Nel 1949, mettendo a disposizione degli studenti pavesi di Giurisprudenza delle Dispense dal titolo Il pensieroantico, Bruno Leoni non immaginava che stava contribuendo a porre le basi per una ...riformulazionedi quella che nello stesso anno Friedrich A. von Hayek aveva chiamato la tradizione del “true individualism” tracciando così una nuova storia delle origini e dello sviluppo della tradizione liberale. infatti, dopoaver descritto l’origine dei concetti di nomos e di physis nella filosofia greca, in quelle DispenseLeoni intende la soluzione epicurea e la sua dottrina del contratto come un qualcosa di “eccezionale importanza per lo sviluppo della speculazione intorno al diritto ed allo Stato nell’età moderna”. Accennato all’importanza che negli stessi anni Ludwig von Mises e Leo Strauss attribuiranno all’epicureismo nella nascita della ‘modernità, il saggio analizza la tesi leoniana sul rapporto tra nomos e physis e, illustratane l’affinità con la tesi di Carl Menger sulla nascita “irriflessa” delle principali istituzioni sociali e del diritto, mostra il modo in cui tale rapporto ha influenzato Hayek e come si rifletta nella di lui (e di Michael Oakeshott) dicotomia tra i modelli istituzionali ‘nomocratici’ e quelli ‘teleocratici’. Un breve cenno, nel finale, al modo in cui tracce della dottrina epicurea del contratto possono essere ravvisate nella teoria dello “scambio di pretese” che Leoni pone all’origine del diritto.
An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, calledguanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer ...items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business-all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples ofguanxistemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.
The pragmatist roots of constructivist grounded theory make it a useful method for pursuing critical qualitative inquiry. Pragmatism offers ways to think about critical qualitative inquiry; ...constructivist grounded theory offers strategies for doing it. Constructivist grounded theory fosters asking emergent critical questions throughout inquiry. This method also encourages (a) interrogating the taken-for-granted methodological individualism pervading much of qualitative research and (b) taking a deeply reflexive stance called methodological self-consciousness, which leads researchers to scrutinize their data, actions, and nascent analyses. The article outlines how to put constructivist grounded theory into practice and ends with where this practice could take us.
Abstract In the view of individualistic and collectivist cultural orientations as situated cognition, it is assumed that these can be induced and modified to some extent, but questions remain about ...the mechanisms by which this occurs. The results found different effects according to the type of priming, being that the agentive induced more individualistic attitudes than the narrative. The collectivist agentive activated to a lesser extent the independent self-concept, characterized by self-interest, compared to the other types of priming. The theoretical and methodological implications of these findings are discussed. El avance de la comprensión de las interacciones entre psicología y cultura puede tener implicaciones teóricas con aplicaciones prácticas en diferentes escenarios, tales como el diseño de políticas, de estrategias comunicativas, de procesos educativos y de orientaciones para la crianza, capaces de ser sensibles a variaciones culturales sutiles e implícitas (Fernández, 2023). Por lo anterior, la investigación sobre estrategias de priming para estudiar diversas influencias culturales particulares, reviste importancia académica, científica y práctica. Aunque el individualismo-colectivismo cultural es uno de los tópicos más estudiados en psicología social en las últimas décadas (Hogg y Vaughan, 2018; Oyserman, 2002), persisten interrogantes sobre su origen, dinámica y características psicosociales, siendo una de estas acerca de las formas diferenciales en que las estrategias de priming influyen en esta orientación, lo que destaca su carácter si tuacional más que disposicional y complejo más que simple (Oyserman, 2016; Oyserman et al., 2014). Contraria a la visión más tradicional (véase la clasificación realizada por Hofstede, 2001), la investigación más actual sobre individualismo y colectivismo cultural plantea que estas no son categorías estáticas, rígidas ni monolíticas (Bianchi, 2016; Inglehart, 2017, 2018; Triandis y Gelfand, 2012), sino que parecen verse mejor descritas como síndromes culturales, que son un conjunto de elementos subjetivos de la cultura organizados alrededor de un tema central (Triandis, 1993; Vinken et al., 2004), que pueden cambiar dinámicamente de forma consistente en relación con la saliencia del individualismo y el colectivismo de forma crónica y en cada momento (Oyserman y Lee, 2008). De esta manera, por ejemplo, cuando las condiciones de seguridad existencial permiten una mayor autonomía individual entonces el individualismo se haría más saliente, mientras que cuando tales condiciones de vida son más restrictivas, amenazantes e inseguras, dificultan la autonomía, volviendo más salientes al colectivismo y la centralidad del grupo, del cual se percibe mayor dependencia (Inglehart, 2018; Páez et al., 2003; Thornhill y Fincher, 2014; Triandis, 1993). Cultura como cognición situada La visión de las orientaciones culturales como síndromes culturales es consistente con la visión de la cultura como cognición situada (Oyserman, 2015; Oyserman et al., 2014), pues en ambos casos se asume la cultura como un proceso cambiante y no estático, que emerge como parte de la respuesta humana adaptativa ante los retos del contexto, que caracterizan la evolución cultural como un proceso rápido y ágil frente a la evolución biológica como un proceso lento y paulatino (Harari, 2015). En este sentido, la teoría de la cognición situada propone que el contexto físico y social impactan en el pensamiento, sentimiento y acción de las personas, a menudo de manera inconsciente; es decir, que la cognición no es un proceso libre del entorno en que ocurre, sino que, en gran parte, se refiere u obedece a este. Desde esta perspectiva, describir una cultura como de orientación individualista o colectivista quiere decir que los miembros de esta tienen frente a sí, con mayor frecuencia, elementos y demandas contextuales propias de una u otra orientación cultural donde lo que se vuelve más central es "ir en tu propia dirección" o "prestar más atención a tu grupo social" (Oyserman, 2016).
In addition to the negative effects of economic inequality on a range of health and social outcomes, we propose that inequality should also affect how people perceive the broader normative climate in ...society. We predicted that people living in a more unequal (vs. equal) society are more likely to appraise the social context as one where individualism determines people's behavior. We tested this idea in three experiments by manipulating the degree of economic inequality in a fictional society. We showed that, compared to the low‐inequality condition, participants in the high‐inequality condition were more likely to project individualistic norms onto society. Furthermore, Experiments 2 and 3 showed that in the high‐ (vs. low‐) economic‐inequality condition, participants inferred more competition and less cooperation between people. Our results are discussed in light of the importance of the perception of a broader normative climate to explain the consequences of economic inequality.
Rethinking individualization Cortois, Liza; Laermans, Rudi
European journal of social theory,
02/2018, Volume:
21, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article proposes a more culturalist and variegated conception of the individual than that presented by individualization theorists. Inspired by the approach of the individual advocated by Émile ...Durkheim, Talcott Parsons and John Meyers, it first outlines the general script of the individual-as-actor that informs modern individualism as well as the generic characteristics that are routinely attributed to persons such as agency and free will. It subsequently reconstructs three predominant interpretations of this general script, i.e. utilitarian, moral and expressive individualism. For each variant, the intellectual genesis and overall definition of the institutionalization in specific societal domains and the dominant articulations in social theory are briefly presented. With this threefold distinction, the aim is to synthesize the extensive literature on individualism and to show the sociological strengths of approaching subjectivity in terms of institutionalized scripts.
Collectivism predicts mask use during COVID-19 Lu, Jackson G; Jin, Peter; English, Alexander S
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
06/2021, Volume:
118, Issue:
23
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Since its outbreak, COVID-19 has impacted world regions differentially. Whereas some regions still record tens of thousands of new infections daily, other regions have contained the virus. What ...explains these striking regional differences? We advance a cultural psychological perspective on mask usage, a precautionary measure vital for curbing the pandemic. Four large-scale studies provide evidence that collectivism (versus individualism) positively predicts mask usage-both within the United States and across the world. Analyzing a dataset of all 3,141 counties of the 50 US states (based on 248,941 individuals), Study 1a revealed that mask usage was higher in more collectivistic US states. Study 1b replicated this finding in another dataset of 16,737 individuals in the 50 US states. Analyzing a dataset of 367,109 individuals in 29 countries, Study 2 revealed that mask usage was higher in more collectivistic countries. Study 3 replicated this finding in a dataset of 277,219 Facebook users in 67 countries. The link between collectivism and mask usage was robust to a host of control variables, including cultural tightness-looseness, political affiliation, demographics, population density, socioeconomic indicators, universal health coverage, government response stringency, and time. Our research suggests that culture fundamentally shapes how people respond to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding cultural differences not only provides insight into the current pandemic, but also helps the world prepare for future crises.
This article establishes empirically that a persistent culture of "rugged individualism," captured by exposure to the American westward-moving frontier from 1790 to 1890, undermines pro-climate ...perceptions, environmental performance, and climate change preparedness across counties in the United States. It also demonstrates that individualism is associated with environmental underperformance at the state level, making it more difficult to mitigate the far-reaching consequences of changing climate conditions. To establish external validity of the subnational evidence, I use a global sample of up to 97 countries and provide suggestive evidence that individualism creates barriers to climate change responses worldwide.
Individualism–collectivism is one of the best researched dimensions of culture in psychology. One frequently asked but underexamined question regards its cross-temporal changes: Are cultures becoming ...individualistic? One influential theory of cultural change, modernization theory, predicts the rise of individualism as a consequence of economic growth. Findings from past research are generally consistent with this theory, but there is also a body of evidence suggesting its limitations. To examine these issues, cross-temporal analyses of individualism–collectivism in the United States and Japan were conducted. Diverging patterns of cultural changes were found across indices: In both countries, some of the obtained indices showed rising individualism over the past several decades, supporting the modernization theory. However, other indices showed patterns that are best understood within the frameworks of a shifting focus of social relationships and a persisting cultural heritage. A comprehensive theory of cultural change requires considerations of these factors in addition to the modernization effect.
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