Why social scientists still need phenomenology

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110643
Author(s):  
Christopher Houston
Keyword(s):  
Social Scientist ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Natural Attitude ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Suspension Of Disbelief ◽  
Do So ◽  
Critical Science

Pierre Bourdieu famously dismissed phenomenology as offering anything useful to a critical science of society – even as he drew heavily upon its themes in his own work. This paper makes a case for why Bourdieu’s judgement should not be the last word on phenomenology. To do so it first reanimates phenomenology’s evocative language and concepts to illustrate their continuing centrality to social scientists’ ambitions to apprehend human engagement with the world. Part II shows how two crucial insights of phenomenology, its discovery of both the natural attitude and of the phenomenological epoche, allow an account of perception properly responsive to its intertwined personal and collective aspects. Contra Bourdieu, the paper’s third section asserts that phenomenology’s substantive socio-cultural analysis simultaneously entails methodological consequences for the social scientist, reversing their suspension of disbelief vis-à-vis the life-worlds of interlocutors and inaugurating the suspension of belief vis-à-vis their own natural attitudes.

Imagination and Art

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Swedberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Basic Knowledge ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the role of imagination and the arts in helping social scientists to theorize well. However deep one's basic knowledge of social theory is, and however many concepts, mechanisms, and theories one knows, unless this knowledge is used in an imaginative way, the result will be dull and noncreative. A good research topic should among other things operate as an analogon—that is, it should be able to set off the theoretical imagination of the social scientist. Then, when a social scientist writes, he or she may want to write in such a way that the reader's theoretical imagination is stirred. Besides imagination, the chapter also discusses the relationship of social theory to art. There are a number of reason for this, including the fact that in modern society, art is perceived as the height of imagination and creativity.

Cycle of Poverty in Developing Countries

2021 ◽  
pp. 126-139
Author(s):  
Opeyemi Idowu Aluko
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Economic Situation ◽  
Economic Cycle ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Cycle ◽  
The World ◽  
The Developed Countries ◽  
Cycle Of Poverty ◽  
Do So

Poverty is no longer fashionable even in the less developed countries of the world. The world has deemed poverty-ridden regions of the world as ‘anathema', forbidden, and ignoble. At the same time ways to get out of the menace are regularly strategised over a period of time. The developed countries of the world had been able to nip poverty to the bud significantly, but the developing countries still have a lot to do so as to overcome the menace. Poverty in the developing countries operates in a cycle of repetitions. This makes it difficult to curtail. How can poverty be reduced in the developing countries? This study reveals the reason while poverty has become a domestic phenomenon in developing countries and the way forward. The theory on poverty is evaluated alongside the present economic situation in Africa. The cycle of poverty, which includes the social cycle of poverty (SCP), political cycle of poverty (PCP), and the economic cycle of poverty (ECP), are examined. This study analyses the strategies to break the cycle of poverty in Africa and other developing countries.

scholarly journals Can social scientists be the change agents for diabetes prevention? Diabetes-related knowledge, attitude, and practice among social scientists

2013 ◽  
Vol 01 (01) ◽  
pp. 032-036
Author(s):  
Raman Shetty ◽  
Biranchi Jena ◽  
Adibabu Kadithi
Keyword(s):  
Social Scientist ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Slow Motion ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Attitude And Practice ◽  
The Social ◽  
Microsoft Office ◽  
Be The Change ◽  
Knowledge Attitude And Practice

Abstract Introduction:Diabetes is an emergency in slow motion in India. There is an urgent need of improving awareness and education on diabetes in the community and the social scientist working in the community health are the important group to make this happen. Objectives:To assess the prevalence of diabetes among the social scientists and measure their knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) on diabetes. Materials and Methods:A delegate of social scientists attending a national conference on social science and health were screened for random blood sugar and a survey was conducted through a structured self-answered questionnaire on KAP in diabetes. Excel Microsoft Office 2010 package was used for descriptive analysis. Results:A total of 245 social scientists attended the conference; of them, 211 (86%) social scientists voluntarily participated in diabetes screening, and among them, 99 (47%) voluntarily responded on KAP questionnaire. Prevalence rate of diabetes among social scientists was found to be 9.5% and the study revealed that the knowledge was fair, attitude was positive, and practice was good among the social scientists working in the field of social health. Conclusion:The social scientists could be the Change Agents for the changing diabetes in the community through appropriate strategies involving them.

The Great Illusion: Ignorance, Informational Cascades, and the Persistence of Unpopular Norms

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Bicchieri ◽  
Yoshitaka Fukui
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Informational Cascades ◽  
Mediterranean Countries ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Choices

Norms of discrimination against women and blacks, norms of revenge still alive in some Mediterranean countries, and norms that everybody dislikes and tries to circumvent, such as the invisible norms of reciprocity that hold among the Iks studied by Turnbull, are all examples of unpopular and inefficient norms that often persist in spite of their being disliked as well as being obviously inefficient from a social or economic viewpoint. The world of business is not immune to this problem. In all those countries in which corruption is endemic, bribing public officials to get lucrative contracts is the norm, but it is often true that such a norm is disliked by many, and that it may lead to highly inefficient social outcomes (Bicchieri and Rovelli 1995).From a functionalist viewpoint such norms are anomalous, since they do not seem to fulfill any beneficial role for society at large or even for the social groups involved in sustaining the norm. In many cases it would be possible to gain in efficiency by eliminating, say, norms of racial discrimination, in that it would be possible to increase the well-being of a racial minority without harming the rest of society. To social scientists who equate persistence with efficiency, the permanence of inefficient norms thus presents an anomaly. They rest their case on two claims: when a norm is inefficient, sooner or later this fact will become evident. And evidence of inefficiency will induce quick changes in the individual choices that sustain the norm. That is, no opportunity for social improvement remains unexploited for long. Unfortunately, all too often this is not the case, and this is not because people mistakenly believe inefficient norms to be good or efficient.

Toward a Theory of State Intervention

1980 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-205
Author(s):  
Ira J. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
Economic Relationships ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Economic

State intervention into the ownership, financing, and regulation of various industries and sectors of the capitalist economy is a phenomenon as old as capitalism itself. In the last 15 years this topic has become a focal point of vigorous interest among social scientists. Given the manifest problems to be found within current political-economic relationships, it is not surprising that a great deal of this attention has been focused on the contemporary scene. Nevertheless, a small number of works have undertaken the explanation of the historical development of state intervention. Unfortunately, the historian in search of explanatory guidance is confronted here with a series of less than comprehensive analyses which move at descriptive and explanatory cross-purposes. The first tasks of the social scientist or historian who wishes to address the development of state intervention therefore must be to classify and clarify the accounts which have been proposed.

Social Scientists and the Point IV Program

1950 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 26-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Omer Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Social Scientist ◽  
Applied Anthropology ◽  
Agricultural Economics ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
Department Of Agriculture ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Farm Population ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sociological Society

The role of the social scientist in the Point IV Program was discussed at a meeting sponsored jointly by the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Sociological Society, during the Annual Conference of the Sociological Society in Denver, September 8, 1950. Chairman of the meeting was Carl C. Taylor, Head, Division of Farm Population and Rural Life, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Discussion: A Sociologist's Point of View

1950 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-149
Author(s):  
W. Rex Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Full Development ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Reverence For Life ◽  
The Individual

The only words in the title of this symposium which do not cause difficulty are “of” and “in,” since even Latin America is a “nomer” that many protest is a “misnomer,” for some parts of the region southeast of the U.S.A., and “pathology” and “democracy” can get into water as hot and deep as any that lies under the thin ice over which the social sciences skate. The very lumping together in our discussion of twenty republics varying as they do in Latin America is a procedure of doubtful accuracy, and one which at first encounter arouses the ire of any good nationalist in these countries. The term “pathological” suggests too strongly a complacent superior attitude on our own part that may befit the propagandist or the naive and uninformed man on the street, but not the social scientist. The world does not fall so neatly into the patterns of perfect democracy and the outer darkness as Mr. Churchill has supposed. Can we not accept a certain relativity in these matters and remember the large-sized mote in our own eye?With the struggle of almost innumerable thinkers to define the direction and goal, we are surely familiar. The writer has no intention of assembling all the definitions available, for if they were all assembled, sociologists might lay the emphasis not upon forms and constitutions so much as upon something broader that earlier theologians would have called men's will and men's love. Since the development of “Mr. Tylor's science,” cultural anthropology, we would be more likely to say that the legal arrangements grow out of and express the culture; that back of them lies a slow secular growth of the idea that personality, the freedom and full development of the individual are ultimate values, not to be sacrificed to the state; that power may be necessary for survival, and that unity or consensus or conformity may be necessary to power, but that something like Albert Schweitzer's “reverence for life” is a deeper principle. These things are no sooner said than we realize that we often sin against the ideals we cherish and fear the freedom to which we give lip-service. The practice falls far short of the preaching.

scholarly journals Globalization, Class and Culture in Global Systems

2000 ◽  
pp. 636-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
Global Age ◽  
The World ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
Global Systems ◽  
Proper Account

The work of Immanuel Wallerstein has been criticized by certain anthropologists for not having taken culture into proper account. He has been accused of the sin of political economy, a not uncommon accusation, a re?ex of the 80’s and post-80’s anthropological jargon that might ?nally today be exhausted. Years earlier a number of social scientists were engaged in a critical assessment of the social sciences from a distinctively global perspective. Wallerstein, Frank and others were at the forefront of this critique which had a powerful impact on anthropology. The global perspective was not a mere addition to anthropological knowledge, not a mere of extension of the use of the culture concept, i.e. before it was local and now it is global, before culture stood still, but now in the global age, it ?ows around the world. It was a more fundamental critique, or at least it implied a more fundamental critique. This critique could only be attained from a perspective in which the very concept of society was re-conceived as something very different, as a locus constructed within a historical force ?eld which was very much broader than any particular politically de?ned unit.

scholarly journals Pierre Bourdieu: Un auto-análisis no biográfico

2017 ◽  
pp. 251
Author(s):  
Franck Poupeau ◽  
Hugo José Suárez
Keyword(s):  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
The Self ◽  
Track Record ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

ResumenEn el artículo se recorre la trayectoria social de Pierre Bourdieu, intentando cruzar posición, contexto y obra.  Se aborda su estancia en Argelia, su regreso a Francia y el campo intelectual de los años 60; sus iniciativas académicas e implicanciones políticas en las décadas posteriores y, finalmente, su visión del mundo a finales de siglo, con las respectivas tomas de posición e intervenciones del sociólogo. El documento toma como base el Esbozo de un autoanálisis, que fue el libro póstumo de Bourdieu, e intenta, como lo sugiere el propio autor, no construir una biografía sino, más bien, situar una trayectoria en distintos momentos del campo académico y político que le tocó vivir.Palabras clave: Pierre Bourdieu, sociología y política, autoanálisis sociológico.AbstractThe article covers the social trajectory of Pierre Bourdieu, trying to cross position, context and work. Addresses his stay in Algeria, he returned to France in the field of intellectual 60s; implicanciones its academic initiatives and policies in the subsequent decades, and finally, his vision of the world at the end of the century, with the respective positions adopted and public sociologist. The document is based on the outline of the self, which was the posthumous book of Bourdieu, and tries, as suggested by the author himself, not to build a biography, but rather putting a track record at various times throughout the academic and political he lived.Key words: Pierre Bourdieu, sociology and political, sociological self.

scholarly journals Pierre Bourdieu: Un auto-análisis no biográfico

2017 ◽  
pp. 251
Author(s):  
Franck Poupeau ◽  
Hugo José Suárez
Keyword(s):  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
The Self ◽  
Track Record ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

ResumenEn el artículo se recorre la trayectoria social de Pierre Bourdieu, intentando cruzar posición, contexto y obra.  Se aborda su estancia en Argelia, su regreso a Francia y el campo intelectual de los años 60; sus iniciativas académicas e implicanciones políticas en las décadas posteriores y, finalmente, su visión del mundo a finales de siglo, con las respectivas tomas de posición e intervenciones del sociólogo. El documento toma como base el Esbozo de un autoanálisis, que fue el libro póstumo de Bourdieu, e intenta, como lo sugiere el propio autor, no construir una biografía sino, más bien, situar una trayectoria en distintos momentos del campo académico y político que le tocó vivir.Palabras clave: Pierre Bourdieu, sociología y política, autoanálisis sociológico.AbstractThe article covers the social trajectory of Pierre Bourdieu, trying to cross position, context and work. Addresses his stay in Algeria, he returned to France in the field of intellectual 60s; implicanciones its academic initiatives and policies in the subsequent decades, and finally, his vision of the world at the end of the century, with the respective positions adopted and public sociologist. The document is based on the outline of the self, which was the posthumous book of Bourdieu, and tries, as suggested by the author himself, not to build a biography, but rather putting a track record at various times throughout the academic and political he lived.Key words: Pierre Bourdieu, sociology and political, sociological self.

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