Theories of Institutions

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Jupille ◽  
James A. Caporaso
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Work ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Organizational Studies ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Diverse Field ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Temporal Qualities ◽  
Cross Fertilization

The human condition teems with institutions – intertemporal social arrangements that shape human relations in support of particular values – and the social scientific work developed over the last five decades aimed at understanding them is similarly vast and diverse. This book synthesizes scholarship from across the social sciences, with special focus on political science, sociology, economics, and organizational studies. Drawing out institutions' essentially social and temporal qualities and their varying relationships to efficiency and power, the authors identify more underlying similarity in understandings of institutional origins, maintenance, and change than emerges from overviews from within any given disciplinary tradition. Most importantly, Theories of Institutions identifies dozens of avenues for cross-fertilization, the pursuit of which can help keep this broad and inherently diverse field of study vibrant for future generations of scholars.

Narrating Society: Enacting ‘Immigrant’ Characters through Negotiating, Naturalization, and Forgetting

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanne Boersma
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Work ◽  
Immigrant Integration ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Global Perspectives ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Media And Communication

This article scrutinizes how ‘immigrant’ characters of perpetual arrival are enacted in the social scientific work of immigrant integration monitoring. Immigrant integration research produces narratives in which characters—classified in highly specific, contingent ways as ‘immigrants’—are portrayed as arriving and never as having arrived. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork at social scientific institutions and networks in four Western European countries, this article analyzes three practices that enact the characters of arrival narratives: negotiating, naturalizing, and forgetting. First, it shows how negotiating constitutes objects of research while at the same time a process of hybridization is observed among negotiating scientific and governmental actors. Second, a naturalization process is analyzed in which slippery categories become fixed and self-evident. Third, the practice of forgetting involves the fading away of contingent and historical circumstances of the research and specifically a dispensation of ‘native’ or ‘autochthonous’ populations. Consequently, the article states how some people are considered rightful occupants of ‘society’ and others are enacted to travel an infinite road toward an occupied societal space. Moreover, it shows how enactments of arriving ‘immigrant’ characters have performative effects in racially differentiating national populations and hence in narrating society. This article is part of the Global Perspectives, Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

scholarly journals Thinking with attachments: Appreciating a generative analytic

2021 ◽  
pp. 030631272110488
Author(s):  
Marianne de Laet ◽  
Annelieke Driessen ◽  
Else Vogel
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Obesity Surgery ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Dementia Care ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
The Social

Much current work in Science and Technology Studies inflects knowing with care. Analyses of the ethos of objectivity, and of the practices by which objectivity is crafted, have shown that knowing and caring cannot be thought apart from each other. Using case studies from our own work we analyse how, in the sociotechnical relationships that we study, knowing and caring are entangled through ‘attachments’. We appreciate – both in the sense of valuing or respecting and in the sense of evaluating or assessing – how the notion of ‘attachment’ invites re-imagining relations between the social and the technical, between knowers and objects known, and between sociotechnical work and the affective sensibilities that enable, and are brought to life by, such work. Our respective ethnographic engagements with dog-human relations, obesity surgery and dementia care demonstrate that it is agents’ diverse and shifting attachments to technologies and techniques that shape the ways in which bodies, knowledge and practices form. The affects that arise in this process, or so we claim in neo-pragmatist fashion, are not preconditions to, but rather the result of such practices of attachment; rather than a prerequisite, they are an effect of the work of attaching itself. Thinking with attachments recognizes how techno-scientific work builds and shapes passions, aesthetics and sensory experience, allowing us to trace how varied sensibilities to what constitutes ‘the good’ come to be and come to matter in practices of relating between humans, animals and things.

Social Sciences and the Old Testament

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor H. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific

The aim of social scientific criticism, as a subfield of biblical exegesis, is to study the biblical materials as a reflection of their cultural setting. The meaning and/or the social background of the text are thus more fully illumined by the exercise of sociological and anthropological methods and theories. The era of modern social-scientific research began in the late 19th century with the work of Karl Marx, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer. Their social theories created an atmosphere of curiosity about the human condition and advanced the evolutionary perspective that had taken hold with the writing of Charles Darwin. As sociology and anthropology emerged as separate sciences, scholars such as W. Robertson Smith and Louis Wallis adapted their methods (at least comparative and functionalist perspectives) to Israelite history and culture. Despite this early start, there was a hiatus in the use of the social sciences (especially psychology, sociology, and anthropology) in the study of the Bible between 1930 and 1960 as literary, historical-critical, and archaeological approaches (the W. F. Albright School) predominated. However, in the last several decades, building on the earlier works of Max Weber and continuing with the study of Israelite origins by George Mendenhall and Norman Gottwald, social science methods have experienced a revival and burgeoned into a major subfield.

Some Problems in Alfred Schutz's Phenomenological Methodology

1975 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Patrick Peritore
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
Philosophical Foundation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Phenomenological Methodology ◽  
Problem Of Other Minds ◽  
To Come ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Alter Ego

Alfred Schutz created a systematic methodology for the social sciences by integrating sociological concepts derived from Max Weber with the philosophical foundation provided by Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. However, much of the rigor of Schutz's analysis of social life is vitiated by his failure to come to grips with the philosophical problem of “other minds.” Analysis and critique of Schutz's “general thesis of the alter ego” reveal the sterility of either pragmatic or dogmatic use of philosophic concepts in social science conceptualization, and the failure of his methodological system demonstrates the serious epistemological consequences of doing social scientific work without rigorous and radical philosophical foundation.

Bringing Moral Culture into the Fray

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Farrell
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Conflict ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Theoretical Argument ◽  
Moral Culture ◽  
Social Scientific Study ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Basic Level

This introductory chapter briefly presents the conflict in Yellowstone, elaborates on the book's theoretical argument, and specifies its substantive and theoretical contributions to the social scientific study of environment, culture, religion, and morality. The chapter argues that the environmental conflict in Yellowstone is not—as it would appear on the surface—ultimately all about scientific, economic, legal, or other technical evidence and arguments, but an underlying struggle over deeply held “faith” commitments, feelings, and desires that define what people find sacred, good, and meaningful in life at a most basic level. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Towards a Contemporary Philosophy of Islamic Science

1990 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Anwar Ibrahim
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Work ◽  
Single Observation ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Stephen Hawking ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theoretical Physicist ◽  
Islamic Science ◽  
Rational Mind ◽  
Understanding Of Science

Our understanding of science itself as a body of knowledge and as asystem of analysis and research has changed over the last decades, just asover the last two centuries, or especially after the age of Enlightement inEurope, science has become more powerful, more sophisticated and complex.It is rather difficult to determine where science ends and where technologybegins. In fact there is a gmwing awareness that the physical or nam sciences,as a means of studying and understanding nature, are relying on the more“humanistic“ and cultural approaches adopted by the social sciences or thehumanities. The tradition of natural science is being challenged by newdiscoveries of the non-physical and non-natural sciences which go beyondthe physical world.Certainly research is vital for the growth and development of all sciencesthat attempt to discover and understand the “secrets” of nature. The validityof any scientific theory depends on its research and methodological premisesand even that-its proposition or theories (in the words of a leading cosmologistand theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking) -is tentative. Hawlung says: “Anyphysical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis:you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experimentsagree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the resultwill not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theoryby finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions ofthe theory.”The history of Western science is rooted in the idea of finding the ’truth’by objectivity. Nothing can be believed until there is a scientific proof ofits existence, or until it can be logically accepted by the rational mind. Theclassical scenario of scientific work gives you an austere picture of heroicactivity, undertaken against all odds, a ceaseless effort to subjugate hostileand menacing nature, and to tame its formidable forces. Science is depicted ...

Ancient Approaches to Letter-Writing and the Configuration of Communities through Epistles

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thorsten Fögen
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Interpersonal Relationship ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Pliny The Younger ◽  
The Social ◽  
Letter Writer

The chapter explores reflections on the practice of letter-writing, with equal attention to instructional handbooks (esp. Demetrius’ Περὶ ἑρμηνείας‎, Iulius Victor’s Rhetorica, Pseudo-Demetrius’ Τύποι ἐπιστολικοί‎, Pseudo-Libanius’ Ἐπιστολιμαῖοι χαρακτῆρες‎, and Erasmus of Rotterdam’s De conscribendis epistolis) and the meta-generic statements that letter-writers routinely embed in their correspondence (with a special focus on Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, and Pliny the Younger). In both types of sources, what one might call the social dimension of style registers as a primary concern: in order for the letter to fulfil its purpose, namely to generate a special bond between sender and recipient, the chosen idiolect has to be ‘appropriate’ (πρέπον‎/aptum) to the interpersonal relationship and its specific circumstances and exigencies. Shared stylistic values and the willingness of the letter-writer to adjust his character to that of the recipient generate a sense of community between the correspondents.

Reconsidering American Power

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
American Power ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Sponsorship ◽  
To Come

Postcolonial studies, postmodern studies, even posthuman studies emerge, and intellectuals demand that social sciences be remade to address fundamentals of the human condition, from human rights to global environmental crises. Since these fields owe so much to American state sponsorship, is it easier to reimagine the human and the modern than to properly measure the pervasive American influence? Reconsidering American Power offers trenchant studies by renowned scholars who reassess the role of the social sciences in the construction and upkeep of the Pax Americana and the influence of Pax Americana on the social sciences. With the thematic image for this enterprise as the ‘fiery hunt’ for Ahab’s whale, the contributors pursue realities behind the theories, and reconsider the real origins and motives of their fields with an eye on what will deter or repurpose the ‘fiery hunts’ to come, by offering a critical insider’s view.

The Oxford Handbook of Social Networks

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Social Network Analysis ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Information Science ◽  
Computational Social Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
Diverse Field ◽  
The Rich

Social networks fundamentally shape our lives. Networks channel the ways that information, emotions, and diseases flow through populations. Networks reflect differences in power and status in settings ranging from small peer groups to international relations across the globe. Network tools even provide insights into the ways that concepts, ideas and other socially generated contents shape culture and meaning. As such, the rich and diverse field of social network analysis has emerged as a central tool across the social sciences. This Handbook provides an overview of the theory, methods, and substantive contributions of this field. The thirty-three chapters move through the basics of social network analysis aimed at those seeking an introduction to advanced and novel approaches to modeling social networks statistically. The Handbook includes chapters on data collection and visualization, theoretical innovations, links between networks and computational social science, and how social network analysis has contributed substantively across numerous fields. As networks are everywhere in social life, the field is inherently interdisciplinary and this Handbook includes contributions from leading scholars in sociology, archaeology, economics, statistics, and information science among others.

Feudal Europe, 800–1300: communal discourse and conflictual practices

1992 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Science ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Structural Theory ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Fundamental Significance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Scientific Argument

The discipline of international relations faces a new debate of fundamental significance. After the realist challenge to the pervasive idealism of the interwar years and the social scientific argument against realism in the late 1950s, it is now the turn of critical theorists to dispute the established paradigms of international politics, having been remarkably successful in several other fields of social inquiry. In essence, critical theorists claim that all social reality is subject to historical change, that a normative discourse of understandings and values entails corresponding practices, and that social theory must include interpretation and dialectical critique. In international relations, this approach particularly critiques the ahistorical, scientific, and materialist conceptions offered by neorealists. Traditional realists, by contrast, find a little more sympathy in the eyes of critical theorists because they join them in their rejection of social science and structural theory. With regard to liberal institutionalism, critical theorists are naturally sympathetic to its communitarian component while castigating its utilitarian strand as the accomplice of neorealism. Overall, the advent of critical theory will thus focus the field of international relations on its “interparadigm debate” with neorealism.

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