1- Introduction

2- Social networks, social capital, social support and higher education outcomes

3- Method

4- Description of the studies included in the review and major themes

5- Relationship between social networks, social capital, social support and academic achievement in higher education

6- Conclusion and discussion

References

Abstract

Widening higher education participation has resulted in efforts directed towards increasing higher education access. However, inequality in higher education completion continues to exist. Social factors have been found to play an important role in academic achievement. Given the role of social factors, this article examines the academic outcomes of students from a social network, social capital, and social support perspective with a special focus on underrepresented groups in higher education. The article is based on a systematic review of literature where evidence shows that the networks of students including their family, ethnic and religious affiliations, friends, and faculty play a role in academic success. The article details a framework describing how network members of underrepresented groups complement each other with regard to resources offered and contribute to academic success.

Introduction

Widening higher education participation has gained increased political focus globally in recent years, resulting in efforts directed towards expanding higher education access (Marginson, 2016; Osborne, 2003). Indeed, these political reforms have resulted in an increase in the number and diversity of students entering higher education. For instance, in the last ten years, the enrolment of students aged 25–34 years in tertiary education has increased in all OECD countries, with some countries e.g., Australia, Czech Republic, Greece, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland even reporting an increase of over 10% (OECD, 2018). Furthermore, previously underrepresented groups such as students from low social background are now increasingly becoming a part of the higher education system. Nonetheless, disparities in education achievement continue to exist as increased participation within these groups alone cannot guarantee academic success (Crozier, Reay, Clayton, Collinader, & Grinstead, 2008; Marginson, 2016). It is observed that first-generation learners (Müller & Schneider, 2013; OECD, 2018), those with migration background (Ebert & Heublein, 2017) are still at-risk of dropping out of university without obtaining a degree. The achievement gap between students from high and low socio-economic backgrounds can be attributed partly to the differences in family’s resources vis-à-vis finances, academic guidance or information, parental involvement or language skills (Willingham, 2012). Alongside family members, the role of peers and support groups at university also influence academic outcomes. Hossler, Schmidt, and Vesper (1999) highlight the importance of peer support in improving understanding of course materials and clarifying difficult concepts (Gallop & Bastien, 2016). Peer support and networks also determine student’s integration and acceptance in higher education institutions which subsequently affects retention and success (Gallop & Bastien, 2016; Nagasawa & Wong, 1999).

Utopia is a culturally constructed vision of an ideal human condition. Although its contents vary cross-culturally, utopian visions exist across cultures and therefore utopian thinking is a widespread human proclivity. When activated, a utopian vision can engage citizens with their on-going societal processes by activating a motivation to criticize and change the status quo, but may also disengage them from their society, enticing them to wallow in their impossible dream. Utopias animate cultural dynamics – the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time – as a critical part of humanity’s effort to collectively self-regulate our construction of society.

Introduction

Long before Thomas More’s coinage of the term, Utopia, humanity has engaged in utopian thinking. When broadly construed as an imagined ideal way of living, utopianism is discernible in most,ifnot all,human culturaltraditions[e.g. 1–4]. From a psychological perspective, utopia can be understood as a symbolically constructed representation of an ideal human world. It is symbolically constructed because it does not currently exist, but is imagined, represented, and communicated in symbolic forms using language, pictures, or othermaterials.Itis about an ideal, or even perfect,world that humans can potentially live in or perhaps construct. As such, utopia is first and foremost a cultural artefact — a product of human imagination, a potential driver of human striving, and is therefore a significant subject matter for cultural dynamics [5]: investigations on the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time.

Utopia and ideology

Mannheim’s [6] Ideology and Utopia is a classic text that contrasts utopianism to ideology. In his view, ideology is a worldview that maintains the status quo, whereas a utopia is meant to change it. He regarded both as more or less coherent depictions about a societal state, which diverge from the actual state of the society as it is. Mannheim arguably takes what Jost et al. [7] called a critical approach to ideology. Thisis because he regards ideology as serving the function of maintaining the existing social system as highlighted in system justification theory [8,9
], and he suggests that ideology can function to mask the social reality at times. In contrast, he regards utopia as functioning to challenge and alter it. In this sense, utopian thinking can activate what Johnson and Fujita [10] called system change motivation (also see Refs. [11,12]).

Introduction

Methods

Can Childhood Maltreatment Predict Parenting Practices Later in Life?

Mechanisms to Explain Intergenerational Transmission of Maltreatment

Poverty and Structural Disadvantage

Mental Health and Emotion Regulation

Biology of Childhood Abuse From an Early-Life Stress Perspective

Genetic Predispositions and Individual Differences

Epigenetic Embedding of Maltreatment

Epigenetic Inheritance of Maltreatment

Timing of Maltreatment

Methodological Challenges

Discussion

References

Abstract

Parents who experienced maltreatment in childhood may be at an increased risk of presenting abusive or neglectful behavior toward their own children. Research suggests reoccurring patterns of abuse and neglect across generations, but the factors that influence these behavioral patterns are complex and poorly understood. Although abusive or neglectful parenting styles undoubtedly are strongly influenced by social factors (ie, “nurture”), there might be underlying biological components to perpetuating behavioral patterns (ie, “nature”). Importantly, nature and nurture are known to interact in shaping developmental outcomes, and as such should not be considered in isolation. In this review, we examine the evidence regarding the inheritance of abusive and/or neglectful parenting behavior using a transdisciplinary approach. We integrate knowledge of the social and biological science fields on the continuance of abusive and neglectful behavior, as well as the methodological challenges that complicate the interpretation of existing research. Finally, we stress the importance of considering contextual factors of both social and biological research findings concerning the intergenerational inheritance of child abuse and neglect and discuss the potential for early social intervention to disrupt harmful intergenerational patterns.

Introduction

Child maltreatment can have devastating psychological and neurobiological consequences. Major areas in which damage can occur include behavioral and affect regulation, attachment relationships, development of identity and self-esteem, peer relationships, and academic performance and adaptation. Consequences may extend into adulthood and include internalizing and externalizing behavior problems, post-traumatic stress, alcohol abuse, obesity, chronic pain, and sexually transmitted infections, unemployment, poverty, and social assistance usage, as well as impairments in attention, abstract reasoning, working memory, problem-solving, verbal and nonverbal fluency, verbal and nonverbal inhibition, and directed attention. To prevent abuse and neglect and the associated consequences, it is critical to determine all the factors that operate in concert to cause maltreatment. The etiology of child abuse and neglect is generally viewed as complex and multiply determined. Estimates of intergenerational transmission of maltreatment vary widely, underscoring the methodological limitations inherent to studying parenting across generations and the lack of clarity in this field of study (see Table 1). Importantly, existing reviews have only included a focus on either social science research or biological research, and several have given too much weight to methodologically weak studies (see63). The purpose of this article is to review the evidence on the role of childhood maltreatment in predicting later abusive and neglectful behavior in order to identify possible mechanisms and interactions influencing the continuity and discontinuity of harmful parenting practices across generations.

Social theory faces new challenges as society changes. The question is not only if social theory can keep up with –and account for– social transformations, but also if it can avail of social changes (in this case, the current dominance of digital media) in order to reinvent itself. The most attracting features of modern digital resources, such as Big Data, lies on their tools of analysis. But it just might be that the most promising contribution to social theory resides in the epistemological foundations backing these developments and the conceptual tools they can offer to rephrase epistemological issues. In this sense, the function debuggers play with regard to their target programs could shed new light not only on the process of knowledge formation, but also on the process of theory-improvement/ updating. The present contribution intends to show how theory-debugging might work, by taking the sociology of Niklas Luhmann as a target program to be debugged by fractal geometry with the goal of delivering an enhanced version of system theory. It concludes by arguing for the plausibility of describing communication as a natural fractal susceptible of being modelled by some kind of fractal set, and for how communication media are responsible for the fractal structure of communication along sociocultural evolution.

Introduction

Once algorithms were an abstract and weird idea developed by philosophers of mathematics and few people knew about them and what the word actually meant; nowadays it is hard to think of someone who have not heard the word at least once, not to mention the fact that, unlike in the past, algorithms are doing things for us all the time. A data revolution has shaken the world changing in unexpected ways how we interact with other human beings and with this new ecology of artificial forms of intelligence (an interface some call Global Brain (Heylighen and Lenartowicz, 2017)), how we do business, how we teach and how we learn, how we read the news, how we search for information, in short, everything we know, the things we do (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier, 2013) and even the pace of life (Wajcman, 2008). And science, of course, is not the exception. Doing science in an information society brings many questions to the fore. To what extent are Big Data, Data Science, AI, Deep Learning, among others, changing the way science constructs knowledge, (i.e. to put forward and test hypothesis, construct theories and deal with the problem of the nature of knowledge and the foundation of knowledgeclaiming statements, create concepts and objects of knowledge, and so on)? (Berthon et al., 2000; Boyd and Crawford, 2012; Kitchin, 2014; Lash, 2002) Can algorithms make the scientific method obsolete? (Anderson, 2008) Can algorithms substitute humans in the process of abduction by suggesting the researcher an array of emergent patterns out of his data base? Are the new statistical tools of Data Science reinforcing and radicalizing empiricism?

In this article, it is argued that social theory must be renewed to comprehend the new power constellations and new challenges to aesthetic and intellectual ways of life that are being shaped by digital transformation. However, while social theory has to renew its tools in order to grasp previously unknown realities, it also runs the risk of being assimilated into the very process that it seeks to understand, or to assimilate so much of the dominant belief system that it loses its critical and creative potential. The aim of this article is to propose a particular, renewed social theory that consists in a recasting some social theoretic insights to be able to preserve aesthetic and intellectual potentials of critique and negation. Through the lens of this renewed social theory, digital transformation is understood as a form of economic domination, which, as this article shows, is sustained by un-enlightenment, that is, by fraudulent myths and misplaced metaphors.

Introduction

Digital transformation is generally theorized as a process by which social existence is increasingly affected by digital processes, digital tools, and abundance of information (Lindgren, 2017). As a result, a new hybrid world arises, in which experience is constituted by the merging of the physical world with the digital world. In the digital age, digital processes are so deeply embedded in the daily life of information capitalism that people barely realize they interact with devices and operate machines (Van de Boomen, 2014; Lupton, 2015; Turkle, 2015; Hess and Davisson, 2018). It is evident that hermeneutic social theory needs to take digital transformation into account (Ossewaarde, 2018; Schroeder, 2018). A renewed hermeneutic social theory is necessary to understand the new age initiated by digital technologies and algorithmic modernization. “Classical” social theory arose in a context of industrialization, where the pervasive effects of automatization were known but those of digitalization were as yet unknown. Given the transformation of the industrial context, hermeneutic social theory has to renew its tools in order to grasp previously unknown realities (cf. Fuchs, 2017a). However, in this process of renewing, hermeneutic social theory runs the risk of being assimilated into the very process that it seeks to understand, or to assimilate so much of the digital age’s dominant language and belief system that it loses its poetic sensibility and its critical, interpretative, and creative potential. In order to understand the “digital transformation of social theory”, it is argued in this article, that digital transformation is, to a high extent, a Silicon Valley-driven process that impacts on hermeneutic social theory’s intellectual potentials. It must be emphasized that the type of social theory that is discussed, and renewed, in this article is a particular social theory that has emerged from the Weberian and hermeneutic traditions. In what follows, the argument of this paper is constructed in seven steps.

Moral dialogues are one mechanism of cultural change, allowing communities to resolve conflicts and revise the fundamental norms and values governing their members’ relationships. This essay illustrates the moral dialogue process with the debates over sexual harassment in the Trump era. Victimized women launched a transnational “megalogue” that pervaded politics, business, entertainment, academia, and other spheres. It transformed norms, institutions, and enforcement of acceptable behavior in employment and in public, resulting in a new shared moral understanding. However, the fact that the President is not punished for immorality demonstrates that normative change ultimately requires the rule of law.

Amitai Etzioni’s essay on “Moral Dialogues” – the social processes through which people form new shared moral understandings – emphasizes the necessary norms and values that underlie social interaction and community cohesion. Social relationships are the purview of the discipline of sociology, especially its Durkheimian tradition. The cultural andmoralmotivations for engagement with others contrast with the self-interest foregrounded in economics and with the coerced conformity stressed in political science and the law. Sociologists maintain that people comply voluntarily and even at their own expense if they believe that norms are legitimate and just. While justifications of behaviour may be both practical and moral, they also have emotional valence. Much psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience report that social emotions like compassion, gratitude, and pride are more powerful motives than material rewards. We help others because it feels “right,” not because we expect reciprocity. And we often regulate our behaviour more in response to informal social sanctions such as ostracism, shaming, and ridicule than to legal or economic penalties for noncompliance. Yet socialization into a culture and internalization of shared values are never complete. Values may be rejected, and rules challenged. Diverse subcultures and behavioural patterns persist. Conflicts erupt, disturbing consensus. Cultures are neither monolithic nor static. Assuming they are so has led many a communitarian into trouble. Etzioni’s essay does seem to assert that societies rest upon an identifiable if unnamed set of core moral values, while admitting a modicum of pluralism or multiculturalism. Even if such core values could indeed be enumerated, they are not forever fixed. Etzioni points to one reason why: culture changes through a process that he calls “moral dialogue.”

Introduction

Grounding and shared reality in dyadic context

Cultural transmission beyond dyad

Collective common ground, collective shared reality, and cultural dynamics

Emotion in cultural transmission and shared reality

Conclusion

References

Abstract

Micro cultural dynamics are concerned with the mechanisms of transmission, retention, and modification of cultural information in social networks. When interacting individuals mutually recognize that they share psychological reactions to given cultural information, it may be grounded as an aspect of their shared reality under specifiable conditions. The interpretation of cultural information as socially verified shared reality provides a basis for further dissemination of the information and coordinated social action. We review the recent literature that supports this general contention, while highlighting the role of emotion – a somewhat under-recognized aspect of shared reality research – and emphasizing the mediating role of cultural dynamics in the mutual constitution of social reality and shared reality.

Introduction

Culture is a set of available information that is transmitted non-genetically in a human population. The social transmission of cultural information between individuals in situ is central to cultural dynamics – the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time. Interpersonal communication, as a type of cultural transmission, is critical for the establishment of shared reality. In this paper, we will spell out the ways in which shared reality is implicated in cultural transmission and therefore in cultural dynamics. Cultural transmission is composed of four subprocesses: production, grounding, interpretation, and memory. Individuals produce a communicable representation of cultural information, ground it to the common ground (i.e., add it to the information actually, and perceived to be, shared with their interaction partners), interpret the grounded information (i.e., transform it into a mental representation), and commit it to memory for future use [1]. Of these, grounding establishes mutuality. It occurs when the sender and receiver both recognize that their understanding of the communicated information is sufficiently similar to carry out their joint activity in the context [2, 3]. We argue that shared reality affects cultural transmission by changing the way in which grounded information is interpreted. Specifically, in the presence of shared reality, this information is tagged as socially verified “fact” (Figure 1). Importantly, socially verified information is more likely to spread through social networks (Figure 2). In this way, shared reality links cultural transmission to macro-level cultural diffusion. In this article, we will first review relevant literature to flesh out these propositions and supportive evidence, and then examine the role of emotion in this process.