Functionalist accounts of hierarchy, longstanding in the social sciences, have gained recent prominence in studies of leadership, power, and status. This chapter takes a critical look at a core implication of the functionalist perspective – namely, that steeper hierarchies help groups and organizations perform better than do flatter structures. We review previous research relevant to this quest...

Recent research has shown that shame activates both a restore and a protect motive (De Hooge, Zeelenberg, & Breugelmans, 2010), explaining the hitherto unexpected finding that shame can lead to both approach and avoidance behaviours. In the present article we show a clear difference in priority and development of restore and protect motives over time. Our experiment reveals that shame mainly mo...

Collaboration between IT staff and user groups is an enduringly problematic aspect of IS deployment and use in organizations. In this paper we offer an explanation as to why such difficulties persist despite management initiatives designed to eliminate them. We examine how a retail banking organization attempted to improve IT-user collaboration through the creation of an intermediary role calle...

Current debates on the future of European Union tend to privilege statist perspectives according which geopolitical challenges and internal politicization either spur disintegration, or drive EU towards more federalist, centralized externally bounded features. Starting from EU’s multilevel polycentric architecture, this article investigates how far such federalist dynamics reach out task-specif...

Insofar as research into intergenerational social mobility and its mediation via education has had any theoretical context, this has been provided by the functionalist theory of industrial and post-industrial society. However, the inadequacies of this theory have become increasingly apparent, and rather little appeal to it is now in fact made. Yet no alternative body of theory has emerged. I pr...

Formalist and functionalist approaches to language have long been seen as inherently antagonistic, but in recent years this has begun to change, as formalists recognize the influence of language use on linguistic structure, and functionalists provide more explicit models for how this influence operates. The model of tone proposed here is formal in the sense of aiming to provide a completely exp...

We present a structuralist analysis of the current state of cognitive science research into the phenomenon of metacognition. We begin from the assumption that cognitive intelligence is an organ just like any other biological organ, with the defined function of allowing intelligent entities to maintain homeostasis with a changing but predictable environment. This understanding leads to the concl...