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Cultural Systems (cultural + system)
Selected AbstractsTHEORIZING THE UNIVERSITY AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM: DISTINCTIONS, IDENTITIES, EMERGENCIESEDUCATIONAL THEORY, Issue 3 2006Mark Considine In this essay, Mark Considine argues that the prospect of such changes requires us to reflect carefully upon the theoretical and normative underpinnings of universities and to delineate the structures and processes through which they might seek to negotiate their identities. Considine re-theorizes the university as a higher education system composed by distinctions and networks acting through an important class of boundary objects. He moves beyond an environmental analysis, asserting that systems are best theorized as cultural practices based upon actors making and protecting important kinds of distinctions. Thus, the university system must be investigated as a knowledge-based binary for dividing knowledge from other things. This approach, in turn, produces an identity-centering (cultural) model of the system that assumes universities must perform two different acts of distinction to exist: first, they must distinguish themselves from other systems (such as the economy, organized religion, and the labor market), and, second, they must operate successfully in a chosen resource environment. Ultimately, Considine argues that while environmental problems (such as cuts in government grants) may generate periodic crises, threats within identities produce emergencies generating a radical kind of problematic for actor networks. [source] Culture and Women's SexualitiesJOURNAL OF SOCIAL ISSUES, Issue 2 2000Evelyn Blackwood Anthropological studies of women's same-sex relations in non-Western societies provide an important source for theorizing women's sexuality because they allow us to go beyond a narrow focus on Western cultures and concepts. Looking at studies from groups other than the dominant societies of Europe and America, I explore the diversity of women's sexualities and the sociocultural factors that produce sexual beliefs and practices. This article argues that sexual practices take their meaning from particular cultures and their beliefs about the self and the world. Cultural systems of gender, in particular, construct different sexual beliefs and practices for men and women. I conclude the article by suggesting some broad patterns at work in the production of women's sexualities across cultures. [source] Parent-Identified Barriers to Pediatric Health Care: A Process-Oriented ModelHEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH, Issue 1 2006Elisa J. Sobo Objective. To further understand barriers to care as experienced by health care consumers, and to demonstrate the importance of conjoining qualitative and quantitative health services research. Data Sources. Transcripts from focus groups conducted in San Diego with English- and Spanish-speaking parents of children with special health care needs. Study Design. Participants were asked about the barriers to care they had experienced or perceived, and their strategies for overcoming these barriers. Using elementary anthropological discourse analysis techniques, a process-based conceptual model of the parent experience was devised. Principal Findings. The analysis revealed a parent-motivated model of barriers to care that enriched our understanding of quantitative findings regarding the population from which the focus group sample was drawn. Parent-identified barriers were grouped into the following six temporally and spatially sequenced categories: necessary skills and prerequisites for gaining access to the system; realizing access once it is gained; front office experiences; interactions with physicians; system arbitrariness and fragmentation; outcomes that affect future interaction with the system. Key to the successful navigation of the system was parents' functional biomedical acculturation; this construct likens the biomedical health services system to a cultural system within which all parents/patients must learn to function competently. Conclusions. Qualitative analysis of focus group data enabled a deeper understanding of barriers to care,one that went beyond the traditional association of marker variables with poor outcomes ("what") to reveal an understanding of the processes by which parents experience the health care system ("how,""why") and by which disparities may arise. Development of such process-oriented models furthers the provision of patient-centered care and the creation of interventions, programs, and curricula to enhance such care. Qualitative discourse analysis, for example using this project's widely applicable protocol for generating experientially based models, can enhance our knowledge of the parent/patient experience and aid in the development of more powerful conceptualizations of key health care constructs. [source] Ideology, Semiotics, and Clifford Geertz: Some Russian ReflectionsHISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 1 2001Andrey Zorin This article, written by a Russian cultural historian, analyzes the concept of "ideology" in the work of Clifford Geertz and his role in understanding the figurative nature of ideology as a cultural system. The author compares Geertz's semiotic approach to culture with the semiotics of culture developed by Russian theorists, particularly Yuri Lotman, showing the convergence and divergence of the two different national traditions. This understanding of the nature and functions of ideology opens new possibilities for discussing the tortured relations of ideology and literature, showing the way fiction can affect the formation of ideological systems and influence practical politics. The analysis is illustrated by examples from Russian political life of the 1990s,when revolutionary changes demanded new sets of ideological metaphors that in their turn shaped the direction of events. [source] Probing the "moralization of capitalism" problem: Democratic experimentalism and the co-evolution of normsINTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, Issue 185 2005Christian Arnsperger The most fundamental issue raised by any discussion around the ,moralization of capitalism' is the puzzle of second-order morality: How exactly is it possible to pass a moral judgement on our categories of moral judgement? How can our norms of morality be said to be immoral, thus calling for (re-)moralization? The answer depends on the observation that norms and interaction structures in capitalism have co-evolved, and hence can be taken neither as autonomous with respect to one another nor as obeying a hidden functionality. This implies that, paradoxically, the moralization problem cannot be solved in moral terms, but calls for a political approach, to make best use of which we need to come to terms with capitalism as a fully fledged cultural system. The ideology inherent in that cultural system can only be attacked from within the system itself, through decentralized processes of democratic decision-making rather than by mere prophetic denunciation or moral invectives. Because the particular version of the capitalist culture in which we live now is a radically contingent result of history, it makes sense to support a framework of democratic experimentalism which embeds multiple institutional experimentation within a system of experience-building and experience-formation analogous to the system of information-utilisation and information-dissemination offered by the Hayekian market. Only by thus creating the real and concrete democratic presuppositions for alternative capitalist practices can we begin to make sense of the puzzle inherent in the "moralization of capitalism" problem. [source] The Urban Landscape of Hyde Park: Adrian Stokes, Conrad and the topos of negationART HISTORY, Issue 2 2000Stephen Kite Adrian Stokes's (1902-72) construct of the urban landscape of Hyde Park as a topos of negation is a remarkable recorded instance in twentieth century criticism of the influence of environment in directing an aesthetic position. Stokes's London landscape of Hyde Park and the monuments embedded within it represented, for him, a powerful negative heuristic; a set of negative rules inscribed within his personal cultural system for the purposes of rejection, and deployed to define , in antithesis , his critical direction. His accounts of Hyde Park are, outwardly, a withering critique of Edwardian moral vacuity and Victorian eclecticism while inwardly , on the psycho-analytic level , they register projections of inner anxiety and personal guilt at the ,destroyed mother' that the Park represents and drive his need to make reparation. The paper examines the formation of Stokes's mental construct of the Park through a close mapping of this landscape and a concrete examination of its artefacts in relation to readings of Stokes's own writings and those of Joseph Conrad, Ruskin and others. Following an outline of Stokes's thought in the context of Kleinian psychoanalysis the paper takes Lakatos's concept of the negative heuristic as a point of departure to chart a journey from Stokes's childhood home in Radnor Place, Bayswater through the park to the Albert Memorial. These topographies disclose Stokes's offensive responses to the Park and its artefacts and show how , in eschewing Hyde Park and all it represents , he begins to discover formal and ethical positions that will frame the core of his architectural-artistic theories. [source] The wealth of species: ecological communities, complex systems and the legacy of Frank PrestonECOLOGY LETTERS, Issue 3 2007Jeffrey C. Nekola Abstract General statistical patterns in community ecology have attracted considerable recent debate. Difficulties in discriminating among mathematical models and the ecological mechanisms underlying them are likely related to a phenomenon first described by Frank Preston. He noted that the frequency distribution of abundances among species was uncannily similar to the Boltzmann distribution of kinetic energies among gas molecules and the Pareto distribution of incomes among wage earners. We provide additional examples to show that four different ,distributions of wealth' (species abundance distributions, species,area and species,time relations, and distance decay of compositional similarity) are not unique to ecology, but have analogues in other physical, geological, economic and cultural systems. Because these appear to be general statistical patterns characteristic of many complex dynamical systems they are likely not generated by uniquely ecological mechanistic processes. [source] Mobile phones, communities and social networks among foreign workers in SingaporeGLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 3 2009ERIC C. THOMPSON Abstract Transnational mobility affects both high-status and low-income workers, disrupting traditional assumptions of the boundedness of communities. There is a need to reconfigure our most basic theoretical and analytical constructs. In this article I engage in this task by illustrating a complex set of distinctions (as well as connections) between ,communities' as ideationally constituted through cultural practices and ,social networks' constituted through interaction and exchange. I have grounded the analysis ethnographically in the experiences of foreign workers in Singapore, focusing on domestic and construction workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh. I examine the cultural, social and communicative role that mobile phones play in the lives of workers who are otherwise constrained in terms of mobility, living patterns and activities. Mobile phones are constituted as symbol status markers in relationship to foreign workers. Local representations construct foreign workers as users and consumers of mobile telephony, reinscribing ideas of transnational identities as well as foreignness within the context of Singapore. Migrant workers demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the various telephony options available, but the desire to use phones to communicate can overwhelm their self-control and lead to very high expenditures. The research highlights the constraints , as well as possibilities , individuals experience as subjects and agents within both social and cultural systems, and the ways in which those constraints and possibilities are mediated by a particular technology , in this case, mobile phones. [source] Gender and Ethnicity in Bolivian Politics: Transformation or Paternalism?JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN & CARIBBEAN ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2000Susan Paulson Throughout Latin America public discourse and political programs dealing with gender and ethnicity have focused mainly on women and indigenous people, often in paternalistic efforts to help these "marginal groups." Bolivian constitutional reforms implemented between 1993 and 1997 challenge this traditional stance by promoting balanced participation in a nation constituted by multiple identities, yet ongoing processes triggered by these reforms testify to the tradition's stubborn endurance. In this article we ask what prevents institutions working in Bolivia from applying anthropological notions of gender and ethnicity as dynamic and interlocking cultural systems, and we question the distancing and antagonism that exists between those working with ethnicity- and those working with gender. Efforts to clarify these phenomena focus on the lack of articulation between ethnographic observations, political philosophies and development policies. [source] Law, Patriarchies, and State Formation in England and Post-Colonial Hong KongJOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 2 2001Carol A. G. Jones The rise of the modern state is often associated with the demise of particularistic ties and authoritarian patriarchy. Classically, particularism gives way to universalism, patronage, hierarchy, and deference to the ,equalities' of contract. But history is not a one-way street nor is patriarchy all of one kind. Society's legal arrangements, structure, custom, power, affect, and sex swing back and forth between values of distance, deference, and patronage and those stressing greater egalitarianism in personal and political relations. Though they vary in type, patriarchy and particularism as cultural systems do not disappear but ebb, flow, and are revived, their oscillation driven by particular economic goals and political insecurities. [source] Culture and Economic SystemsAMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 4 2007Frederic L. Pryor Applying a cluster analysis to the results of the World Value Study, this article shows that the OECD nations have five distinct patterns of cultural characteristics. Moreover, these five cultural systems are almost the same as a classification of economic systems that have been derived from a cluster analysis of their economic institutions. A comparison of the cultural characteristics of East and West Germany suggests that the economic system has relatively little influence on the cultural systems. Instead, in a democracy, where the economic system is not imposed by force, the cultural characteristics are more likely to determine the economic system, rather than the reverse. [source] On market mavens and consumer self-confidence: A cross-cultural studyPSYCHOLOGY & MARKETING, Issue 1 2007Piotr Chelminski Market mavens are attentive to media and important diffusers of marketplace information. This study examines the relationships between cultural individualism, general and consumer self-confidence, and market mavenism in the context of two distinct cultural systems, the United States and South Korea. The examination of cross-cultural equivalence of the constructs under study provides evidence for both configural and full or partial metric invariance. The results indicate that cultural individualism is positively related to general self-confidence, general self-confidence is positively related to consumer selfconfidence, and consumer self-confidence is positively related to market mavenism. Additionally, this research shows that these relationships hold in both the U.S. and South Korean samples. The results of this study indicate that market mavenism, and thus levels of confidence about marketplace knowledge and speed of diffusion of such information may be more prevalent among the more individualistic than collectivistic consumers. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] | ||||||||||