uses network analysis software designed explicitly for kinship studies with explicit network measures of cohesion. It presents evidence of fundamental differences in the forms of marital cohesion that show profoundly variable effects over a wide range of social phenomena, regional scales, and diverse cultures. Social cohesion is the ba...

The aim of this study was to examine the separate and combined relationships of neighborhood social norms and neighborhood social cohesion with smoking behavior in a cohort of adult Mexican smokers. Neighborhood anti-smoking norms were measured as the proportion of residents in each neighborhood who believed that society disapproves of smoking. Perceived social cohesion was measured using a 5-i...

Investigators interested in developing a general theory of social cohesion are confronted with a complex body of work that involves various definitions of social cohesion, specialized literatures on particular dimensions of social cohesion (e.g., membership turnover, organizational commitment, categorical identifications, interpersonal attachments, network structures), and lines of inquiry focu...

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (henceforth BA)1 serves as justification and support for one of the most influential hypotheses in contemporary social epidemiology, namely that the primary explanation for health inequalities in wealthy countries lies in low levels of social capital or social cohesion. For example, the major textbook of the sub-discipline2 includes two chapters on this topic. Putn...