Trust, Standards of Public Office, and Corruption

The central contention of this chapter is that the legal and political history of trust is also a history of the development of public office. ‘Trust’ helped to define and restrain the abuse of office in the early modern period. Originally a Roman legal concept, fiduciary trust was designed in the sixteenth century to protect private property rights but came to be applied, in the mid-seventeenth century, to public (and commercial) office to help describe, but also tackle, the abuse of powers exercised by officeholders. By the nineteenth century its standards and criteria had become widely shared norms—so much so, that we have largely forgotten their origins and the cultural factors that shaped their genesis. Trust and ‘breach of trust’ had great discursive power but also had juridical reach.

‘Everyone’s Annoyed’: Leveraging Uncertainty in the Smell of Others

A growing literature illuminates the limits of claims made on the basis of sensory perception in scientized, rationalized, and bureaucratic contexts. How to understand exceptions to the rule – cases where claims based on sensory experience are taken at face value, even without corroborating evidence? Here, I focus on one such exception, in which citizen complaints about the smell of a small shantytown functioned successfully as both demands and justifications despite a lack of the kinds of instrumentally and technologically enabled corroboration that the literature would suggest are necessary to strengthen such claims. I show how complaints slotted neatly into a specific cultural structure, an olfactory cosmology in which ‘bad air’ that endangers health can be identified by smell and requires ongoing management and amelioration, and where adherence to hygienic norms is required for full moral citizenship. The case suggests ways that the apparent weaknesses of olfactory claims might allow them to be uniquely weaponized in social and political life, and shows how such claims can exploit shared norms, values, and meanings to enroll others in the demand for action.

Limited Scope for Group Coordination in Stylistic Variations of Kolam Art

In large, complex societies, assorting with others with similar social norms or behaviors can facilitate successful coordination and cooperation. The ability to recognize others with shared norms or behaviors is thus assumed to be under selection. As a medium of communication, human art might reflect fitness-relevant information on shared norms and behaviors of other individuals thus facilitating successful coordination and cooperation. Distinctive styles or patterns of artistic design could signify migration history, different groups with a shared interaction history due to spatial proximity, as well as individual-level expertise and preferences. In addition, cultural boundaries may be even more pronounced in a highly diverse and socially stratified society. In the current study, we focus on a large corpus of an artistic tradition called kolam that is produced by women from Tamil Nadu in South India (N = 3, 139 kolam drawings from 192 women) to test whether stylistic variations in art can be mapped onto caste boundaries, migration and neighborhoods. Since the kolam art system with its sequential drawing decisions can be described by a Markov process, we characterize variation in styles of art due to different facets of an artist's identity and the group affiliations, via hierarchical Bayesian statistical models. Our results reveal that stylistic variations in kolam art only weakly map onto caste boundaries, neighborhoods, and regional origin. In fact, stylistic variations or patterns in art are dominated by artist-level variation and artist expertise. Our results illustrate that although art can be a medium of communication, it is not necessarily marked by group affiliation. Rather, artistic behavior in this context seems to be primarily a behavioral domain within which individuals carve out a unique niche for themselves to differentiate themselves from others. Our findings inform discussions on the evolutionary role of art for group coordination by encouraging researchers to use systematic methods to measure the mapping between specific objects or styles onto groups.

Homophobia and national collective narcissism in populist Poland

Opposition to sexual minority rights in Poland is among the highest in the EU. Populist political actors in the country repeatedly scapegoat gays and lesbians, presenting them as a threat to the Polish nation and its shared norms and values, particularly those derived from religion. Building upon previous research which shows how discourse constructing homosexuality as a threat to the nation has been used by social and political actors to legitimize homophobic rhetoric and behaviour, our paper shows whether nationalism—understood here as national collective narcissism—predicts prejudice towards gays and lesbians at the level of individual beliefs.

Groepsidentificatie en cognitie

Group-identification and cognition: Why trivial conventions are more important than we think In existing (evolutionary) explanations for group formation and -identification, the function of cultural conventions such as social etiquette and dress codes is limited to providing group-markers. Group formation and identification itself is explained in terms of less arbitrary and more substantial phenomena such as shared norms and institutions. In this paper I will argue that, however trivial and arbitrary, cultural conventions fulfil an important cognitive function that makes them essential to the formation of and identification with large groups. Complex role-division, both informal and institutional, is important in the functioning of any large group of people. Shared conventions enable a virtually automatic understanding of signals, scripts and rules that regulate the interaction of divided roles. They provide a cultural infrastructure within which we perceive e.g. specific behavior and clothing as a range of social-cultural affordances for role-interactions. Shared familiarity with this infrastructure is the foundation for the basic kind of trust of in-group strangers that is a requirement for the formation of large groups. This non-intellectualist view on group formation and group identification can contribute to new ways of dealing with problems in multicultural societies.

Knowledge management system implementation success: A social capital perspective

BACKGROUND: Organizations develop knowledge management (KM) strategies with the intention to leverage knowledge across all functional areas. A knowledge management system (KMS) is used to facilitate KM processes such as the creation, storage, and application of knowledge. However, mere adoption and deployment of KMS do not warrant its effective use to facilitate knowledge-sharing efforts. OBJECTIVE: This study investigates the facilitative role of social capital in the use of KMS by considering three social capital dimensions –cognitive (i.e., shared norms), relational (i.e., trust), and structural (i.e., social connectedness). METHODS: A case study strategy was used for this study. A mixed approach of qualitative and quantitative techniques was used to obtain relevant data for analysis. Instruments used to collect the data were semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. Documents regarding social policy, shared values, and shared goals were also obtained for triangulation purposes. A total of 15 respondents were interviewed while 73 respondents participated in the survey. A simple random sampling technique was used to select the participants and the survey data were analyzed using Pearson’s correlation, factor analysis, and multiple regression analysis. RESULTS: The study found that each of the three dimensions of social capital has a positive and significant relationship with the use of KMS. Specifically, shared norms (i.e., cognitive social capital), trust (i.e., relational social capital), and strong connectedness (i.e., structural social capital) were good predictors of employees’ use of KMS while user attitude and perceived usefulness mediate social capital dimensions in terms of KMS usage for knowledge exchange or transfer in the organization. CONCLUSIONS: The application of social capital theory to KMS context should be a very important consideration by both researchers and practitioners due to the socio-technical nature of KMS and the need to recognize social capital as a mechanism for inducement and opportunity to promote KMS usage for successful knowledge sharing.

Feeling global belonging: Sensorial experiences in global education

Global citizenship education (GCE) seeks to develop critical thinking and self-reflexivity and, crucially, to create feelings of belonging to a common humanity. Although the subjectivity of belonging has been widely recognized, gaps remain around the micro-level experiences and practices that foster global identities. This article addresses these questions through the analysis of the individual’s lived experience on an international GCE programme. It will be argued that global belonging is a transformative process of self-identity, shaped primarily through shared sensorial experience where the unfamiliar becomes familiar. The senses here help to create new personal and shared norms building trust, bonds and belonging between individuals from different backgrounds. Thus, in order to understand the journey towards feelings of global belonging, we must look to the senses as key sites of transformation.

Introductory Reflections on Scholastic Economic Thought

This essay provides a general overview of the development of economic theories in Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries in the light of the latest studies and offers new perspectives for future investigations. Scholasticism is a milestone in the history of Western philosophy as well as its contribution to scientific method and innovation. At the end of the Middle Ages, the ideal of shared norms and values clashes with the tensions of commercial transformation. In this historical framework – characterized not only by an unprecedented international trade and new financial institutions but also by a sort of proto-empiricism – the philosophical speculation tries to find a unitary “way of knowledge” between the legitimacy of individual interests and the primacy of general principles. This interdisciplinary effort is based on the innovative interpretation of theology, (natural) philosophy, Roman and Canon law such as local customary rules applied to the emergent economic issues.

What a Girl Wants, What a Girl Needs: Analyzing Postfeminist Themes in Girls’ Magazines

Girls’ magazines play an important role in the maintenance of gender perceptions and the creation of gender by young girls. Due to a recent resurgence within public discussion and mediated content of feminist, postfeminist, and antifeminist repertoires, centered on what femininity entails, young girls are growing up in an environment in which conflicting messages are communicated about their gender. To assess, which shared norms and values related to gender are articulated in girl culture and to what extent these post/anti/feminist repertoires are prevalent in the conceptualization of girlhood, it is important to analyze magazines as vehicles of this culture. The current study analyzes if and how contemporary postfeminist thought is articulated in popular girl’s magazines. To reach this goal, we conducted a thematic analysis of three popular Dutch teenage girls’ magazines (N = 27, from 2018), <em>Fashionchick</em>, <em>Cosmogirl</em>, and <em>Girlz</em>. The results revealed that the magazines incorporate feminist, antifeminist, and as a result, postfeminist discourse in their content. The themes in which these repertoires are articulated are centered around: the body, sex, male–female relationships, female empowerment, and self-reflexivity. The magazines function as a source of gender socialization for teenage girls, where among other gendered messages a large palette of postfeminist themes are part of the magazines’ articulation of what it means to be a girl in contemporary society.