Why do people like books, music, or movies that adhere consistently to genre conventions? Why is it hard for politicians to take positions that cross ideological boundaries? Why do we have dramatically different expectations of companies that are categorized as social media platforms as opposed to news media sites? The answers to these questions require an understanding of how people use basic concepts in their everyday lives to give meaning to objects, other people, and social situations and actions. In this book, a team of sociologists presents a groundbreaking model of concepts and categorization that can guide sociological and cultural analysis of a wide variety of social situations. Drawing on research in various fields, including cognitive science, computational linguistics, and psychology, the book develops an innovative view of concepts. It argues that concepts have meanings that are probabilistic rather than sharp, occupying fuzzy, overlapping positions in a “conceptual space.” Measurements of distances in this space reveal our mental representations of categories. Using this model, important yet commonplace phenomena such as our routine buying decisions can be quantified in terms of the cognitive distance between concepts. Concepts and Categories provides an essential set of formal theoretical tools and illustrates their application using an eclectic set of methodologies, from micro-level controlled experiments to macro-level language processing. It illuminates how explicit attention to concepts and categories can give us a new understanding of everyday situations and interactions.

Concepts and Categories: Foundations for Sociological and Cultural Analysis (The Middle Range Series)

Business & Money

Hannan, Michael T.

Pólos, László

Negro, Giacomo

Le Mens, Gaël

Hsu, Greta

Kovács, Balázs

Pontikes, Elizabeth

Sharkey, Amanda J.

Management & Leadership

Columbia University Press

This volume is based on the International Conference Logic at Work, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in December 1992. The 14 papers in this volume are selected from 86 submissions and 8 invited contributions and are all devoted to knowledge representation and reasoning under uncertainty, which are core issues of formal artificial intelligence. Nowadays, logic is not any longer mainly associated to mathematical and philosophical problems. The term applied logic has a far wider meaning, as numerous applications of logical methods, particularly in computer science, artificial intelligence, or formal linguistics, testify. As demonstrated also in this volume, a variety of non-standard logics gained increased importance for knowledge representation and reasoning under uncertainty.

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Under Uncertainty: Logic at Work (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

Computers & Technology

Masuch, Michael

Computer Science

Springer, Verlag

Logics of Organization Theory: Audiences, Codes, and Ecologies

Building theories of organizations is challenging: theories are partial and "folk" categories are fuzzy. The commonly used tools--first-order logic and its foundational set theory--are ill-suited for handling these complications. Here, three leading authorities rethink organization theory. Logics of Organization Theory sets forth and applies a new language for theory building based on a nonmonotonic logic and fuzzy set theory. In doing so, not only does it mark a major advance in organizational theory, but it also draws lessons for theory building elsewhere in the social sciences. Organizational research typically analyzes organizations in categories such as "bank," "hospital," or "university." These categories have been treated as crisp analytical constructs designed by researchers. But sociologists increasingly view categories as constructed by audiences. This book builds on cognitive psychology and anthropology to develop an audience-based theory of organizational categories. It applies this framework and the new language of theory building to organizational ecology. It reconstructs and integrates four central theory fragments, and in so doing reveals unexpected connections and new insights.

Carroll, Glenn R.

Princeton University Press

Building theories of organizations is challenging: theories are partial and "folk" categories are fuzzy. The commonly used tools--first-order logic and its foundational set theory--are ill-suited for handling these complications. Here, three leading authorities rethink organization theory. Logics of Organization Theory sets forth and applies a new language for theory building based on a nonmonotonic logic and fuzzy set theory. In doing so, not only does it mark a major advance in organizational theory, but it also draws lessons for theory building elsewhere in the social sciences.
 Organizational research typically analyzes organizations in categories such as "bank," "hospital," or "university." These categories have been treated as crisp analytical constructs designed by researchers. But sociologists increasingly view categories as constructed by audiences. This book builds on cognitive psychology and anthropology to develop an audience-based theory of organizational categories. It applies this framework and the new language of theory building to organizational ecology. It reconstructs and integrates four central theory fragments, and in so doing reveals unexpected connections and new insights.

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