Nearly every community of practice develops its own representations to support the practices of the community. For example, the community of electric circuit designers has developed circuit diagrams to represent electric circuits. Members of that community rely on such diagrams to discuss, communicate, and document what they do. Past research has established that members of a given community no...

The suicide rate in South Korea has been steadily increasing for the past twenty years and has become a major societal issue. Accordingly, the phenomenon has drawn the attention of researchers from many different perspectives that have looked to a variety of causes. Efforts to understand the trends from a sociological perspective, however, are scarce. One notable exception is Ben Park’s (2012) ...

In these times, when our social and political inadequacies in dealing with the advances wrought by nuclear fission are so apparent, it is encouraging to find that forward-looking men in medicine and the social sciences are working together to bridge that gap between their respective fields of interest. Although the authors point out that the practice of medicine at large or in the hospital in p...

Evolutionary Theories of Cultural Change: An Empirical Perspective Richard R. Nelson Columbia University Version: January18, 2005 Abstract Evolutionary theorizing in the social sciences has a long tradition, going back well before Darwin. Much of contemporary evolutionary theorizing by social scientists about the processes of change at work in various aspects of human culture for example scienc...

To date, the study of societal change in social and political psychology has been dominated by an intergroup relations research agenda. But in addition to intergroup dynamics, there are other major pathways to societal change and emancipation, which are almost never systematically considered in psychological research. The distribution of technologies (e.g., “ICT for development”) or money (e.g....

Leadership is commonly seen as an important variable affecting organizational performance. While the concept has been extensively studied, there is still much to be discovered regarding how leadership affects variables such as organizational culture, climate, and performance. Most of the research on leadership has been in for-profit organizations. While research on leadership in human services ...

The next two chapters are about social history. The basic argument is that if Darwin was right about natural history (and he was) then Marx was right about social history. They both use the same explanatory framework. Each theory is an analogue of the other. Chapter 10 is about how we can use an evolutionary framework to understand social and cultural changes. And chapter 11 is about the implic...

Most studies on entrepreneurs’ networks incorporate social capital and networks as independent variables that affect entrepreneurs’ actions and its outcomes. By contrast, this article examines social capital of the Chinese and Russian entrepreneurs and venture capitalists as dependent variables, and it examines entrepreneurs’ social capital from the perspectives of institutional theory and cult...

This article shows that social norms are better explained as correlating devices for a correlated equilibrium of the underlying stage game, rather than Nash equilibria. Whereas the epistemological requirements for rational agents playing Nash equilibria are very stringent and usually implausible, the requirements for a correlated equilibrium amount to the existence of common priors, which we in...

Hegemony is a term both elusive and recurrent. It provides a theory of the social for a world in which all universalizing truth narratives have lost their fantasmatic hold over our lives and, in their withdrawal, we are forced to confront the fictions that they in fact always represented. In a certain sense, hegemony theory is the fiction of social fiction; a fiction designed to account for the...