This paper examines the e¤ects of social ties on governance. Social ties are per se neutral and merely act as incentive bridges that transmit incentives between individuals. Whether such transmission of incentives improves or undermines governance depends on the particular incentives transmitted. We demonstrate this through a delegated monitoring model where the supervisor is friends with the a...

During the late-Victorian period, campaigns to "reform" middle-class women's dress were grounded in discourses on health, eugenics, declining birth rates, comfort, and aesthetics. In Britain, the United States and Germany, organized "dress reform" movements emerged in the latter half of the 19th century, while in Canada the campaign was led primarily by physicians through public health educatio...

Cooperation in social systems such as tax honesty is of central importance in our modern societies. However, we know little about cognitive and neural processes driving decisions to evade or pay taxes. This study focuses on the impact of perceived tax authority and examines the mental chronometry mirrored in ERP data allowing a deeper understanding about why humans cooperate in tax systems. We ...

■ Abstract This chapter surveys sociological approaches to the study of job authority, including theoretical foundations, measurement, and emergence as an important dimension of social inequality. The focus here is mainly on studies of race and gender differences in the determinants of authority and the consequences of race and gender differences in authority for income. Despite significant adv...

Social norms help people self-organizing in many situations where having an authority representative is not feasible. On the contrary to institutional rules, the responsibility to enforce social norms is not the task of a central authority but a task of each member of the society. “The social norms I am talking about are not the formal, prescriptive or proscriptive rules designed, imposed, and ...

This article compares the social settings and teaching organization of two differently structured childbirth education courses in Cagliari, Italy, in order to understand how social processes and contexts work to negotiate authoritative knowledge. Although the explicit goal of both courses was to transmit biomedical knowledge, knowledge based in women's experience nonetheless dominated some cour...

Obedience and disobedience have always been salient issues for both civil society and social psychologists. Since Milgram's first studies on destructive obedience there has not been a bottom-up definition of what obedience and disobedience mean. The current study aimed at investigating the social representations young adults use to define and to co-construct knowledge about obedience and disobe...

Power is at the core of feminist theories of sexual harassment, though it has rarely been measured directly in terms of workplace authority. While popular characterizations portray male supervisors harassing female subordinates, power-threat theories suggest that women in authority may be more frequent targets. This article analyzes longitudinal survey data and qualitative interviews from the Y...