Category: English

We now know what kinship terminologies are and what their function is in kinship systems, even though this knowledge is not yet widespread.  Every social system consists of a set of organizations built up interactively by the use of specific idea syste…

Kinship terminology is a human universal, a kind of cultural knowledge circulated through language. In this paper I explore the possibility that the need for social rules prompted the development of fully syntactic language via kinship terminologies. I…

Raymond Firth’s We, The Tikopia, first published in 1936, still sets the standard for detailed, nuanced, sensitive ethnography.  As Malinowski’s student, Firth—who died in 2002 at the age of 100—was a hard-headed functionalist, whose forte was careful …

Tradeoffs between time allocated to sleeping versus waking result from variations in local ecologies and should correlate to alterations in behavioral life history strategies.  It was predicted that firefighters who sleep less, with lower overall sleep…

In the 1980s, the EC engaged in trying actively to construct a European identity, primarily through a ’manufacturing of symbols’, such as a common flag, hymn and day of celebration. A lesser-known element of this symbolic construction was the elevation…

In this chapter I develop the psychological underpinnings of environmental music towards an understanding of how the goals of cognitive and behavioral psychologists contributed to a new kind of listening at the beginning of the twentieth century. I beg…

The struggle over cure rate measures in nineteenth-century asylums provides an exemplary instance of how, when used for official assessments of institutions, these numbers become sites of contestation. The evasion of goals and corruption of measures te…

This article is based on a research project that explores the proliferation of information and communication technology (ICT) in public services. Furthermore, the research explores how the enhanced presence of ICT relates to efforts to increas-ingly in…

Departing from a discussion of transformations in the premises of managerial rationality and “managementality” as a pacemaker of the (post)modern social order, as it is steeped in economic crisis, the paper critiques and extends Baudrillard’s construct…

The article treats the issue of generality. How may one conceive of the relationship between the uniqueness of individuality and the commonality of the human (species and society) without reduction? Can generalization be made moral – es-chewing stereot…

This paper is based on studies of how standardized entities work as elements in a regime to control risk and hazardous work. Drawing on empirical examples from the petroleum industry and infrastructure sectors, we illustrate not only the mechanisms by …

Private standards and certification schemes in agrifood networks tend to be de-scribed as neoliberal, suggesting that they share a common understanding of that which they seek to govern and the tools to be used. Although such certification systems do h…

The articles in this issue of Culture Unbound were presented at a multidisciplinary conference entitled “Objectification, Measurement and Standardization” held at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, in Januar…

This article discusses the implications of working through globally integrated computer systems in transnational firms and addresses in particular employees’ possibility to give feedback on how these systems are working. The aim is to contribute to the…

To develop a theory of Robust Intelligence (RI), we continue to advance our theory of interdependence on the efficient and effective control of systems of autonomous hybrid teams composed of robots, machines and humans working interchangeably. As is th…

The article discusses practices of placemaking through empirical fieldwork undertaken in the subculture of urban exploration in Copenhagen. The making and experience of place is discussed, firstly, in relation to methodology and academic representation…

Modernity has meant a cultural and social differentiation within the western society, which, according to Jürgen Habermas’ theory on communication, can be seen as a division between different forms of actions that takes place in different realms of the…

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Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), and specifically the concept of infrastructure as conceptualised by Bowker and Star (2000; Star 1999), this paper argues and empirically demonstrates that self-care may be considered a practice that is t…

This article aims to contribute to the understanding concerning the introduction of crisis psychotherapy in the 1970s in psychiatric clinics in Sweden. The article discusses how this psychotherapy became central in the work of the clinics in supporting…