Social system

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

Connecting the person to the social: The functions of social identification.

Abstract: After decades of emphasizing the individual, U.S. social psychologists have rediscovered the social self. Nudged by their European colleagues, who have typically placed more emphasis on group-level phenomena (Doise, 1986), significant numbers of U.S. investigators have turned their attention to questions that address the links between self and others. Social psycholo­ gists are theoretically committed to exploring the links between individuals and their social worlds. Yet, with our skill in creating specific social settings for experimental participants, we sometimes fail to pay attention to the larger social system in which people actually engage, choose, respond, and despair. A comprehensive analysis of the social self needs to attend to these issues and to develop theoretical models that explicitly incorporate the social as well as the individual.

The Social Side of Schooling: Ecological Studies of Classrooms and Schools.

Abstract: Ecological researchers did not discover the social aspects of schools; earlier thinkers and observers such as Dewey (e.g., 1916/1966, 1938/1963), Waller (1932/ 1967), and Parsons (1959) pointed out what many teachers already knew-that teaching and learning in classrooms are social activities, conducted in groups. Teaching and learning in most school classrooms differ profoundly from the teaching and learning embodied in such powerful images as Socrates in dialogue with his students, Emile with his tutor, or the psychologist shaping the behavior of rats and pigeons one at a time in the laboratory. Recent ecological studies reveal the operations of school social systems in sufficient detail to provide a clearer understanding of how those systems work and what their implications are, both for the

Visualizing the evolution of community structures in dynamic social networks

Abstract: Social network analysis is the study of patterns of interaction between social entities. The field is attracting increasing attention from diverse disciplines including sociology, epidemiology, and behavioral ecology. An important sociological phenomenon that draws the attention of analysts is the emergence of communities, which tend to form, evolve, and dissolve gradually over a period of time. Understanding this evolution is crucial to sociologists and domain scientists, and often leads to a better appreciation of the social system under study. Therefore, it is imperative that social network visualization tools support this task. While graph-based representations are well suited for investigating structural properties of networks at a single point in time, they appear to be significantly less useful when used to analyze gradual structural changes over a period of time. In this paper, we present an interactive visualization methodology for dynamic social networks. Our technique focuses on revealing the community structure implied by the evolving interaction patterns between individuals. We apply our visualization to analyze the community structure in the US House of Representatives. We also report on a user study conducted with the participation of behavioral ecologists working with social network datasets that depict interactions between wild animals. Findings from the user study confirm that the visualization was helpful in providing answers to sociological questions as well as eliciting new observations on the social organization of the population under study.

Can Social Systems be Autopoietic? Bhaskar's and Giddens' Social Theories

Abstract: The theory of autopoiesis, that is systems that are self-producing or self-constructing, was originally developed to explain the particular nature of living as opposed to non-living entities. It was subsequently enlarged to encompass cognition and language leading to what is known as second-order cybernetics. However, as with earlier biological theories, many authors have tried to extend the domain of the theory to encompass social systems, the most notable being Luhmann. The purpose of this paper is to consider critically the extent to which the theory of autopoiesis, as originally defined, can be applied to social systems-that is, whether social systems are autopoietic. And, if it cannot, whether some weaker version might be appropriate. It addresses this question by considering whether autopoiesis can be applied to the theoretical conceptions of Giddens and Bhaskar. It follows an earlier paper that evaluated Luhmann's autopoietic social theory.