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.

/pdf/organizational-learning-and-communities-of-practice-toward-a-5d5ay5q3oh.pdf

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.

/pdf/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-480wr4m3kb.pdf

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

Rethinking Kinship and Marriage

Part 1: Empiricism and Historical Materialism1. Maurice Godelier Modes of Production, Kinship, and Demographic Structures2. Raymond Firth The Sceptical Anthropologist? Social Anthropology and Marxist Views on Society3. Stephan Feuchtwang Investigating ReligionPart 2: Class and Class Consciousness4. Emmanuel Terray Classes and Class Consciousness in the Abron Kingdom of Gyaman5. Joel Kahn Economic Scale and the Cycle of Petty Commodity Production in West SumatraPart 3: Dominance Determination and Evolution6. Jonathan Friedman Tribes, States, and Transformations7. Maurice Bloch Property and the End of Affinity

Marxist analyses and social anthropology

T he zafimaniry are a group of Malagasy swidden cultivators living in high-altitude montane forest. In terms of general culture they are fairly close to the neighbouring Betsileo or even the Merina. Their political history has been characterized by their determined attempts to avoid various forms of centralized government, attempts which on the whole have been fairly successful. The only period when the Zafimaniry suffered tight government control followed the Madagascar-wide anti-colonial revolt of 1947 when the French army probably killed at least 80,000 people. The best detailed study of this revolt remains Jacques Tronchon's L'Insurrection Malgache de 1947 (1974), but it would not be appropriate for the purposes of this chapter to give a general account of the events here. The revolt affected the Zafimaniry particularly badly. This is largely because of their geographic position. The largest contingent of the rebel army had grouped on the coast to the east of them and then marched up to the central plateau in order to attack the larger towns in the centre of Madagascar. They chose to do this through the least accessible parts of the east coast forest in order to avoid detection and that meant through Zafimaniry country. The rebels and what they had to say was mostly well received by the Zafimaniry although I think very few Zafimaniry actually joined them. Nonetheless it is significant that to this day no Zafimaniry I know ever refers to the rebels of 1947 by the normal Malagasy word for ‘rebel’, which in their dialect has negative connotations, but they use instead another term with positive connotations.

The resurrection of the house amongst the Zafimaniry of Madagascar

The paper deals with the so-called problem of the dominance of superstructures-kinship, religion, politics-and supports the view that kinship or religion dominates social organization and the thought of social actors when it functions as relations of production and as framework for material action upon nature. Consequently, it becomes impossible to oppose the dominance of kinship, religion, or politics to the hypothesis that everything is ultimately determined by economic relationships. But this is only true if one can see in the distinction between infrastructures and superstructures a distinction of functions and not of institutions as most Marxists and non-Marxists usually do. A society has no top and no bottom, no levels, and the distinction between infrastructure, superstructures, and ideology has nothing to do with the various layers of a cake. Furthermore, "productive forces" include both the intellectual and the material capacities of men to act upon nature and therefore include an ideel and ideol...

Maurice Bloch

Papers

Rethinking Kinship and Marriage

Marxist analyses and social anthropology

The resurrection of the house amongst the Zafimaniry of Madagascar

Infrastructures, Societies, and History [and Comments]

The Moral and Tactical Meaning of Kinship Terms