| English term or phrase: structured organic whole | Legal theory teaches us that all contractual relationships are binary in nature. For example, an employee signs a contract with an employer, a firm merges with another firm, a firm purchases an asset from another firm, etc. In all cases the law recognizes two and only two parties to a transaction, even when one of those parties is a corporate body. Similarly, one does not tax a group of people, one taxes individuals. One does not tax the owners of a firm as a group, one taxes the individual stock holders. This same line of thinking can be applied to those who work within a firm. For example, a worker who surrenders his desk to another worker, or who receives tea from a another colleague as an expression of goodwill.
Other social sciences and the biological sciences take umbrage with these reductive dichotomies and view social relationships in a far more complex manner. For example, in economics one speaks of demand and supply, production and cost functions, and industrial structure. Anthropology often treats social relationships as a structured organic whole in which ideas and behaviour are shared among many simultaneously. Chaos theory, a biological concept, is often rejected by social scientists, because human beings differ from their animal counterparts insofar as they have memory. Notwithstanding, electronic bulletin boards tend to be chaotic and as result can easily be described using chaos theory.
I will stop here and pick up tomorrow morning (Hong Kong time) to review the response. Please keep in mind for those of you who wish to begin their own thread on this subject that my language pairs are G to E, F to E, J to E, and E to E.
G = German
F = French
J = Japanese
E = English
By the way, I do not own a car, I travel by bus, train, plane, and taxi depending on the destination and time required for travel. I have rented a car and even a truck on occasion, but these were dichotomous transactions and were lacking in the social atmosphere usually found in buses, trains, and planes. |
| Roddy StegemannKudoZ activityQuestions: 666 ( 4 open) ( 6 without valid answers) ( 3 closed without grading) Answers: 1221
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