XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

846

The Sociocybernetics of Cultural Transmissions and Transformations

RC51 Sociocybernetics (host committee)

Language: English

This session invites papers, empirical and/or theoretical, that address issues concerning cultural transmissions and transformations using sociocybernetic methodologies and concepts. Here, by “culture” is meant the attitudes and values, often tacit, of a particular collective or community as expressed in individual behaviours, interactions and productions of “artefacts” in the broadest sense (for example, encompassing spoken and written texts and other symbolic forms and found or constructed concrete objects) . It is intended to be distinguished from “social institutions” that are explicitly constructed to guide and control said behaviours and interactions.

Possible topics to be addressed include:

• Conceptions and definitions of “culture”.
• Case studies of cultural transmission and transformations, including historical examples.
• Relations between culture and “personality” and other individual differences.
• Interactions between different cultures, including studies and commentaries on what some authorities refer to as the so-called “clash of civilisations” and others as “intercultural conversations”.
• Culture and exposure and susceptibility to “counterknowledge” (pseudohistory, pseudoscience, pseudomedicine).
• Attempts to change culturally transmitted attitudes and behaviour (for example: counterterrorism, rehabilitation of criminals, alienation and problems of mental health).
• Reflections on and critical appraisals of the culture of the sociocybernetics community itself and its similarities and differences with other disciplinary groupings and “communities of practice”.