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

This book examines the uses made of anthropology by Marx and Engels, and the uses made of Marxism by anthropologists. Looking at the writings of Marx and Engels on primitive societies, the book evaluates their views in the light of present knowledge and draws attention to inconsistencies in their analysis of pre-capitalist societies. These inconsistencies can be traced to the influence of contemporary anthropologists who regarded primitive societies as classless. As Marxist theory was built around the idea of class, without this concept the conventional Marxist analysis foundered. First published in 1983.

Marxism and Anthropology: The History of a Relationship

In this provocative new study one of the world's most distinguished anthropologists proposes that an understanding of cognitive science enriches, rather than threatens, the work of social scientists. Maurice Bloch argues for a naturalist approach to social and cultural anthropology, introducing developments in cognitive sciences such as psychology and neurology and exploring the relevance of these developments for central anthropological concerns: the person or the self, cosmology, kinship, memory and globalisation. Opening with an exploration of the history of anthropology, Bloch shows why and how naturalist approaches were abandoned and argues that these once valid reasons are no longer relevant. Bloch then shows how such subjects as the self, memory and the conceptualisation of time benefit from being simultaneously approached with the tools of social and cognitive science. Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge will stimulate fresh debate among scholars and students across a wide range of disciplines.

Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge

This book brings together recent work by Maurice Bloch which explores thehighly controversial territory between the cognitive and social sciences. The essays are of broad, theoretical interest and aim to combine naturalistic approaches to cognition with a recognition and respect for the cultural and historical specificity of ethnography. All the essays illustrate Bloch's characteristic approach to the relation between anthropology and cognitive science, where cognitive science is used to criticize anthropological assumptions concerning such key topics as religion, kinship, belief, ritual, symbolism and art.

Essays on Cultural Transmission

One of the more disturbing moments of my field work occurred at the very end of my first period with the Merina of central Madagascar. As I was about to leave, the head of the family in which I had become partly integrated, presented to me a significant sum of money in Malagasy bank notes. These were intended to help me on my journey and perhaps also to be used when I arrived back in England. The cause of my embarrassment, I told myself at the time, was the difficulty I felt in receiving money from people who were clearly much poorer than myself. Another element was perhaps the recurrent sense of guilt of fieldworkers who feel that they are putting a relationship of mutual moral obligation to quite another purpose. This is made all the worse by the suspicion that the fieldworker benefits from this in a way which does not include the other party in the relationship. However, as I think back over this episode, which was to repeat itself on my subsequent visits, I am not sure that my worries were not really of a different nature. The moral problem of the fieldwork relationship I had partly resolved at the time, by having made what I was doing as clear as I could. The problem of taking from people who were poorer than me was also an unsatisfactory explanation. First of all I am not sure that it was literally true in this particular case.

Maurice Bloch

Papers

Marxism and Anthropology: The History of a Relationship

Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge

Essays on Cultural Transmission

The symbolism of money in Imerina

Money and the Morality of Exchange