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Social theory

About: Social theory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 11421 publications have been published within this topic receiving 624898 citations.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a multi-method investigation was designed to assess the power of information richness theory, relative to alternative social theories, to explain and predict managers' use of email.
Abstract: As new technologies that support managerial communication become widely used, the question of how and why managers, especially senior managers, use them increases in importance. This paper examines how and why managers use electronic mail. Today, one of the more influential theories of media choice in organization and information science is information richness theory, which has stimulated much empirical research on media selection and has clear implications for how managers should use media. Despite numerous modifications and elaborations, information richness theory remains an individual-level rational choice explanation of behavior, and as such it differs fundamentally from theories that emphasize the social context of managers' communication and media choice behavior. While the weight of informed opinion seems to be shifting toward social theories of media selection and use, much empirical research continues to test individual-level rational choice models. A multi-method investigation was designed to assess the power of information richness theory, relative to alternative social theories, to explain and predict managers' use of email. Managers were found to perceive various media in ways that were relatively consistent with information richness theory, but to use email more and differently than the theory predicted. In particular, effective senior managers were found to use email heavily and even for equivocal communications tasks. These results cannot be explained by information richness theory or by simple modifications of the theory. Rather, they suggest that the adoption, use, and consequences of media in organizations can be powerfully shaped by social processes such as sponsorship, socialization, and social control, which require social perspectives to understand them. These processes can result in differences across organizations and other social units in the patterns of using traditional media like the telephone, but such differences are even more likely for new media, like electronic mail.

1,188 citations

BookDOI
09 Nov 2006
TL;DR: Ortner as mentioned in this paper argues that a theory which depends on the interested action of social beings, specifically practice theory, associated especially with the work of Pierre Bourdieu, requires a more developed notion of human agency and a richer conception of human subjectivity.
Abstract: In Anthropology and Social Theory the award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity for the social sciences of the twenty-first century. The seven theoretical and interpretive essays in this volume each advocate reconfiguring, rather than abandoning, the concept of culture. Similarly, they all suggest that a theory which depends on the interested action of social beings—specifically practice theory, associated especially with the work of Pierre Bourdieu—requires a more developed notion of human agency and a richer conception of human subjectivity. Ortner shows how social theory must both build upon and move beyond classic practice theory in order to understand the contemporary world. Some of the essays reflect explicitly on theoretical concerns: the relationship between agency and power, the problematic quality of ethnographic studies of resistance, and the possibility of producing an anthropology of subjectivity. Others are ethnographic studies that apply Ortner’s theoretical framework. In these, she investigates aspects of social class, looking at the relationship between race and middle-class identity in the United States, the often invisible nature of class as a cultural identity and as an analytical category in social inquiry, and the role that public culture and media play in the creation of the class anxieties of Generation X. Written with Ortner’s characteristic lucidity, these essays constitute a major statement about the future of social theory from one of the leading anthropologists of our time.

1,188 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Elihu Katz1
TL;DR: The idea of a two-step flow of communication was first proposed by as mentioned in this paper, who argued that influence often flows from radio and print to opinion leaders and from these to less active sections of the population.
Abstract: The hypothesis that "ideas often flow from radio and print to opinion leaders and from these to the less active sections of the population" has been tested in several successive studies. Each study has attempted a different solution to the problem of how to take account of interpersonal relations in the traditional design of survey research. As a result, the original hypothesis is largely corroborated and considerably refined. A former staff member of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, the author is now on leave from his post as assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and is currently guest lecturer in sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A NALYSIS OF THE PROCESS of decision-making during the course of an election campaign led the authors of The People's Choice to suggest that the flow of mass communications may be less direct than was commonly supposed. It may be, they proposed, that influences stemming from the mass media first reach "opinion leaders" who, in turn, pass on what they read and hear to those of their every-day associates for whom they are influential. This hypothesis was called "the two-step flow of communication."1 The hypothesis aroused considerable interest. The authors themselves were intrigued by its implications for democratic society. It was a healthy sign, they felt, that people were still most successfully persuaded by give-andtake with other people and that the influence of the mass media was less automatic and less potent than had been assumed. For social theory, and for the design of communications research, the hypothesis suggested that the image of modern urban society needed revision. The image of the audience as a mass of disconnected individuals hooked up to the media but not to each other could not be reconciled with the idea of a two-step flow of communication implying, as it did, networks of interconnected individuals through which mass communications are channeled.

1,139 citations

Book
02 Dec 2009
TL;DR: Archer as discussed by the authors argues that people in their daily lives feel a genuine freedom of thought and belief, yet this is unavoidably constrained by cultural limitations, such as those imposed by the language spoken, the knowledge developed and the information available at any time.
Abstract: People are inescapably shaped by the culture in which they live, while culture itself is made and remade by people. Human beings in their daily lives feel a genuine freedom of thought and belief, yet this is unavoidably constrained by cultural limitations--such as those imposed by the language spoken, the knowledge developed and the information available at any time. In this book, Margaret Archer provides an analysis of the nature and stringency of cultural constraints, and the conditions and degrees of cultural freedom, and offers a radical new explanation of the tension between them. She suggests that the "problem of culture and agency" directly parallels the "problem of structure and agency," and that both problems can be solved by using the same analytical framework. She therefore paves the way toward the theoretical unification of the structural and cultural fields.

1,125 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202323
202241
2021232
2020308
2019305
2018326