Embeddedness

About: Embeddedness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4773 publications have been published within this topic receiving 229721 citations.

Technology and education: Challenges and opportunities

Abstract: This article seeks to contribute to the continuous reflection on the integration of technology into education. In order to accomplish this aim, the use of technology in the form of blended learning and online education will be utilised to illustrate how technology plays a central role in education today. It is argued that technology should not merely be viewed as a tool, but rather as a medium that shapes culture. Therefore, the integration of technology into education should be accompanied by continuous reflection on the identifiable characteristics of technology as medium that is not value-neutral or a disembedded force. To the contrary, technology is socially embedded and could be directly linked to other social developments and processes. The article therefore wishes to highlight the social embeddedness of technology by stressing how it is intertwined with other social developments like economy. In order to utilise technology more effectively and in a responsible manner in education, the nature thereof as medium should be reflected on. In light of the discussion on the technology as a socially embedded medium, the possible challenges and opportunities that it poses as medium to education, are identified and discussed. Specific reference is made on how theological education could benefit from educational technologies.

Careers in Overlapping Institutional Contexts: The Case of Academe.

Abstract: Purpose – Studying academic careers can be particularly useful for discussions about new forms of professional careers. This conceptual paper seeks to shed light on academic careers by discussing the (changing) multiple contexts governing academic careers.Design/methodology/approach – A neo‐institutional framework for analysing academic careers is developed that treats them as outcomes of overlapping institutions belonging to the different social contexts in which academics simultaneously act. This approach allows one to locate academic careers in the context of new and traditional career literature and to address changes in the institutional context of academic careers.Findings – Shows how traditional structures and mechanisms of academic careers are interwoven with the overall patterns of national higher education systems and their societal embeddedness. Empirical evidence was found that academic careers are becoming more boundaryless. But evidence was also found that academic careers are more bound to ...

Enriching exchange: Cultural dimensions of markets

Abstract: As economic sociologists have been arguing for some time, markets are not to be abstractly opposed to other social relations but rather to be understood as embedded in them, and indeed subject to the same kinds of analysis as other social relations. However, many accounts of embeddedness explain it in structural terms and still operate with an impoverished notion of culture. It is argued that there is a rich agenda for cultural investigation which has yet to be fully exploited in economic sociology, and fascinating work on economic embeddedness which could be enriched with more culturally oriented analysis and research. Three issues on this agenda which are more often collapsed are distinguished, arguing that the meaning of markets should be investigated in terms of the cultural construction of objects of market exchange, the cultural construction of parties to market exchange, and the cultural construction of norms of exchange.