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

Discovery of an Apparently Neolithic Artefact in Madagascar

Traduit de l'anglais par Gerard Lenclud Psychologie de la colonisation a ete ecrit en 1948 a Madagascar, un an apres la rebellion qui s'y deroula et qui conduisit a l'un des episodes les plus sanglants de la periode coloniale en Afrique. Dans ce livre, termine au lendemain de la repression, Octave Mannoni s'efforce d'apporter une explication a cette revolte anticolonialiste et a la maniere brutale dont l'armee francaise la mata, au prix d'environ 100 000 morts. On relevera tout de suite que l...

La psychanalyse au secours du colonialisme. A propos d'un ouvrage d'Octave Mannoni

'Eating' young men among the Zafimaniry

Relations of Production: Marxist Approaches to Economic Anthropology

The preceding chapter has shown that the combination of studies produced by anthropologists with those of other cognitive scientists such as psychologists or neurologists seems, at first, impossible since what they propose appears contradictory. However, we saw that if we introduce the notion of different yet interconnected levels the apparent contradiction disappears and a richer picture is revealed. This chapter continues the argument that such an approach is also valuable when it is applied to the very core of our studies: that is what makes human individuals. Again we shall see that what appears at first as incompatible conclusions emanating, on the one hand, from psychologists and neurologists and, on the other, from social and cultural anthropologists, becomes, when theoretically combined, a dynamic whole. The history of the social sciences and especially that of modern anthropology has been dominated by a recurrent controversy about what kind of phenomenon people are. On the one hand, there are those who assume that human beings are a straightforward matter. They are beings driven by easily understood desires directed towards an empirically obvious world. The prototypical examples of such theoreticians are Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer or more recently the proponents of rational choice theory. These early social science theories have also been the assumptions underlying most cognitive science; in some cases this has been quite explicit (Tooby and Cosmides 1990; Boyd and Richerson 2005). By contrast, these positions have been criticised, again and again, by many modern social scientists, more particularly social and cultural anthropologists. They have stressed that in theory there can be no place for actors who are simply imagined as ‘generic human beings’ since people are always the specific product of their particular and unique location in the social, the historical and the cultural process. Among the writers who have made this kind of point are Durkheim, Dumont and more recently Michel Foucault and the post-modernists.

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Maurice Bloch

Papers

Discovery of an Apparently Neolithic Artefact in Madagascar

La psychanalyse au secours du colonialisme. A propos d'un ouvrage d'Octave Mannoni

'Eating' young men among the Zafimaniry

Relations of Production: Marxist Approaches to Economic Anthropology

Reconciling social science and cognitive science notions of the 'self'