Download or read book The Social Construction of Communities written by Gerald D. Suttles and published by Chicago : University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1972 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Social Construction of Communities written by Mark D. Varien and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2008-08-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Social Construction of Communities draws on archaeological research in the Southwest to examine how communities are created through social interaction. The archaeological record of the Southwest is important for its precise dating, exceptional preservation, large number of sites, and length of occupation—making it most intensively researched archaeological regions in the world. Taking advantage of that rich archaeological record, the contributors to this volume present case studies of the Mesa Verde, Rio Grande, Kayenta, Mogollon, and Hohokam regions. The result is an enhanced understanding of the ancient Southwest, a new appreciation for the ways in which humans construct communities and transform society, and an expanded theoretical discussion of the foundational concepts of modern social theory.

Download or read book The Social Construction of Reality written by Peter L. Berger and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-04-26 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A watershed event in the field of sociology, this text introduced “a major breakthrough in the sociology of knowledge and sociological theory generally” (George Simpson, American Sociological Review). In this seminal book, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann examine how knowledge forms and how it is preserved and altered within a society. Unlike earlier theorists and philosophers, Berger and Luckmann go beyond intellectual history and focus on commonsense, everyday knowledge—the proverbs, morals, values, and beliefs shared among ordinary people. When first published in 1966, this systematic, theoretical treatise introduced the term social construction,effectively creating a new thought and transforming Western philosophy.

Download or read book The Social Construction of Virtue written by George W. Noblit and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1996-09-26 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's time to face an inevitable conclusion: School reform does not reform schools. That's because reform movements conceive of schools as being about transmitting knowledge. Yet, schools are not primarily about knowledge. They are about the construction of meaning and morality in the lives of students and communities. In this book, the authors argue that to break this recycling of reform efforts, we must understand how schools construct moral life. The focus is on two elementary schools: Rougemont, an historically African American school that was closed during school desegregation in the 1970s, and Cedar Grove, an historically white school to which the former Rougemont students were sent. Described are the histories of these schools, the communities in which they are located, and some of the people who influenced and were influenced by the schools. From those contexts the authors then make explicit the "virtues" that these communities and schools constructed and valued, and describe how those virtues came to influence lives. The oral histories of the two schools and their communities provide the basis of a novel critique of the value conflict that has characterized educational reform in this country. The social construction of virtue offers an alternative perspective on the moral purpose of schooling in America.

Download or read book The Social Construction of Community Care written by Anthea Symonds and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1998-11-11 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents a new development in the discussion of community care policies with its integrated approach addressed to both community nurses and social workers. It includes contributions from practitioners in both fields, as well as lecturers and researchers in sociology and social policy. The overall theme of the book is the concept of 'community' as a social and cultural construction. The authors begin with an account of the historical construction of community care, followed by explorations of the actual practice of the delivery of care and of the needs of particular groups within the community.

Download or read book The Social Construction of Technological Systems anniversary edition written by Wiebe E. Bijker and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-05-18 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anniversary edition of an influential book that introduced a groundbreaking approach to the study of science, technology, and society. This pioneering book, first published in 1987, launched the new field of social studies of technology. It introduced a method of inquiry—social construction of technology, or SCOT—that became a key part of the wider discipline of science and technology studies. The book helped the MIT Press shape its STS list and inspired the Inside Technology series. The thirteen essays in the book tell stories about such varied technologies as thirteenth-century galleys, eighteenth-century cooking stoves, and twentieth-century missile systems. Taken together, they affirm the fruitfulness of an approach to the study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions, and they demonstrate the illuminating effects of the integration of empirics and theory. The approaches in this volume—collectively called SCOT (after the volume's title) have since broadened their scope, and twenty-five years after the publication of this book, it is difficult to think of a technology that has not been studied from a SCOT perspective and impossible to think of a technology that cannot be studied that way.

Download or read book Human Rights as Social Construction written by Benjamin Gregg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-12 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most conceptions of human rights rely on metaphysical or theological assumptions that construe them as possible only as something imposed from outside existing communities. Most people, in other words, presume that human rights come from nature, God, or the United Nations. This book argues that reliance on such putative sources actually undermines human rights. Benjamin Gregg envisions an alternative; he sees human rights as locally developed, freely embraced, and indigenously valid. Human rights, he posits, can be created by the average, ordinary people to whom they are addressed, and that they are valid only if embraced by those to whom they would apply. To view human rights in this manner is to increase the chances and opportunities that more people across the globe will come to embrace them.

Download or read book Symbolic Construction of Community written by Anthony P. Cohen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthony Cohen makes a distinct break with earlier approaches to the study of community, which treated the subject in largely structural terms. His view is interpretive and experiential, seeing the community as a cultural field with a complex of symbols whose meanings vary among its members. He delineates a concept applicable to local and ethnic communities through which people see themselves as belonging to society. The emphasis on boundary is sensitive to the circumstances in which people become aware of the implications of belonging to a community, and describes how they symbolise and utilise these boundaries to give substance to their values and identities.

Download or read book Building Successful Online Communities written by Robert E. Kraut and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-03-23 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How insights from the social sciences, including social psychology and economics, can improve the design of online communities. Online communities are among the most popular destinations on the Internet, but not all online communities are equally successful. For every flourishing Facebook, there is a moribund Friendster—not to mention the scores of smaller social networking sites that never attracted enough members to be viable. This book offers lessons from theory and empirical research in the social sciences that can help improve the design of online communities. The authors draw on the literature in psychology, economics, and other social sciences, as well as their own research, translating general findings into useful design claims. They explain, for example, how to encourage information contributions based on the theory of public goods, and how to build members' commitment based on theories of interpersonal bond formation. For each design claim, they offer supporting evidence from theory, experiments, or observational studies.

Download or read book The Social and Cultural Construction of Risk written by B.B. Johnson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Social and Cultural Construction of Risk: Issues, Methods, and Case Studies Vincent T. Covello and Branden B. Johnson Risks to health, safety, and the environment abound in the world and people cope as best they can. But before action can be taken to control, reduce, or eliminate these risks, decisions must be made about which risks are important and which risks can safely be ignored. The challenge for decision makers is that consensus on these matters is often lacking. Risks believed by some individuals and groups to be tolerable or accept able - such as the risks of nuclear power or industrial pollutants - are intolerable and unacceptable to others. This book addresses this issue by exploring how particular technological risks come to be selected for societal attention and action. Each section of the volume examines, from a different perspective, how individuals, groups, communities, and societies decide what is risky, how risky it is, and what should be done. The writing of this book was inspired by another book: Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technoloqical and Environmental Dangers. Published in 1982 and written by two distinguished scholars - Mary Douglas, a British social anthropologist, and Aaron Wildavsky, an American political scientist - the book received wide critical attention and offered several provocative ideas on the nature of risk selection, perception, and acceptance.

Download or read book Environmental Injustices Political Struggles written by David Enrique Cuesta Camacho and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, few issues are more socially divisive than the location of hazardous waste facilities and other environmentally harmful enterprises. Do the negative impacts of such polluters fall disproportionately on African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian Americans? Environmental Injustices, Political Struggles discusses how political, economic, social, and cultural factors contribute to local government officials' consistent location of hazardous and toxic waste facilities in low-income neighborhoods and how, as a result, low-income groups suffer disproportionately from the regressive impacts of environmental policy. David E. Camacho's collection of essays examines the value-laden choices behind the public policy that determines placement of commercial environmental hazards, points to the underrepresentation of people of color in the policymaking process, and discusses the lack of public advocates representing low-income neighborhoods and communities. This book combines empirical evidence and case studies--from the failure to provide basic services to the "colonias" in El Paso County, Texas, to the race for water in Nevada--and covers in great detail the environmental dangers posed to minority communities, including the largely unexamined communities of Native Americans. The contributors call for cooperation between national environmental interest groups and local grassroots activism, more effective incentives and disincentives for polluters, and the adoption by policymakers of an alternative, rather than privileged, perspective that is more sensitive to the causes and consequences of environmental inequities. Environmental Injustices, Political Struggles is a unique collection for those interested in the environment, public policy, and civil rights as well as for students and scholars of political science, race and ethnicity, and urban and regional planning. Contributors. C. Richard Bath, Kate A. Berry, John G. Bretting, David E. Camacho, Jeanne Nienaber Clarke, Andrea K. Gerlak, Peter I. Longo, Diane-Michele Prindeville, Linda Robyn, Stephen Sandweiss, Janet M. Tanski, Mary M. Timney, Roberto E. Villarreal, Harvey L. White

Download or read book The Social Construction of What written by Ian Hacking and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2000-11-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social construction, Ian Hacking reminds us. His book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality. Especially troublesome in this dispute is the status of the natural sciences, and this is where Hacking finds some of his most telling cases, from the conflict between biological and social approaches to mental illness to vying accounts of current research in sedimentary geology. He looks at the issue of child abuse—very much a reality, though the idea of child abuse is a social product. He also cautiously examines the ways in which advanced research on new weapons influences not the content but the form of science. In conclusion, Hacking comments on the “culture wars” in anthropology, in particular a spat between leading ethnographers over Hawaii and Captain Cook. Written with generosity and gentle wit by one of our most distinguished philosophers of science, this wise book brings a much needed measure of clarity to current arguments about the nature of knowledge.

Download or read book The Social Construction of Community written by Dale Jager and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Social Construction of SARS written by John H. Powers and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-11-12 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the SARS virus began its spread from southern China around the world in spring 2003, it caught regional and international health officials by surprise. The SARS epidemic itself lasted for only a few months, whereas its treatment, in communicative terms, keeps providing us with important lessons that can prepare us all for the much larger pandemic that many are predicting will eventually occur. While the medical aspects of SARS are now relatively well understood, the discursive rhetorical dimensions are much less so. As an international epidemic, SARS arrived in a number of distinctive societies with the result that different communities handled the crisis in different ways, some far more effectively than others. Accordingly, the 12 chapters in The Social Construction of SARS are studies of how a major health-related crisis was understood and dealt with from a communicative perspective in such diverse places as Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore, Taiwan, Canada and the United States during the SARS outbreak.

Download or read book An Introduction to Social Constructionism written by Vivien Burr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-07-13 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An invaluable, clear guide to social constructionism for all perplexed students who want to begin to understand this difficult area. Introduction to Social Constructionism is a readable and critical account of social constructionism for students new to the field. Focusing on the challenge to psychology that social constructionism poses, Vivien Burr examines the notion of 'personality' to illustrate the rejection of essentialism by social constructionists. This questions psychology's traditional understanding of the person. She then shows how the study of language can be used as a focus for our understanding of human behaviour and experience. This is continued by examining 'discourses' and their role in constructing social phenomena, and the relationship between discourse and power. However, the problems associated with these analyses are also clearly outlined. Many people believe that one of the aims of social science should be to bring about social change. Vivien Burr analyses what possibilities there might be for change in social constructionist accounts. She also addresses what social constructionism means in practice to research in the social sciences, and includes some guidelines on doing discourse analysis.

Download or read book The Social Construction of Death written by Leen Van Brussel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 12 of this book is open access under a CC BY license. Well-established scholars from a variety of disciplines - including sociology, anthropology, media and cultural studies, and political sciences – use the social construction of death and dying to analyse a wide variety of meaning-making practices in societal fields such as ethics, politics, media, medicine and family.

Download or read book White Women Race Matters written by Ruth Frankenberg and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: