Social institutions, effects

Clearly, there exist cases where the community is contained within a single company or institution, often for security reasons, though there are cases where the proprietary nature of the research effectively contains the community. Still, I think these are exceptions, and I would argue that, generally speaking, engineering communities span social institutions, such as corporations, universities, and national lines. 

These records we can supplement, but only imperfectly, by a study of legal systems, of the practical principles of politics and public economy, and of religion and superstition in general. For there can be such a vast discrepancy between the law in writing and the law applied, between the principles of rulers and their practice as modified by the will of their subjects, between a social institution in the minds of those who conceive it and the same institution when its provisions are realised in practice, between the religion of books and the religion of the people, between the apparently universal acceptance of a superstition and the support which it can in fact command, that the actual effects may bear no relation whatever to their public and widely known causes. 

Only the last of these rights needs any explanation. The equality which is needed for [this] natural right to exist between men excludes any inequality which is not the necessary consequence of man s nature and of things, and which, in consequence, would be the arbitrary effect of social institutions. So, for example, inequality of wealth is not... 

Most of the eight table- and stage-setting factors in the Bhopal case, discussed above, relate to one or more of these subsystems of the MIC plant s or the broader society s cultural system. Thus, the lack of an idea of preventive maintenance pertains to the Indian ideational subsystem (of both the plant and Indian society) the lack of effective social institutions of zoning and industrial... 

Bringing enormous reductions in avoidable suffering and deaths worldwide, the reform would furthermore be vastly more cost-effective and also be vastly better received in the poor countries than similarly expensive humanitarian interventions we have undertaken in recent years and the huge, unrepayable loans our governments and their international financial institutions tend to extended to (often corrupt and oppressive) rulers and elites in the developing countries. Last, not least, there is the important moral and social benefit of working with others, nationally and internationally, toward... 

Interpersonal behaviour is an interest of many clinical studies and so some questionnaires have been developed. Due to the context of these questionnaires, many of the behaviours are related to interaction in a psychiatric institute setting and only a few of them are free from the limitation of this context and suitable for a non-clinical population. Despite this limitation, two questionnaires have been used in psychopharmacological studies and have shown promising results indicating the effects of antidepressants on social behaviour. 

For a final example, again from the San Francisco Chronicle, Fig. 20 illustrates the increasing social responsibility of industry. Wealthy industrialists have always practiced philanthropy but now we have a business school in a major university presenting formal instruction to business students on how to be an effective philanthropist. The clear implication here is that the support of cultural institutions is no longer an incidental item but an integral part of a business plan. 

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