The Plural Actor

The individual that the social sciences take as an object is most often studied in a particular context or from a single dimension. The actor is analysed as a student, worker, consumer, spouse, reader, sportsperson, a voter etc. However, in societies where individuals live often through simultaneously and successively heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory social experiences, each person inevitably carries a plurality of roles, ways of seeing, feeling and acting. The aim of this study is to consider the ways in which this plurality of worlds and experiences are incorporated into the being of each individual and to observe the individual's actions in a variety of settings. In addition to his sociological viewpoint, the author engages with psychology, history, anthropology and philosophy. His reflections lead him to embark on a program of psychological sociology to highlight the complexities of this plural view of the social.

This introduction to the descriptive and historical linguistics of the Papuan languages of New Guinea provide an accessible account of one of the richest and most diverse linguistic situations in the world. The Papuan languages number over 700 (or 20 per cent of the world's total) in more than sixty language families. Less than a quarter of the individual languages have yet been adequately documented, and in this sense William Foley's book might be considered premature. However, in the search for language universals and generalisations in linguistic typology, it would be foolhardy to neglect the information that is available. In this respect alone, the present volume, systematically organised on mainly typology principles, is particularly timely and useful. In addition, the processes of linguistic diffusion are present in New Guinea to an extent probably paralleled elsewhere on the globe. The Papuan Languages of New Guinea will be of interest not only to general and comparative linguists and to typologists, but also to sociolinguists and anthropologists for the information it provides on the social dynamics of language content.

The book systematically discusses the formal and functional properties as well as the rules of the manifold productive reduplication types of Bikol, an Austronesian language of the Philippines. Based on the author's own fieldwork, this case study demonstrates the highly complex and grammaticized status of reduplication. In addition, the formal and semantic properties of unproductive reduplicative forms of the language are also investigated.

This volume represents an advance in our understanding of how to represent and reason about organizational phenomena. Although organizational theorists have long grappled with the complexities of adaptive agents, ecological systems, and non-linear relations among the basic elements of organizational design, they have not, until recently, had the tools to grapple with these complex relationships. Recent advances in logic, symbolic programming, network analysis, and computer technology have made possible a series of tools that can be used to understand the complexities of organizational behavior. New computational techniques make it possible to develop and test more realistic models of organizational behavior. This volume offers examples of this new breed of models, and provides insight into how these advances and techniques can be used to extend our theoretical understanding of organizations. Authored by leading researchers in the area of computational organization theory, the various chapters demonstrate the value of computational analysis for organizational theory and advance our understanding of the relationship between organizational design and performance. This book contains both theoretical and methodological contributions that enable organizational theorists to use computational and mathematical techniques to systematically address the complex relationships that underlie organizational life. It also presents new -- or sometimes, renewed -- approaches on how to conduct organizational research from multiple formal perspectives including: simulation, numerical analysis, symbolic logic, mathematical modeling, and graph theory.

These critical essays bring together prominent scholars in the social sciences to consider the diverse nature of the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in contemporary social theory. In offering a range of perspectives on the continuing relevance of Bourdieu's sociology, the essays of this volume examine Bourdieu's relationship to both classical and contemporary social theory. This collection constructs an intellectual bridge between French-speaking and English-speaking accounts of Bourdieu's work.

The purpose of this book is to provide a general introduction to Systemic Linguistics in the form of essays written by leading figures in the field. These are, with one exception, not previously published, and taken together they constitute a comprehensive coverage of the diverse interests of current systemic theory. The volume contains bibliographies and an index.