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How Institutions Think
''How Institutions Think'' (first published 1986) is a book that contains the published version of the Frank W. Abrams Lectures delivered by the influential cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas at Syracuse University in March 1985. Summary In ''How Institutions Think'', Douglas offers a critique of the rational choice theory rooted in social anthropology and a structural functionalist approach. She aims at explaining how humans cooperate, and the role of building and maintaining institutions to shape ways of thinking useful to cooperation. To achieve this, she builds on the work of Émile Durkheim and Ludwig Fleck and examples drawn from anthropology. She argues that rational choice theory that humans cooperate because this is individually advantageous can not explain empirically observed phenomena, such as self-sacrifice or non-authoritarian, 'latent', groups. The book aims at discussing alternative explanations, such as the building of analogies to support common unders ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mary Douglas
Dame Mary Douglas, (25 March 1921 – 16 May 2007) was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism, whose area of speciality was social anthropology. Douglas was considered a follower of Émile Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion. Biography She was born as Margaret Mary Tew in Sanremo, Italy, to Gilbert and Phyllis (née Twomey) Tew. Her father, Gilbert Tew, was a member of the Indian Civil Service serving in Burma, as was her maternal grandfather, Sir Daniel Twomey, who retired as the Chief Judge of the Chief Court of Lower Burma. Her mother was a devout Roman Catholic, and Mary and her younger sister, Patricia, were raised in that faith. After their mother's death, the sisters were raised by their maternal grandparents and attended the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton. Mary went on to study at St. Anne's College, Oxford, from 1939 to 1943; there ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim ( or ; 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber. Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies can maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social and religious ties are much less universal, and in which new social institutions have come into being. Durkheim's conception of the scientific study of society laid the groundwork for modern sociology, and he used such scientific tools as statistics, surveys, and historical observation in his analysis of suicides in Catholic and Protestant groups. His first major sociological work was (1893; ''The Division of Labour in Society''), followed in 1895 by (''The Rules of Sociological Method''), the same year in which Durkheim set up the first European dep ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Books By Mary Douglas
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1986 Books
The year 1986 was designated as the International Year of Peace by the United Nations. Events January * January 1 **Aruba gains increased autonomy from the Netherlands by separating from the Netherlands Antilles. **Spain and Portugal enter the European Community, which becomes the European Union in 1993. *January 11 – The Gateway Bridge in Brisbane, Australia, at this time the world's longest prestressed concrete free-cantilever bridge, is opened. *January 13– 24 – South Yemen Civil War. *January 20 – The United Kingdom and France announce plans to construct the Channel Tunnel. *January 24 – The Voyager 2 space probe makes its first encounter with Uranus. *January 25 – Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army Rebel group takes over Uganda after leading a five-year guerrilla war in which up to half a million people are believed to have been killed. They will later use January 26 as the official date to avoid a coincidence of dates with Dictator Idi Amin's 1971 co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Business History Review
The ''Business History Review'' is a scholarly quarterly published by Cambridge University Press for Harvard Business School. ''Business History Review'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering the field of business history. It was established in 1954 by Harvard University Press as the continuation of the ''Bulletin of the Business Historical Society''. The journal is one of the leading scholarly journals in the field of business history alongside '' Enterprise & Society'' and '' Business History''. The ''Business History Review'' traces it origins to 1926 with the publication of Harvard’s ''Bulletin of the Business Historical Society''. The Bulletin aimed “to encourage and aid the study of the evolution of business in all periods and in all countries” and devoted much space to describing the growing archival collections oHarvard’s Baker Library Henrietta Larson, whose ''Guide to Business History'' (1948) also documented the scope of available research materials, wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
London Review Of Books
The ''London Review of Books'' (''LRB'') is a British literary magazine published twice monthly that features articles and essays on fiction and non-fiction subjects, which are usually structured as book reviews. History The ''London Review of Books'' was founded in 1979, when publication of ''The Times Literary Supplement'' was suspended during the year-long lock-out at ''The Times''. Its founding editors were Karl Miller, then professor of English at University College London; Mary-Kay Wilmers, formerly an editor at ''The Times Literary Supplement''; and Susannah Clapp, a former editor at Jonathan Cape. For its first six months, it appeared as an insert in ''The New York Review of Books''. It became an independent publication in May 1980. Its political stance has been described by Alan Bennett, a prominent contributor, as "consistently radical". Unlike ''The Times Literary Supplement'' (TLS), the majority of the articles the ''LRB'' publishes (usually fifteen per issue) are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ian Hacking
Ian MacDougall Hacking (born February 18, 1936) is a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, he has won numerous awards, such as the Killam Prize for the Humanities and the Balzan Prize, and been a member of many prestigious groups, including the Order of Canada, the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy. Life Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, he earned undergraduate degrees from the University of British Columbia (1956) and the University of Cambridge (1958), where he was a student at Trinity College. Hacking also earned his PhD at Cambridge (1962), under the direction of Casimir Lewy, a former student of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He started his teaching career as an instructor at Princeton University in 1960 but, after just one year, moved to the University of Virginia as an assistant professor. After working as a research fellow at Cambridge from 1962 to 1964, he taught at his alma mater, UBC, first as an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ludwik Fleck
Ludwik Fleck (11 July 1896 – 5 June 1961) was a Polish Jewish and Israeli physician and biologist who did important work in epidemic typhus in Lwów, Poland, with Rudolf WeiglT. Tansey (2014) ''Typhus and tyranny'', ''Nature'' 511(7509), 291. and in the 1930s developed the concepts of the "''Denkstil''" ("thought style") and the "''Denkkollektiv''" ("thought collective"). The concept of the " thought collective" defined by him is important in the philosophy of science and in logology (the "science of science"), helping to explain how scientific ideas change over time, much as in Thomas Kuhn's later notion of the " paradigm shift" and in Michel Foucault's concept of the "episteme". His account of the development of facts at the intersection of active elements of the thought collective and the passive resistances of nature provides a way of considering the particular culture of modern science as evolutionary and evidence-oriented. Life Fleck was born in Lemberg (''Lwów'' i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Structural Functionalism
Structural functionalism, or simply functionalism, is "a framework for building theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability". This approach looks at society through a macro-level orientation, which is a broad focus on the social structures that shape society as a whole, and believes that society has evolved like organisms. This approach looks at both social structure and social functions. Functionalism addresses society as a whole in terms of the function of its constituent elements; namely norms, customs, traditions, and institutions. A common analogy, popularized by Herbert Spencer, presents theses parts of society as "organs" that work toward the proper functioning of the "body" as a whole. In the most basic terms, it simply emphasizes "the effort to impute, as rigorously as possible, to each feature, custom, or practice, its effect on the functioning of a supposedly stable, cohesive system". For Talcott Parsons ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cultural Anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions. Anthropologists have pointed out that through culture people can adapt to their environment in non-genetic ways, so people living in different environments will often have different cultures. Much of anthropological theory has originated in an appreciation of and interest in the tension between the local (particular cultures) and the global (a universal human nature, or the web of connections between people in distinct places/circumstances). Cultural anthropology has a rich methodology, including participant observation (often called fieldwork because it requires the anthropologist spending an extended period of time at the research locat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Anthropology
Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology. Comparison with cultural anthropology The term ''cultural'' anthropology is generally applied to ethnographic works that are holistic in spirit, are oriented to the ways in which culture affects individual experience, or aim to provide a rounded view of the knowledge, customs, and institutions of a people. ''Social'' anthropology is a term applied to ethnographic works that attempt to isolate a particular system of social relations such as those that comprise domestic life, economy, law, politics, or religion, give analytical priority to the organizational bases of social life, and attend to cultural phenomena as somewha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rational Choice Theory
Rational choice theory refers to a set of guidelines that help understand economic and social behaviour. The theory originated in the eighteenth century and can be traced back to political economist and philosopher, Adam Smith. The theory postulates that an individual will perform a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether an option is right for them.Gary Browning, Abigail Halcli, Frank Webster (2000). ''Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of the Present'', London: SAGE Publications. It also suggests that an individual's self-driven rational actions will help better the overall economy. Rational choice theory looks at three concepts: rational actors, self interest and the invisible hand. Rationality can be used as an assumption for the behaviour of individuals in a wide range of contexts outside of economics. It is also used in political science, sociology, and philosophy. Overview The basic premise of rational choice theory is that the decisions made by individual ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
