International aid workers are invisible in the absence of data as to who cleaves to what knowledges and practices about how aid works to be effective. When it is similar or different best practice ...positions that are taken is another unknown, despite what this could tell us about aid effectiveness. This paper identifies through their everyday poetics two of the angles on 'how aid works' that aid workers take. One angle displays a programmatic, or 'like clockwork' aesthetic about how aid is said to 'work' through causal mechanisms, provided only that the right policy and 'the tools we have' are put in place and implemented. The other, a 'like an artwork' aesthetic, puts constitutive institutions and new interpretative understandings to the fore. The aid effectiveness issues and reforms associated with the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and subsequent meetings, the latest in Busan in 2011, do not address many, if any, of the issues raised in this paper. They should.
The author analyses institutional beginning of Slovak sociology, which was very much influenced by Czech scholars. Earlier, somewhat amateur attempts at establishing a particular Slovak sociological ...tradition, associated mainly with Jan Lajciak, were singularly unsuccessful, while members of the so-called Hlas movement ("Hlasists"), who followed Masaryk in the pre-First World War period, preferred politics to academic sociology in the interwar years. Slovak sociology was thus initially represented by Czech scholars employed in Bratislava (Josef Kral, Otakar Machotka and Bedrich Vasek) who taught the first Slovak sociologists Peter Gula and Alexander Hirner until the split of Czechoslovakia in 1939. A new Slovak sociological tradition (sociography) was established by former politician with sociological interests Anton Stefanek in the late 1930s and 1940s at which time he remained the only professor of sociology in the Slovak Republic. Although Gula and Hirner were closer to the Prague sociological school and the older Stefanek to the Brno sociological school, there were no significant clashes between these Slovak sociologists and they eventually created their own sociological tradition, separate from Czech sociology, during the 1940s. It had two centres, which differed theoretically and methodologically, one in Bratislava (Stefanek and his followers including Ignac Gasparec) and another in Martin (Peter Gula, Alexander Hirner). Adapted from the source document.
The book by Reinhard MÜLLER deals with the well-known study "Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community" by Marie JAHODA, Paul F. LAZARSFELD, and Hans ZEISEL (1933, 1971). The author ...presents interesting socio-historical details about the study itself as well as about the community and factory. More than half of the book is dedicated to the development of the workers' settlement of Marienthal, starting with the founding of the village and then the textile factory. The author describes historical events, important people' and developments in the community. Also additional information--portraits and memories--about the well-known study is presented. The book not only enables a deeper insight into the classical study and the settlement of Marienthal, it also illustrates (Austrian) history by way of a community and a study. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0903206
With the focus on organizations, this article describes power in relation to mediated surveillance using Luhmann’s systems theory, poststructuralist theory and theory of media sociography. It aims to ...sketch out the main issues in contemporary surveillance discourse and illustrate the current situation, as well as discuss surveillance from the perspective of poststructuralist theory in relation to Luhmann’s concepts of trust, risk and especially power. The underlying media sociographical question is which storing-, retrieving-, localisation- and temporal possibilities for communication and surveillance do digital media provide and how the realization of this potential feeds back into organizations’ power structures.
The article analyses the process of the candidates' nomination to the European elections of 2009 for the French socialist party. It shows that the elaboration of the lists is strongly linked to ...internal policies and disregards the European capital of the candidates. By linking qualitative sociography and interviews, the purpose is to grasp as subtly as possible the numerous and contradictory logics which govern the elaboration of the lists. The fact that the Europeanization of the candidates is not really taken into account is linked to conjunctural and structural logics. The increase of the criteria at stake in 2009 multiplies the doubts hanging over the negotiation process. Adapted from the source document.
The purpose of this paper is to present a spatial agent-based model of N-person prisoner's dilemma that is designed to simulate the collective communication & cooperation within a socio-geographic ...community. Based on a tight coupling of REPAST & a vector Geographic Information System, the model simulates the emergence of cooperation from the mobility behaviors & interaction strategies of citizen agents. To approximate human behavior, the agents are set as stochastic learning automata with Pavlovian personalities & attitudes. A review of the theory of the standard prisoner's dilemma, the iterated prisoner's dilemma, & the N-person prisoner's dilemma is given as well as an overview of the generic architecture of the agent-based model. The capabilities of the spatial N-person prisoner's dilemma component are demonstrated with several scenario simulation runs for varied initial cooperation percentages & mobility dynamics. Experimental results revealed that agent mobility & context preservation bring qualitatively different effects to the evolution of cooperative behavior in an analyzed spatial environment. Adapted from the source document.
The aim of this article is to revise the research line about the unemployment social effect, which started with the report directed by Paul Lazarsfeld during the 30s, as well as to explore the ...potentialities and analytical limits that provide this theoretical field for the current Latin American unemployment study. Marienthal: The sociography of an unemployed community, as the report was titled, is recognized as the pioneering work about life conditions of a population affected by unemployment during the Great Depression and constitutes the kickoff to subsequent developments of "Stage theory" (1938) and "Deprivation theory" (1982). Although the variety of background and social groups affected by unemployment establish a distance between current Latin American situation and the Marienthal experience, the absolute or relative deprivation risk and the absence or fragility of the State to guaranteed protections, are still useful analytical tools for current Latin American studies. Adapted from the source document.
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