Charisma and objectivity

1988 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron A. Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Theory ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
Science Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Relationship

This essay analyzes the relationship between two ideas central to the social sciences and religion: charisma and objectivity. My goal is to interpret a longstanding theoretical dispute regarding objectivity in the social sciences by referring to sectarian charisma and its challenge to the legitimacy of ecclesiastical authority. In illuminating a religious pattern revealed in the confrontation between social science theory and political philosophy, I suggest that objectivity represents a form of ‘secular’ charisma. I describe the cross-cutting relationship between charisma and objectivity and examine both the religious implications of objectivity and the epistemological implications of charismatic phenomena.

Social Science Theory for Environmental Sustainability

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc J. Stern
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Persuasive Communication ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Social Science Theory ◽  
Science Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
Communication Conflict ◽  
To Come ◽  
Sustainability Challenges

Social science theory for environmental sustainability: A practical guide makes social science theory accessible and usable to anyone interested in working toward environmental sustainability at any scale. Environmental problems are, first and foremost, people problems. Without better understandings of the people involved, solutions are often hard to come by. This book answers calls for demonstrating the value of theories from the social sciences for solving these types of problems and provides strategies to facilitate their use. It contains concise summaries of over thirty social science theories and demonstrates how to use them in diverse contexts associated with environmental conflict, conservation, natural resource management, and other environmental sustainability challenges. The practical applications of the theories include persuasive communication, conflict resolution, collaboration, negotiation, enhancing organizational effectiveness, working across cultures, generating collective impact, and building more resilient governance of social-ecological systems. Examples throughout the book and detailed vignettes illustrate how to combine multiple social science theories to develop effective strategies for environmental problem solving. The final chapter draws out key principles for enhancing these efforts. The book will serve as a key reference for environmental professionals, business people, students, scientists, public officials, government employees, aid workers, or any concerned citizen who wants to be better equipped to navigate the social complexities of environmental challenges and make a meaningful impact on any environmental issue.

History and Social Science in the West

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Passmore
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
External Force ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The West ◽  
Grand Theory ◽  
Academic History ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter analyzes the relationship between history and various disciplines within the social sciences. Historians and social scientists shared two related sets of assumptions. The first supposition was of a world-historical shift from a traditional, hierarchical, religious society to a modern egalitarian, rational one. Second, history and social science assumed that progress occurred within nations possessed of unique ‘characters’, and that patriotism provided the social cement without which society could not function. Nevertheless, academic history seemingly differed from social science in that it was untheoretical and predominantly political. Yet historians focused on the nation’s attainment of self-consciousness, homogeneity, and independence through struggle against internal and external enemies—a history in which great men were prominent. Historians and sociologists unwittingly shared versions of grand theory, in which change was an external ‘force’ driven by the functional needs of the system, and in which meaning derived from measurement against theory, rather than from protagonists’ actions and beliefs.

Alfred Schutz and ethnomethodology: Origins and departures

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martyn Hammersley
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Alfred Schutz ◽  
Theory Formation ◽  
Harold Garfinkel ◽  
Social Inquiry ◽  
The Social ◽  
Early Influence ◽  
Alfred Schütz ◽  
The Relationship

The work of Alfred Schutz was an important early influence on Harold Garfinkel and therefore on the development of ethnomethodology. In this article, I try to clarify what Garfinkel drew from Schutz, as well as what he did not take from him, specifically as regards the task of social inquiry. This is done by focusing in detail on one of Schutz’s key articles: ‘Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences’. The aim is thereby to illuminate the relationship between Schutz’s views on the character of social science and Garfinkel’s radical proposal for a re-specified focus of investigation. This is further pursued by examining an important debate about the link between Schutz and ethnomethodology.

Logics of History as a Framework for an Integrated Social Science

2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-553 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Steinmetz
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Event History ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
The Social ◽  
Historical Social Science ◽  
The Relationship

This essay surveys the contributions of William H. Sewell Jr.'sLogics of History and concludes that the book sketches a compelling agenda for an integrated historical social science. The author first summarizes Sewell's ontological and epistemological claims concerning social structure and event, history and temporality, and sociohistorical causality. The author then discusses five main areas in which ambiguities in Sewell's approach might be clarified or his arguments pushed farther. These concern (1) the relationship between historical event and traumatic event; (2) the idea of the unprecedented event or “antistructure”; (3) the theory of semiosis underlying Sewell's notion of a multiplicity of structures; and (4) the compatibilities and differences between the concepts of structure and mechanism (here the author argues that social structures are the distinctive “mechanisms” of the human or social sciences). Finally, (5) Sewell's call for “a more robust sense of the social” in historical writing locates the “social” mainly at the level of the metafield of power, or what regulation theory calls the mode of regulation; the author suggests a possible integration of this society-level concept with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of semiautonomous fields.

scholarly journals Contemporary insights from Social Sciences Theory: Implications for Management

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 35-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Management Theory ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Social Science Theory ◽  
Science Theory ◽  
Social Science Literature ◽  
History Of

Management theory has a long history of drawing from social science theory to provide useful theoretical frameworks for managers. In resource constricted times, and in global contexts of uncertainty, the need for theory to provide insights for managers has perhaps never been so important. The objective of this research is to provide an analysis of seminal theory of paradigms and their incommensurability, and to offer a model which includes contemporary literature relevant to the challenges faced by management as a field. While certain pillars of social science theory have provided the bedrock upon which management has built certain of its literature, this paper argues not all social science tenets have been immune to the vagaries of contextual change over past decades. This paper seeks to revisit seminal social science literature on paradigms, and to derive a model of paradigm relationships in relation to management’s relationships to other social sciences. Central to this reflexive engagement is the argument that social science validity is contingent on a multiplicity of perspectives, and that paradigm incommensurability is antithetical to notions of contemporary validity. Implications for management are drawn from the analysis.

Can Law Learn from Social Science?

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 205-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Nelken
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Fundamental Problem ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Legal Rules ◽  
Political Critique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Styles Of Reasoning

In this paper I shall be discussing a fundamental problem in the relationship between law and the social sciences. Many social scientists have pointed out that the “pull of the policy audience” in legislative and administrative exercises and the confines of practical decision-making in legal settings can compromise the proper development of academic social science and blunt the edge of political critique. The danger is real enough. But they have given insufficient attention to the opposite concern which will be my topic in this article. Here the charge is that the introduction of social scientific styles of reasoning can have ill effects for legal practice by threatening the integrity of legal processes and the values they embody. How can social scientists be sure that they have properly understood the nature of law or the meaning and point of the legal rules, procedures, and institutions which they attempt to analyze and seek to improve? What warrant can they have that social scientific interpretation, at any level, does not end up creating law in its own image? If this is a genuine risk, what implications follow for the way law should learn from social science? I shall argue that there are no easy answers to these questions even, or especially, where law apparently welcomes contributions from social science.

Education as a Human Science

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Higgs
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Human Science ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Cultural Considerations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Educational Relationships ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Relationship

The debate concerning the nature of education, and more particularly the debate as it is directed toward the discourse and logic of schooling, has customarily taken place within the social science tradition. As a result, educational research has been characterized by a modern positivist science which has tended to privilege knowledge relevant to a technocratic evaluation and control of educational relationships and achievements through a process of socialization. From the relationship between student and teacher to the relationship between school and society, the widespread acceptance of quantitative research findings and behavioristic theory reveals that the evaluation of educational issues has been tied to an understanding of reality as ideological as it is “scientific.” What should constitute a scientific inquiry that effectively counters positivist assumptions and what should characterize the inquirer’s relation to the real are still central questions within educational theory and practice in the philosophy of education. In responding to these questions, the positioning of education in the social science tradition has given rise to the politicization of education in an ideologically directed process of socialization which, in turn, has resulted in education, including schooling, being subjected to the idiosyncratic stranglehold and abuse of ideological and cultural considerations propagated in the name of a pseudo-scientific scientism. Furthermore, the problem concerning the nature of education is more authentically situated within the human science tradition than within the social sciences. This argument is grounded on a fundamental objection to positivism and the influence that this has had on the tradition of the social sciences.

The Harm and Benefit Thesis

1995 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Armor
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
School Segregation ◽  
Social Science Theory ◽  
Science Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Judicial Doctrine

Of all the social science theories that have been applied to school desegregation policy, none has a longer or more important history than the harm and benefit thesis. In its simplest form, the thesis holds that school segregation is harmful to the social, psychological, and educational development of children, both minority and white, and that school desegregation is beneficial for undoing or at least ameliorating the damages from segregation and discrimination. While the harm and benefit thesis began as a purely social science theory, its apparent endorsement by the Supreme Court in Brown gave the thesis an enormous boost, elevating it from academic theory to moral authority. From Brown to the present time, the harm and benefit thesis has played a curious and bifurcated role in the evolution of school desegregation policy. Although it began as a social science theory that had apparently found its way into judicial doctrine, its role in the courts soon parted from its role among educators, social scientists, and civil rights groups. On the judicial front, a number of lower court decisions in the early 1970s stressed the harms of school segregation and the benefits of integration remedies. The Supreme Court itself never again explicitly addressed the harm and benefit thesis after Brown, however, and its judicial relevance diminished over the next three decades as the high Court majority restricted the application of Brown to government-enforced school segregation. For this reason many constitutional scholars have long maintained that the psychological harm finding in Brown is not an essential part of constitutional law. To the extent that a harm thesis can be inferred from current judicial doctrine, then, harm arises only if school (or other) segregation is sanctioned by law or official action. For many other actors on the desegregation stage, however, the harm and benefit thesis has had a far broader applicability. During the periods when the earliest formulations began to appear, such as that by Gunnar Myrdal in 1944 or the famous doll studies of Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the late 1930s, most existing segregation was in fact sanctioned by law, and thus most social science research on this issue of necessity reflected the effects of official segregation.

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