A groups __________, or typical social arrangement, is brought about by norms.

1 Markets as Social Arrangements

As social arrangements markets are constituted by bilateral, actual and potential, exchange transactions. By contrast to theft or coercive taking, exchange is a peaceful method of obtaining things that one desires. It is based on mutual agreement between the trading parties. Given the noted alternative methods of personal enrichment, people can be expected to engage in exchange when and where the alternatives appear less attractive. This is normally the case where people meet within a normative-legal-institutional framework that defines and enforces property rights, though, even in the absence of a shared normative order, people may have prudent reasons for pursuing their interests through exchange rather than violent methods. As Max Weber (1978, p. 640) observed, even someone who, prefers to take without pay whatever he can, may choose to resort to peaceful exchange where he is ‘confronted with a power equal to his own,’ or where he regards it ‘as shrewd to do so for the sake of future exchange opportunities which might be endangered otherwise.’ In fact, the interest in exploiting potential gains from trade outside of one's own inherited community can be seen as a principal driving force in the evolution of a normative-legal order that extends beyond traditional community limits. As Weber (1978, p. 637) put it, ‘The market is a relationship which transcends the boundaries of neighborhood, kinship group, or tribe. Originally, it is indeed the only peaceful relationship of such kind.’

To say that markets are constituted by potential as well as actual exchange transactions points to the role of competition as the essential market force, a role that Weber (1978, p. 635) underlines when he defines, ‘A market may be said to exist wherever there is competition, even if only unilateral, for opportunities of exchange among a plurality of potential parties.’ Competition means that sellers can choose among potential alternative buyers, and that buyers can choose among potential alternative sellers. The terms under which exchanges are actually carried out in a market cannot be adequately understood without considering the potential alternative transactions that the respective parties might have chosen, but did not. As, market transaction ‘is always a social act insofar as the potential partners are guided in their offers by the potential action of an indeterminately large group of real or imaginary competitors rather than by their own actions alone’ (Weber 1978, p. 636).

‘Competition for opportunities of exchange’ (Weber 1978) is constitutive of markets. It is also the source of a fundamental ambiguity in people's attitudes towards markets. While one's own interests are furthered by competition on the other side of the transaction, competition on one's own side is often perceived as a nuisance. As seller one welcomes any increase in the pool of potential buyers, and as buyer one welcomes an increase in the plurality of potential sellers, because this can only improve the terms of trade. Conversely, competition on one's own side of the transaction, be it as buyer or as seller, is much less welcome as it tends to limit the gains that one can hope to realize in the exchange. Despite the benefits that an open market with free entry of potential buyers and sellers has to offer to all parties, there are obvious benefits to be had from the privilege of being in one's own role protected from competition. Interests in securing the benefits of protectionist privileges, on the one side, and interests in realizing the gains that can be had from ‘exchange with the highest bidder’ (Weber 1978, p. 638), on the other side, are two opposing forces that shape a political community's legal-institutional framework and determine the extent to which it facilitates or inhibits trade within and across its boundaries. Medieval feudal and guild restrictions heavily favored the former; modern market economies are the product of the growing weight of the latter interests.

Markets are a paradigm example of a self-generating or spontaneous social order (Hayek 1973, p. 37), i.e., of social arrangements in which the activities of participants are coordinated in a spontaneous manner, through mutual adjustment or adaptation of separate decision-makers, without any deliberate, central direction. In this sense the order of the market can be contrasted ‘as a specific type of social structure’ (Swedberg 1994, p. 255) to the deliberate, centralized coordination of activities that occurs within corporate entities or organizations, i.e., within social units such as the ‘family, the farm, the plant, the firm, the corporation, and the various associations, and all the public institutions including governments’ (Hayek 1973, p. 46). It is one of the central themes in the works of F. A. Hayek that the distinction between ‘the two kinds of order’ (Hayek 1973, p. 46), market and organization (Vanberg 1982), is of fundamental importance for an adequate understanding of the nature of societal phenomena in general and of the order of the market in particular. The failure to appreciate adequately the nature of the market as a spontaneous social order is, in Hayek's view, a major source of confusion in discussions on economic theory and, in particular, economic policy, a confusion that he attributes in part to the ambiguity that is implied when the term ‘economy’ is used to describe the order of the market. As the term is derived from the Greek word oikonomia, which means household-economy, an ‘economy, in the strict sense of the word, is an organization or arrangement in which someone deliberately allocates resources to a unitary order of ends’ (Hayek 1978, p. 178). In order to avoid any misleading connotations Hayek suggests speaking of the order of the market not as an economy but as a catallaxy—derived from the Greek word katallatein, which means ‘to exchange’ (Hayek 1976, p. 108).

According to Hayek (1976, p. 115), the operation of the market system and the way it coordinates the actions of market-participants can be understood best by thinking of it as a game, ‘the game of catallaxy.’ The game metaphor is meant to emphasize two essential attributes of the competitive market process. First, it ‘proceeds, like all games, according to rules guiding the actions of individual participants’ (Hayek 1976, p. 71). And, second, as with all genuine games, the particular outcomes of the ‘game of catallaxy’ cannot be predetermined but must always remain to a large extent unpredictable, owing to the multitude of contributing factors and to the inventiveness of the participants who are free to choose their strategies within the limits defined by the general rules of the game. Indeed, that particular market outcomes cannot be predetermined is but a consequence of the fact that the ‘rules of the game’ are the essential device by which the moves of players in the ‘game of catallaxy’ are coordinated. These rules are typically negative rules that exclude as impermissible certain kinds of strategies, but leave significant scope for choice. By contrast, the essential coordinating device within organizations or corporate arrangements are positive commands rather than (negative) general rules of conduct, commands either in the form of specific orders or in the form of generalized commands as they are implied in ‘organizational rules’ that define the tasks to be performed by persons in particular organizational positions.

By speaking of the market as a ‘game of competition’ that is played according to certain rules, Hayek underscores the inherent connection between markets and the law. Since the coordination of actions within markets is based on certain general rules of conduct that impose constraints on the behavior of market participants, it follows that only where suitable rules are in force can a market order be expected to emerge at all, and that the particular nature of the legal-institutional framework within which markets operate will determine their overall working properties. As Hayek (1960, p. 229) puts it: ‘If there is to be an efficient adjustment of the different activities in the market, certain minimum requirements must be met; the more important of these are … the prevention of violence and fraud, the protection of property, and the enforcement of contracts, and the recognition of equal rights of all individuals to produce in whatever quantities and sell at whatever prices they choose. Even when these basic conditions have been satisfied, the efficiency of the system will still depend on the particular content of the rules.’

If, as Hayek points out, the order of the market is based on rules, one should expect the ‘relation between the character of the legal order and the functioning of the market system’ (Hayek 1960 p. 229) to be a central theme of the social science that concerns itself with the study of markets, economics.

Publisher Summary

A diverse body of research in engineering and the social sciences documents the working of systems that require technical artifacts and social arrangements to function. Single plants, firms, or entire industrial sectors constitute socio-technical systems if technological components and social arrangements are so intertwined that their design requires the joint optimization of technological and social variables. Social and technical subsystems are intertwined and each has multiple layers that are designed and evolve on different time scales. Multi-level systems have been more widely studied by social scientists than by engineers in institutional approaches. Design decisions are made at all layers but the scope for such choices is generally broader at the lower layers. Consequently, in higher layers of the socio-technical system, deliberate design decisions become less prevalent and emergent characteristics become more important. Continuous and specific design choices are made at the operational and management layer. These design decisions are constrained by design choices at the governance layer. Design decisions are made at that layer although the decision-makers typically are different.

4.1 The Rationality of Cooperation

There are parallels between the style of argument in the surprise examination paradox and certain arguments concerning the rationality or otherwise of cooperative social arrangements. Many cooperative arrangements that have both costs and benefits to the involved parties rest on the basis of expected returns in the future to all parties to the arrangement. The Robinsons work with the Smiths on something that advantages the Smiths in the expectation that in the future the Smiths will work with the Robinsons on something that advantages the Robinsons. A classic example is helping with building houses. It is much easier to build a house when there are a number of workers to lift heavy beams and the like. So the Robinsons give of their time to help the Smiths build the Smiths' house, but do so in the expectation that the Smiths will later help the Robinsons build the Robinsons' house. But why, in terms of self-interest, should the Smiths later help the Robinsons; they already have their house? The answer is that there will be other opportunities for cooperation, and the Smiths can expect to benefit from some of them.

This intuitively appealing answer can be challenged by a ‘backwards induction.’ It will not be rational (in the sense of being advantageous) for the ‘giving’ party to cooperate on the last occasion for possible cooperation, because there is no prospect of their being the ‘receiving’ party in the future. But then, it seems, there is no reason for the giving party to cooperate on the second last occasion either, assuming rationality on the part of both parties. The only reason for the giving party to cooperate on the second last occasion is in the hope of being the receiving party on the last occasion, and that could only happen if the giving party on the last occasion is irrational. Similar reasoning applies to the third last, fourth last, etc. occasions, so yielding the conclusion that it is never rational to be a giving party in a cooperative arrangement.

It would be a mistake to reply to this argument by challenging the self-interest conception of rationality it employs. The puzzle is that it clearly is in parties' self-interest sometimes to cooperate when they are the givers, in the expectation of being receivers in the future. The error in the argument is that it neglects the kind of epistemological points we saw to be crucial in diagnosing the error in the surprise examination paradox. Although it would be irrational for the giving party to cooperate on the known last occasion for cooperation, normally it is not known when the last occasion for cooperation is. Similarly, there may be doubt about all parties being rational.

2.3.2.1.2 Groups

The concept of group does not exist as such in AML. In its place are organization units. These are used in AML to describe organizational structures, environments which specify social arrangements between the entities in terms of interaction, roles, constraints, etc. This approach is relatively close to the notion of group as it is introduced into the AGR model. As a result, we have decided to use OrganizationUnitType to describe the groups of our MAS. In the same way as for agents, it is essential to make a distinction between the group as a structure and the group as an instance.

In the AGR approach, the group is an abstract notion, allowing us to bring together the agents which share characteristics or resources. As it stands, the AML formalism shown in Figure 2.9 is too rich. In fact, a group, as defined in the AGR model, has neither attributes nor methods. This formalism nonetheless allows us to model the notion of an agentified group.

Our model must actually be able to describe the fact that a set of agents may be considered as a unique entity at a higher level of abstraction. We represent this in AML using OrganizationUnitTypes and a specific role of leader for each group. This role will always have the name of leader followed by the name of the group to which it is attached.

In a model, a group will have its empty attribute list, operation list and behavior parts. The parts part is the only one that will be full: this is the part that makes it possible to describe the group’s structure, that is to describe what it is made up of. A group may be made up of agents, other groups or possibly both. In this part the various roles which the group’s agent may play are also found, with the specific role of Leader which is present in each group.

2.6 Researcher’s agenda

The widespread adoption of social media tools has begun to usher in a golden age of social science research. Social media systems provide a wealth of data about communication patterns, location information, friendships, and other social arrangements. Mining this data is bound to provide numerous insights into human nature for decades to come. There are also many important questions that need answering to help us effectively utilize social media tools to achieve our goals. For example, we need to understand how to support democratic societies in the midst of increasingly divided clans [14], examine the use of social media supported political protests [15], develop ways to build community [16], understand the power dynamics at play in social media, motivate voluntary participation [17], develop persuasive systems [18], govern social media communities [19], organize activities to meet specific goals, find the limits of scalability, and develop tools to better visualize and understand social activity. Related issues of trust, empathy, responsibility, and privacy have strong research foundations, which can be helpful to a wide range of practitioners. Addressing these issues will help designers and community managers make well-informed decisions rather than simply relying on intuition and anecdotes.

The rapid pace of commercial development offers new challenges to the research community to evaluate the impact of design changes, novel policies, and evolving norms. What forms of recognition or reward are appropriate for different domains? How can communities that involve participants with different expectations, skills, and experience be accommodated? How can malicious behavior be reduced? Can envisioned benefits to health, education, energy, or international development become a reality?

1.3 Roles and Relationships

The biological functions normally associated with the social unit of the family are reproduction, nurture of children, and preservation and control of fertile adults, particularly women. At different times and places, a variety of social arrangements have been in operation to facilitate these. Responsibilities for children, whether the provision of food and other resources, or of nurture, have been variously divided among men and women, parents and grandparents, though women have had a mothering role in most societies. Perhaps the most commonly recognized family roles have been those of mother, father, children, grandparents, siblings, and ancestors. Religious beliefs and practices have played an important part in endorsing such family roles and the duties associated with them. Roles have often been conferred through rituals, affirmed by religious teachings, and sometimes mirrored and authorized by mythic accounts of divine family roles.

The use of ritual in celebrating entry into different life-stages, conferring appropriate roles, and ensuring group membership, continuity, and loyalty has been the subject of anthropological debate. Functionalists, such as Durkheim and Malinowski, and later, Rappaport, stressed the importance of ritual for social integration, whereas Edmund Leach held the view that rituals reflected conflicting interpretations and often contained the seeds of social instability while legitimizing a particular power structure. This ambiguity was also acknowledged by Victor Turner who held that the symbolic complexity of rituals made space for competing interpretations, thus enabling solidarity to be achieved without compromise. These scholarly perspectives were significant for understanding many types of ritual, including those related to the family. For example, in his study of the Ndembu of Zambia, Turner described the various symbolic meanings of the milk tree, for girls at the time of initiation, for their mothers, and for the society of which they were a part. It symbolized breast milk and the mother–child relationship, the exclusion of men from women's experience, but also the separation of the growing daughter from her mother. Turner suggested that this tree constituted a dominant symbol which enabled the expression both of dissonant interests and of the solidarity of the group as a whole.

Religious rituals and symbols, then, may sometimes affirm divergent viewpoints about family roles and relationships for the social good. Religious teachings, however, are often less ambiguous, constituting normative statements about family life and the roles and duties of mothers, fathers, and children. Householder life has been prescribed by religious and moral texts in many societies. A nineteenth century example of this may be found in the schoolbooks produced during the Meiji period in Japan when the imperial ideology of State Shinto was gaining its fullest expression. The emperor was held to be the supreme father or head of house, guiding his family, with each individual family being a branch of the same tree, following the same structure. This patriarchal ideal, which came to apply also to corporate families, was authorized by the Shinto myth of the sun goddess, Amaterasu-o-mi-kami, of whom the emperor was held to be a direct descendent.

A more recent example, which builds on earlier Confucian family ideals, may be witnessed in the teachings of the Unification Church, a movement which began in Korea in the 1950s and was popularized in the West in the 1970s. According to theDivine Principle, the movement's founder, Sun Myung Moon, and his wife are the true parents of the world. They seek to heal the broken family, bringing people together regardless of social or religious background. With God as the father of all creation, Jesus as the true spiritual father, and the holy spirit as the true spiritual mother, the movement mirrors this divine family in the human family, with God as the focal point, the male as head of the family, and the mother subject to her husband. With the essential fourth component, their children, they are expected to prepare, through active missionary service, for the second advent. The Unification Church is an example of a religious group for whom the family ideal is central in its theological, ethical, and social teachings, and for whom family relationships are the model for all other relationships.

3 Accommodation of Diversity

A brief sketch of the design of the traditional civilization of the subcontinent will be provided as an aid to the understanding of the multitude of beliefs, practices, habits, customs, and manners prevalent in the region to this day. The first striking feature of this design is the accommodation of diversity. The rich ethnographic record available from the middle of the nineteenth century onward shows an endless, almost inexhaustible, variety in material culture, social arrangements, and religious beliefs and practices. Some of the variation in material traits, in matters such as food, dress, and habitation, may be explained by variations in geographical environment and natural resources. But the cultural variation is far in excess of what would be required by variations of natural environment. For instance, even where its basic ingredients are the same, food might be prepared and served differently among the different castes and communities in the same village.

Then there is the great diversity of social arrangements in matters relating to family, marriage, descent, inheritance, residence, and so on. What needs to be stressed is not simply the diversity of practices but also the diversity of rules; they were the despair of the colonial administrators of the nineteenth century who sought to codify the laws and customs of the subcontinent. There is finally the profusion of religious beliefs, doctrines, rituals, customs, and usages which have been mentioned.

The presence of diversity has been more than a matter of mere existence. In Indian society in particular and South Asian societies in general, it has been sustained by law, custom, and popular religion. Accommodation without assimilation has been a core value of Indian civilization until modern times. It has led to the co-existence of a large multiplicity of beliefs and practices as well as of social groups. Adding new components has not meant discarding old ones, and new and old components of the most heterogeneous kinds have existed cheek-by-jowl to a greater extent than in other civilizations. The Indian subcontinent has been and still largely remains a vast mosaic of tribes, clans, castes, sects, and communities, each with its own identity.

6 The Cybernetic Program for the Sociology of Emotions

In 1985, the sociology of emotions was formally recognized as a subsection in the American Sociological Association. Several scholars independently suggested a cybernetic program for emotion studies. This balanced the cultural and structural shaping of emotions with equal attention to how individual emotional experience worked inadvertently to maintain, confirm and change the social arrangements that initially shaped them. This view is clearly illustrated by incest taboos shaping feelings of sexual attraction and disgust. Aggregate individual experiences of these sexual aversions confirm and maintain the kinship arrangements and feeling rules that shaped them in the first place. Without these feelings, the structures of kinship would collapse. The advantage of such an approach is that it allows for a detailing of the individual interactional processes that form the foundation of emergent structures. Without this, our theory of social structure becomes dangerously reified (Scheff 1990). Regardless of the emergent quality of structures, the detailed link between concrete people and institutions must be traced. Collins’ (1984) conception of emotional energy emanating from ‘interactional ritual chains’ argues for a similar articulation between micro- and macro-levels.

3.1 Sources of Authority

Christianity is virtually unique among the world's religions for the extent to which its practice has been controlled by centralized, formal organizations cutting across ethnic, tribal, and political groupings. By contrast, Hinduism, Judaism, and Shinto crystallized slowly out of predominantly tribal and ethnic cultures, giving rise to temples, synagogues, and shrines as centers of rites and ritual worship rather than as agencies of civil administration. Diasporic Judaism, lacking the authority previously vested in the Temple at Jerusalem and its hereditary priests, regrouped around rabbis as teachers of the law and around synagogues as ritual centers. Communal organizations have played a major role in preserving the ethnic and religious identity of Jews under persecution, but centralized organizations to control Jewish beliefs and rituals are relatively weak.

Buddhism and Islam emerged from more deliberate attempts to cultivate religious and philosophical systems partly at odds with prevailing culture and social arrangements, and this feature of their historical emergence may help to account for the fact that they have been closely allied with political regimes at various times. Thailand and Japan, for example, have had something approaching Buddhist parish systems. Modern Japan has also seen the rise of massive, hierarchical organizations of Buddhist laypeople such as Risshō Kōsei-kai and Sōka Gakkai. But elsewhere in Asia, Buddhism functions like a diffuse folk religion supported by monastic institutions and temples.

The organization of Islam is subtle, multistranded and variable by region of the world. As a conversion faith Islam has been interwoven with political regimes, but it does not have a single, authoritative organization. There are multiple, competing sources of theological, legal, spiritual, and moral authority in Islam, for the authority of learned experts, jurists, hereditary sheikshs, leaders of brotherhoods and clergy (among the Shi'ites) are all part of the complex organizational tapestry of Islam. This high degree of complexity makes it difficult for any single organization to claim convincingly that it represents all Muslims. Now that tens of millions of Muslims live as religious minorities in the predominantly Christian countries of Europe and North America, pressure may be increasing for would-be representative organizations to seek to represent all Muslims in their collective relations with nation states, nongovernmental organizations, and the European Union.

3.1 The Tradition of the New

From approximately the middle of the nineteenth through nearly half of the twentieth century it became customary to speak of artistic change as a revolutionary succession of art movements or avant-gardes (Poggioli 1971). Most of them challenged stylistic strictures governing artistic form, some challenged the social structures of art worlds, and certain of them used their art to attack political and social arrangements beyond art worlds. Through these independent artists of avant-garde or secession movements that challenged the academy's legitimacy, the academic fine arts fell into disrepute. Several of the new styles gained ascendancy, but even as anti-academic artists, they did not eradicate the idea of fine art itself, nor their aspiration to aesthetic autonomy.

The story of the apparently inexorable march of new styles encompassed elements that contributed to the ‘tradition of the new,’ as Harold Rosenberg termed it (1965). Its pattern of innovation, rejection, and acceptance has become familiar and conventional in the fine arts, and is acknowledged as part and parcel of the flow of modernism. In the post-World War II period, the United States produced what was then considered the most innovative artistic movement. Referred to variously as Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting, or simply the New York School, its members aspired to replace the figurative content and narrative of art, largely hegemonic at the time, by abstract representations of the artist's feelings and impulses. Viewed by many as incomprehensible or self indulgent, as it gained acceptance among a few collectors and a place in adventurous museums, in line with the century-long pattern of the challenge by the new, it too was faced by rivals: even without an institution such as the academic system, avant-gardism itself had become institutionalized. Soon, they too found themselves and the aesthetics they had constructed challenged (Crane 1987).

As unexpected as they were, the new genres and styles—Pop Art, Minimalism, Pattern, Photo-Realism—could claim as much legitimacy as had previous newcomers. There was little basis for holding them off except through assertions of bad faith on the part of artists, decline of standards, lack of discrimination. On the one hand, these resemble the reproaches that have been invoked for a century and a half. On the other, the Pop Artists had crossed the barrier separating naked commercialism from disinterested art. Their popularity assailed what might be called the dominant canon of abstractionist modernity, leading the way to what has been termed the postmodern condition.