Today, the earth is an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions-a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space. The ethical question is whether this is contributing to authentic human development and helping individuals and peoples to be true to their transcendent destiny. The new media are powerful tools for education, cultural enrichment, commercial activity, political participation, intercultural dialogue and understanding. They also can serve the cause of religion. Yet the new information technology needs to be informed and guided (...) by solidarity in the service of the common good bridging the digital divide within and among nations. The value-laden message of Western secular culture to people and traditional societies in many cases ill-prepared to evaluate it leads to widespread crisis, for example, in regard to marriage and family life. This technology can be a means for solving human problems, promoting the integral development of persons, creating a world governed by justice, peace, and love. It also can help men and women in their age-old search for self-understanding. Like today's world itself, the world of media, including the Internet, has been brought by Christ, inchoately yet truly, within the boundaries of the kingdom of God and placed in service to the word of salvation. (shrink)

This volume provides a comprehensive account of Wilhelm Röpke as a liberal political economist and social philosopher. Wilhelm Röpke was a key protagonist of transatlantic neoliberalism, a prominent public intellectual and a gifted international networker. As an original thinker, he always positioned himself at the interface between political economy and social philosophy, as well as between liberalism and conservatism. Röpke’s endeavors to combine these elements into a coherent whole, as well as his embeddedness in European and American intellectual networks of (...) liberal and conservative thinkers, are a central theme throughout the book. The volume includes papers by international experts from a conference in Geneva on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Röpke’s passing. The first part focuses on new biographical insights into his exile years in Istanbul and Geneva, while the second part discusses his business cycle theory in the context of the Great Depression, and the third part elaborates on his multifaceted social philosophy. Wilhelm Röpke was among the most important thinkers within the classical liberal revival post-WWII, with intriguing tensions between liberalism and conservatism. A highly recommended volume. –– Peter J. Boettke, 2016-2018 President of the Mont Pèlerin Society and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, George Mason University This important collection of papers provides an in-depth assessment of Wilhelm Röpke’s contributions, placing him in the context of his time. A fine contribution. –– Bruce J. Caldwell, Director of the Center for the History of Political Economy and Research Professor of Economics, Duke University. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 10, September 2020, Page 1105-1107.

Background: School meal programs are not only government initiatives but also community-driven efforts. Aiming to combat food insecurity among school-aged children effectively, these programs are executed in conjunction with food bank initiatives. Various community groups play a crucial role in the success of both food security initiatives. There is a need to improve community engagement to successfully link school meal programs with food banks to build program synergy, combating food insecurity through a two-sided approach. Aim: This study (...) aims to examine community engagement in school meals program by analyzing its purposeful focus on creating jobs and income-generating opportunities for different community groups, i.e., youths, women, and others. Methods: The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework, combining the reasoning strengths of Mindsponge theory and inference advantages of Bayesian analysis, was employed on a dataset of 126 government representatives who manage large-scale school meal programs in 126 different countries. Results: Findings showed that the school meals program’s purposeful focus on creating jobs and income-generating opportunities for women in the community was positively associated with community engagement, thereby supporting the linkage between the programs and food banks. In contrast, providing jobs and income-generating opportunities for youths and other community groups had an ambiguous association with community engagement in school meal programs. Conclusions: Findings underscore the importance of creating jobs and income-generating opportunities for women to improve community engagement in school meal programs. Formulating strategies that empower woman’s entrepreneurship may foster their involvement and engagement in school meal programs, promising to successfully link these programs with food bank initiatives among implementing countries. (shrink)

Volume 39, Issue 4, October-December 2024, Page 295-295.

This is an interview by the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics with Robert Sugden. The interview covers the intellectual trajectory of Sugden, from his early critique of Amartya Sen’s liberalism, to his interactions with James Buchanan and his contributions to behavioural economics. A major theme in the interview is Sugden’s development of a rival program of normative economics based on modern behavioural economics. The interview also discusses Sugden’s recent book The Community of Advantage which synthesizes many of the (...) themes he worked on. (shrink)

in a very different sense, to refer to the cultural community, or cultural structure, itself On this view, the cultural community continues to exist even when its members arc free to modify the character of the culture, should they find its traditional ...

The Community of Shared Future for Mankind (CSFM) concept is a comprehensive Chinese proposal for a better future of mankind. In this article, we provide a comprehensive analysis of this concept by focusing on its origin, evolution and philosophical foundation. This article deals with the origin and evolution of the CSFM concept. We show that the concept originated during the presidency of Hu Jintao, who initially used it for the domestic affairs of China. However, the usage of the concept (...) was later extended from domestic to international affairs. Though Hu Jintao conceived the CSFM concept, it is president Xi Jinping who became its greatest advocate. We explore the CSFM concept’s development and evolution into one of the most influential, diverse and dominant concepts of international relations under president Xi. Furthermore, the article explores the philosophical foundation of the CSFM concept. We argue that although CSFM concept is seen as a 21st century Chinese idea, the roots of the concept can be traced back to much earlier time in history. The concept is based on three major philosophical thoughts: Marxism, Confucianism and the philosophy of Mencius. We show that the CSFM concept is greatly influenced by Marx’s ideas such as the transformation of the world, the free association of producers, historical materialism and dialectics. We also point to a number of Confucian principles that are adopted by the CSFM concept. The CSFM concept not only adopts Confucian principles but also extends their scope from the individual level to international relations. Similarly, we also highlight that the CSFM concept is influenced by Mencius’ concepts such as universal brotherhood, responsibility towards the betterment of the world, humane governance, free trade, equal sharing of wealth and the conservation of natural resources. (shrink)

Ecology, Community and Lifestyle is a revised and expanded translation of Naess' book Okologi, Samfunn og Livsstil, which sets out the author's thinking on the relevance of philosophy to the problems of environmental degradation and the rethinking of the relationship between mankind and nature. The text has been thoroughly updated by Naess and revised and translated by David Rothenberg.

Systematic ethics support in community health services in Norway is in the initial phase. There are few evaluation studies about the significance of ethics reflection on care. The aim of this study was to evaluate systematic ethics reflection in groups in community health , - from the perspectives of employees participating in the groups, the group facilitators and the service managers. The reflection groups were implemented as part of a research and development project.

I defend an empirically-oriented approach to the analysis and remediation of social injustice. My springboard for this argument is a debate—principally represented here between Tommie Shelby and Elizabeth Anderson, but with much deeper historical roots and many flowering branches—about whether racial-justice advocacy should prioritize integration (bringing different groups together) or community development (building wealth and political power within the black community). Although I incline toward something closer to Shelby’s “egalitarian pluralist” approach over Anderson’s single-minded emphasis on integration, many (...) of Shelby’s criticisms of integrationism are misguided, and his handling of the empirical literature is profoundly unbalanced. In fact, while both Shelby and Anderson defend the importance of social science to their projects, I’ll argue that each takes a decidedly unempirical approach, which ultimately obscures the full extent of our ignorance about what we can and ought to do going forward. A more authentically empirical tack would be more epistemically humble, more holistic, and less organized around what I’ll call prematurely formulated “Grand Unified Theories of Social Change.” I defend a more “diversified experimentalist” approach, which rigorously tests an array of smaller-scale interventions before trying to replicate and scale up the most promising results. (shrink)

Background In the wake of mandates for biomedical research to increase participation by members of historically underrepresented populations, community engagement (CE) has emerged as a key intervention to help achieve this goal.Methods Using interviews, observations, and document analysis, we examine how stakeholders in precision medicine research understand and seek to put into practice ideas about who to engage, how engagement should be conducted, and what engagement is for.Results We find that ad hoc, opportunistic, and instrumental approaches to CE exacted (...) significant consequences for the time and resources devoted to engagement and the ultimate impacts it has on research. Critical differences emerged when engagement and research decisionmaking were integrated with each other versus occurring in parallel, separate parts of the study organization, and whether community members had the ability to determine which issues would be brought to them for consideration or to revise or even veto proposals made upstream based on criteria that mattered to them. CE was understood to have a range of purposes, from instrumentally facilitating recruitment and data collection, to advancing community priorities and concerns, to furthering long-term investments in relationships with and changes in communities. These choices about who to engage, what engagement activities to support, how to solicit and integrate community input into the workflow of the study, and what CE was for were often conditioned upon preexisting perceptions and upstream decisions about study goals, competing priorities, and resource availability.Conclusions Upstream choices about CE and constraints of time and resources cascade into tradeoffs that often culminated in “pantomime community engagement.” This approach can create downstream costs when engagement is experienced as improvised and sporadic. Transformations are needed for CE to be seen as a necessary scientific investment and part of the scientific process. (shrink)

Crowdsourcing innovation community has become an important platform for enterprises to gather group wisdom. However, how the crowdsourcing innovation community plays a reference role in creative crowdsourcing participation is unclear. Based on the reference group theory, taking online impression management as the explanatory framework, this study explores the impact of crowdsourcing innovation community reference on the creative territory behavior, and the differences in the crowdsourcing innovation community reference effect among members of different community age groups. (...) A total 524 valid two-stage questionnaires were collected. The empirical analysis results show that under the influence of informational reference and utilitarian reference of the crowdsourcing innovation community, community members are significantly more likely to adopt acquired impression management than defensive impression management ; under the influence of value expressive reference of the crowdsourcing innovation community, the possibility of adopting DIM behavior is significantly greater than that of adopting AIM behavior; compared with DIM behavior, AIM behavior has a more inhibitory effect on creative territory behavior. Interestingly, there are different community reference effects among members of different community age groups. In particular, the positive contribution of the elder members is not as good as that of the newcomers. The above research conclusions not only confirm the influence of crowdsourcing community reference on crowd participation decision making but also provide theoretical and practical enlightenment for exploring the cooperation mechanism of crowdsourcing innovation. (shrink)

The considerable attention to financial interests in clinical research has focused mostly on academic medical centers, even though the majority of clinical research is conducted in community practice settings. To fill this gap, this article maps the practices and policies in 73 community hospitals and several hundred specialized facilities around the country for reviewing clinical investigators’ financial relationships with research sponsors. Community hospitals face a substantially different mix of issues than academic medical centers do because their physician (...) researchers are usually not employees, and more of their studies are later-phase, multicenter trials. Accordingly, community physicians stand to benefit personally from per capita payments, but they tend to have less direct influence over research findings when compared with their academic peers. These and other contrasts require separate guidance for community-based organizations that takes into account their particular needs, circumstances, and institutional capacities. (shrink)

Philosophers often characterize discourse in general as aiming at some sort of convergence (in beliefs, plans, dispositions, feelings, etc.), and many views about aesthetic discourse in particular affirm this thought. I argue that a convergence norm does not govern aesthetic discourse. The conversational dynamics of aesthetic discourse suggest that typical aesthetic claims have directive force. I distinguish between dynamic and illocutionary force and develop related theories of each for aesthetic discourse. I argue that the illocutionary force of aesthetic utterances is (...) typically invitational because its dynamic force is influenced by a ‘communal’ norm. I draw on dynamic pragmatics to develop a formal account of this dynamic force that explains why invitation has pride of place in aesthetic conversation. It turns out that the end of aesthetic discourse is not convergence but a distinctive form of community, a kind of harmony of individuality, that is compatible with aesthetic disagreement. If this is right, then convergence theories of aesthetic and normative discourse, and of conversation in general, need to be revised. (shrink)

New techniques for the genetic modification of organisms are creating new strategies for addressing persistent public health challenges. For example, the company Oxitec has conducted field trials internationally—and has attempted to conduct field trials in the United States—of a genetically modified mosquito that can be used to control dengue, Zika, and some other mosquito-borne diseases. In 2016, a report commissioned by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine discussed the potential benefits and risks of another strategy, using gene drives. (...) Driving a desired genotype through a population of wild animals or insects could lead to irreversible genetic modification of an entire species. The NASEM report recommends community, stakeholder, and public engagement about potential uses of the technology, and it argues that the engagement should occur as research advances, well before gene drives are deployed. Yet what “engagement” means in practice is unclear. This article seeks clarity on this problem by offering a justification for community engagement and drawing out implications of this argument for the implementation and desired outcomes of community engagement. Community engagement is essential when it comes to research that would release genetically modified insects or animals into the environment. By contrast, obtaining informed consent from people who live near such a proposed field trial is neither necessary nor sufficient. Drawing on the epistemic and moral arguments for deliberative democracy, I propose two discrete mechanisms of community engagement: community advisory boards and deliberative forums, neither of which has been systematically incorporated into research governance. The proposed mechanisms would engender respect for persons who live near field trials, even when the results of deliberation override some individuals’ preferences. Community engagement foregrounds the community in our thinking about humans’ relationship to nature, and it implies that deciding to release genetically modified insects or animals into the wild ought to be a collective decision, not one made by product developers, policy-makers, private companies, research funders, or scientists alone. (shrink)

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, is considered by many to be the most significant healthcare overhaul since the 1960s, but part of its promise — improvement of population health through requirements for non-profit hospitals to provide “community benefit” — has not been met. This paper examines the history of community benefit legislation, how community benefit dollars are allocated, and innovative practices by a few hospitals and communities that are addressing primarily non-medical factors (...) that influence health such as social disadvantage, attitudes, beliefs, risk exposure, and social inequalities. (shrink)

In this article we argue that the emergence of a new form of organization – community enterprise – provides an alternative mechanism for corporations to behave in socially responsible ways. Community enterprises are distinguished from other third sector organisations by their generation of income through trading, rather than philanthropy and/or government subsidy, to finance their social goals. They also include democratic governance structures which allow members of the community or constituency they serve to participate in the management (...) of the organisation. Partnerships between corporations and community enterprises therefore raise the possibility of corporations moving beyond philanthropic donations toward a more sustainable form of intervention involving long-term commitments to communities. At the same time they change substantively the nature of any collaboration by allowing relationships to proceed on the basis of mutual advantage, thereby broadening their appeal and scope. In doing so, partnerships build capacity and enfranchise communities in a way that avoids the paternalism that has traditionally characterised relationships between corporations and voluntary sector organisations. Power relations are transformed because partners are seen as sources of valuable assets, knowledge and expertise, rather than recipients of patronage or charity. (shrink)

Despite US policy documents which recommend that in areas of environmental risk, interaction between scientific experts and the public move beyond the so-called “Decide, Announce, and Defend model,” many current public involvement policies still do not guarantee meaningful public participation. In response to this problem, various attempts have been made to define what counts as sufficient or meaningful participation and free informed consent from those affected. Though defining “meaningfulness” is a complex task, this paper explores one under-examined dimension that concerns (...) the relationship between consent and the idea that citizens should be sufficiently informed: epistemic capacity. This paper will look at some of the work on meaningful participation and consent, give a definition of epistemic capacity, and argue that only a community with sufficient epistemic capacity can have the understanding and competence to give informed enough consent and thus participate meaningfully. (shrink)

This article argues against the concept of integration as the main mechanism allowing various sociocultural groups to live together and instead proposes ‘radical inclusivity’ as a better, less oppressive model of a pluralistic society. Through analytical and reflective research on the non-cohesion-based approach to integration or inclusion, this article is devoted to examining the affordances and limitations of integration through various forms of spatial interventions. As an example, we will discuss the Ellesmere Green Project in Sheffield (UK) as a typical (...) small urban regeneration executed in a highly diverse part of Sheffield. This piece aims to bring forward the significance of moving beyond the community-as-cohesion model in urban politics and planning for integration. (shrink)

Community shared agriculture is a concept that brings food producers and consumers together in a relationship that supports values associated with sustainable agriculture, community development, and food security. At the heart of the concept is the notion of sharing. Participants share the real costs of food production through fair prices for the farmer and by assuming part of the risk of poor harvests. They also share the rewards that come through a seasons supply of fresh produce, the development (...) of fellowship, and the knowledge that they are part of an effort to “think globally, act locally.”. (shrink)

Conventionalists hold that the sorts of events that one survives—such as teletransportation, or a brain transplant—is at least partly determined by our attitudes. But if Conventionalism is true, whose attitudes directly determine whether one survives? Do the individual's attitudes do all the work as Private Conventionalists hold, or do the community's attitudes also factor in as Public Conventionalists hold? There has recently been a greater push towards Private Conventionalism, while explicit arguments for Public Conventionalism are difficult to come by. (...) In this paper, I attempt to rectify the situation by presenting my case for Public Conventionalism. (shrink)

Esta contribución teórica propone una reflexión abierta sobre la incertidumbre, tan presente en los debates sociales y educativos contemporáneos, y sobre el valor que puede tener para el bienestar de las personas y las comunidades aprender a habitar esas «incertidumbres». Percibir diferentes alternativas antes de tomar una decisión, encontrarse perdido ante la ambigüedad de alguna información y sentir desorientación frente a la complejidad, son características de esta escurridiza «incertidumbre» (Barreneche, Santi, 2022). La incertidumbre puede ser percibida de forma negativa si (...) provoca miedo, preocupación, ansiedad, percepción de vulnerabilidad (Hillen et al., 2017) o de forma constructiva si aparece como un motor vital para la investigación (Tauritz, 2019). La comunidad de indagación filosófica (CPI) -tal y como se conceptualiza y promueve en el plan de estudios de la Philosophy for Children (P4C) - se convierte en un «entorno de creatividad seguro» (Weinstein, 2016), en el que aprender a habitar la incertidumbre. Una IPC que improvisa (Zorzi, Santi, 2023), desarrolla y hace conscientes disposiciones hacia la incertidumbre, aprendiendo a ver las alternativas como un recurso, las ambigüedades como horizontes creativos de sentido, y la complejidad como una actuación colectiva a experimentar. Seis dimensiones de la improvisación – (1) respeto a las diversidades, (2) confianza en las posibilidades, (3) construcción de un sentido de comunidad, (4) actitud de apertura a los cambios, (5) actitud exploratoria, (6) pasión creativa, surgidas de otras investigaciones previas (Zorzi et al., 2019), se proponen para orientar la formación de facilitadores y CdI, dialogando con los «nueve momentos recurrentes de desequilibrio» sugeridos por Karin Murris (2008). (shrink)

Over the past four decades, I have been asked many questions regarding the substance and methodology of my essay “Person and Community in African Thought”. I cannot in the space of these pages retrieve or reframe the content and implications of these several questions and it would be fool-hardy to attempt an answer to all of them here. But that is no reason not to try to say a few things, by way of additional commentary, on the occasion of (...) this retrospective on the essay. It would be helpful to proceed by concentrating on a few issues which have been of some concern, or interest, to readers over the years, adding a response, however brief, as I go along. Keywords: Community, Personhood, Descriptive Metaphysics Africa Philosophy Human Person. (shrink)

Toleration, freedom of thought and liberation from social and intellectual convention have long been recognised as the basic tenets of Enlightenment thought and social morality. In the political sphere, the response of radical social criticism to these ideals led to the emergence of revolutionary claims of egalitarian social justice - the Enlightenment as forerunner of the Revolution. But do we need revise our understanding of Enlightenment political thought? In this volume, eleven scholars examine how Enlightenment political and literary concerns work (...) in different cultural and linguistic contexts; appraise Enlightenment reflection on interstate relations, political morality and religious toleration; and look at the challenges posed by eighteenth-century radicalism and republicanism to the organisation of public life. In analysing the theories underpinning Enlightenment political thought, they provide a searching re-examination of the concepts of republican polity and national community and trace the emerging international theory in eighteenth-century Europe and North America. (shrink)

Effective community engagement is an important legal, ethical, and practical prerequisite for conducting field trials of genetically modified mosquitoes, because these studies can substantially impact communities and it is usually not possible to obtain informed consent from each community member. Researchers who are planning to conduct field trials should develop a robust community engagement strategy that meets widely recognized standards for seeking approval from the affected population, such as timeliness, consent, information sharing, transparency, understanding, responsiveness, mutual understanding, (...) inclusiveness, and respectfulness. Additional research is needed on the effectiveness of different methods of engaging communities in field trials of genetically modified mosquitoes and how to respond to public opposition to genetically modified organisms. For research programs involving the genetic modification of disease vectors to move forward, they must have public acceptance and support, which cannot be achieved without effective community engagement. (shrink)

In academic research, many attempts have been undertaken to legitimize corporate community involvement by showing a business case for it. However, much less attention has been devoted to building understanding about the actual dynamics and challenges of managing CCI in the business context. As an alternative to existing predominantly static and top-down approaches, this paper introduces a social movement framework for analyzing CCI management. Based on the analysis of qualitative case study data, we argue that the active role of (...) employees pressuring for CCI policies and practices, as well as the organization audience responses to their efforts, are at the core of the challenges involved in managing CCI. These challenges also pose limits to how far CCI can be extended to a “business as usual” activity. (shrink)

We conducted and analyzed qualitative interviews with 12 persons working on the Healthy Public Housing Initiative in Boston, Massachusetts in 2001. Our goal was to generate ideas and themes related to the ethics of the community-based participatory research in which they were engaged. Specifically, we wanted to see if we found themes that differed from conventional research that is based on an individualistic ethics. There were clearly distinct ethical issues raised with respect to projects and individuals who engage in (...) community-based collaborations. The differences that arose from the interviews were seeking equality between the partners, the need for the community partner to defend the community, dealing with unflattering data, meeting community expectations and producing tangible benefits to the community. (shrink)

The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) is today recognized as one of the most important twentieth-century thinkers about scientific knowledge and scientific community. Yet Polanyi's philosophy of science exhibits an unresolved tension between science as a traditional community and science as an intellectual marketplace. Binding together these different models was important for his overall intellectual and political project, which was a defense of bourgeois liberal order. His philosophy of science and his economic thought were mutually supporting elements (...) within this political project. Polanyi's intellectual corpus formed a contradictory unity, the tensions within which were manageable only under particular historical conditions. His attempt to hold together traditional authority and the free market fit with, and derived plausibility from, the social conditions under which his philosophical work came to maturity: Keynesian class compromise and surviving habits of social deference within postwar Britain. (shrink)

I attempt to vindicate our authority to create new practical reasons for others by making choices of own own. In The Doctrine of Right Kant argues that we have an obligation to leave the Juridical State of Nature and found the state. In a less familiar passage in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason he argues for an obligation to leave what he calls the Ethical State of Nature and join together in the Moral Community. I read both (...) texts as addressing and trying to resolve a tension between our individual freedom and our authority to make claims on one another. I explicate the political argument, and then develop the view that Kant sketches in the Religion, arguing that regarding others as capable of making choices that give you reasons to act is a condition of the full exercise of your autonomy. (shrink)

We draw upon the attention-based view of the firm to identify the conditions under which community influentials (CIs) on a board impact a firm’s corporate social performance (CSP). We test our hypotheses with a panel data set of Fortune 500 firms from 2004 to 2008, including 3,955 unique firm–director combinations (aggregated to the board level). Although CIs are often considered less powerful directors, we identify that when the firm is experiencing poor CSP, CIs have a positive effect on CSP. (...) The ability of CIs to influence CSP is also conditional on the access of CIs and other board members to socially oriented board ties. Our article points out that power and influence is contingent on the decision context and the relative knowledge of organizational players, and that players with relatively lower power may improve their status and command attention when they can offer exclusive insight into important issues. (shrink)

Errors have been the concern of providers and consumers of health care services. However, consumers' perception of medical errors in developing countries is rarely explored. The aim of this study is to assess community members' perceptions about medical errors and to analyse the factors affecting this perception in one Middle East country, Oman.

In spite of many and varied concerns that the processes of institutional ethical review are flawed, cumbersome, and in need of reform, these processes do provide effective protection in certain sit...

Reciprocity theory (RT) and costly signaling theory (CST) provide different explanations for the high status of pro-community altruists: RT proposes that altruists are positively and negatively sanctioned by others, whereas CST proposes that altruists are attractive to others. Only RT, however, is beset by first- and higher-order free rider problems, which must be solved in order for RT to explain status allocations. In this paper, several solutions to RT’s free rider problems are proposed, and data about status allocations to (...) Ecuadorian Shuar pro-community altruists are analyzed in light of RT and CST. These data confirm that perceived pro-community altruists are indeed high status and suggest that (1) community residents skillfully monitor the altruism of coresidents, (2) residents who engage in opportunities to broadcast desirable qualities are high status only to the extent that they are considered altruistic, and (3) individuals who sanction coresidents based on coresidents’ contributions to the community are themselves relatively high status. To a greater extent than CST, RT straightforwardly predicts all of these results. (shrink)

Social embeddedness, defined as the interaction of economic activities and social behavior, is used in this study as a conceptual tool to describe the growing phenomenon of food community networks (FCNs). The aim in this paper was to map the system of relations which the FCNs develop both inside and outside the network and, from the number of relations, it was inferred the influence of each FCN upon the formation of new socially embedded economic realities. A particular form of (...) FCN was taken under consideration: solidarity purchase groups (SPGs). Performed with the aid of social network analysis on a sample of SPGs in Sicily (a region in southern Italy), the study allowed us to identify a relational (internal) social embeddedness, in which groups of consumers and farmers are directly influenced by reciprocal interactions, giving rise to more or less numerous links of reciprocity and trust depending on the number of interactions. It was also identified a structural (external) social embeddedness, generated by the nature of relations that the SPGs undertake with the various social actors. From the results of our analysis it emerges that SPGs lie at the intersection of many social realities, influencing them and in turn being influenced by such realities. We highlight the major role played by consumer and environmental associations in affecting the phenomenon of social embeddedness. (shrink)

Community engagement and participatory research have been appropriately employed to increase the relevance, rigor, and acceptability of all types of research, but these approaches may be particularly important in genomics and biomedical research on sensitive traits such as neurodevelopmental, psychiatric, and behavioral ones. Here, we provide an overview of past and ongoing efforts in community engagement in genomics studies and consider successes and opportunities for further improvement. Informed by this knowledge as well as one of the author's experiences, (...) we set out a vision for a more equitable and collaborative genomics where wider communities, including social, ethnic, and other communities that share a particular trait, are included in the research as peers and collaborators, not solely as objects of study. (shrink)

The conventional community sports facility allocation methods have high minimum costs, and a new community sports facility allocation performance optimization method is designed based on a linear programming model in order to reduce the performance capital investment. The standardized community sports facility allocation performance objective function is established, and a pairwise model is built to divide the feasible and optimal solutions, and the feasible solutions and their constraints are found out. Establish a community sports facility configuration (...) performance optimization model, delineate the boundaries of the optimal solution by bifurcation, and set the feasible domain of the performance optimization model. The performance optimization algorithm is designed to improve the speed of community sports facility allocation performance optimization. In the experiment, the method is compared with data-driven method, digital management method, and evolutionary game algorithm, which requires less capital investment in spring, autumn, and winter than digital management method and evolutionary game algorithm, and the minimum capital investment in summer is less than the other three methods. From the above experimental data, it is clear that the performance optimization method has the smallest minimum capital investment and achieves the purpose of reducing the input cost. (shrink)

We identified nearly 180 Black women who earned medical degrees prior to the start of the Second World War and found information regarding their family and social connections, premedical and medical educations, and internship experience or lack thereof for many of these women. Through their collective history, we observed large-scale trends, especially regarding the importance of “separatist” medical education and declining medical school attendance among African American women in the 1910s as medicine became an increasingly exclusionary profession. While our research (...) uncovered trends specific to Black women physicians, the implications of our research can be applied far more widely to other historically marginalized scientific practitioners. This research reminds us of the longstanding and shifting presence of Black women in science and medicine, despite the enduring popular belief that white men represent who participates in science, both historically and today. (shrink)