Worldview Analysis

2018 ◽  
pp. 156-172
Author(s):  
Mona Kanwal Sheikh
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Culturally Sensitive ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
The Other ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Global Era ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The Way

In a global era, the challenge for worldview analysis is to embrace both a context-sensitive and a culturally sensitive approach to concepts and ideas. This chapter identifies solid methods to analyze and comprehend the vertical dynamics between worldviews and action and also the horizontal dynamics between the precepts, imageries, and grievances that stem from transnational views of religion, politics, and society. The chapter reviews the most dominant definitions and applications of the worldview concept as it has been used in the study of global phenomena in the social sciences and how they differ from the way the concept of ideology is applied. This opens up a critical discussion of the link between worldview on one side and behavior on the other. By drawing on sociotheology, the chapter engages with the question of how to embrace context and culturally sensitive methods to study transnational worldviews.

The Trouble with Class

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
James G. Carrier
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
The Other ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article considers aspects of the use of class in sociology and anthropology since the period around 1970, when Neo-Marxism became important in the social sciences, and is concerned primarily with Marxist and Weberian uses of the concept. It considers changes in the use of class in terms of two dimensions. One is the degree to which class is placed in a more macroscopic or more microscopic frame. The other is the degree to which class is defined in more objectivist terms or relies more on the way that the people being studied use the term. It is argued that since around 1970 writing on class has tended to become more microscopic and subjectivist. This tendency is related to changes within the two disciplines and within society more generally. The article closes with a consideration of some of the costs of this changing scholarly orientation to class.

BORDER CROSSINGS

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (03) ◽  
pp. 319-323
Author(s):  
Richard Adelstein
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Undergraduate Program ◽  
Interdisciplinary Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Essential Unity ◽  
The Way

I first met Bill Barber in 1975, when I came to interview for a position in economics at Wesleyan University, where Bill had taught for almost twenty years. I’d shown some interest in interdisciplinary work, so my hosts made sure my tour included the College of Social Studies, an unusually intensive undergraduate program that combined three years of close study in economics, government, history, and philosophy with a relentless regime of weekly essays and tutorial meetings. Bill had his office there, across the campus from the other economists, and taught half his courses in the college, which he’d helped to found. It was, my skeptical hosts cordially informed me, modeled on the way philosophy, politics, and economics were taught together at Oxford, and had little to do with "real" economics, the kind they did, with its high theory and, even then, its commitment to econometrics. As I soon learned, the college was the brainchild of a group of tweedy Oxonians with a mission: to teach these subjects together in a way that recognized the essential unity of the social sciences and history and, in the teaching of each, drew insights and context from all the others. This wasn’t how I’d been taught economics, or anything else. I knew nothing about Oxford, and next to nothing about history and philosophy. But in the two hours I spent that day at the College of Social Studies with Bill and his collaborators in the mission, all of them subjects of the same cordial skepticism in their own departments, I became one of them myself.

Benson and Miller in Perspective

1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 242-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Applied Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Stock Of Knowledge

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.

Futures Honed

Futures ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 118-134
Author(s):  
Barbara Adam
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
The Past ◽  
Writing Theory ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
The Way

This chapter comprises an interview between Barbara Adam and the editors, and is followed by Adam’s ‘Honing Futures’, which is presented in four short verses of distilled theory. In the interview Adam reflects on thirty-five years of futures-thinking rooted in her deeply original work on time and temporality, and her innovative response to qualitative and linear definitions of time within the social sciences. The interview continues with a discussion of the way Adam’s thinking on futures intersects in her work with ideas of ethics and collective responsibility politics and concludes with a brief rationale for writing theory in verse form. In ‘Honing Futures’, a piece of futures theory verse form, Adam charts the movements and moments in considerations of the Not Yet and futurity’s active creation: from pluralized imaginings of the future, to an increasingly tangible and narrower anticipated future, to future-making as designing and reality-creating performance. Collectively, the verses identify the varied complex interdependencies of time, space, and matter with the past and future in all iterations of honing and making futures.

Voices of Spectators and Audience Power

Pólemos ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Biet
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationship ◽  
The Other ◽  
Long Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Dramatic Action ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Voice ◽  
The Way

AbstractTheatre and law are not so different. Generally, researchers work on the art of theatre, the rhetoric of the actors, or the dramaturgy built from law cases or from the questions that the law does not completely resolve. Trials, tragedies, even comedies are close: everybody can see the interpenetration of them on stage and in the courts. We know that, and we know that the dramas are made with/from/of law, we know that the art the actors are developing is not so far from the art of the lawyers, and conversely. In this paper, I would like to have a look at the action of the audience, at the session itself and at the way the spectators are here to evaluate and judge not only the dramatic action, not only the art of the actors, not only the text of the author, but also the other spectators, and themselves too. In particular, I will focus on the “common judgment” of the audience and on its judicial, aesthetic and social relationship. The spectators have been undisciplined, noisy, unruled, during such a long period that theatre still retains some prints of this behaviour, even if nowadays, the social and aesthetic rule is to be silent. But uncertainty, inattention, distraction, contradiction, heterogeneity are the notions which characterise the session, and the judgments of the spectators still depend on them. So, what was and what is the voice of the audience? And with what sort of voice do spectators give their judgments?

scholarly journals Pragmatisme og "practice turn"

2018 ◽  
pp. 43-61
Author(s):  
Antje Gimmler
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
The Other ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
Practice Turn ◽  
Understanding Of Science ◽  
The One ◽  
Philosophical Pragmatism

Practices are of central relevance both to philosophical pragmatism and to the recent ‘Practice Turn’ in social sciences and philosophy. However, what counts as practices and how practices and knowledge are combined or intertwine varies in the different approaches of pragmatism and those theories that are covered by the umbrella term ‘Practice Turn’. The paper tries to show that the pragmatism of John Dewey is able to offer both a more precise and a more radical understanding of practices than the recent ‘Practice Turn’ allows for. The paper on the one hand highlights what pragmatism has to offer to the practice turn in order to clarify the notion of practice. On the other hand the paper claims that a pragmatism inspired by Dewey actually interprets ‘practices’ more radically than most of the other approaches and furthermore promotes an understanding of science that combines nonrepresentationalism and anti-foundationalism with an involvement of the philosopher or the social scientist in the production of knowledge, things and technologies.

Reasons, Causes, and Intentional Explanation

1986 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Stoutland
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Social ◽  
Intentional Explanation ◽  
Covering Law ◽  
Causal Laws ◽  
Physical Laws ◽  
And Behavior

AbstractThe reasons-causes debate concerns whether explanations of human behavior in terms of an agent's reasons presuppose causal laws. This paper considers three approaches to this debate: the covering law model which holds that there are causal laws covering both reasons and behavior, the intentionalist approach which denies any role to causal laws, and Donald Davidson’s point of view which denies that causal laws connect reasons and behavior, but holds that reasons and behavior must be covered by physical laws if reasons explanations are to be valid. I defend the intentionalist approach against the two causalist approaches and conclude with reflections on the significance of the debate for the social sciences.

scholarly journals We Need to Talk about Impact: Why Social Policy Academics need to Engage with the UK's Research Impact Agenda

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATHERINE E. SMITH ◽  
ELLEN STEWART
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Health Inequalities ◽  
Research Impact ◽  
Policy Response ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Policy Relevance ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

AbstractOf all the social sciences, social policy is one of the most obviously policy-orientated. One might, therefore, expect a research and funding agenda which prioritises and rewards policy relevance to garner an enthusiastic response among social policy scholars. Yet, the social policy response to the way in which major funders and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) are now prioritising ‘impact’ has been remarkably muted. Elsewhere in the social sciences, ‘research impact’ is being widely debated and a wealth of concerns about the way in which this agenda is being pursued are being articulated. Here, we argue there is an urgent need for social policy academics to join this debate. First, we employ interviews with academics involved in health inequalities research, undertaken between 2004 and 2015, to explore perceptions, and experiences, of the ‘impact agenda’ (an analysis which is informed by a review of guidelines for assessing ‘impact’ and relevant academic literature). Next, we analyse high- and low-scoring REF2014 impact case studies to assess whether these concerns appear justified. We conclude by outlining how social policy expertise might usefully contribute to efforts to encourage, measure and reward research ‘impact’.

Queer as Materialism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Noyé ◽  
Gianfranco Rebucini
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Family Resemblance ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
The Social

Since the 2000s, forms of articulation between materialist and Marxist theory and queer theory have been emerging and have thus created a “queer materialism.” After a predominance of poststructuralist analyses in the social sciences in the1980s and 1990s, since the late 1990s, and even more so after the economic crisis of 2008, a materialist shift seems to be taking place. These recompositions of the Marxist, queer, and feminist, which took place in activist and academic arenas, are decisive in understanding how the new approaches are developing in their own fields. The growing legitimacy of feminist and queer perspectives within the Marxist left is part of an evolution of Marxism on these issues. On the other side, queer activists and academics have highlighted the economic and social inequalities that the policies of austerity and capitalism in general induce among LGBTQI people and have turned to more materialist references, especially Marxist ones, to deploy an anticapitalist and antiracist argument. Even if nowadays one cannot speak of a “queer materialist” current as such, because the approaches grouped under this term are very different, it seems appropriate to look for a “family resemblance” and to group them together. Two specific kinds of “queer materialisms” can thus be identified. The first, queer Marxism, seeks to theorize together Marxist and queer theories, particularly in normalization and capitalist accumulation regimes. The second, materialist queer feminism, confronts materialist/Marxist feminist thought with queer approaches and thus works in particular on the question of heteropatriarchy based on this double tradition.

Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models for the Co-Evolution of Networks and Behavior: An Introduction and Tutorial

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuval Kalish
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Model Building ◽  
Network Evolution ◽  
Network Ties ◽  
Network Change ◽  
Step Model ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Organizational Scholarship ◽  
And Behavior

Stochastic actor-oriented (SAO) models are a family of models for network dynamics that enable researchers to test multiple, often competing explanations for network change and estimate the extent and relative power of various influences on network evolution. SAO models for the co-evolution of network ties and actor behavior, the most comprehensive category of SAO models, examine how networks and actor attributes—their behavior, performance, or attitudes—influence each other over time. While these models have been widely used in the social sciences, and particularly in educational settings, their use in organizational scholarship has been extremely limited. This paper provides a layperson introduction to SAO models for the co-evolution of networks and behavior and the types of research questions they can address. The models and their underpinnings are explained in nonmathematical terms, and theoretical explanations are supported by a concrete, detailed example that includes step-by-step model building and hypothesis testing, alongside an R script.

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