TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I: UTILITY AND INTEREST Introduction 5 1.1 - Utility and Interest 6 1.2 - Rationality and public goods 7 1.3 - A quantitative determination of the group and a collective undertaking 8 1.4 - The prisoner¿s dilemma and the dominant strategy 10 1.5 Dimension of the groups and selective incentives 13 CHAPTER II: FOR AN UNORTHODOX THEORY OF RATIONALITY Introduction 17 2.1 - Freedom of choice and freedom of the mode of choice 20 2.2 - Strategic rationality and parametric rationality 23 2.3 - Cooperative solutions to the prisoner dilemma 25 2.3.1 Evolutionary emergence of cooperation 25 2.3.2 Cooperation as a dynamic process 26 2.3.3 Does being altruistic pay? 27 2.4 - Sub-intentional causality 28 2.4.1 Convince yourself to believe: Pascal 29 2.4.2 Force yourself to be coherent: Cartesius 29 2.4.3 Endogenous change of the preferences 30 2.4.4 Temporarily incoherent preferences 31 2.5 Super-intentional causality 32 2.6 How to explain altruism 32 2.6.1 Altruism and the social environment 33 2.7 - Altruism as a by-product 37 2.8 - Is altruism rational? 39 Conclusions 40 CHAPTER III: COLLECTIVE ACTION AND THE THEORY OF MOVEMENT Introduction 45 3.1 - Mobilization of resources and relative privation 45 3.2 - The Identity theory 46 3.3 - Identity and loyalty: two models compared 47 3.4 - Identity and recognition 48 3.5 - Private happiness and public happiness 50 3.6 ¿ Identity and contract 51 3.7 - Conditions of cooperation 53 3.8 - Strategy and identity 54 CHAPTER IV: SOCIAL CAPITAL AS A RESOURCE FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION 4. 1 - For a definition of social capital 57 4.2 - Form and genesis of social capital 59 CHAPTER V: SEARCHING FOR LOST ALTRUISM 5.1 - Anti-utilitarianism 63 5.2 - Altruism and social capital 70 Bibliography 79.
Volume 32 of Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management (RPHRM) contains seven papers on important issues in the field of human resources management. The subject matter in this volume covers myriad areas: compensation, performance evaluation, reputation, employee furloughs, and research methodology.
Updated to include a new chapter about the influence of social media and the Internet—the 20th anniversary edition of Bowling Alone remains a seminal work of social analysis, and its examination of what happened to our sense of community remains more relevant than ever in today’s fractured America. Twenty years, ago, Robert D. Putnam made a seemingly simple observation: once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolized a significant social change that became the basis of the acclaimed bestseller, Bowling Alone, which The Washington Post called “a very important book” and Putnam, “the de Tocqueville of our generation.” Bowling Alone surveyed in detail Americans’ changing behavior over the decades, showing how we had become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether it’s with the PTA, church, clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues. In the revised edition of his classic work, Putnam shows how our shrinking access to the “social capital” that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing still poses a serious threat to our civic and personal health, and how these consequences have a new resonance for our divided country today. He includes critical new material on the pervasive influence of social media and the internet, which has introduced previously unthinkable opportunities for social connection—as well as unprecedented levels of alienation and isolation. At the time of its publication, Putnam’s then-groundbreaking work showed how social bonds are the most powerful predictor of life satisfaction, and how the loss of social capital is felt in critical ways, acting as a strong predictor of crime rates and other measures of neighborhood quality of life, and affecting our health in other ways. While the ways in which we connect, or become disconnected, have changed over the decades, his central argument remains as powerful and urgent as ever: mending our frayed social capital is key to preserving the very fabric of our society.
The birth of the social sciences and specifically of sociology begets some open questions, among which the debate on altruism and the concept of social solidarity. The term altruism was firstly used by Auguste Comte. It is one of the few terms born within the scientific field that will enter the common language roughly maintaining the same meaning. For the positivist Comte, altruism represented the powerful impulse to the intellectual and moral development of humanity to which we must strive as a future state. The term commonly means all those actions whose benefits fall on others and not on the agent (actor). In short, for Comte, altruism means "to live for others" (vivre pour autrui). The centrality of altruism as part of the reflections of social sciences can be found in many classic authors. Durkheim, for example, explains the foundations of social solidarity in modern society precisely through the opposition between altruism and egoism and defines its implications in the book Le Suicide in 1897, also identifying what will later become the main typology of suicide by contrasting altruistic suicide with egoistic suicide. Likewise, both Weber and Marx, while not using the term altruism as such, refer to it indirectly. The former, when describing the ethics of love for the charismatic authority as opposed to legal and rational authority, the latter, when corroborating his polemics against Christian charity. The interest in altruism as an object of study of social sciences, however, is progressively waning - especially in Europe. From the second half of the last century, theoretical and empirical studies show the indifference of social scientists towards this object, except for the Russian-American sociologist Sorokin, who in 1949 founded the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism. In recent years, however, the topic seems to take renewed vigor, especially in the United States with the birth in 2012 of the section "Altruism, Morality & Social Solidarity" within the American Sociological Association. It considered these three aspects as a single field of disciplinary specialization, since they are significantly dependent on socio-cultural reality. This is the situation in the United States. In Europe, there is a renewed interest in studies on altruism, especially in French-language sociology, above all starting from the numerous contributions to reading and re-reading work on Marcel Mauss's on gift of 1925, and in following the anti-utilitarian movement and studies of the school of social representations of Moscovici, which leads to the definition of the elementary forms of altruism. The book aims to analyze the concept of altruism starting from classical philosophy up to the systems of ideas of contemporaneity, considering the approaches and authors of reference in an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary way. The representations of altruism and egoism in contemporary society are constantly changing, following the transformations of society itself. Having abandoned the idea that the factors leading to altruism or egoism lay only in human nature, we find them in people’s conduct, freedom, relationships, their associative forms and society. The attention is thus turned to two elements of the daily life of individuals: culture and social relations. The book tries, therefore, through the meso-theories developed in recent decades, which study the relationships between life-world and social system, to describe the links between altruism, egoism, culture and social relations. We will pay particular attention to the relationality of individuals, in an attempt to overcome the dichotomy altruism/egoism by reading some aspects little considered by previous studies - or contemplated only indirectly or marginally. The ultimate goal is to highlight how positive actions are necessary for the contemporary society and how social sciences must go back and study positive socio-cultural actions and phenomena, not only negative, as a way to promote them for the well-being of the society.
Addresses a range of phenomena related to the general question of when people behave in an altruistic fashion. This book contains topics that include how empathy induced altruism can actually be a threat to the some larger collective good, and the role of egoism in the production and maintenance of social order.
The Handbook on the Economics of Giving, Reciprocity and Altruism provides a comprehensive set of reviews of literature on the economics of nonmarket voluntary transfers. The foundations of the field are reviewed first, with a sequence of chapters that present the hard core of the theoretical and empirical analyses of giving, reciprocity and altruism in economics, examining their relations with the viewpoints of moral philosophy, psychology, sociobiology, sociology and economic anthropology. Secondly, a comprehensive set of applications are considered of all the aspects of society where nonmarket voluntary transfers are significant: family and intergenerational transfers; charity and charitable institutions; the nonprofit economy; interpersonal relations in the workplace; the Welfare State; and international aid.*Every volume contains contributions from leading researchers*Each Handbook presents an accurate, self-contained survey of a particular topic *The series provides comprehensive and accessible surveys
Altruism in Cross-Cultural Perspective provides such a scholarly overview, examining the intersection of culture and such topics as evolutionary accounts of altruism and the importance of altruism in ritual and religion. The past decade has seen a proliferation of research on altruism, made possible in part by significant funding from organizations such as the John Templeton Foundation. While significant research has been conducted on biological, social, and individual dimensions of altruism, there has been no attempt to provide an overview of the ways that altruistic behavior and attitudes vary across cultures. The book addresses the methodological challenges of researching altruism across cultures, as well as the ways that altruism is manifest in difficult circumstances. A particular strength of the book is its attention to multiple disciplinary approaches to understanding altruism, with contributors from fields including psychology, anthropology, sociology, biology, communication, philosophy, religious studies, gender studies, and bioethics.
Presents a collection of papers by economists theorizing on the roles of altruism and morality versus self-interest in the shaping of human behavior and institutions. Specifically, the authors examine why some persons behave in an altruistic way without any apparent reward, thus defying the economist's model of utility maximization. The chapters are accompanied by commentaries from representatives of other disciplines, including law and philosophy.
This book presents a cross-cultural investigation into the interplay between social capital and subjective well-being. Based on a quantitative analysis of the latest large-N cross-cultural data sets, including the World Value Survey and the European Social Survey, and covering various countries, it offers a comparative perspective on and new insights into the determinants of social capital and well-being. By identifying both universal and culture-specific patterns, the authors shed new light on the spatial and temporal differentiation of social capital and subjective well-being. The book is divided into two main parts: The first discusses mutual trust, religious and cultural tolerance, and pro-social and human values as essential dimensions of social capital. In turn, the second part studies social capital as a source of subjective well-being and life satisfaction. Given its scope, the book will appeal to scholars of sociology, social psychology, political science and economics seeking a deeper understanding of the multi-faceted nature of social capital and well-being.
While Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000) highlighted the notion of volunteerism, little attention has been paid to religion's role in generating social capital--an ironic omission since religion constitutes the most common form of voluntary association in America today. Featuring essays by prominent social scientists, this is the first book-length, systematic examination of the relationship between religion and social capital and what effects religious social capital has on democratic life in the United States.
