Week8(3/6)
“Exercise of Human Agency Through Collective Efficacy.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 2000. (Albert Bandura. )
Perceived efficacy plays a key role in human functioning because it affects behavior not only directly but by its impact on other determinants such as goals and aspirations, outcome expectations, affective proclivities, and perception of impediments and opportunities in the social environment. (75)
In many activities, however, people do not have direct control over social conditions and institutional practices that affect their lives. Under these circumstances, they seek their well-being and security through the exercise of proxy agency. (75)
People do not live their lives in individual autonomy. Indeed, many of the outcomes they seek are achievable only through interdependent efforts. Hence, they have to work together to secure what they cannot accomplish on their own. Social cognitive theory ex- tends the conception of human agency to collective agency. People’s shared beliefs in their collective power to produce desired results are a key ingredient of collective agency. (75)
People’s shared beliefs in their collective efficacy influence the types of futures they seek to achieve through collective action, how well they use their resources, how much effort they put into their group endeavor, their staying power when collective efforts fail to produce quick results or meet forcible opposition, and their vulnerability to the discouragement that can beset people taking on tough social problems.(p.76)
the group outcome is the sum of the attainments produced indi- vidually rather than by the mem- bers working together. Aggregated personal efficacies are well suited to measure perceived efficacy for the latter types of endeavors. (77)
A sense of efficacy does not neces- sarily spawn an individualistic life- style, identity, or morality. If belief in the power to produce results is put to social purposes, it fosters a communal life rather than eroding it. Indeed, developmental studies show that a high sense of efficacy promotes a prosocial orientation characterized by cooperativeness, helpfulness, and sharing.(77)
A collective system with members plagued by self-doubts about their capabilities to perform their roles will achieve little. A strong sense of personal efficacy to manage one’s life circumstances and to have a hand in effecting societal changes contributes substantially to perceived collective efficacy(77)
[Impact of Perceived Collective Efficacy on Group Functioning]
People who believe they can achieve desired changes through their collective voice, and who view their governmental systems as trustworthy, are active participants in conventional political activities. Those who believe they can accomplish social changes by perseverant collective action, but view the governing systems and office- holders as untrustworthy, favor more confrontive and coercive tactics outside the traditional political channels. (78)
Question:
How the social norm one belongs to affects to the perception of efficacy?
If one’s efficacy would be made in a certain environment, how would that influence us?
e.g. If one was raised in an educational environment where surrounded by a perception of hopelessness,
what makes the person aspire for higher education?
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Nature's Metropolis (1991). Chapters 6, 7, Epilogue. (William Cronon,)
【Chapter6】
[Mapping Captal](Through the geopolitical lens)
Moreover, as Chicago grew to metropolitan stature, hundreds of other towns and cities grew with it, becoming part of its hinterland while simultaneously developing hinterlands of their own. (265)
Chicago, and the economic demand it represented, put new pressures on species hundreds of miles away. Its markets allowed people to look farther and farther afield for the goods they consumed, vastly extending the distance between points of ecological production and points of economic consumption. (266)
As the human inhabitants of Chicago's hinterland responded to the siren song of its markets, they simplified local ecosystems in the direction of monocultures. (267)
If it exists in the world at all, it does so only as a multitude of real things and their even more multitudinous relationships to each other. Size and accessibility may have been the abstract features of second nature that placed Chicago atop the regional hierarchy of the Great West. (268)
What gave a large city its influence-what made Chicago a metropolis-was that many small places could communicate more easily with it than with anywhere else. In so doing, they tied the fates of their local ecosystems-their farms, their forests, their rangelands-to the movements of urban markets and the fate of the city system as a whole. (268)
[Credit Flows](Through the economical lens)
Bankruptcy records are particularly useful in showing relations between city and country because so much of the debt they track is commercial in nature. Although one might think that a bankrupt's debts would consist principally of the direct loans one obtains from a bank today-to finance a mortgage, say, or a business expansion-the more common form of debt in the nineteenth century consisted of what one might call commercial paper. (272)
One begins to understand the significance of these patterns if one combines the lists of creditors for all Chicago bankrupts who shared a particular line of work and examines where they lived geographically. The result is a map of the hinterlands that supplied each major commodity bought and sold in the city. (274)
In economic and environmental terms, we should think of a city and its hinterland not as two clearly defined and easily recognizable places but as a multitude of overlapping market and resource regions. (279)
[The Urban Hierarchy] (Through the sociological lens)
The difference between a high-order metropolis like Chicago and a lower-order town like Peoria or Burlington was not merely Chicago's much larger population. Chicago's high rank meant that its market attracted customers for many more goods and services from a much wider region. The hierarchy of urban settlements is also a hierarchy of markets.
Specialist retailers could carry a narrower line of products because a medium-ranked city-by virtue of its better transportation connections-could draw wealthier customers from a wider area that included smaller towns as well as farms. The more diverse and numerous its customers, the more concentrated and varied its market-and hence the more specialized its shops could become.
Higher rank city enjoys:
Government and affiliated institutions: newspapers, lawyers,
Cultural institutions: Orchestra, Libraries, museum
Decent interest rate
Access to eastern sources of credit
Chicago earned its high rank partly by being a retailer itself, offering its customers a greater variety and number of retail establishments than any other city in the Great West.
[Key terms and figures]
System of Cities：
The location and size of human settlements, but also, implicitly, the subtler web of connections among them.
Central place theory:
Seeks to explain geographic phenomenon:the tendency of human settlements to organize themselves into hierarchies.A few large metropolises link with a larger number of big cities, and each of those links in turn with a still larger number of small towns. Urban populations arrange themselves into rank order by size
【Chapter7】
[The Merchant’s World: Prerailroad]
The marketing institutions he developed during the 1850s were widely adopted by mer chants and manufacturers in many lines of business, so a new culture of buying and selling emerged simultaneously with the growth of Chicago and its hinterland. (318)
Looking back on his ventures of the 1840s, Burrows emphasized how much of his time he had devoted solely to finding a market for the goods he needed to sell.
"My great trouble," he wrote, "was to know where to place the products.There was no Chicago then, not much of a market in St. Louis, and I had to make frequent trips to every landing north of Davenport as far as Fort Snelling,”(320)
But the biggest challenge of being a frontier merchant was undoubtedly the winter. The seasonal cycle that froze rivers and closed down the regional transportation system for almost half the year affected nearly every aspect of a storekeeper's business.(321)
[The Merchant’s World: Postrailroad]
Expansion of railroad consequently influenced significantly to several stakeholders in the region.
Burrows(merchant):
No more need to purchase all of one’s stock in single expedition-quicker cycling of capital-
Allowance of carrying smaller quantities of a variety of goods
Produce merchants who purchase crops from farmers:
Less investment for warehouse facilities→ more people to becoming merchants
With the railroad and the access it gave to Chicago-one needed neither as much wealth nor as much credit to be as successful as Burrows had been in frontier Davenport.”(326)