Poverty and Penia

Author(s):  
Claire Taylor

This chapter lays out the theoretical approach for the book and discusses the methodological problems of writing about poverty and the poor in the ancient world. Whilst studying the lives of the poor in the ancient world is to some extent elusive, it argues that historians can do more than simply imagine this group of people back into the gaps left by other evidence. As well as reviewing previous scholarship on poverty in the ancient world, it suggests a way forward which is more in line with contemporary poverty research within the social sciences.

1995 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis C. Duling

This article explores marginality theory as it was first proposed in  the social sciences, that is related to persons caught between two competing cultures (Park; Stonequist), and, then, as it was developed in sociology as related to the poor (Germani) and in anthropology as it was related to involuntary marginality and voluntary marginality (Victor Turner). It then examines a (normative scheme' in antiquity that creates involuntary marginality at the macrosocial level, namely, Lenski's social stratification model in an agrarian society, and indicates how Matthean language might fit with a sample inventory  of socioreligious roles. Next, it examines some (normative schemes' in  antiquity for voluntary margi-nality at the microsocial level, namely, groups, and examines how the Matthean gospel would fit based on indications of factions and leaders. The article ,shows that the author of the Gospel of Matthew has an ideology of (voluntary marginality', but his gospel includes some hope for (involuntary  marginals' in  the  real world, though it is somewhat tempered. It also suggests that the writer of the Gospel is a (marginal man', especially in the sense defined by the early theorists (Park; Stone-quist).


2012 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-183 ◽  

David Audretsch of Indiana University reviews “Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure” by Tim Harford. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins: Explores how we can learn to use adaptive trial and error to solve current complex situations and problems in politics and the social sciences. Discusses conflict, or how organizations learn; creating new ideas that matter, or variation; finding what works for the poor, or selection; climate change, or changing the rules for success; preventing financial meltdowns, or decoupling; the adaptive organization; and adapting and you. Harford is a columnist for the Financial Times. Index.


1983 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Galambos

In this suggestive essay, Professor Galambos surveys the large number of books and articles, published since 1970, that together point toward a new “organizational synthesis” in American history. Expanding upon an earlier, more tentative essay on the same subject published in the Autumn 1970 issue of the Business History Review, he contrasts the widely disparate postures adopted in recent years by historians studying organizational behavior. His survey reveals a rich diversity of opinion, less reliant than was previous scholarship upon abstractions drawn from the social sciences. This diversity of opinion, Galambos concludes, provides the organizational synthesis with much of its continued vitality, and makes possible “the kind of moral judgments that have always characterized the best historical scholarship.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-36
Author(s):  
K.V. Sorvin ◽  
A. Mert

This paper addresses one of the main topics of the works of the famous Russian philosopher F.T. Mikhailov aimed at overcoming the oversimplified conception of the relation between the biological and the social origins of human being, in the context of the methodological problems in the social sciences that have characteristic representations of the transcendence of society over individual. It is shown that the solution proposed by the philosopher was related to the revision of the dominant notions about the ground of the subject-subject unity and the ontology of the symbolic objects that provide this unity. In particular, the disintegration of the ‘activity approach’ in psychology into the concepts of A.N. Leontyev and S.L. Rubinstein, that are called by Mikhailov ‘antinomical’, is associated with the limited reliance on the methodological traditions of Spinozism, in which there was no idea about the reflexive type of subject-subject relation as opposed to the methodology of "late Fichte", with his characteristic position on the initial identity based on multiple selves. It is argued that the most adequate categories for description of the ontological connections between the ideal content and the material form in symbolic objects that provide such an identity can be found in Hegel's aesthetic works.


Author(s):  
Eerik Lagerspetz

Prediction is important in science for two reasons. First human beings have a practical interest in knowing the future. Therefore, all science is potentially predictive in the sense that its results may be used as a basis for expectations. Second, a test of our beliefs is the truth of the predictions we can derive from them. In the social sciences, however, predictions are often supposed to create specific philosophical and methodological problems, the roots of which are the following: the phenomena studied in the social sciences are so complex and so interrelated that it is practically impossible to formulate law-like generalizations about them; human beings are supposed to possess free will; and the predictions may themselves modify the phenomena predicted.


Author(s):  
Mark Fedyk

In this book, Mark Fedyk offers a novel analysis of the relationship between moral psychology and allied fields in the social sciences. Fedyk shows how the social sciences can be integrated with moral philosophy, argues for the benefits of such an integration, and offers a new ethical theory that can be used to bridge research between the two. Fedyk argues that moral psychology should take a social turn, investigating the psychological processes that motivate patterns of social behavior defined as ethical using normative information extracted from the social sciences. He points out methodological problems in conventional moral psychology, particularly the increasing methodological and conceptual inconsilience with both philosophical ethics and evolutionary biology. Fedyk's "causal theory of ethics" is designed to provide moral psychology with an ethical theory that can be used without creating tension between its scientific practice and the conceptual vocabulary of philosophical ethics. His account aims both to redirect moral psychology toward more socially realistic questions about human life and to introduce philosophers to a new form of ethical naturalism—a way of thinking about how to use different fields of scientific research to answer some of the traditional questions that are at the heart of ethics.


Author(s):  
Stanisław Sala

The paper presents an attempt to identify methodological problems in the research into the processes of globalization. Originally globalization was treated as a homogeneous process, leaving its impress on the ground of economic and social sciences. Later, however, scientists realized that globalization triggers a lot of processes, part of which are known, but many of which we are not aware of. In this context, it is more proper to write and talk not about globalization but about the processes of globalization. The author understands the processes of globalization as a whole of the processes which occur on the social- economic and political plane. The processes lighten mutual connections between countries, regions or single people, and their consequences. According to the author, the main problems in the research into processes of globalization are: problems with defining the subject of research, lack of proper methodology and methods of research, interdisciplinary problems and problems with objectivity of facts. The selection of proper research methods to conduct the research into the processes of globalization poses a lot of difficulties. They result from the fact that geography has worked out a lot of detailed research methods, used to describe quantitative phenomena, which are the essence of globalization, using qualitative methods. At this stage of research, the essence of globalization can be captured by using systematic approach in an idiographic sense.


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