Showing papers on "Social system published in 1976"

Social networks, support, and coping: an exploratory study.

Abstract: This paper reports a study that investigated the areas of stress, support, and coping, using the structural model of the social network. The social network model is borrowed from sociology and anthropology and is used to describe and quantify not only an individual's immediate family but also all of those with whom the individual has regular contact. By comparing the networks of a sample of "normal" and schizophrenic males, it was possible to identify differences in their relationships to their social networks, in the make-up of the networks themselves, and in the coping styles and recent histories of the subjects. The results suggest, first, that the network model can be used to investigate the larger social system with which individuals interact and, second, that it may be a valuable approach to the expansion of family research.

A framework for social motives.

Abstract: In any complex social system, the choices of a single person often affect the outcomes of others. When one takes the others' outcomes into account in making choices, we say one is manifesting a social motive. We assume that an individual's social motives are manifested in his social preferences. Any theory of decision or choice requires information about preferences, and so in addition to attempting to clarify definitions of social motives, this study provides a framework for theories of social decision. To begin, we establish operational definitions for the motives of self-interest, self-sacrifice, altruism, aggression, cooperation, and competition. These definitions are based on the simple operators of summations and differences. Then we examine some supplementary motives involving proportionality operators. Next we eliminate the assumption that an individual has a fixed preference structure which is applied to all social choices. This leads to a focus on the specific distribution of consequences resulting in conditional motives; conditional motives reflect varying basic motives depending on whether the individual is ahead or behind. All these motives are represented graphically, and a correspondence matrix is given to illustrate the interrelationships among the motives. Finally, we investigate combinations of the motives since such composites are less restrictive and can better account for observed behavior. Linear combinations are interesting but still too restrictive. Conjunctive, disjunctive and lexicographic combinations offer useful possibilities for characterizing particular social motives. Complex combinations involving general nonlinear forms arise and some representative forms are explored.

Theory of Social Systems Delimitation: A Preliminary Statement

Abstract: Current organizational theory is viewed here as being unidimensional in the sense that it is entirely subsumed under the allocative criteria of the market system As an alternative to such a confinement of contemporary organizational theory, this author proposes a model for social systems analysis and design which considers the market as one among many enclaves of society-each of them possessing its own substantive characteristics and requirements.

Crime in Society and Schools

Abstract: many years thereafter, people spoke about crime in society, not from the point of view of a careful analysis, nor from the point of view of evaluating efforts to deal with crime, but rather from personal ideology and organizational and institutional interests. The predictable result was that they talked past each other and arrived at no agreements as to how to approach the problem. Influential spokesmen aroused public expectations and then disappointed them. They fanned the flames of ideology and allowed preconceived positions to harden. This, in my view, made us worse rather than better off.

Toward a systems theory of unequal exchange, uneven development and dependency relationships

Abstract: This paper proposes a systems framework for the analysis of economic exchange and development. Exchange is examined in the context of a social system in which actors have differential control over resources and different action opportunities and positions in a structure of social relationships. Exchange activities in a social system have ramifications in different spheres (economic and non‐economic) of social life. We focus on those ramifications which relate to social differentiation in terms of power‐unequal or differentiated action capabilities and different structural positions of actors in the social system of interaction. This perspective on exchange leads to the consideration of factors important to the emergence and maintenance of systemic, uneven development of action capabilities and to unequal dependency relationships among actors in a social system. In sum, what we wish to do in this paper is to develop a more systematic model that indicates the mechanisms whereby initial imbalances of the sort mentioned above generate social processes‐non‐economic as well as economic‐which tend to institutionalize the imbalances and perpetuate them in a self‐reinforcing manner.

An Overview of Social Forecasting Procedures

Abstract: Among systematic methods for forecasting the future of large-scale social systems, extrapolation from trend measurements is the most common. The search for a firmer conceptual basis of extrapolation has taken two forms. One is the notion that certain psychological elements held in common by the members of a social system presage subsequent sociocultural realities; these factors include images of the future, values, aspirations, and motives. The other approach is to project forward an understanding of the social system itself. In the discipline of sociology this attempt has been weightily theoretical, while in the nascent field of futures research it is atheoretical and prolific, resulting in such techniques as scenario writing, the Delphi method, simulation modelling, and cross-impact analysis. Although the overall number of procedures is large, so far just one has been substantiated satisfactorily.

Central-Place Theory and Endogamy in China

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the central-place theory and endogamy in China. There is a redundancy of social communication that fosters multiplex relationships among people, and there is also a redundancy of background that furthers understanding. Endogamy as a topic is ambiguous for many reasons, not least because it operates to reduce the strangeness and discontinuities produced by exogamy. Skinner's original hypothesis of the identity of marketing and marriage communities is reasonable in the light of our findings on endogamous groups. Skinner has pointed out that in China, at least, and probably in other places as well, the degree of openness of communities was cyclical, reaching a peak during periods of economic prosperity. Central-place theory is useful not because it allows us to predict the sizes and interrelationships of marriage communities solely from data on marketing. It provides one with a set of possibilities, almost a language, with which one can conceptualize the organization of any kind of social system in which distance is important.

Preparing Social Workers for Practice in Rural Social Systems

Abstract: This paper calls on schools of social work to provide more workers for practice in rural settings. It reviews the basic character of rural areas and the need for systematic intervention and program development to alter the disproportionate amount of social and economic problems existing there. The use of rural settings for student practice is reviewed, including concepts such as the community of communities, models for designing practice experiences, the role of the educator, and positive features and barriers found in providing social services.

Regional Social Systems: Linking Quantitative Analysis and Field Work

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter presents linking quantitative analysis and field work of regional social systems Regional analysis, simply stated, is an attempt to understand social and cultural organization in terms of spatial differentiation and organization It bears strong relations to geography and in part owes its existence to the vigor of recent developments in human geography Regional analysis of social systems follows upon previous attempts within sociology, anthropology, and rural sociology to examine the organization of society in spatial terms In particular, several overlapping but distinct traditions of research and thought about communities form a backdrop for current efforts in regional analysis A distinction between regional analysis as, on the one hand, the attempt to specify parsimoniously the variables underlying spatial variation and to shift attention to the abstract processes involved therein, and, on the other hand, the more synthetic approach that argues that spatial localization of a complex of factors is an important social structural phenomenon and not simply a geographic fact

The Adaptation Patterns of the Medical System and Social Change

Abstract: In order for a social institution or social organization, or, to put it more generally, any social system, to survive and develop in the changing environment, it must be both functional and adaptive. The term ‘functional’ means here that the system pursues the goals for the implementation of which it has been established. These goals are defined ‘from above’, by important needs and values of a broader and superior suprasystem, of which the system is a component part. Because the suprasystem is simultaneously the environment of the system, these goals are for the system external goals. In other words, functionality is a kind of a relation1 between the system and the suprasystem (or, to put it more precisely, between the system and its environment). The ‘adaptiveness’ of the system is understood as a certain dynamic quality which resides in the capability of the system to regulate its relations with the suprasystem in time, and correspondingly to the changing goals and functions of the suprasystem as a whole (e.g. in accordance with changing needs and values). To put it briefly, adaptiveness amounts to functionality in time.

Systems Theories in the Social Sciences

Abstract: During the last decades a whole spectrum of system-theoretic approaches has been developed in the social sciences. There can be distinguished three broad domains: A meta-scientific systems approach intending the constitution of an interdisciplinary framework for theorizing (“General Systems Theory”(GST)); a systems approach as a framework of sociological considerations taking social units, especially societies, as a whole and focusing on the functional prerequisites of a longtime maintenance of characteristic structures of social systems. In this approach (especially the structural functionalism (Parsons)), quasi-descriptive concepts like “integration”, “maintenance” etc. are used. Further developments of this approach, the most relevant of which seem to be the functional structuralism of N. Luhmann and the political cybernetics of K.W. Deutsch, center on social systems as open systems, thus focusing on aspects of system-environment relations and learning among others. At least partially, in these approaches exact concepts like stabilitity, control, complexity are taken from mathematical systems theory and used in a more inexact manner, thus stipulating the impression of solving old problems by a mere reformulation in a quasi-technological language; a formalized systems approach aiming at the construction of quantitative system models for all three aspects of a system as follows:

Simulation Models in a Social Environment: The Need for Dequantification

Abstract: Various approaches to solving or alleviating social problems are compared. It is argued that, when mathematical models are used, not only the building of the model but also the retranslation of the model’s outcome to the level of preciseness of the social system (dequantification) is of vital importance. The usefulness of such dequantification is illustrated with reference to Meadows’ World3-model.

The Health System and the Social System

Abstract: The major intent of this paper is to present a synthetic view of the health system as an integral component of the social system for which it performs a series of critical functions and from which, in turn, it receives a number of problematic supports or resources. As such an attempt is made to place the health system in its proper perspective, i.e. not at the exclusive center of sociological interest but alongside a group of complementary and differentiated sub-systems, each one performing its own tasks and necessarily competing for the scarce resources necessary for the performance of these tasks. My conceptual scheme is ‘structural-functional’ and derives, in its greater part, from the insights elaborated by Talcott Parsons and his view of society as an equilibrium-maintaining system, and made up of meaningfully interrelated sub-systems in such a way that change in one sub-system is potentially bound to affect other sub-systems and the system as a whole.

Basic Sociological Concepts for the Simulation of Political Decision-Making

Abstract: The decision-making of political systems is determined mainly by those values and needs which are prevalent in the social system, respectively in the perception of its political decision-makers. Other factors are the reactions of other systems to the decisions of a system, and also its own reaction to the decision outcome in the form of changes of its values and needs structures and of learning for future decision requirements.

Career development in a socialist country—A case study of Hungary

Abstract: The aim of this study is to present an illustration of the career‐development system in Hungarian enterprises. As the notion of ‘career’ may, under socialism, have a different social content from that in countries with other social systems, it is necessary to outline the interpretation given to career development in Hungary. I have not attempted to make a comparitive analysis of career in different social systems.

Psychological Approaches to Development

Abstract: Albert Lauterbach's Psychological Challenges to Modernization summarizes much of the general knowledge and conventional wisdom about the broad psychological aspects of development that have accumulated during the last 3 decades of the Western world's experiences with modernization at home and abroad. Equally important, this book is an illustration of the theoretical and methodological difficulties which are so easily encountered in efforts to view social processes from a psychological perspective. Any study that is concerned with the "psychological" aspects of modernization is based on the fundamental postulate that institutions, a nation's culture and history, and even economic factors, influence social processes mainly through man, what he thinks and does. Furthermore, it is necessary to assume that human beings-who are born into a social structure and are socialized into a nation's culture, who learn its history and are incorporated into the social and economic system-through their actions and in other ways influence people, the operation of institutions, and the alteration of social systems. Writers who emphasize psychological factors in development, therefore, must pay particular attention to the variables and linkages among them which in one way or another are the properties of individuals, to the specification of the conditions for and ways in which individuals change, and to the relationships between individuals and social processes. Lauterbach describes these variables and relationships in a readable, straightforward fashion that should appeal to the general reader who is searching for a "human dimension" to economic statistics, political discussions, and sociological treatises. Unfortunately, the term "psychological" has a number of meanings today, and theories that deal with psychological aspects of development therefore can take any one of several positions on these issues. Among the major varieties are those which emphasize particular internal characteris-

Technology, Mass Communication, and Law

Abstract: ... freedom of expression and freedom of the press mean... a guarantee for a social system that tolerates creative minds and encourages critical opinions by providing ways of involving the many and varying talents of individuals in the discussion about society and about the future of the social system.

Social integration of young offenders in a longitudinal perspective

Abstract: In 1970 we interviewed two groups of juvenile delinquents with the objective of discovering factors related with delinquent behaviour. The theoretical background of the study is to be found in subcultural theory as worked out by Merton (1957), Cohen (1955), Cloward & Ohlin (1960). These sociologists hold that our society is essentially a class-society, and that adolescent boys of the lower social classes meet specific cultural, social and economic barriers which hinder them considerably in their adaptation to the existing social system. As Cloward and Ohlin (p. 86) say: ‘The disparity between what lower-class youth are led to want and what is actually available to them is the source of a major problem of adjustment. Adolescents who form delinquent subcultures, we suggest, have internalized an emphasis upon conventional goals. Faced with limitations on legitimate avenues of access to these goals, and unable to revise their aspirations downward, they experience intense frustrations; the exploration of non-conformist alternatives may be the result.’ However subcultural theory is not directly tested in this study, because of its essentially macro-character. But the authors indicate the importance of specific social sub-systems. Merton and Cohen see education as a way to high social status.