How Social Organizations Define a Culture

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Social Organizations

The Cooking Ape: An Interview with Richard Wrangham

2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-37
Author(s):  
elisabeth townsend
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Primate Research ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
Cooked Food ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Brain

Humans: The Cooking Ape Perhaps the first to suggest that humans were cooking as early as 1.9 million years ago, Richard Wrangham shows through his new research and his imagination how and possibly when cooking changed humans dramatically. Wrangham, Harvard University primatologist and MacArthur Fellow, has been studying the evolution of human cooking. After 25 years of primate research at his site in Kibale, Uganda, Wrangham is best known for explaining the similarity and differences across species of primate social organizations. In Kibale, he has analyzed chimpanzees’ behavior: how it’s changed when they interact with the environment and how their social groups have evolved. In particular, he noticed how food changed their interactions with each other. Like that of chimps, human behavior has been affected by food, especially as they shifted from raw to cooked food. Moving from eating food as it was discovered to collecting edibles and cooking them altered our social relationships. Cooked food has changed Homo sapiens physically by making food more digestible thereby altering jaws, teeth, and guts, and providing more calories for more expensive organs such as the brain. Wrangham discusses when and how humans may have started using fire to cook food, what they cooked, and the transition from cooking in an outdoor fire to hearths and open ovens.

Ritualized Writing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan D. Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
State Control ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
Ritual Practices

Transcribing scripture (sutras) represents one of the most central devotional practices in the Buddhist world. Sutra copying functioned as a form of ritualized writing, a practice strategically set apart from more mundane forms through a set of practices and beliefs. This book highlights sutra transcription throughout Asia, but focuses primarily on seventh- through ninth-century Japan, where the practice is particularly well-documented. It shows how scribes engaged in ritual practices related to purification and how patrons held elaborate dedication ceremonies upon the completion of a project. It traces the social organizations and institutional structures through which sutra copying took place. It highlights the function of the practice in the lives of diverse individuals from scribes to rulers. As a whole, the book offers a radical reassessment of Buddhism in ancient Japan that moves beyond scholarly tendencies to focus on state control and exploitation, and proposes a new way to treat scriptures as ritualized texts that interact dynamically with the individuals and communities who produce them.

Perspectives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Szollosy
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Augmentation ◽  
Public Imagination

This chapter introduces the “Perspectives” section of the Handbook of Living Machines offering an overview of the different contributions gathered here that consider how biomimetic and biohybrid systems will transform our personal lives and social organizations, and how we might respond to the challenges that these transformations will inevitably pose to our ‘posthuman’ worlds. The authors in this section see it as essential that those who aspire to create living machines engage with the public to confront misconceptions, deep anxieties, and unrealistic aspirations that presently dominate the cultural imagination, and to include potential users in questions of design and utility as new technologies are being developed. Human augmentation and enhancement are other important themes addressed, raising important questions about what it means fundamentally to be ‘human’. These questions and challenges are addressed through the lens of the social and personal impacts of new technologies on human selves, the public imagination, ethics, and human relationships.

scholarly journals Government Service Purchasing from Social Organizations in China: An Overview of the Development of a Powerful Trend

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Weinan Wang ◽  
Holly Snape
Keyword(s):  
Development Process ◽  
Government Service ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
Look Back ◽  
Comprehensive Picture ◽  
Service Purchasing ◽  
Party State

AbstractIn this work, we draw on available data to develop a comprehensive picture of the process through which “government service purchasing” has developed in China thus far. We argue that to understand the challenges that have begun to emerge in practice, it is important to look back and understand how government service purchasing has developed to date. Our hope is that by providing an overview of this development process, we can facilitate further research on what we believe is a phenomenon that will have deep implications for the relationships between Party, state, society, and market over the next decades in China.

scholarly journals Randomized and Generated Instances Fitting with the Home Health Care Problem Subjected to Certain Constraints

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 3346
Author(s):  
Colin Huvent ◽  
Caroline Gagné ◽  
Aymen Sioud
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Home Health Care ◽  
Hospital Cost ◽  
Time Window ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Home Health ◽  
Precedence Constraints ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
Health Support ◽  
Time Window Constraints

Home Health Care (HHC) is a worldwide issue. It focuses on how medical and social organizations of different countries handle providing patients with health support at home. In most developed countries, reducing hospital cost constitutes a main objective. It is important to research the improvement of HHC logistics. This paper addressed the generation and development of a benchmark properly fitting different constraints of the HCC problem. Consequently, a generator was proposed dealing with all kinds of constraints such as time window constraints, workload constraints, synchronization, and precedence constraints. This generator allows researchers to validate and compare solving methods on a common dataset regardless of confidentiality issues. We validated our generator by firstly creating a common benchmark available for researchers and secondly by proposing a set of instances and a solving method based on an HHC problem found in the literature.

scholarly journals The “Dark Side” Effects of Social Capital on Harmful Drinking among Chinese Community Residents: A Multilevel Study

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (10) ◽  
pp. 2249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Nie ◽  
Yongkai Zhu ◽  
Hua Fu ◽  
Junming Dai ◽  
Junling Gao
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Social Participation ◽  
Odds Ratio ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
Harmful Drinking ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
Multilevel Study ◽  
Community Residents

Background: To determine the effects of social capital on harmful drinking (HD) among Chinese community residents using a multilevel study. Methods: A cross-sectional study conducted from 2017–2018. In total, 13,610 participants were randomly interviewed from 29 districts of 3 cities in China with a multi-stage sampling procedure. Social capital, including social cohesion, membership in social organizations, and frequency of social participation, were assessed using validated scales. HD was assessed using the CAGE four-item questionnaire. Multilevel models were developed to determine whether social capital was related to HD when socioeconomic and demographic covariates were controlled. Results: In general, the prevalence of HD was 8.18%, and more specifically, 13.77% for men and 2.74% for women. After controlling for covariates and stratifying by gender, compared to residents in the low individual-level membership of social organizations, we found that the odds ratio (OR) for HD was 1.30 with a 95% confidence interval (CI) of 1.07–1.56 among men and 1.95 (95% CI: 1.29–2.97) among women. Compared to residents in the low individual-level frequency of social participation groups, the odds ratio of HD among women was 1.58 (95% CI: 1.10–2.26). There was no association between district-level social capital and HD. Conclusions: A high level of social capital may promote HD among the residents of Chinese neighborhoods. Intervention to modify social capital under the Chinese drinking culture may help reduce HD.

Radical Political Unionism as a Strategy for Revitalization in Argentina

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 97-113
Author(s):  
Lucila D’Urso ◽  
Julieta Longo
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
Toma De Decisiones ◽  
Automotive Parts ◽  
The Relationship

The grassroots union experiment undertaken at the Lear automotive parts factory in Argentina can be seen as a paradigmatic struggle for an understanding of the relationship between unionism and politics. The Lear case reveals that the distinctiveness of radical political unionism lies in the democratic elements of its decision making and its appeal to direct action, its construction of alliances with other social organizations, its linkage of economic demands with broader political objectives, its identification of the management, the state, and the union bureaucracy as adversaries, and its transmission of a leftist political culture. La experiencia sindical de la fábrica de autopartes Lear en Argentina puede ser analizada como un conflicto paradigmático para comprender la relación entre sindicalismo y política. El caso de Lear revela que el carácter distintivo del sindicalismo político radical se encuentra en los mecanismos democráticos de toma de decisiones y en la apelación a medidas de acción directa, la construcción de alianzas con otras organizaciones sociales, la vinculación de las demandas económicas con objetivos políticos más amplios, la identificación de la empresa, el Estado y la burocracia sindical como adversarios y la transmisión de una cultura política de izquierda.

scholarly journals Client or Volunteer? Understanding Neoliberalism and Neocolonialism Within International Volunteer Health Work

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 233339361879295
Author(s):  
Oona St-Amant ◽  
Catherine Ward-Griffin ◽  
Helene Berman ◽  
Arja Vainio-Mattila
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Health Work ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Volunteer

As international volunteer health work increases globally, research pertaining to the social organizations that coordinate the volunteer experience in the Global South has severely lagged. The purpose of this ethnographic study was to critically examine the social organizations within Canadian NGOs in the provision of health work in Tanzania. Multiple, concurrent data collection methods, including text analysis, participant observation and in-depth interviews were utilized. Data collection occurred in Tanzania and Canada. Neoliberalism and neocolonialism were pervasive in international volunteer health work. In this study, the social relations—“volunteer as client,” “experience as commodity,” and “free market evaluation”—coordinated the volunteer experience, whereby the volunteers became “the client” over the local community and resulting in an asymmetrical relationship. These findings illuminate the need to generate additional awareness and response related to social inequities embedded in international volunteer health work.

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