The Police

2021 ◽  
pp. 466-487
Author(s):  
Simon Holdaway
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Participatory Methods ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
What Works ◽  
The Social ◽  
Police Policy ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

This chapter interrogates the contemporary dominance of a “What Works” approach in studies of the police. It examines and finds wanting the methodological and theoretical foundations of this orientation. Instead, it argues that researchers should begin with an understanding of human beings, adopting research methods resonating with their conclusion. Ethnography is based on the meanings human beings attribute to the social world; it is concerned with a systematic, detailed description and analysis of the police and policing. After this introduction, major ethnographic studies of the police are discussed, and their main findings analyzed. Studies conducted beyond Anglo-American societies are covered. Each study reveals a key feature of policing that would not have been identified if ethnographic, participatory methods had not been used. The consequences of each finding for policing and for academic knowledge are discussed briefly, and somewhat ironically, key implications for police policy are considered.

Belief in the Human

2018 ◽  
pp. 250-281
Author(s):  
Ethan H. Shagan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Suspension Of Disbelief

This chapter cites Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of the “willing suspension of disbelief” in order to describe the timeless process by which human beings believe in their own creations. As seen before, Europeans influenced by new ideas in the seventeenth century were freed to believe in spiritual objects in much the same way they believed in mundane ones, as acts of sovereign judgment. With the category so perforated, there was no intrinsic reason why belief had to remain bound to objects judged “true” in a transcendent or universal sense; it might also alight upon objects judged true in more provisional or instrumental ways. Crucially, this included the social world: ephemeral human creations, the ideas and things that humans themselves make.

Symbolic interactionism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Brittan
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Interactionism ◽  
Social World ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
The Self ◽  
Psychological Perspective ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Language Identity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interactive View

Symbolic interactionism is in the main a US sociological and social psychological perspective that has focused on the reciprocal relationship between language, identity and society. Philosophically it has largely been associated with pragmatists such as James (1907), Mead (1934), Dewey (1922) and Pierce (1958), although in the European context it has affinities with hermeneutics and phenomenology. In addition, it has links with various ‘dramaturgical’ approaches to communication that emphasize the interactive processes underpinning the construction, negotiation, presentation and affirmation of the self. In brief, symbolic interactionism is premised on the supposition that human beings are ‘active’ and not ‘reactive’. Although it is not easy to spell out the central propositions of Symbolic Interactionism in a systematic way, nevertheless, most of its proponents are committed to an interactive view of self and society, that is, they take issue with those views that see the social world as a seamless unity that completely encapsulates and determines individual conduct.

Genealogies of the Global

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 387-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Featherstone
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Linear Process ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Global Knowledge ◽  
Global Village ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Media

The term global suggests all-inclusiveness and brings to mind connectivity, a notion that gained a boost from Marshall McLuhan's reference to the mass-mediated ‘global village’. In the past decade it has rapidly become part of the everyday vocabulary not only of academics and business people, but also has circulated widely in the media in various parts of the world. There have also been the beginnings of political movements against globalization and proposals for ‘de-globalization’ and ‘alternative globalizations’, projects to re-define the global. In effect, the terminology has globalized and globalization is varyingly lauded, reviled and debated around the world. The rationale of much previous thinking on humanity in the social sciences has been to assume a linear process of social integration, as more and more people are drawn into a widening circle of interdependencies in the movement to larger units, but the new forms of binding together of social life necessitate the development of new forms of global knowledge which go beyond the old classifications. It is also in this sense that the tightening of the interdependency chains between human beings, and also between human beings and other life forms, suggests we need to think about the relevance of academic knowledge to the emergent global public sphere.

Human dignity as a structural feature of functional differentiation – a precondition for modern responsibilization

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gesa Lindemann
Keyword(s):  
Structural Feature ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Functional Differentiation ◽  
Social World ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Philosophical Discussion ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Open Question

AbstractThis article offers a new sociological understanding of human dignity as a structural feature of modern functionally differentiated society. Durkheim and Luhmann build their analyses of dignity on the notion that functional differentiation and individualization are interconnected. At the same time, both assume implicitly that only living human beings can be bearers of dignity. The philosophical discussion around dignity does not take this for granted, however. Fichte responded to Kant's analysis of dignity by treating as an open question who can be identified as a bearer of dignity and by what criterion. If it is to take this seriously, sociological analysis must combine the theory of functional differentiation with an analysis of the borders of the social world. This paper follows this insight by presenting a new approach to human dignity that provides a systematic sociological answer to the question of how the borders of the social world are connected with the structure of social differentiation. In conclusion, I explore the implications for the concept of responsibility: how can bearers of human dignity be held responsible in a functionally differentiated society?

scholarly journals The Concept of ‘Peasant Embourgeoisement’ in the Perspective of Different Historical Conjunctures

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
András Vigvári ◽  
Tamás Gerőcs
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sociological Concept

AbstractThe paper combines the historical analysis of the social transformation of rural Hungary with the evolution of the sociological concept of ‘peasant embourgeoisment’. The authors highlight the long lasting impact of the concept in the understanding of academic knowledge production. The concept was the product of thorough ethnographic studies in the inter- and postwar periods by scholarly intellectuals, whose aim went beyond academic purposes and translated into a political agenda of rural modernization. To make such a methodological combination the authors demonstrate that the global historical context is necessary in the understanding of how knowledge production occurs and interacts at various historical conjunctures, especially during periods of crises.

scholarly journals Collective intentionality or documentality?

2015 ◽  
Vol 41 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 423-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurizio Ferraris
Keyword(s):  
Exponential Growth ◽  
Social World ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Technological Developments

In this article I defend two theses. The first is that the centrality of recording in the social world is manifested through the production of documents, a phenomenon which has been present since the earliest phases of society and which has undergone an exponential growth through the technological developments of the last decades (computers, tablets, smartphones). The second is that the centrality of documents leads to a view of normativity according to which human beings are primarily passive receptors of rules manifested through documents. We are not intentional producers of values. The latter, as I shall suggest in my conclusion, should be viewed as being ‘socially dependent’ rather than ‘socially constructed’.

No “Mean” Solution

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-124
Author(s):  
Arunabh Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social World ◽  
Mathematical Statistics ◽  
Statistical Education ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Anglo American

This chapter explores how this new understanding of statistics became dominant in the 1950s and how it affected the valuation of key concepts and methods. It first unpacks attempts at demarcation by focusing on the nearly decade-long sequence of publications that sought to criticize Anglo-American “bourgeois” statistics and its practitioners. The chapter then shifts to the changes in statistical education and to the debates over the content of statistics. In broad terms, the consequences of this transition are well known: as a social science, statistics dealt with the social world rather than the natural world. As a result, it was bifurcated from what was seen as the abstract and formal theorizing of mathematical statistics, which was, in turn, banished to departments of mathematics.

Ideology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Freeden
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Social World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Cultural Symbols ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Facts ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
Major Division ◽  
Beliefs And Attitudes

An ideology is a set of ideas, beliefs and attitudes, consciously or unconsciously held, which reflects or shapes understandings or misconceptions of the social and political world. It serves to recommend, justify or endorse collective action aimed at preserving or changing political practices and institutions. The concept of ideology is split almost irreconcilably between two major senses. The first is pejorative, denoting particular, historically distorted (political) thought which reinforces certain relationships of domination and in respect of which ideology functions as a critical unmasking concept. The second is a non-pejorative assertion about the different families of cultural symbols and ideas human beings employ in perceiving, comprehending and evaluating social and political realities in general, often within a systemic framework. Those families perform significant mapping and integrating functions. A major division exists within this latter category. Some analysts claim that the study of ideology can be non-evaluative in establishing scientific facts about the way political beliefs reflect the social world and propel people to specific action within it. Others hold that ideology injects specific politically value-laden meanings into conceptualizations of the social world which are inevitably indeterminate, and is consequently a means of constructing rather than reflecting that world. This also applies to interpretations undertaken by the analysts of ideology themselves.

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