Gruppe und Netzwerk — eine begriffsgeschichtliche Rekonstruktion

The essay develops three central arguments. Firstly, while being one of the core concepts of sociology in the early 20^th century, the group concept loses its central position between 1960 and 1970. As a conceptual tool for the understanding of configurations of social relationships, it is increasingly replaced by the network concept. Secondly, the group concept implies bounded social entities. The network concept, in contrast, stresses the unbounded interweaving of social ties and contexts. This allows for a better understanding of the complex social patterns of modernity. Thirdly, groups are special cases of ?involuted“ network structure. Here, a symbolically constructed social boundary becomes the central focus for transaction processes. This also makes for an increased alignment of social relationships within the group. These three arguments are grounded in a historical perspective on the conceptual careers of ?groups“ and ?networks“ in various sociological schools. The essay stresses the dynamics and inner logics of social relationships and resulting configurations (groups being one example) on the meso-level.     

论舆论监督的有效途径

在现代民主法治国家,舆论监督在社会生活中扮演着非常重要的角色。在我国,舆论监督越来越 受到公众的关注,并在推进改革、防止腐败和保护公民权等方面发挥着重要的作用。加强新闻立 法工作,推动舆论监督法治化;完善舆论监督外部环境的制度建设;建立监督主体的自律机制,是 完善这一制度的有效途径。     

Organizations and Pluralist Democracy

The ideal conception of pluralist democracy can be seen as a schematic picture of actual conditions. On the local level - in the municipalities - there are a number of variants of pluralism. If local political systems can be assumed to be of varying character, it stands to reason that the roles of organizations in those sub-systems can also vary.
The following three general conclusions concerning the role of organizations in Swedish municipal politics are supported by our empirical findings:
(1) A heterogeneous pattern of values in a municipality promotes the development of an arrangement in which organizations predominantly assume the role of political opposition.
(2) The interaction between municipalities and organizations is a function of the pattern of local political values. The more heterogeneous this pattern, the more frequent are politically oriented contacts.
(3) Increased overlap of the social, the economic and the political arenas, and a more incrementalist decision-making structure in modern municipalities, creates greater incentives for the formation of organizations.
There should not be any doubt about the fact that the amalgamation reforms contributed to the creation of a more differentiated and multifaced structure of organizations. Hence, it could be said that the amalgamation reforms together with other structural factors are in the long run positively correlated with pluralism!
'Whatever progress may come in the future, anyone attempting today to give a systematic account of organizational behavior, especially of politically relevant behavior, cannot pretend he is offering a theory in any strict sense. At best, he can offer a theoretical perspective, a way of looking at organizations that directs attention persuasively to a few central processes that seem to explain (though not predict, in any scientific sense) a wide variety of phenomena.' (Wilson 1973. 13).     

Color separation in forensic image processing

In forensic image processing, it is often important to be able to separate a feature from an interfering background or foreground, or to demonstrate colors within an image to be different from each other. In this study, a color deconvolution algorithm that could accomplish this task is described, and it is applied to color separation problems in document and fingerprint examination. Subtle color differences (sometimes invisible to the naked eye) are found to be sufficient, which is demonstrated successfully for several cases where color differences were shown to exist, or where colors were removed from the foreground or background. The software is available for free in the form of an Adobe Photoshop-compatible plug-in.