Social system

About: Social system is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2974 publications have been published within this topic receiving 92395 citations.

Industrial relations as a social system

Abstract: The article starts with a criticism of John Dunlop's systems theory of industrial relations. The article argues that some of the weaknesses of Dunlop's approach can be overcome by a systems theoretical conceptualisation of industrial relations based on Niklas Luhmann's theory of autopoietic social systems. It discusses five types of social systems that Luhmann's theory offers to characterise industrial relations as a social system: a set of interaction systems, an organisation system, a conflict system, an immune system and a function system of society. The article proposes to adopt a view of industrial relations as a fully-fledged function system operating within the world society. In its last part it sets out the major characteristics of such an autopoietic industrial relations system.

The physical environment and social welfare.

Abstract: Besides providing shelter and space for organized work and play, the physical environment symbolically communicates important information about the attributes and tasks of social systems and about the dynamics of individuals operating within those systems. The environment also influences the behavior of system participants.

An ecosysthemic vision of homicide.

Abstract: Four cities were analyzed in term of homicide rates, namely two Brazilian and two Argentinian cities. In each country, a city with high homicide rates and another with low rates were studied over the same three-year period. The theoretical approach of complex systems was used as it examines the link between the local system in its internal interconnections, the influence of the external environment and psychic engagement, namely the interpenetration between the social system and subjectivities. The emphasis of the study and the comparisons were conducted using qualitative research with observation, the use of interviews and focal groups. The results show that in locations with high or low homicide rates, there is synergy between the external environment (macrosocial and macroeconomic politics), the social system (social organization, local government, community participation) and subjectivity, whether it is in the construction of solidarity or social disintegration. Studies about changes in the violent social systems show that persistent and coordinated actions that articulate economic, social and educational investments as measures to prevent and restrain homicides have a positive impact in historical terms.

Self-Definition in Thought Action, and Life Path Choices

Abstract: Self-definition, a personality style associated with internally developed identity and behavior is differentiated from social definition, the tendency to adopt social category definitions of self. These personality patterns, sampled in imaginative thought, were related to plans, actions, rationales, and life outcomes both cross-sectionally and longitudinally over 14 years in a sample of 118 women first studied as college seniors. Self-defining women showed more autonomy in relation to personal relationships and the traditional female role, took more instrumental initiatives, sought excellence in multiple roles with less role conflict, and took more social system initiatives (starting and leading organizations and goal-oriented family-formation activities). Socially defined women chose more traditionally female careers initially, reported more career goal indecision and compromises, changed to more role-innovative careers, reported more role conflict, and gave more social rationales for actions.

Cultural Revitalization and Educational Change in Cuba

Abstract: THE NEED TO DEVELOP more powerful theories to illuminate relationships between social development and educational change has recently received growing recognition. This call for "theory building," for the creation of logico-deductive explanatory systems which could serve to generate empirically verifiable propositions about critical knowledge needs is, I believe, a hopeful sign of maturation in the field of educational studies.' Theory-building has, of course, long been the central concern of social scientists in their efforts to produce knowledge about human behavior and change in social systems. It is a major contention of this paper that educators seeking to better understand the inter-relationships between any nation's educational complex of formal, non-formal, and informal educational subsectors to other developmental sectors will be well advised to look to existing theory in the social disciplines. Clearly, one need is to order, to synthesize the large number of existing assumptions, propositions, and hypotheses in the literature with the intent of constructing middle-range theories to guide further research and attempts at innovation and renewal within educational systems. Educational-change theories must be built not only retroductively working from the data to an explanatory framework, but also through the testing and reformulation of existing theoretical constructs.2 It is here, perhaps, in the testing and adaptation of existing social-science theory that the comparative educator has the best possibilities to make significant contributions to the basic task of science, to our understanding of how classes of systems work. This paper will concentrate on this second imperative, that comparative educators become more knowledgeable consumers of, and contributors to, theory in the social sciences. My objective will be, using the extreme case of Cuba, to explain how the process of rapid and thorough-going educational change is intricately bound up in the process of radical social reconstruction. The analysis draws heavily on the corpus of revitalization theory elaborated in large part by the social anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace. Although this theory offers an essentially anthropological or cultural explanation of the inter-connections between educational and social change, it is, nevertheless, as I will attempt to