Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Recent ethnographic studies of workplace practices indicate that the ways people actually work usually differ fundamentally from the ways organizations describe that work in manuals, training programs, organizational charts, and job descriptions. Nevertheless, organizations tend to rely on the latter in their attempts to understand and improve work practice. We examine one such study. We then relate its conclusions to compatible investigations of learning and of innovation to argue that conventional descriptions of jobs mask not only the ways people work, but also significant learning and innovation generated in the informal communities-of-practice in which they work. By reassessing work, learning, and innovation in the context of actual communities and actual practices, we suggest that the connections between these three become apparent. With a unified view of working, learning, and innovating, it should be possible to reconceive of and redesign organizations to improve all three.

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Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

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The WEIRDest People in the World

Part I. From There to Here - Theoretical Background: 1. From visiousness to viciousness: theories of intergroup relations 2. Social dominance theory as a new synthesis Part II. Oppression and its Psycho-Ideological Elements: 3. The psychology of group dominance: social dominance orientation 4. Let's both agree that you're really stupid: the power of consensual ideology Part III. The Circle of Oppression - The Myriad Expressions of Institutional Discrimination: 5. You stay in your part of town and I'll stay in mine: discrimination in the housing and retail markets 6. They're just too lazy to work: discrimination in the labor market 7. They're just mentally and physically unfit: discrimination in education and health care 8. The more of 'them' in prison, the better: institutional terror, social control and the dynamics of the criminal justice system Part IV. Oppression as a Cooperative Game: 9. Social hierarchy and asymmetrical group behavior: social hierarchy and group difference in behavior 10. Sex and power: the intersecting political psychologies of patriarchy and empty-set hierarchy 11. Epilogue.

http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam032/98044356.pdf

Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression

The central argument is that firm behavior is the result of how firms channel and distribute the attention of their decision-makers. What decision-makers do depends on what issues and answers they focus their attention on. What issues and answers they focus on depends on the specific situation and on how the firm's rules, resources, and relationships distribute various issues, answers, and decision-makers into specific communications and procedures. The paper develops these theoretical principles into a model of firm behavior and presents its implications for explaining firm behavior and adaptation. ? 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Towards an attention-based view of the firm

L'anthropologie cognitive a l'epreuve du terrain

Comment on SAHLINS, Marshall. 2013. What kinship is—and is not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

/pdf/what-kind-of-is-is-sahlins-is-18i2wsmzk1.pdf

What kind of "is" is Sahlins' "is"?

Hierarchy and Equality in Merina Kinship

Annales de l'Universite de Madagascar.

This review focuses on the cognitive implications of Alfred Gell’s book, Art and Agency. From the start, Gell refuses the concept of aesthetics and suggests that we see art as a form of social communication. Accordingly, artworks stimulate the imagination through the many types of intentionality that have gone into producing them; and they themselves become imagined sources of intentionality. Gell’s theory of art is anchored in recent developments in cognitive psychology having to do with the human ability to understand others. An innate «theory of mind» is widely assumed to be the basis for this intercomprehension and for life in society. While enthusiastically embracing this way of seeing art, this review article regrets that Gell did not delve deeper into the implications of his cognitive theory. Ce compte rendu critique du recent livre d’Alfred Gell, Art and Agency, est centre sur ce qui concerne l’aspect cognitif. Gell suggere de remplacer le concept d’esthetique par celui d’art, considere comme un element de la communication entre individus. Pour Gell, les objets d’art nous font imaginer les intentionnalites tres variees qui sont liees a leur production ; nous nous les representons comme possedant eux-memes une intentionnalite propre. Cette theorie de l’art est fondee sur les recents developpements de la psychologie cognitive concernant la capacite des etres humains de se comprendre entre eux au moyen d’une « theorie de l’esprit » innee, ce qui est generalement considere comme le fondement du social. L’auteur de cet article fait un accueil enthousiaste a cette maniere de voir l’art, tout en regrettant que Gell n’ait pas pousse plus loin les implications de sa theorie cognitive.

Maurice Bloch

Papers

L'anthropologie cognitive a l'epreuve du terrain

What kind of "is" is Sahlins' "is"?

Hierarchy and Equality in Merina Kinship

Annales de l'Universite de Madagascar.

Book review: Une nouvelle théorie de l’art: a propos d’Art and agency d’Alfred Gell