The Social Life of Measures: Conceptualizing Measure–Value Environments

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Mubi Brighenti
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contemporary Social Theory

Issues of measure and measurement, and their relation to value and values, are of concern in several major threads in contemporary social theory and social research. In this article, the notion of ‘measure–value environments’ is introduced as a theoretical lens through which the life of measures can be better understood. A number of points are made which represent both a continuation and a slight change in emphasis vis-à-vis the existing scholarship. First, it is argued that the relation between measure and value is necessarily circular – better, entangled. Second, a conceptualization of measures as territorializing devices is advanced. Third, importance is given to the fact that measures are not simply tools in our hands, they are also environments in which we live. Fourth, attention is drawn to the fact that the unit ( n = 1) is not just a quantitative happening among others, but is qualitatively distinct.

Inventing the Social

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Wilkie
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Creative Practice ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social

Inventing the Social, edited by Noortje Marres, Michael Guggenheim and Alex Wilkie, showcases recent efforts to develop new ways of knowing society that combine social research with creative practice. With contributions from leading figures in sociology, architecture, geography, design, anthropology, and digital media, the book provides practical and conceptual pointers on how to move beyond the customary distinctions between knowledge and art, and on how to connect the doing, researching and making of social life in potentially new ways. Presenting concrete projects with a creative approach to researching social life as well as reflections on the wider contexts from which these projects emerge, this collection shows how collaboration across social science, digital media and the arts opens up timely alternatives to narrow, instrumentalist proposals that seek to engineer behaviour and to design community from scratch. To invent the social is to recognise that social life is always already creative in itself and to take this as a starting point for developing different ways of combining representation and intervention in social life.

scholarly journals On the assumption of self-reflective subjectivity

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110328
Author(s):  
Christoforos Bouzanis
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Rule Following ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
Discursive Participation ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Contemporary Social Theory

Contemporary social theory has consistently emphasized habitual action, rule-following, and role-performing as key aspects of social life, yet the challenge remains of combining these aspects with the omnipresent phenomenon of self-reflective conduct. This article attempts to tackle this challenge by proposing useful distinctions that can facilitate further interdisciplinary research on self-reflection. To this end, I argue that we need a more sophisticated set of distinctions and categories in our understanding of habitual action. The analysis casts light on the idea that our contemporary social theories of self-reflection are not consistent with everyday notions of agential knowledgeability and accountability, and this conclusion indicates the need to reconceptualize discourse and subjectivity in non-eliminative terms. Ultimately, the assumption of self-reflective subjectivity turns out to be a theoretical necessity for the conceptualization of discursive participation and democratic choice.

scholarly journals Althusser’s turn in Marxism and its meaning for the social theory

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-71
Author(s):  
Petr Tolkachev ◽  
Tsolak Agasovich Davtyan
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Marxist Philosophy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theoretical Line ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Interpretation

Rehabilitation of Marxist thought present in Althusser’s compilation of the articles titled by catching appeal “For Marx” is carried out in two directions: general – when theoretical line of understanding of the society and history is derived out of Marxism as political ideology; specific – when revealing the “ rational kernel” of Marxist philosophy of history or society, Althusser extracts dialectical contradiction rooted it his methodology of basis and superstructure. The subject of this research is the hermeneutic project of Althusser aimed at new interpretation of the Marxist philosophy of history, as well as elucidation of the “absence” of dialectical turn in Marx’s continuity of Hegel’s philosophy. The object of this article is the new methodology of social research oriented towards finding additional meanings of the principle of overdetermination, which allows Althusser to reconsider the Marxist method of basis and superstructure in a structuralistic way. The essence of its rehabilitation criticism (criticism of elimination of false understanding of Marxist philosophy) consists in the fact that the latter contributed to neglecting the superstructure and led the research to acknowledgement of its nature as a nonexistent phantom, illusion, behind which lies the only true reality resembled by the determinant of economic formations.

scholarly journals From methodology to methodography?

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 205979912097699
Author(s):  
Martyn Hammersley
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Research Methodology ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Qualitative Approaches ◽  
The Social

This article examines the character of a small but detailed observational study that focused on two teams of researchers, one engaged in qualitative sociological research, the other developing statistical models. The study was presented as investigating ‘the social life of methods’, an approach seen by some as displacing conventional research methodology. The study drew on ethnomethodology, and was offered as a direct parallel with ethnographic and ethnomethodological investigations of natural scientists’ work by Science and Technology Studies scholars. In the articles deriving from this study, the authors show how even the statisticians relied on background qualitative knowledge about the social phenomena to which their data related. The articles also document routine practices employed by each set of researchers, some ‘troubles’ they encountered and how they dealt with these. Another theme addressed is whether the distinction between quantitative and qualitative approaches accurately characterised differences between these researchers at the level of practical reasoning. While this research is presented as descriptive in orientation, concerned simply with documenting social science practices, it operates against a background of at least implicit critique. I examine its character and the closely associated criticism of social research methodology and conventional social science.

scholarly journals What’s at Stake in Digital Social Research?

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-40
Author(s):  
Nick Couldry
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Researcher ◽  
The Social ◽  
Multiple Actors

I am a social researcher who uses both theoretical and empirical enquiry not so much to describe the social as to understand the conflicts involved in constructing an order that appears to us as ‘social’. I seek to address the paradox of doing social research: for the social is not something concrete at which we can point, but a dimension of how whatever in our life is concrete holds together as a world. Media are crucial to what hangs together as a world – and in ways that much social research to this day still ignores. Media are in the contemporary era irrevocably ‘digital’: they take forms that automatically bring possibilities for recombination, retransmission, and reworking by multiple actors. As such, and unavoidably, digital media can be woven tight into the fabric of social life much more than previous media. But what does this mean for the social world, that is, for our possibilities to enhance or undermine how we live together today?

Doing Critical IS Research

2011 ◽  
pp. 141-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dubravka Cecez-Kecmanovic
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Critical Social Theory ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Information System Design ◽  
Is Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Process ◽  
Critical Social

Critical information systems (IS) research denotes a critical process of inquiry that seeks to achieve emancipatory social change by going beyond the apparent to reveal hidden agendas, concealed inequalities and tacit manipulation involved in a complex relationship between IS and their social, political and organisational contexts. It has its philosophical and theoretical roots in critical social theory (Held, 1980; Fay, 1987; Morrow and Brown, 1994). As a critical social researcher studies the social life of people in order to help them change conditions and improve their lives, so too does a critical IS researcher. By demystifying technological imperatives and managerial rationalism justifying a particular information system design, the critical IS researcher helps both IS practitioners and users understand its social consequences, envisage desirable alternatives and take action.

How do we know what we know? Epistemic tensions in social and cultural research on gambling 1980-2000

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia M. McGowan
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Narrow Range ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Culturally Informed ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Epistemic Cultures ◽  
Contemporary Social Theory

This project seeks to answer the question, how do we know what we know about gambling? With reference to a systematic review of the gambling research literature that addresses social and cultural topics and issues, this paper explores the epistemic cultures that created and gave authority to knowledge about gambling presented in scholarly research published between 1980 and 2000. From small beginnings in the 1980s, scholarly research in this area exploded during the 1990s and was dominated by surveys describing the distribution of problem and pathological forms. The trend in gambling research is towards an increasingly narrow range of topics, focused on pathology, and curiously disengaged from advances in contemporary social theory. The paper concludes with a plea for nuanced, politically engaged, and culturally informed gambling research grounded in the social, cultural, historical, and everyday contexts in which gambling is embedded.

scholarly journals After Practice? Material Semiotic Approaches to Consumption and Economy

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 340-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Material Forces ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theories Of Practice ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Cultural Turn

The ‘turn’ to practice in social theory is proving influential in the sociological study of consumption (following Warde, 2005). This article joins current debates that appraise the contributions of this growing body of work, specifically its relationship with – and possible mode of succession to – cultural studies of consumption. It considers two claims about the impact and status of practice theoretic repertoires in consumption scholarship (Warde, 2014). First, that they invite greater attention than the cultural turn to objects and technologies as material forces. Second, that they have not yet found ways to locate consumption in the context of wider economic processes. My central argument is that theories of practice offer a partial reading of materiality, and that engagement with a greater range of material semiotic approaches can help in making better links between consumption and economy. This argument is illustrated through reference to market agencements, the social life of things, and ontological politics. I suggest these perspectives are compatible with practice theoretic approaches and that taken together, they represent some promising responses to a suite of fundamental challenges confronting consumption studies. I conclude that theories of practice – plural – have not yet run their course as an approach to consumption and economy. The parameters of consumption scholarship are also considered alongside the relationships between political economy and cultural analysis.

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