THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE CULTURAL TURN IN THE 1930s USDA

This article proposes the social sciences consider texture – rather than text − as the important legacy of the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences. The article considers texture in the literal sense of surface-patterns, as well as texture as a metaphor for the ‘dynamic’ and hard-to-capture qualities of social life. The article draws on the philosopher Stephen C. Pepper and the anthropologist Tim Ingold, the ‘practice turn’ in organizational studies and recent developments in geography and cultural research to map out different textural frameworks. While sociologists have lagged behind their counterparts in other fields in embracing a textural sensibility, the article considers the writings of Georg Simmel and the Yale School of Cultural Sociology as prominent exceptions to that rule. The article concludes by encouraging sociologists to consider the textural as a way into a ‘theoretical’ – as against a purely ‘methodological’ conception – of the qualitative.

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Four Ways to Measure Culture: Social Science, Hermeneutics, and the Cultural Turn

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195377767.013.4 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Craig Rawlings ◽

John Mohr

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Data Analysis ◽

Text Analysis ◽

Formal Models ◽

Measurement Models ◽

The Social ◽

Different Types ◽

Before And After ◽

Measurement Practices ◽

Cultural Turn

This article considers four of the ways in which measurement practices have been applied to create formal models of culture in the social sciences. It first examines the nature of formal measurement models in the social sciences and compares this mode of scholarship to more hermeneutic styles of research, paying attention to debates over method in the social sciences before and after the cultural turn. It then discusses four different types of formal (measurement) models that have been especially important to the cultural sciences over the last century: pre-cultural turn/non-hermeneutic, pre-cultural turn/hermeneutic, post-cultural turn/non-hermeneutic, and post-cultural turn/hermeneutic. It also cites an exemplar figure for each model, namely, Alfred Kroeber, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paul DiMaggio, and Harrison White, respectively. Finally, it revisits the problem of how to conceptualize a scientific hermeneutics by comparing the theorization of the practice of data analysis to Paul Ricoeur’s theorization of the practice of text analysis.

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Agency, identity and personhood in the social sciences

Personhood, Identity and Care in Advanced Old Age ◽

10.1332/policypress/9781447319054.003.0003 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Paul Higgs ◽

Chris Gilleard

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Social Representations ◽

Individual Life ◽

Cultural Framework ◽

The Social ◽

Second Modernity ◽

Cultural Turn ◽

Life Projects

This chapter explores how terms like agency and personhood have been understood within the social sciences. It argues that there has long been a tradition of scepticism to the use of such terms and their status as ‘social realities’ rather than ‘social representations’. More recently, there has been renewed interest in concepts of ‘individualisation’ and ‘reflexivity’ as part of the cultural framework in late or ‘second’ modernity. This cultural turn toward demanding increased autonomy, choice and the necessary reflexivity to choose wisely, the chapter argues, has given the problem of dementia a more critical place in society. Addressing dementia as a particularly powerful threat to the lifelong realisation of individual life projects is a useful framework through which to explore care.

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Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences

10.1017/cbo9780511801938 ◽

2008 ◽

Cited By ~ 88

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

The Social

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What Can We Learn From Factorial Surveys About Human Behavior?

Methodology ◽

10.1027/1614-2241/a000161 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 19-30 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Knut Petzold ◽

Tobias Wolbring

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Behavioral Intentions ◽

Actual Behavior ◽

Full Time ◽

Factorial Survey ◽

Survey Experiment ◽

Intended Behavior ◽

The Social ◽

Survey Experiments ◽

High Level

Abstract. Factorial survey experiments are increasingly used in the social sciences to investigate behavioral intentions. The measurement of self-reported behavioral intentions with factorial survey experiments frequently assumes that the determinants of intended behavior affect actual behavior in a similar way. We critically investigate this fundamental assumption using the misdirected email technique. Student participants of a survey were randomly assigned to a field experiment or a survey experiment. The email informs the recipient about the reception of a scholarship with varying stakes (full-time vs. book) and recipient’s names (German vs. Arabic). In the survey experiment, respondents saw an image of the same email. This validation design ensured a high level of correspondence between units, settings, and treatments across both studies. Results reveal that while the frequencies of self-reported intentions and actual behavior deviate, treatments show similar relative effects. Hence, although further research on this topic is needed, this study suggests that determinants of behavior might be inferred from behavioral intentions measured with survey experiments.

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