Special Issue of21st Century Society: Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences:‘Identity, Politics and Social Action’

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-296
2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110146
Author(s):  
Ping-Chun Hsiung

This Special Issue aims to advance critical qualitative inquiry in China studies and contribute to a vibrant, inclusive global community. It builds upon debates and efforts in the behavioral and social sciences among area specialists in two eras: researchers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the diaspora in the 1980s who sought to sinologize behavioral and social sciences, and sociologists in China in the 2000s who are seeking to indigenize these fields. The Issue takes a two-pronged approach toward advancing critical reflection in knowledge production: (a) it aspires to diminish the current influence of Western and positivistic paradigms on behavioral and social sciences research; (b) it seeks to challenge discursive hegemonic influences to create and sustain space for critical qualitative inquiry. The Issue traverses disciplinary boundaries between history and behavioral and social sciences within China Studies. It opens dialogue with the non-area specialists who are the primary audience of the Qualitative Inquiry.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Máiréad Nic Craith ◽  
Laurent Sebastian Fournier

This special issue on anthropology and literature invited proposals for original contributions focusing on relationships between anthropology and literature. We were especially interested in the following questions: what role does literature play in anthropology? Can literature be considered as ethnography? What are the relationships between anthropology and literature, past and present? Are anthropology and anthropological motives used in literature? We also looked for critical readings of writers as anthropologists and critical readings of anthropologists as writers. Moreover, we wanted to assess the influence of literature on the invention of traditions, rituals and cultural performances. All these different questions and topics are clearly connected with the study of literacy, illiteracy and popular culture. They also lead to questions regarding potential textual strategies for ethnography and the possibilities of bringing together the field of anthropology (more associated with the social sciences) and literary studies (traditionally part of the humanities).


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina Moro ◽  
Samita Nandy ◽  
Kiera Obbard ◽  
Andrew Zolides

Using celebrity narratives as a starting point, this Special Issue explores the social significance of storytelling for social change. It builds on the 8th Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies conference, which brought together scholars and media practitioners to explore how narratives inspired by the lives of celebrities, public intellectuals, critics and activists offer useful rhetorical tools to better understand dominant ideologies. This editorial further problematizes what it means to be a popular ‘storyteller’ using the critical lens of celebrity activism and life-writing. Throughout the issue, contributors analyse the politics of representation at play within a wide range of glamourous narratives, including documentaries, memoirs, TED talks, stand-up performances and award acceptance speeches in Hollywood and beyond. The studies show how we can strategically use aesthetic communication to shape identity politics in public personas and bring urgent social change in an image-driven celebrity culture.


HUMANIKA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
Sindung Tjahyadi

This article discusses about a paradigm shift in the social sciences based on "the history of science" perspective. The key question is how the recent development of the discourse about the paradigms of the social sciences. The paradigmatic and methodological development forward directed through a post-empirical approach to the exclusion of desire unification cause or structure as the objective theory of social action, and develop a multi-theoretical paradigms on the basis of variations in the structure that can be applied to the various regions and types of action. Furthermore, elaborated further needed is to develop methodological pluralism and theoretical unification in the social sciences are expected to confirm the two sides of the comprehensive-pluralistic approach in the philosophy of social sciences. The main thing about the legitimacy of the methodology underlying the study is to examine the criteria on what should have knowledge of it. Finally, that the dimensions of "ontological" social science should be "liberated" from the illusion of objectivism


Organization ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wright ◽  
Daniel Nyberg ◽  
Lauren Rickards ◽  
James Freund

The functioning of the biosphere and the Earth as a whole is being radically disrupted due to human activities, evident in climate change, toxic pollution and mass species extinction. Financialization and exponential growth in production, consumption and population now threaten our planet’s life-support systems. These profound changes have led Earth System scientists to argue we have now entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. In this introductory article to the Special Issue, we first set out the origins of the Anthropocene and some of the key debates around this concept within the physical and social sciences. We then explore five key organizing narratives that inform current economic, technological, political and cultural understandings of the Anthropocene and link these to the contributions in this Special Issue. We argue that the Anthropocene is the crucial issue for organizational scholars to engage with in order to not only understand on-going anthropogenic problems but also help create alternative forms of organizing based on realistic Earth–human relations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Martin Oteng-Ababio

Since the last formal vestiges of colonial rule disappeared in 1994, the democratically elected governments on the African continent have been experimenting with developmental strategies and policies. These experiments come at the backdrop that Africa’s output per head is notoriously among the lowest in the world and has, on the average, expanded slowly and haltingly since 1960, albeit, with some critical changes, and variations over place, space and time. The structural adjustment programme (SAP) in the 1980s, for example, marked a watershed: a fundamental shift from administrative to market means of resource allocation. This opinion piece, appearing in this Special Issue of the Oguaa Journal of Social Sciences on the theme “Developmental issues in contemporary Ghana”, provides an overview of Africa’s development trajectories as presented by the collection of articles, using Ghana as a test-tube.


Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Scaff

This chapter examines how Max Weber's work has been recast as canonical for the social sciences and central to its current agendas. It first considers the substantial body of translations that became the basis for the postwar permeation of Weber's work into the social sciences, and especially into the subfield specializations of sociology, including Talcott Parsons' The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, before discussing the role played by the interwar émigrés in the struggle over the mastery of Weber. It then explains how Weber achieved an intellectual synthesis through a combination of structural and institutional analysis, notions of rationality, propositions about social action, awareness of cultural particularities, and a deep appreciation for historical inquiry and evidence. It also analyzes the expansion of the horizon for Weber's ideas beyond the boundaries of sociology to the Western philosophical and political tradition.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
Maren Freudenberg ◽  
Tim Weitzel

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.


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