Social Groups

Inherent components of group life, conflicts include both positive and negative aspects from a psycho-social point of view. They can generate chaos and progress, separation and cohesion. More and more specialists believe that conflict management is as important as the other management functions. We can say that there is no organization without conflicts and no social group without disputes. The present paper tries to identify the modality in which conflicts are born, as well as to present various strategies of conflict resolution, on the basis of a cost analysis generated by conflicts at organizational level.

The paper presents an empirical model of acceptance of mobile phones by elderly people. It is based on an extension of the widely used TAM-Technology Acceptance Model and aims specifically at investigating the relationship among intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to use. The data consists of 740 questionnaires from people over 65 years old. The validated model shows that intrinsic motivations play an important role albeit always mediated by utilitarian motives. Similarly, it emerges a strong influence of the reference social group (children and relatives) in increasing the utilitarian values of the use of mobile phones. These findings suggest that mobile phone usage by elderly might not be, after all, too much different, from a motivational point of view, from that of younger or adult people.

This paper presents a brief overview of findings collected from an ethnographic field study of young people and their use of mobile telephones. The findings indicate that mobile phones provide young people with a means of demonstrating their social networks. That is, through owning and using mobile phones, young people demonstrate their participation in social groupings and define the boundaries of their social networks. Using activity theory, the findings from this research have been interpreted to produce a number of preliminary design considerations. This work reflects the first of several stages aimed at investigating a systematic means of using rich and meaningful qualitative data for the purposes of design.

The Food Security and Agricultural Projects Analysis Unit (ESAF) of FAO has undertaken a number of pilot studies to develop a methodology for understanding why certain groups of people are vulnerable to becoming food insecure. The studies use the sustainable livelihoods approach adopted for food security analysis and are primarily based on qualitative information collection. The objective of these studies is to inform policy and programming decisions for reducing vulnerability to food insecurity. Drawing from these experiences and those of other FAO units involved in similar work, this paper identifies key lessons learnt and makes recommendations for strengthening future work on food security and vulnerability analysis.

PR systems often are credited with producing more equitable outcomes between political parties and encouraging wider social group representation than majoritarian systems. Theory suggests that this should instill greater trust, efficacy, and faith in the political system. We assume that citizens disadvantaged by majoritarian rules (political minorities) will have a relatively greater shift toward positive attitudes about democracy following a

A number of low and middle income countries (LMICs) are considering social health insurance (SHI) for adoption into their social and economic environment or striving to sustain and improve already existing SHI schemes. SHI was first introduced in Germany in 1883. An analysis of the German system from its inception up to today may yield lessons relevant to other countries.