Social system

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

Social conventions in computer-mediated communication: a comparison of three online shared virtual environments

Abstract: Recent studies of social processes via the Internet have begun to concentrate on the question of whether computer-mediated communication enables people to build up social relations with other persons despite geographical dispersion [1, 2]. It sill seems to be rather unclear whether the Internet can support the development of new forms of social structures, such as virtual communities, which exhibit social binding and social coherence comparable to those in real life. Studies that support the assumption that computer-mediated communication generates new forms of social systems [3, 2] are confronted with a more skeptical assessment, which raises the question of whether the variables used to provide evidence for this are really valid [4]. Critics refer to the absence of commonly-shared life-world perspectives in online communities [3], while more optimistic researchers point out that a common background in online environments is generated by communication [5, 6, 2].

Autopoiesis and socialization: on Luhmann's reconceptualization of communication and socialization.

Abstract: In 1984, Niklas Luhmann published Soziale Systeme in which he applies the idea of autopoiesis (= self-production) to social systems. Abstracted from its biological connotations, the concept of autopoiesis leads to a sharp distinction between different kinds of autopoietic organization, i.e. between life, consciousness and communication. According to Luhmann, the relationship between social systems and human beings cannot be adequately analysed except by taking into account that they are environments for one another. If this theoretical background is accepted, the concepts and theory of socialization need to be revised. Luhmann takes issues with classical notions such as internalization, inculcation, or 'socialization to the grounds of consensus' (Talcott Parsons). After a historical overview of social systems research and general systems theory, it is indicated how communications trigger further communications and realize the autopoiesis of social systems. In the second part of the article, the distinction between social systems and psychic systems is used to discuss issues crucial to socialization theory. Both a revision of the concept of socialization, and lines for an empirical research programme are proposed in accordance with Luhmann's theory of social systems.

Changing Patterns of Social Integration: A Prehistoric Example from the American Southwest1

Abstract: Social integration is a key concept to modern social anthropology. Furthermore, it is a concept of long standing concern in the field. The means by which individuals and social groups are integrated to form a cohesive whole must be understood if one is to understand the workings of the social system itself. Interest in the means by which societies achieve social integration, cohesion, or social solidarity extends deep into the historical roots of anthropology. During the time of the American Civil War, the French Sociological School was beginning to develop, and one of its first concerns was with the nature of social systems and means of social integration. This interest in social cohesion was transmitted from Fustel de Coulanges (1864), one of the first names associated with the rise of French Sociology, to one of his most famous students, Emile Durkheim. Durkheim devoted much of his intellectual energy to the investigation of social solidarity. His book, The Division of Labor in Society (1893), is a classic in the field, and in it, he explicitly raises the question of social integration in his discussion of Organic and Mechanical Solidarity. In a later work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), he concerns himself with religion as a basic means of social integration. Interest continued among the French sociologists from Durkheim's time to the present day as seen in the work of Marcel Mauss (1925) and Claude LeviStrauss (1949), to name only two. Concern with social integration is central to modern anthropology. This can be seen in the writings of such workers as Eggan (1950:43-44; 216ff; 303-304), Fortes (1936), Gluckman (1959), Service (1962), and Steward (1955:168-172). So central to the field is the concept of social integration, that Nadel (1951:165) was led to remark that it is ". . . the very essence of society itself. .. ." The mechanisms of integration are extremely varied, including kinship, religion, prescriptive marriage, reciprocal exchange of goods and services, and many more. Regardless of the type of cohesion, it is an essential factor to the workings of a social system and, as such, it is adaptive in nature. Changes in the nature of social integration can be viewed in relation to alterations in other parts of the cultural system as an adaptive response to other factors, such as environmental change, or basic change in the technological order.

Ethics and the Broader Rethinking/Reconceptualization of Research as Construct

Abstract: The focus of this article is the conceptualization of a critical anticolonial social science that places ethics and concern for others at the forefront, while at the same time challenges the will to know others that so dominates social science research as construct. The authors propose that research examine and challenge social systems, support struggles for social justice, and construct a nonviolent revolutionary ethical consciousness.

The Social Form of Napster: Cultivating the Paradox of Consumer Emancipation

Abstract: Aggregating more than 10 million users in the first six month period and attaining a growth rate of 200,000 new subscribers in a single day, the online music file sharing service Napster.com became the noisy center of a new social reality that struck terror into even the most sturdy of music entertainment executives. In this exploratory netnographic analysis of Napster consumption meanings, we analyze 80 cyber-interviews, 52 emails, 70 homepages and 80 entries on message boards to map micro-emancipatory consumption discourse and practices and build an understanding of the moderato social processes that construct Napster as an emancipative consumption community. We introduce the idea of the social form of emancipation. A social form of emancipation is theorized as an operationally closed, self-referential and consumption-related social system, which, by social communication, is engaged in a permanent process of ensuring a social distinction between itself and its environment (which is the only device to be used to reproduce itself in the course of time). Consumer emancipation of consumption-related yet market-distanced social entities is developed and explored as a process conditioning communication about ideologies, meanings, norms, and values in the social form of emancipation. Our findings reveal that consumer emancipation is the reassurance of social difference through communication, and the implicit self-paradoxification of centering into the cultural crosshairs of the social form of emancipation those entities it wishes to distance from. By exploring and problematizing the distinctions between one particular social form of emancipation “Napster” and its environment, the present work helps consumer researchers better understand consumer emancipation as a conviction to difference, a difference which is being cultivated through social communication (autopoiesis). The specific autopoietical processes at Napster create the social form of emancipation as a space of choice against modern society’s conviction to inclusion with respect to music corporations, commodification and copyright. The work concludes that social communication, understood as the concatenation of operations of drawing distinctions and observations of these operations performed by drawing other distinctions, is an important yet equally under-researched dimension of consumer emancipation. “What record companies don’t really understand is that Napster is just one illustration of the growing frustration over how much the record companies control what music people get to hear, over how the air waves, record labels and record stores, which are now all part of this ‘system’ that recording companies have pretty much succeeded in establishing, are becoming increasingly dominated by musical “products” to the detriment of real music. Why should the record company have such control over how he, the music lover, wants to experience the music? From the point of view of the real music lover, what’s currently going on can only be viewed as an exciting new development in the history of music. And, fortunately for him, there does not seem to be anything the old record companies can do about preventing this evolution from happening”