The Collective Communication of Social Choice Messages

The research problem addressed in this dissertation is to develop a theory of collective communication. Collective communication is defined as social interaction mediated through messages whose production involves a collectivity. The focus of analysis is on social choice messages, messages that prescribe or proscribe the behavior of members of that collectivity. The theory developed here is used to describe the social choice messages necessary to realize common interests in specific economic environments and the collective communication systems necessary to communicate those messages in those environments. The theory of collective communication is developed in four steps. First, a mathematical theory of collective communication is derived from the unification of game theory and information theory. Building upon the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern, Shannon, Ashby and Conant, philosophical foundations are established and nineteen theorems are derived to predict the transmission of information in a basic game and in a metagame whose outcomes describe constraints to be imposed upon strategic behavior in the basic game. Second, this mathematical theory is formally interpreted as a social theory of collective communication. Third, these theorems are applied to a variety of political and social problems, including those of common property resource management, market failure, the provision of public goods, collective action and coordinated action. Finally, the empirical validity of this theory is tested against research on the development of property rights. The set of regulations and statutes governing mining activity in Nevada between 1858 and 1895 is studied using the techniques of content analysis and multiple linear regression analysis. The predicted relationship between the precision of mining law and the value of mine output is found to be strong, with R squares as high as 0.82347. The research instrument is determined to be reliable and the findings to be statistically significant at the 0.01 level. The evidence presented here is limited but sufficient to motivate the continued development of a unified theory of information and games and the use of mathematical modeling to study salient social problems in the collective communication of social choice messages

Plural Rationality and Interactive Decision Processes; Proceedings of an IIASA Summer Study on Plural Rationality and Interactive Decision Processes, Sopron, Hungary, August 16-26, 1984

These Proceedings report the scientific results of the Summer Study on Plural Rationality and Interactive Decision Processes organized jointly by IIASA and the Hungarian Committee for Applied Systems Analysis. Sixty-eight researchers from sixteen countries participated, most of them contributing papers or experiments. The Study gathered specialists from many disciplines, from philosophy and cultural anthropology, through decision theory, game theory and economics, to engineering and applied mathematics. Twenty-eight of the papers presented during the Study are included in this volume

A critical review of the capital investment decision making process

This thesis attempts to untangle the complexities of capital investment decision making by an in depth review and analysis of the literature on the subject which has grown since World War II in discontinuous and widely spread bits. Then, this author tries to weave these isolated threads of knowledge into some kind of comprehensive whole

Rape and "consent to force" : legal doctrine and social context in Victorian Britain

This thesis is an exercise in the historical use of legal analysis. It illuminates the social construction of gender in an era of changing social mores, by relating rape doctrines to demographic, economic, social, and cultural changes. Changes in the rape law of early Industrial Britain (1800-1860) are examined as: 1). results of ideological changes since the eighteenth century; and 2). causes of the creation of Victorian sexual culture. The ideology of “Separate Spheres” for men and women led to a fearful sexual regime which prescribed chaperoning to ensure women’s chastity. Law made women’s avoidance of being alone outside, where they could become prey of strange men, a requirement for sexual respectability, because rape became more difficult to prove.The 1817 rural Midlands murder case of Rex versus Abraham Thornton caused popular controversy because the judge said physical evidence of brutal sex was not inconsistent with consensual sex: the woman could have been “persuaded” by violence: reasonable doubt on the rape meant the accused was presumed to lack a motive to kill the deceased. Thornton was influential on law and gender ideology. “Consent to force”—the idea that a woman could meaningfully consent to sex after violence—was extended in later rape cases. Secondly, even though the public reacted against Thornton’s acquittal, popular culture interpreted it to support “Stranger Danger”—that women risk rape by strangers while out alone, and should remain at home unless accompanied by trusted men. “Consent to Force” and “Stranger Danger” worked at different levels of the social hierarchy. But both served to extend Separate Spheres to working class women.Law undermined traditional mores which had supported the North West European marriage system—late marriage, small age difference between brides and grooms, nuclear family households, and numerous adolescents working in others’ homes as servants, resulting in low rates of premarital births during long courtships. Young commoners had managed a sexual balancing act by engaging in sexual exploration while refraining from vaginal intercourse. Late marriage, very low illegitimacy, and high rates of prenuptial conceptions of first marital births, resulted from young couples engaging in sexual intercourse only when conditions for marriage were right. Young men had to marry pregnant sweethearts, because communities could identify putative fathers.Industrialization threw the North West marriage system out of balance: young men became more mobile and able to evade forced marriage. It also became more difficult for young men, especially artisans, to achieve the status traditionally associated with marriage. This sexual crisis was exacerbated by upper class libertinism spreading to commoner men. The Thornton case promoted libertinism among all men, to allow men of higher class to approach lower class women for prostitution.The moral denigration of lower class women under rape law after Thornton was the flip side of the association of marriage with making wives consent to sex upon demand by their husbands, under Fraternal Patriarchy. Categorizing women as “bad girls” or “good girls” became central to rape law, yet illusory. Lower class women “persuadable” by force were subjected to similar constraints as wives: both were to think selflessly about fulfilling men’s “needs”. Bourgeois wives, like domestic servants, entered lifelong contracts to serve heads of households upon demand. Domestic torts based upon the property right of masters of households to service provided by wives and children, as well as servants, linked treatment of different classes of women. But because lower class women were not marriageable to elite men, their premarital chastity was not considered as valuable. Working class women’s gender value was discounted; working class men were emasculated as potential heads of households, by economic instability interfering with marriage, the displacement of men’s authority over wives to their employers, and the 1834 New Poor Law, which proposed removing wives and children from working class husbands and fathers when they went onto relief. De-gendering of lower class women and men was reflected in the difficulty that lower class men had in obtaining damages for domestic torts. Privileging of the bourgeois with respect to gender contributed to the failure of feminist and labour movements to cement a political alliance. Industrial-era rape doctrines were ultimately applied to all women rape complainants, regardless of class status, and became the basis for the anti-victim rape laws which second wave feminists analyzed and opposed. Modern rape law still presents women with similar challenges, based upon rape myths like Stranger Danger

Bowdoin Orient v.108, no.1-23 (1978-1979)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1970s/1009/thumbnail.jp

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed