Recent work in cognitive psychology and social cognition bears heavily on concerns of sociologists of culture. Cognitive research confirms views of culture as fragmented; clarifies the roles of institutions and agency; and illuminates supraindividual aspects of culture. Individuals experience culture as disparate bits of information a d as schematic structures that organize that information. Cu...

Most standard social science accounts only offer limited explanations of institutional design, i.e. why institutions have common features observed in many different human groups. Here we suggest that these features are best explained as the outcome of evolved human cognition, in such domains as mating, moral judgment and social exchange. As empirical illustrations, we show how this evolved psyc...

It is argued that there is a disjunction between conservation and modern architectural theories with regards to the concept of space. The argument is developed through a case study, the Casa de Detenção do Recife, a XIX Century listed penitentiary, whose restoration demonstrates how subtle spatial changes can alter building’s properties. The paper concludes by proposing a new approach to archit...

The Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services now administer a variety of social programs that incorporate literacy training. Adult Basic Education (ABE), English as a Second Language (ESL), JOBS, workplace literacy, family literacy, library literacy, and correctional institution education are the primary examples of these programs, but others exist that either provide lite...

Given the extreme importance of improving accountability private social solidarity institutions (IPSS), both for reasons legal compliance and legitimacy notoriety among their stakeholders, in order to be accountable them maintain sustainability, this article aims present a framework designed under more comprehensive research project assessment IPSS accountability, as well preliminary results pi...

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two “quasi-natural experiments” in history, the division of Korea into two parts with very different economic institutions and the colonization of much of the w...

Lin Ostrom’s work constitutes a great step forward in the analysis of social governance. Instead of focusing on the technical characteristics of goods she studies what types of institutions have emerged and how they affect individual motivation and behavior in public goods and commons situations. Her approach represents a careful analysis of institutions often emerging from below. Unorthodox im...