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.

/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

This paper examines the link between truth and sight, and the implications of this link for our understandings of the concept of evidence. I propose to give an example of precisely how we might attempt to generalize about a phenomenon such as the recurrence of the association between truth and sight without ignoring important anti-universalist points. In doing this, I hope to give one example of how anthropology, in the original sense of the term, is a still possible enterprise, in spite of the criticisms such an approach has had to face in the last thirty years.



Resume

L'auteur examine le lien entre verite et vision et ses implications pour notre comprehension du concept de preuve. Il propose un exemple de la maniere dont nous pourrions tenter de generaliser un phenomene tel que la recurrence de l'association entre verite et vision, sans negliger d'importants arguments anti-universalistes. Par la meme occasion, l'auteur espere donner un exemple de la facon dont l'anthropologie, au sens originel du terme, est encore une entreprise possible malgre les critiques que cette approche a essuyees au cours des trente dernieres annees.

/pdf/truth-and-sight-generalizing-without-universalizing-4750jmcqrc.pdf

Truth and sight: generalizing without universalizing

La psychologie et les sciences sociales traitent la memoire de facon tres contrastee : cet essai compare leurs approches et montre en particulier que les caracteristiques de la memoire autobiographique (ou episodique) — c’est-a-dire son caractere non explicite, le fait que le souvenir puisse etre evoque de facon toujours nouvelle, la charge emotionnelle qu’il contient et la multiplicite d’aspects qu’il revet — peuvent aussi s’appliquer a la memoire d’un passe plus lointain dont les individus n’ont pas fait l’experience directe Ceci tient au fait que les evocations associees a des lieux ou a des objets transforment les recits qu’on a entendus d’autres personnes en experiences personnelles : les recits sont nourris par ceux qui les entendent a partir de processus inferentiels, en sorte que des evenements dont on a seulement entendu parler peuvent faire l’objet de representations aussi vives que le souvenir d’experiences personnelles Le point de vue presente dans cet article est illustre par un exemple tire d’une recherche ethnologique menee a Madagascar

/pdf/memoire-autobiographique-et-memoire-historique-du-passe-3ggvttls9j.pdf

Mémoire autobiographique et mémoire historique du passé éloigné

Ritual and deference

Zafimaniry birth and kinship theory

The role of social or cultural anthropology is to provide evidence for the reconstruction of the history of mankind through the study of primitive people. Technological or intellectual advances were the driving force for forward movement, but this was along a road which was traced by the internal potential of a shared human nature. In the fog of imprecision, diffusionism/constructionism has meant that anthropology could not anymore have human nature as its subject because there was no such thing. The further surreptitious abandonment of a notion of human nature, involved in the condemnation of ethnocentrism in the dialectics of teaching, combines dangerously smoothly with the negative stance that the history of the subject has produced. Most fundamental of all, however, is the assumption that internal characteristics of human nature can be used directly to account for specific cultures and histories.

/pdf/where-did-anthropology-go-or-the-need-for-human-nature-2ifetorxel.pdf

Maurice Bloch

Papers

Truth and sight: generalizing without universalizing

Mémoire autobiographique et mémoire historique du passé éloigné

Ritual and deference

Zafimaniry birth and kinship theory

Where did anthropology go? Or, The need for 'human nature'