scholarly journals Editorial

Transfers ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Georgine Clarsen ◽  
Gijs Mom
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Innovative Research ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Theoretical Developments

This is the twelfth issue of Transfers, and perhaps it is time to stop calling it a “new” journal! Our “baby” is growing up, thriving in an expanding landscape of interdisciplinary mobilities research. Transfers is maturing into a robust vehicle for global conversations.Our rather ambitious mission has been both conceptual and empirical: to “rethink mobilities” and provide publishing opportunities for innovative research. For us, that has been exemplified in our commitment in several areas. Most importantly, we fly the flag for the new theoretical approaches that continue to move the field beyond the social sciences, where the “new mobilities paradigm” was first articulated. We position ourselves as part of a vibrant intellectual project that bridges theoretical developments and research agendas in the humanities and the social sciences.

scholarly journals Introduction

Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 41-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgine Clarsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Editorial Team ◽  
Innovative Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Theoretical Developments

Transfers seeks to broaden the geographical, empirical, and theoretical reach of mobilities scholarship. Our editorial team especially aims to foster innovative research from new locales that moves our field beyond the social sciences where the “new mobilities paradigm” was first articulated. Th is journal is part of a growing intellectual project that brings together theoretical developments and research agendas in the humanities and the social sciences. Our ambition is to bring critical mobilities frameworks into closer conversation with the humanities by encouraging empirical collaborations and conceptual transfers across diverse disciplinary fields. Th e articles presented in this special section forward those aims in several ways.

Actors

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-52
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Merkel ◽  
Hans-Jürgen Wagener
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Action Theory ◽  
System Change ◽  
Transformation Process ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Subjective Assessments ◽  
Collective Decisions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Transformation Processes ◽  
Empirical Approaches

Methodological individualism is widely accepted in the social sciences as a fundamental theoretical paradigm. In this context, it means attributing collective decisions or societal acceptance to individual behaviour. From the perspective of action theory, the outcome of transformation processes therefore depends less on objective circumstances (structures) or power configurations than on the subjective assessments, strategies, and actions of the relevant actors. As a rule, elites are the predominant actors in political and in economic system change. Since in the transformation process the basic institutions of society are generally reformulated at the negotiating table, much of the attention is centred on negotiation theories that use game-theoretical tools. By contrast to modernization, culturalist, and structuralist theories, actor theories set out from the micro and meso levels of the actors. Different approaches can be discerned. Historical-empirical approaches do not go beyond the description of transformation processes. Economic public choice approaches assume rather simplistic motivational structures of actors. In actor-centred institutionalism, the social sciences find a typical fusion of paradigms: action- and structure-theoretical approaches are combined.

Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Charisma’

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
Maren Freudenberg ◽  
Tim Weitzel
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Social ◽  
Conceptual Debate ◽  
The Individual

The introduction to the special issue on ‘charisma’ offers a very brief overview of the development of the concept in the social sciences and various critiques and intersecting debates. It casts a close look at Max Weber’s sometimes contradictory use of the concept and the different ways he conceptualized it in his sociology of religion and his sociology of domination. It then examines alternative theoretical approaches to ‘charisma’ that emerge in the course of the twentieth century before outlining this special issue’s contribution to the conceptual debate and the individual articles’ operationalization of the term by viewing charisma as relational, communicative, procedural, as well as related to ideas, practices, and objects.

Critical Realism for Ethnography

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant Banfield
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Critical Realism ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Sociological Practice ◽  
Critical Realist ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theoretical Developments ◽  
British Philosopher

While specific applications of critical realism to ethnography are few, theoretical developments are promising and await more widespread development. This is especially the case for progressive and critical forms of ethnography that strive to be, in critical realist terms, an “emancipatory science.” However, the history of ethnography reveals that both the field and its emancipatory potential are limited by methodological tendencies toward “naïve realism” and “relativism.” This is the antimony of ethnography. The conceptual and methodological origins of ethnography are grounded in the historical tensions between anti-naturalist Kantian idealism and hyper-naturalist Humean realism. The resolution of these tensions can be found in the conceptual resources of critical realism. Working from, and building upon, the work of British philosopher Roy Bhaskar, critical realism is a movement in the philosophy of science that transcends the limits of Kantian idealism and Humean realism via an emancipatory anti-positivist naturalism. Critical realism emerged as part of the post-positivist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. From its Marxian origins, critical realism insists that all science, including the social sciences, must be emancipatory. At its essence, this requires taking ontology seriously. The call of critical realism to ethnographers, like all social scientists, is that while they must hold to epistemological caution this does not warrant ontological shyness. Furthermore, critical realism’s return to ontology implies that ethnographers must be ethically serious. Ethnography, if it is to hold to its progressive inclinations, must be about something. Critical realism for ethnography pushes the field to see itself as more than a sociological practice. Rather, it is to be understood as a social practice for something: the universalizing of human freedom.

scholarly journals “Fronteiras dos Movimentos Sociais” / "Frontiers of the Social Movements"

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (20) ◽  
pp. 7-25
Author(s):  
José Eduardo Leon Szwako ◽  
Monika Dowbor ◽  
Matheus Mazzilli Pereira
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Research Networks ◽  
Graduate Studies ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
Academic Production ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Social ◽  
Robust Evidence ◽  
Academic Debate

O adensamento da produção acadêmica sobre movimentos sociais na última década no Brasil, quer nas Ciências Sociais ou ao redor delas, se expressa hoje na consolidação de redes de pesquisa e espaços de debate acadêmico em fóruns como, por exemplo, as últimas edições do Congresso Brasileiro de Sociologia e os encontros anuais da Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação em Ciências Sociais (Anpocs). Junto a tais redes e fóruns, é possível destacar como evidência robusta desse mesmo processo o volume crescente de dossiês temáticos, bem como de artigos publicados em diálogo constante e crítico com abordagens teóricas e autores internacionais. O dossiê ora apresentado se insere nesse ritmo de adensamento, explorando, nesta apresentação e nos artigos a seguir, debates sobre fenômenos e abordagens que, há algum tempo, têm recebido crescente atenção de pesquisas de movimentos sociais, expandindo as fronteiras analítico-conceituais desse campo de estudos e, assim, desafiando-o. AbstractThe intensification in academic production on social movements in the last decade in Brazil, whether within or around the Social Sciences, is expressed today in the consolidation of research networks and spaces for academic debate in forums such as, for example, the latest editions of the Brazilian Congress of Sociology and the annual meetings of the National Association of Graduate Studies in Social Sciences (Anpocs). Along with such networks and forums, it is possible to highlight as robust evidence of this same process the growing volume of thematic dossiers, as well as articles published in constant and critical dialogue with theoretical approaches and international authors. The dossier presented here falls within this pace of intensification, exploring, in this presentation and in the following articles, debates on phenomena and approaches that, for some time, have received increasing attention from research on social movements, expanding the analytical-conceptual frontiers of this field of studies and, thus, challenging it.

scholarly journals The association of thinking styles with research agendas among academics in the social sciences

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
João M. Santos ◽  
Hugo Horta ◽  
Li‐fang Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Thinking Styles ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Agendas

Norms: An Integrated Framework

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 467-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Horne ◽  
Stefanie Mollborn
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Conflict ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Integrated Framework ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Social ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Do So

Norms are a foundational concept in sociology. Following a period of skepticism about norms as overly deterministic and as paying too little attention to social conflict, inequalities, and agency, the past 20 years have seen a proliferation of norms research across the social sciences. Here we focus on the burgeoning research in sociology to answer questions about where norms come from, why people enforce them, and how they are applied. To do so, we rely on three key theoretical approaches in the literature—consequentialist, relational, and agentic. As we apply these approaches, we explore their implications for what are arguably the two most fundamental issues in sociology—social order and inequality. We conclude by synthesizing and building on existing norms research to produce an integrated theoretical framework that can shed light on aspects of norms that are currently not well understood—in particular, their change and erosion.

scholarly journals Participant-driven photo-elicitation in library settings: A methodological discussion

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (125) ◽  
pp. 81-103
Author(s):  
Shailoo Bedi ◽  
Jenaya Webb
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Photo Elicitation ◽  
Research Experiences ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Library Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Library And Information Studies ◽  
Information Studies ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Productive Method

With the current attention in libraries on user-focused services and spaces, there is an increased interest in qualitative research methods that can provide insight into users’ experiences. In this paper, we advance photo-elicitation—a research method that employs photographs in interviews—as one such method. Although widely used in the social sciences, photo-elicitation has seen comparatively little uptake in Library and Information Studies (LIS). Here, we provide an overview of the method, consider epistemological and theoretical approaches, discuss cases of its application in library contexts and examine the benefits of using photo-elicitation for LIS research. We draw on our own research experiences and argue that photo-elicitation is a productive method for learning about the lived experiences of our users and for creating a collaborative approach to library research.

Aesthetics on the Edge

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic McIver Lopes
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Music Literature ◽  
The Relationship

Recent years have seen an explosion of research on the biological, neural, and psychological foundations of artistic and aesthetic phenomena, which had previously been the province of the social sciences and the humanities. Meanwhile, it is a boom time for meta-philosophy, many new methods have been adopted in aesthetics, and philosophers are tackling the relationship between empirical and theoretical approaches to aesthetics. These eleven essays propose a methodology especially suited to aesthetics, where problems in philosophy are addressed principally by examining how aesthetic phenomena are understood in the human sciences. Since the human sciences include much of the humanities as well as the social, behavioural, and brain sciences, the methodology promises to integrate arts research across the academy. The volume opens with four essays outlining the methodology and its potential. Subsequent essays put the methodology to work, shedding light on the perceptual and social-pragmatic capacities that are implicated in responding to works of art, especially images, but also music, literature, and conceptual art.

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