The People’s History and the Politics of Everyday Life since 1945

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Social World ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Economic Uncertainty ◽  
Science Projects ◽  
The Social ◽  
Informal Politics

This chapter revisits interview transcripts from postwar social science projects to explore vernacular understandings of the social world, especially the informal politics of everyday life. Understanding shifting conceptions of historical time provides the key to understanding the crisis of social democracy in the 1970s and 1980s which was rooted less in the machinations of high politics than in popular responses to economic uncertainty and social change. What sealed the fate of the mobilizing myths of postwar social democracy was the collapse of popular belief in the idea of ‘the people’s’ forward march. By the 1980s expectations of intergenerational ‘progress’ had begun to loosen and conceptions of a shared future had broken down. But if popular conceptions of time and politics represent vernacular attempts to make sense of everyday experience, resetting the terms of economic life and public policy may re-establish shared conceptions of progress.

scholarly journals Romancing science for global solutions: on narratives and interpretative schemas of science diplomacy

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Rungius ◽  
Tim Flink
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Global Solutions ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Expectations ◽  
Means And Ends ◽  
Global Challenges ◽  
Science Diplomacy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Positive Properties

Abstract In recent years, the concept of science diplomacy has gained remarkable ground in public policy. Calling for closer cooperation between actors from science and foreign policy, it is often being promulgated as a hitherto neglected catalyst for international understanding and global change. On what grounds science diplomacy entertains these high hopes, however, has remained unclear, and—as a blind spot—unaddressed in a discourse mostly shaped by policy practitioners. Recognizing that the discourse on science diplomacy is still unspecific about how its means and ends should fit together and be comprehended, we reconstruct the concept and its discourse as a materialization of actors’ interpretative schemas and shared assumptions about the social world they constantly need to make sense of. Science diplomacy is presented as a panacea against looming threats and grand challenges in a world facing deterioration. The prerequisite for such a solutionistic narrative is a simplified portrait of diplomacy in need of help from science that—romanticized in this discourse—bears but positive properties and exerts rationalizing, collaborative and even pacifying effects on a generic international community in its collective efforts to tackle global challenges. We conclude that these interpretative schemas that idealize and mythify science as overall collaborative, rationalizing and complexity-reducing are problematic. First, because the discourse misconceives ideals and norms for real and will therefore disappoint social expectations, and second, because science is likely to be instrumentalised for political purposes.

Direct Action, Dramatic Action: Theatre and Situationist Theory

1993 ◽  
Vol 9 (36) ◽  
pp. 329-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham White
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Social World ◽  
King's College ◽  
The Social ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
Dramatic Action ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The Relationship

In exploring the relationship between situationist theory and theatre in the period of the ‘counter-culture’ in Britain, the following article seeks to provide an account of the ‘spectacularization’ of political action through the language and forms of drama. The relatively neglected work of Raoul Vaneigem is examined for its treatment of theatricality as one of the organizing discourses of the spectacle, and the suggestion that ‘drama’ is a constant choreographic presence in the social world is explored alongside related ideas concerning the dramatization of everyday life in the work of Raymond Williams and Aida Hozic. Attempts to ‘disrupt the spectacle’ through political action during the period of the counter-culture are discussed in relation to this material. Graham White is Lecturer in English at King's College, University of London, and has been Literary Manager of the Finborough Theatre since 1990.

Review Symposium: Interdisciplinary Readings of Ari Z. Bryen's Violence in Roman Egypt: Where Law, Violence, and Culture Collide: A Sociolegal Reading of Violence in Everyday Life

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (03) ◽  
pp. 802-806
Author(s):  
Jill D. Weinberg
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
Review Symposium ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Law And Society ◽  
Cultural Resource ◽  
The Social ◽  
Roman Egypt

This comment considers Ari Bryen's Violence in Roman Egypt (2013) from sociological and sociolegal perspectives. Although Bryen is a historian, and his site of inquiry is second‐century Roman Egypt, he turns to contemporary sociologists and law and society scholars to highlight the interplay between law and the social world in the construction of violence. In doing so, he finds a new way to analyze the role of law as a cultural resource for nonelites to make sense of their social world but also to change it (albeit with limits) through law.

scholarly journals Prose miniatures as an experience of self-identification (author's mini-texts in the Vepsian language)

2020 ◽  
Vol 210 ◽  
pp. 16005
Author(s):  
Galina Ivanova
Keyword(s):  
World Order ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Adaptation ◽  
Specific Situation ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
The Core ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
The Social

Prose miniatures of Alexander Ulyanov are analyzed not only as a way of self-expression of the author's ego, but also as an experience of self-identification, awareness of their place in the social world order and historical time. The format of the miniature cycle appears as a convenient form of reproducing key moments of a person's life, which corresponds to the mechanism of memories as processing pop-up engrams of episodic memory into a complete self-reflection. At the same time, focusing on a particular idea unfolds in a specific situation in life. The creative principle of the author of miniatures serves the pragmatics of social adaptation in the surrounding stressful world. It is creativity that turns out to be a tool for assembling the personality in its multiple forms and serves as a way of integration into a heterogeneous external environment. The mechanisms of constructing miniatures in the perspective of achieving self-reliance and integration into the surrounding world are considered. Namely, the thematic diversity, the author's initial data representing a «fluid identity» typical for a person of the twentieth century with the help of a cumulative attitude to «collecting stones» are successfully overcome in the choice of a reflective style of description and the absence of hasty subjective conclusions. The core of self-identification of the series of miniatures by A. S. Ulyanov translates to the reader dignity, self-confidence and readiness for any tests.

Socialism’s Past, New Social Democracy, and Socialism’s Futures

1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brad Rose ◽  
George Ross
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Work Experience ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Actor ◽  
Social Collaboration ◽  
The Social

The ideas of socialism grew in ordinary people’s lived experience of all-encompassing markets, totalizing doctrines of individualism, the power of capitalist property over human dignity and destiny, and equations between market success and human merit. Codified into doctrine, socialism was pro-ductivist, seeing the work experience as that which determined personal identity and the shape of social collaboration. It was also class analytical, mapping the social world in terms of classes in conflict and specifying the working class as the central social actor and agent for change. Third, it was egalitarian democratic, rejecting arbitrary distinctions determining different stations in life. Finally, socialism was Utopian, revolutionary at least in aspiration if not always in deed. The capitalist order could be, and ought to be, radically transcended. Socialism, which would follow, would reappropriate control over work and its fruits by “the workers” and would facilitate full democracy, equality, and the consecration of a creative and cooperative social order.

Enhancing Frame Analysis: Five Laminating Functions of Language in the 1987 NFL Strike

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond L. Schmitt
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Frame Analysis ◽  
Social World ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
The Social ◽  
Live Television

The introduction of “replacement teams” into the social world of NFL football during the 1987 strike stimulated a laminated language, a language that transformed traditional meanings by linking varying social definitions to one another. Emergent content analysis of extensive newspaper, sport magazine and newsmagazine, and live television and radio accounts was used to inductively study this language. Power, media, and social structure impacted on the various language terms that were created. Laminated language protected, rejected, accepted, satirically extended, and integrated definitions. Various ways in which the recognition of laminated language may be used to enhance the use of Goffman’s framing concepts and leads in the sociological study of everyday life are offered.

Folk Psychology and the Biological Basis of Intersubjectivity

2005 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 18-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ratcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Folk Psychology ◽  
Social World ◽  
Biological Basis ◽  
Intentional States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interpersonal Understanding

Recent philosophical discussions of intersubjectivity generally start by stating or assuming that our ability to understand and interact with others is enabled by a ‘folk psychology’ or ‘theory of mind’. Folk psychology is characterized as the ability to attribute intentional states, such as beliefs and desires, to others, in order to predict and explain their behaviour. Many authors claim that this ability is not merely one amongst many constituents of interpersonal understanding but an underlying core that enables social life. For example, Churchland states that folk psychology ‘embodies our baseline understanding’ of others (1996, p. 3). Currie and Sterelny similarly assert that ‘our basic grip on the social world depends on our being able to see our fellows as motivated by beliefs and desires we sometimes share and sometimes do not’ (2000, p. 143). And, as Frith and Happé put it, ‘this ability appears to be a prerequisite for normal social interaction: in everyday life we make sense of each other’s behaviour by appeal to a belief-desire psychology’ (1999, p. 2).

Folk Psychology and the Biological Basis of Intersubjectivity

2005 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 211-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ratcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Folk Psychology ◽  
Social World ◽  
Biological Basis ◽  
Intentional States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interpersonal Understanding

Recent philosophical discussions of intersubjectivity generally start by stating or assuming that our ability to understand and interact with others is enabled by a ‘folk psychology’ or ‘theory of mind’. Folk psychology is characterized as the ability to attribute intentional states, such as beliefs and desires, to others, in order to predict and explain their behaviour. Many authors claim that this ability is not merely one amongst many constituents of interpersonal understanding but an underlying core that enables social life. For example, Churchland states that folk psychology ‘embodies our baseline understanding’ of others (1996, p. 3). Currie and Sterelny similarly assert that ‘our basic grip on the social world depends on our being able to see our fellows as motivated by beliefs and desires we sometimes share and sometimes do not’ (2000, p. 143). And, as Frith and Happe put it, ‘this ability appears to be a prerequisite for normal social interaction: in everyday life we make sense of each other's behaviour by appeal to a belief-desire psychology’ (1999, p. 2).

The Performance Complex

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Performance Metrics ◽  
Market Competition ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pharmaceutical Companies ◽  
Management Consultants ◽  
Online Platforms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Architectural Competitions

What’s valuable? Market competition provides one kind of answer. Competitions offer another. On one side, competition is an ongoing and seemingly endless process of pricings; on the other, competitions are discrete and bounded in time and location, with entry rules, judges, scores, and prizes. This book examines what happens when ever more activities in domains of everyday life are evaluated and experienced in terms of performance metrics. Unlike organized competitions, such systems are ceaseless and without formal entry. Instead of producing resolutions, their scorings create addictions. To understand these developments, this book explores discrete contests (architectural competitions, international music competitions, and world press photo competitions); shows how the continuous updating of rankings is both a device for navigating the social world and an engine of anxiety; and examines the production of such anxiety in settings ranging from the pedagogy of performance in business schools to struggling musicians coping with new performance metrics in online platforms. In the performance society, networks of observation—in which all are performing and keeping score—are entangled with a system of emotionally charged preoccupations with one’s positioning within the rankings. From the bedroom to the boardroom, pharmaceutical companies and management consultants promise enhanced performance. This assemblage of metrics, networks, and their attendant emotional pathologies is herein regarded as the performance complex.

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