Social Studies

Worlds held together, Worlds Torn Apart

The Ties that bind

Sources of cultural Identity

Frameworks to evaluate

The Five dimensions of culture

Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede defines "culture" as a set of unwritten rules of behavior that set out what a particular group expects its members to do and believe. Hofstede measures culture in five dimensions and teaches that cooperation across cultures is essential to human survival. Some analysts apply Hofstede's teachings to national populations and their citizens, but they can also apply to a company's culture and its employees.

Power Distance

The power distance dimension is a literal measurement of the layers of management between an individual employee and the highest level of management. An individual contributor who reports to a manager who reports to a director who reports to a vice president who reports to a CEO has a power distance dimension of three, because there are three layers of management between the individual contributor and the CEO. The higher the power distance dimension, the less likely the employee is to feel that his contribution matters to the company. An organization may flatten its organizational structure to help employees feel connected to senior leadership.

Individualism

The individualism dimension measures not only the degree to which an employee maintains her unique attributes, but also the degree to which she becomes integrated into the collective group. An individualist employee has loose ties to others in the organization. She looks out for herself and perhaps for others in her small work group. A collectivist employee fully integrates herself into the organization and demonstrates loyalty to the extended corporate "family." In turn, she expects others in the organization to support her.

Masculinity

The masculinity dimension measures the organization's personality against masculine and feminine stereotypes. A company with a masculine culture operates assertively and competitively, and a company with a feminine culture comes across as more modest and caring. Employees tend to model their behavior after their companies' leaders. If the leadership team is competitive, employees may be encouraged to compete with one another or to beat out the company's competitors. If leaders are caring, employees are more likely to behave with tolerance and compassion.

Uncertainty Avoidance

Hofstede's uncertainty avoidance dimension measures employees' comfort with unstructured environments — unknown situations where surprising events may occur. In a business that lends itself to structure, such as a factory, the culture calls for rules that establish structure to promote safety and efficiency. In a creative environment, such as a design house, the culture encourages flexibility and problem-solving. Employees may not feel comfortable with either extreme, and an employee who likes to plan every minute of her day will quickly get frustrated in an organization with a low uncertainty avoidance dimension.

Long-Term Orientation

The long-term orientation dimension is associated with eastern culture and dates to the time of the Chinese leader Confucius. It measures long-term values, such as perseverance and thrift, against short-term values such as respect for tradition, fulfillment of social obligations and avoiding personal embarrassment. Employees with a high measure of long-term orientation respond well to a hierarchy-based organizational structure where leaders are highly respected. Employers with a low measure of long-term orientation demonstrate personal stability and observe customs such as reciprocating favors and gifts from others.

Mechanical vs. Organic Solidarity

Durkheim discusses two different kinds of  “positive” solidarity; one in which the individual is directly linked to society though collective beliefs and ideas and one in which the individual is linked to society because he is dependent on other people in the same society.

The first type of solidarity is only possible if there exists a strong homogeneity of personalities in the society. Durkheim points out that there is an inverse relationship between this type of solidarity and one’s individuality because the stronger this type of solidarity becomes, the weaker our individual consciousness becomes because everything becomes enveloped by the collective. We become a “collective being” rather than striving to be our own person. In this type of society, division of labor can only operate in its simplest forms. Durkheim uses the example of Indian tribes in North America, where nearly everyone has the same social capital and works towards the same goals. He coins this type of solidarity “mechanical,” because “the individual consciousness is simply a dependency of the collective type, and follows all its motions, just as the object possessed follows those which its owner imposes on it. (p. 84-85) The society is the owner, and the individuals become objectified, almost in comparison to robots.

The second type of solidarity only works when individuals ARE unique from one another. People become specialized in one particular area, and are linked to other people and consequently the society through dependency. This is where division of labor thrives; since people are only able to do one particular thing, they depend much more on the rest of society to do other things. “Here, then, the individuality of the whole grows at the same time as that of the parts.” (85) An example of this is a symphony orchestra. The more skilled each musician is at his or her respective instrument, the better the orchestra will sound as a whole. However, this also indicates that the collective consciousness grows stronger as well. If the two consciousnesses have an inverse relationship to each other, how can they both increase at the same time? Durkheim believes the division of labor enables this to happen. ”Yet social progress does not consist in a process of continual dissolution-quite the opposite: the more we evolve, the more societies develop a profound feeling of themselves and their unity.” (122)

This ties in with his quote on page 133. Division of labor increases as societies develop. The “frame that it hedges itself in” can be thought of as a less developed, homogeneous society in which the mechanical solidarity exists. If the individual consciousness belongs to the collective that division of labor stays stagnant. Durkheim argues that this mechanical solidarity must disappear so that organic solidarity can take its place.

Sociobiology vs. Cultural selection

Sociobiological concepts are easily misapplied to human behavior because the

latter is cultumlly as well as biologically organized. Because biological and cultural

evolution are two linked but conceptually distinct processes, sociobiology is more

readily applied to the evolution of cultural capacity than to contemporary cultural

behavior. The extent to which the latter is consistent with sociobiological expectation

must be determined empirically, although there are theoretical grounds for

predicting a limited degree of concordance

Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviorism. Its core idea is that mental states (beliefs, desires, being in pain, etc.) are constituted solely by their functional role – that is, they are causal relations to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs. Functionalism is a theoretical level between the physical implementation and behavioral output.

KEY TERMS

1  1.Ethnocentrism: is judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one's own culture. Ethnocentric individuals judge other groups relative to their own ethnic group or culture, especially with concern for language, behavior, customs, and religion.

2.Cultural Adaptations : The theory of cultural adaptation refers to the process and time it takes a person to assimilate to a new culture. It is not always an easy transition. How would you feel if you could no longer read signs because they were in a different language?

3.Social Structure : On the macro scale, social structure is the system of socioeconomic stratification (e.g., the class structure), social institutions, or, other patterned relations between large social groups. On the meso scale, it is the structure of social network ties between individuals or organizations.

4. A symbol : is an object that represents, stands for, or suggests an idea, visual image, belief, action, or material entity. Symbols take the form of words, sounds, gestures, or visual images and are used to convey ideas and beliefs. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP".

5.Pluralism: Cultural pluralism, when small groups within a larger society maintain their unique cultural identities .

6.Ethnicity: An ethnic group or ethnicity is a socially defined category of people who identify with each other based on common ancestral, social, cultural or national experience.

7. Nationalism: Nationalism is a belief, creed or political ideology that involves an individual identifying with, or becoming attached to, one's nation.

8. Subculture: In sociology and cultural studies, a subcultureis a group of people within a culture that differentiates itself from the larger culture to which it belongs.

9. Enculturation : Enculturation is the process by which people learn the requirements of their surrounding culture and acquire values and behaviours appropriate or necessary in that culture.

10.Rituals : A ritual "is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence.

11.Inversion : The concept of inversion in postcolonial theory and subaltern studies refers to a discursive strategy which opposes or resists a dominant discourse by turning around its categories and re-enacting an a symmetrical relation with the terms the other way around.

12. Reinforcement : In behavioral psychology, reinforcement is a consequence that will strengthen an organism's future behavior whenever that behavior is preceded by a specific antecedent stimulus.

13. Culture Shock : Culture shock is the personal disorientation a person may feel when experiencing an unfamiliar way of life due to immigration or a visit to a new country, a move between social environments, or simply travel to another type of life.

14. Deviance: Deviance is any behavior that violates social norms, and is usually of sufficient severity to warrant disapproval from the majority of society. Deviance can be criminal or non‐criminal. The sociological discipline that deals with crime (behavior that violates laws) is criminology (also known as criminal justice).

Examples to consider

This is nothing much just keep in mind that like the resources say there are three types of examples to consider that is festivals , Sporting event and Political and other crises…from which we can conclude that all the people work together during these three events or can be divided….it depends on the person and his mentality.

Sociology Agents in the 21st century

Schools

Schools socialize children by teaching them their formal curriculum but also a hidden curriculum. The formal curriculum is the “three Rs”: reading, writing, and arithmetic. But there is also a hidden curriculum that schools impart, and that is the cultural values of the society in which the schools are found.

Peers

When you were a 16-year-old, how many times did you complain to your parent(s), “All of my friends are [doing so and so]. Why can’t I? It isn’t fair!” As this all-too-common example indicates, our friends play a very important role in our lives. This is especially true during adolescence, when peers influence our tastes in music, clothes, and so many other aspects of our lives, as the now common image of the teenager always on a cell phone reminds us. But friends are important during other parts of the life course as well. We rely on them for fun, for emotional comfort and support, and for companionship.

The Mass Media

The mass media are another agent of socialization. Television shows, movies, popular music, magazines, Web sites, and other aspects of the mass media influence our political views; our tastes in popular culture; our views of women, people of color, and gays; and many other beliefs and practices.

Religion

Although religion is arguably less important in people’s lives now than it was a few generations ago, it still continues to exert considerable influence on our beliefs, values, and behaviors.

Semiotics: The study of meaning making

Semoictics is the study of meaning-making, the philosophical theory of signs and symbols.This includes the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. The Semiotic Tradition explores the study of signs and symbols as a significant part of communications.

In semiotics, a sign is something that can be interpreted as having a meaning, which is something other than itself, and which is therefore able to communicate information to the one interpreting or decoding the sign. Signs can work through any of the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory or taste, and their meaning can be intentional such as a word uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition.

According to Saussure (1857–1913), a sign is composed of the signifier (signifiant), and the signified (signifié). These cannot be conceptualized as separate entities but rather as a mapping from significant differences in sound to potential (correct) differential denotation. They are arbitrary. In other words, there’s nothing inherent about a beard that means hipster – the signifier could just as easily have been wearing a blanket, or having blue hair.

Charles Sanders Peirce proposed a different theory. Unlike Saussure who approached the conceptual question from a study of linguistics and phonology, Peirce was a somewhat Kantian philosopher who distinguished "sign" from "word" as only a particular kind of sign, and characterized the sign as the means to understanding.

Obstacles to intercultural Communication and collaboration

Trompenaars' Model of National Culture Differences is a framework for cross-cultural communication( is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavour to communicate across cultures) applied to general business and management, developed by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner. This involved a large-scale survey of 8,841 managers and organization employees from 43 countries.

This model of national culture differences has seven dimensions. There are five orientations covering the ways in which human beings deal with each other, one which deals with time, and one which deals with the environment.

Chronemics is the study of the use of time in nonverbal communication(Nonverbal communication is the process of communication through sending and receiving wordless (mostly visual) cues between people.). The way in which one perceives and values time, structures time, and reacts to time frames communication. Across cultures, time perception plays a large role in the nonverbal communication process. Time perceptions include punctuality, willingness to wait, and interactions. The use of time can affect lifestyle, daily agendas, speed of speech, movements, and how long people are willing to listen.

Time can be used as an indicator of status. For example, in most companies the boss can interrupt progress to hold an impromptu meeting in the middle of the work day, yet the average worker would have to make an appointment to see the boss. The way in which different cultures perceive time can influence communication as well.

The reemergence of anarchism

Anarchism is a political philosophy that advocates stateless societies often defined as self-governed voluntary institutions, but that several authors have defined as more specific institutions based on non-hierarchical free associations.

Around the start of the 21st century, anarchism grew in popularity and influence as part of the anti-war, anti-capitalist, and anti-globalisation movements. Anarchists became known for their involvement in protests against the meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Group of Eight, and the World Economic Forum. Some anarchist factions at these protests engaged in rioting, property destruction, and violent confrontations with police. These actions were precipitated by ad hoc, leaderless, anonymous cadres known as black blocs; other organisational tactics pioneered in this time include security culture, affinity groups and the use of decentralised technologies such as the internet. A significant event of this period was the confrontations at WTO conference in Seattle in 1999. According to anarchist scholar Simon Critchley, "contemporary anarchism can be seen as a powerful critique of the pseudo-libertarianism of contemporary neo-liberalism...One might say that contemporary anarchism is about responsibility, whether sexual, ecological or socio-economic; it flows from an experience of conscience about the manifold ways in which the West ravages the rest; it is an ethical outrage at the yawning inequality, impoverishment and disen franchisment that is so palpable locally and globally."

Breakups and Breakdowns

Balkanization and disintegration of nations

Balkanization, or Balkanisation, is a pejorative geopolitical term, originally used to describe the process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions or states that are often hostile or non-cooperative with one another.

PARTITION OF INDIA VS. BREKUP OF YUGOSLAIVA

The Partition of India was the partition of the British Indian Empire that led to the creation of the sovereign states of the Dominion of Pakistan (it later split into the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh) and the Union of India (later Republic of India) on 15 August 1947. "Partition" here refers not only to the division of the Bengal province of British India into East Pakistan and West Bengal (India), and the similar partition of the Punjab province into Punjab (West Pakistan) and Punjab, India, but also to the respective divisions of other assets, including the British Indian Army, the Indian Civil Service and other administrative services, the railways, and the central treasury.

In the riots which preceded the partition in the Punjab region, between 200,000 to 500,000 people were killed in the retributive genocide. UNHCR estimates 14 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were displaced during the partition; it was the largest mass migration in human history.

It was mainly caused due to the Mountbatten plan And Radcliffe line.

VS.

The breakup of Yugoslavia occurred as a result of a series of political upheavals and conflicts during the early 1990s. After a period of political crisis in 1980s, constituent republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia split apart, but the unsolved issues caused bitter inter-ethnic Yugoslav wars. The wars primarily affected Bosnia and Croatia.

After the communist victory in World War II, Yugoslavia was set up as a federation of six republics, with borders drawn along ethnic and historical lines: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. In addition, two autonomous provinces were established within Serbia: Vojvodina and Kosovo. Each of the republics had its own branch of theLeague of Communists of Yugoslavia party and a ruling elite, and any tensions were solved on the federal level. The Yugoslav model of state organization, as well as a "middle way" between planned and liberal economy, had been a relative success, and the country experienced a period of strong economic growth and relative political stability up to the 1980s, under the firm rule of president-for-life Josip Broz Tito. After his death in 1980, the weakened system of federal government was left unable to cope with rising economic and political challenges.

                             Vaclav Havel, 1995 Harvard Commencement Speech

Currently, We are living in a global civilization, the identity of this lies technologically. Its emerged in means of telecommunication. The life of human races is interconnected in all senses including casualties. We can say it is been occupied by European or ultimately Euro-American culture as they  have evolved the most(technologically). Today, It is also the sum total of human awareness and immense variety of cultures, of people, of religious worlds etc. While the world is accepting this , another contradicting process is taking place where ancient traditions are reviving and seeking new rooms to exist. Today, Every one want independence from some or the other things people fight for that with things that oppose the current civilization (such as swords, bows etc.) as well as with things that support it(such as lasers, gases, radars etc.). Ultimately, They’re denying democracy (which is the major thing they’ve been fighting for). Today’s world has also been equipped with instruments that can not only destroy things but can even cripple the capacity to live together. Thus, We need to be multi-cultural which is possible only if we accept a basic code of mutual co-existence. Today,  Our world is covered with modern consciousness of humanity which has a dual nature, the thousands of marvelous achievements and the potential to do even better. The basic code or simple solution to this progressive civilization is the “RADICAL RENEWAL OF HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY” i.e. our co-science must be upon our reason otherwise we are doomed. We think that this can be achieved if we diver ourselves from esofistical anthropocentrism i.e. we must discover a new respect for what transcends us from life or reality, But a better alternative lies in being imbuing(filling with a feeling or quality) our civilization with a spiritual dimension.

Then he gives examples from his life and in conclusion he gives another real life event where he says that he was never allowed to leave his home but his mother had a dream that he would have a degree from Harvard and he received a doctoral degree at Harvard without even having to study there. He also went to Singapore and many other exotic places and realised that how small this world is and how it torments itself with countless things it need not torment itself with if people could find within themselves a little more courage, a little more hope, a little more responsibility, a little more mutual understanding and love.

Introduction to Post-modernity and Post-structuralism

Postmodernism is a late-20th-century movement in the arts, architecture, and criticism that was a departure from modernism. Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism.

Post-structuralism is the name for a movement in philosophy that began in the 1960s. It remains an influence not only in philosophy, but also in a wider set of subjects, including literature, politics, art, cultural criticisms, history and sociology.

                                   Simulations, Simulacra, and Hyper-Reality

Simulacra and Simulation is a 1981 philosophical treatise by Jean Baudrillard seeking to examine the relationships among reality, symbols, and society.

Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original to begin with, or that no longer have an original. Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.

"Simulacra and Simulation" breaks the sign-order into 4 stages:

1.   The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order".

2.   The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.

3.   The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.

4.   The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.

In semiotics and postmodernism, hyperreality is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.^[1] It allows the co-mingling of physical reality with virtual reality (VR) and human intelligence with artificial intelligence (AI). Individuals may find themselves for different reasons, more in tune or involved with the hyperreal world and less with the physical real world.
                                            Jean Baudrillard, excerpt from America

Anti-utopia (or anti-perfection) rose Europe in the 20^th century. All of that was then achieved by America in the simplest radical way. America is undergoing anti-utopia (or missing of) culture, It doesn’t ironize upon the future or depend upon the future.The American way of living is the end of culture or thinking about it worthlessly. This way is vainly thought about in many other colonies, and the dimensions that utopia can give to it.

If you’re able to understand all of your dreams today including the theoretical and cultural ones then you’re understanding America and their situation, as with the same enthusiasm you’ve understood the new world. If you don’t understand your own history or its end, America seeks to give them neither a meaning nor an identity.

We are shy and understanding concept, but we can’t understand its effect until it is not extraverted (or going out from you). Like this America is a desert where culture lives in a wild state where transcripts are processed into real. This is given to them by the virgins. Americans are destroying themselves, Here there’s no transcendence of history. Here the culture which has been made real is everything. In America culture exists in space, speed, cinema and technology. In the US, there are no commissions or subsidies for it either. America is following technological culture due to which searching d=for sophisticated entertainment is tough, but there’s even larger works in high culture there. The movies there are also present with high level of culture.  Lack of culture as well as vulgarity do have different meanings in America (not according to language but sociology) then they do in different parts of the world, because Americans quite simply accept vulgarity.

California if we describe it in detail would support some facts about itself while opposing the very same facts (For eg. If we take Disneyland)

After all this we can say that California (or we take America) is our decadent (for the entire world) but is not decedent at all. We can’t find the key to Europe in its history but in today’s world. The details of America is what passes our imagination, each detail might be accurate but it passes the bounds of stupidity.

The New America is in in the clash being wild and primitive as well as the absolute simulacrum but these can be said to be the first and last level of its description and there’s no second level in between them.

To see and feel America, you have to have had for at least one moment in some downtown jungle, in the Painted Desert, or on some bend in a freeway, the feeling that Europe had disappeared. You have to have wondered, at least for a brief moment, “How can anyone be European?”

                            Uberto Eco “City of robots” from Travels in hyperreality
As Eco explains it, his trip is a pilgrimage in search of "hyperreality," or the world of "the Absolute Fake," in which imitations don't merely reproduce reality, but try improve on it.
Not unexpectedly, it leads him to the "absolutely fake cities," Disneyland and Disney World, with their re-created main streets, imitation castles and lifelike, animatronic robots. Here, he takes a boat ride through artificial caves, where he sees scenes of pirates sacking a city, in the attraction, Pirates of the Caribbean, and he travels through a ghost story that appears to have come to life, with transparent, dancing spirits, and skeletal hands lifting gravestones, in the attraction, the Haunted Mansion.
It is in the two Disneys, where he finds the ultimate expression of hyperreality, in which everything is brighter, larger and more entertaining than in everyday life. In comparison to Disney, he implies, reality can be disappointing. When he travels the artificial river in Disneyland, for example, he sees animatronic imitations of animals. But, on a trip down the real Mississippi, the river fails to reveal its alligators. "...You risk feeling homesick for Disneyland," he concludes, "where the wild animals don't have to be coaxed. Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can."
He also discovers something else in Disney: a place that no longer even pretends it is imitating reality, but is straightforward about the fact that "within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced."
But, perhaps his most interesting perception occurs when he discovers, behind all the spectacle in Disneyland, the same old tricks of capitalism, with a new twist: "The Main Street facades are presented to us as toy houses and invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing," he writes. He similarly finds in Disney, "An allegory of the consumer society, a place of absolute iconism, Disneyland is also as place of total passivity. Its visitors must agree to behave like robots."
The sims : Game designer Will Wright was inspired to create a "virtual doll house" after losing his home during the Oakland firestorm of 1991 and subsequently rebuilding his life. Replacing his home and his other possessions made him think about adapting that life experience into a game.When he initially took his ideas to the Maxis board of the directors, they were skeptical and gave little support or financing for the game. The directors at Electronic Arts, which bought Maxis in 1997, were more receptive, primarily because the success of SimCity and they foresaw the possibility of building a strong Sim franchise. Wright also took ideas from the 1977 architecture and urban design book A Pattern Language, American psychologist Abraham Maslow's 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation and his hierarchy of needs, and Charles Hampden-Turner's Maps of the Mind to develop a model for the game's artificial intelligence.

Las vegas : Las Vegas, the most populous city in the state of Nevada, the county seat of Clark County, and the city proper of the Las Vegas Valley. Las Vegas is an internationally renowned major resort city known primarily for gambling, shopping, fine dining and nightlife and is the leading financial and cultural center for Southern Nevada.It is no doubt post structured according to today’s world.

Amusement Parks: An amusement is a group of entertainment attractions, rides, and other events in a location for the enjoyment of large numbers of people. Amusement parks have a fixed location, as opposed to travelling funfairs and traveling carnivals, and are more elaborate than simple city parks or playgrounds, usually providing attractions meant to cater specifically to certain age groups, as well as some that are aimed towards all ages. Theme parks, a specific type of amusement park, are usually much more intricately themed to a certain subject or group of subjects than normal amusement parks.With its roller coasters, and other significant features its definitely post-structured and post-modern with respect to today’s world. 

Additional People to Investigate

Michel Foucault (born Paul-Michel Foucault) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels, preferring to present his thought as a critical history of modernity. His thought has been highly influential for both academic and activist groups.

Martin Heidegger  was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition, particularly within the fields of existential phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics. From his beginnings as a Catholic academic, he developed a groundbreaking and widely influential philosophy.

His best known book, Being and Time (1927), is considered one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. In it and later works, Heidegger maintained that our way of questioning defines our nature. He argued that Western thinking had lost sight of being. Finding ourselves as "always already" moving within ontological presuppositions, we lose touch with our grasp of being and its truth becomes "muddled".As a solution to this condition, Heidegger advocated a change in focus from ontologies based on ontic determinants to the fundamental ontological elucidation of being-in-the-world in general, allowing it to reveal, or "unconceal" itself as concealment.

Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queen and literary theory. Since 1993, she has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is now Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory.

Academically, Butler is most well known for her books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", which challenge notions of gender and develop her theory of gender performativity. Her works are often implemented in film studies courses emphasizing gender studies and the performativity in discourse. She is also well known for her difficult to understand prose. This theory now plays a major role in feminist and queer scholarship.She has also actively supported lesbian and gay rights movements and been outspoken on many contemporary political issues.

Charles Sanders Peirce was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism"(it is a type of philosophy movement where the  meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of accepting it, and that unpractical ideas are to be rejected.). He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism.

An innovator in mathematics, statistics, philosophy, research methodology, and various sciences, Peirce considered himself, first and foremost, a logician. He made major contributions to logic, but logic for him encompassed much of that which is now called epistemology (knowledge, understanding) and philosophy of science. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics, of which he is a founder, and which foreshadowed the debate among logical positivists and proponents of philosophy of language that dominated 20th century Western philosophy; additionally, he defined the concept of abductive reasoning(logical reference to a hypothesis), as well as rigorously formulated mathematical induction and deductive reasoning(opposite of abductive reasoning). As early as 1886 he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits; the same idea was used decades later to produce digital computers.

James Campbell Scott (born December 2, 1936) is a political scientist, anthropologist, and Sterling Professor at Yale University. He is a comparative scholar of agrarian societies(these are societies which depend on producing and maintaining farmlands for agriculture), subaltern politics(politics in areas or colonies which are geographically and out of their homeland), and anarchism whose research has focused primarily on peasant populations of Southeast Asia. Scott has directed Yale's Program in Agrarian Studies since 1991.

Alfonsus (Fons) Trompenaars  is a Dutch organizational theorist, management consultant, and author in the field of cross-cultural communication, known for the development of Trompenaars' model of national culture differences(this describes the five ways in which human deal with each other).

David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist, social psychologist and philosopher. He formally established the academic discipline and — with Karl Marx and Max Weber — is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.

Gerard Hendrik (Geert) Hofstede is a Professor Emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, well known for his pioneering research of cross-cultural groups and organizations.

His most notable work has been in developing cultural dimensions theory(it is a framework for cross-cultural communication. Hofstede developed his original model as  a result of using factor analysis to examine the results of a world-wide survey of employee values by IBM in the 1960s and 1970s. The theory was one of the first that could be quantified, and could be used to explain observed differences between cultures). The five dimensions are; Power Distance, Individualism, Uncertainty avoidance, Masculinity, and Long Term Orientation

Robert King Merton  was an American sociologist .In 1994 Merton won the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science. He is considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern-day sociology.

Merton developed notable concepts such as "unintended consequences", the "reference group", and "role strain" but is perhaps best known for having created the terms "role model" and "self-fulfilling prophecy".A central element of modern sociological, political and economic theory, the "self-fulfilling prophecy" is a process whereby a belief or an expectation, correct or incorrect, affects the outcome of a situation or the way a person or a group will behave.

Chie Nakane is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology at the University of Tokyo.

Nakane’s work focuses on cross-cultural comparisons of social structures in Asia, notably Japan, India, and China. She is internationally known for her bestselling book, Japanese Society, which has been translated into 13 languages. In this book, Nakane characterizes Japan as “a vertical society” where human relations are based on “place” (shared space) instead of “attribute” (qualification).

 Some of the important questions to be answered

Is the internet a force against Balkanisation?..or something leading to it?

Today only one-third of the world’s population has access to the Internet, and, of course, the languages of this one-third dominate online. As more people gain access to the network, other languages will join in. But this is not the fragmentation of the Internet—it’s diversity through continued expansion. It’s leading to a richer representation of mankind, something to be cherished and encouraged. Moreover, it offers new possibilities to preserve some of that diversity: Enduring Voice, a joint project between the National Geographic Society and Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, uses the Internet to preserve rare languages including this interactive website .Due to different domains names on the web it is not dividing people its just bringing more and more diversity. So, no doubt its against balkanisation

Do the so called “weapons of the weak” inevitably include terrorism?

In some or the other ways the so called ”weapons of the weak” inevitably include terrorism because in this book by James C. Scott he clearly mentions many times that if the paddy production (by the farmer who’s poor) is to be doubled then he would need combines , mechanization, Equality and insurances which would lots the rich and harm the poor. And that’s what terrorism is it is the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.

Do examples such as “jaywalking, the anti-SAT movement or assembly-line slowdown[s]” show that anarchy has a place in modern society?

To most Americans the term anarchism probably invokes bomb-throwing radicals. But seen through Mr. Scott’s squint, anarchist principles are in action all around us, whether in jaywalking, the anti-SAT movement or assembly-line slowdowns — all examples, he contends, of everyday resistance to the rule of technocratic elites. “Unlike the anarchists, I don’t believe the state will ever be abolished,” he said in the interview. “It’s a matter of taming it” — through the kind of lawbreaking and disruption, he argues, that have always been crucial to democratic political change.