Critical political economy and the critique of comparative capitalisms scholarship on capitalist diversity

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Bruff ◽  
Matthias Ebenau
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The Self ◽  
German Language ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Significant Potential ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Comparative Capitalisms

This introduction to the special issue focuses on the rise to dominance in debates on capitalist diversity of approaches which take institutions as their starting point, rather than the wider social relations in which institutions sit and are constituted by. However, although this is part of broader trends across the social sciences over the last three decades, the self-marginalisation of critical political economy perspectives from these debates was also a factor, as was the declining dialogue between critical political economy researchers rooted in different geographical and philosophical traditions. Echoing the influence on the emergent Conference of Socialist Economists of German-language debates on the state in the 1970s, we call for renewed dialogue between researchers from different linguistic and intellectual backgrounds in the name of a renewed critique of dominant comparative capitalisms (CC) approaches. In so doing, we emphasise the range of alternative perspectives that can be offered through such dialogues and critiques, and thus the significant potential for further collaboration and advances in our understanding of capitalist diversity.

scholarly journals Social Theory after Strathern: An Introduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 7-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Street ◽  
Jacob Copeman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Subject And Object

Taking its cue from the articles in this special issue, this introduction explores what value a critical engagement with Strathern’s work might have for the social sciences by setting such an engagement in motion. It argues that Strathern’s writings are a particularly fruitful starting point for reflecting on our assumptions about what exactly theory might be and how and where it may be made to travel. Through the juxtaposition of articles published in this special issue and Strathern’s writings on Melanesia it explores the theorization of power in the social sciences as one arena in which Strathernian strategies might be harnessed in order to reflect on and extend Euro-American concepts. It also takes Strathern’s own interest in gardening as a metaphoric base for generating novel topologies of subject and object, the particular and the general, and the concrete and the abstract. This introduction does not provide a primer for ‘Strathernian theory’. Instead it reviews some of the original strategies and techniques – differentiation, staging of analogy, surprise, bifurcation, the echo, and an unremitting focus on how we make our familiar categories of analysis known to ourselves – that Strathern has used to ‘garden’ her theory: it can be used, if you like, as a conceptual toolkit.

scholarly journals Protest communication ecologies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Mercea
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Information Communication ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Media Communication ◽  
Growth Area ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Communication Practices ◽  
Media And Communication

The flurry of protests since the turn of the decade has sustained a growth area in the social sciences. The diversity of approaches to the various facets and concerns raised by the collective action of aggrieved groups the world over impresses through multidisciplinarity and the wealth of insights it has generated. This introduction to a special issue of the international journal Information, Communication and Society is an invitation to recover conceptual instruments—such as the ecological trope—that have fallen out of fashion in media and communication studies. We account for their fall from grace and explicate the rationale for seeking to reinsert them into the empirical terrain of interlocking media, communication practices and protest which we aim to both capture with theory and adopt as a starting point for further analytical innovation.

scholarly journals ‘I like to go out to be energised by different people’: an exploratory analysis of mobility and wellbeing in later life

2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 758-781 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRIEDERIKE ZIEGLER ◽  
TIM SCHWANEN
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Older People ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Later Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

ABSTRACTThis paper adds to the growing number of studies about mobility and wellbeing in later life. It proposes a broader understanding of mobility than movement through physical space. Drawing on the ‘mobility turn’ in the social sciences, we conceptualise mobility as the overcoming of any type of distance between a here and a there, which can be situated in physical, electronic, social, psychological or other kinds of space. Using qualitative data from 128 older people in County Durham, England, we suggest that mobility and wellbeing influence each other in many different ways. Our analysis extends previous research in various ways. First, it shows that mobility of the self – a mental disposition of openness and willingness to connect with the world – is a crucial driver of the relation between mobility and wellbeing. Second, while loss of mobility as physical movement can and often does affect older people's sense of wellbeing adversely, this is not necessarily so; other mobilities can at least to some extent compensate for the loss of mobility in physical space. Finally, wellbeing is also enhanced through mobility as movement in physical space because the latter enables independence or subjectively experienced autonomy, as well as inter-dependence in the sense of relatively equal and reciprocal social relations with other people.

scholarly journals Inter-cultural communications and power relations in international tourism commodity chains

2006 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolai Scherle ◽  
Tim Coles
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
International Tourism ◽  
Commodity Chains ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
Tourism Product ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Cultures

The internationalisation of tourism has resulted in the mediation of spatially-stretched commodity chains which often transcend international frontiers and which in businesses from different cultures come into contact with one other. This paper examines the social relations in bilateral business co-operations between Moroccan and German enterprises. As a central concept in the social sciences, there are multiple contested theorizations of power and in this paper we adopt a Lukesian starting point. A more precise naming and locating of power is vital to enhancing our understanding of the way in which the tourism product is commodified.

scholarly journals Phenomenological approaches to personal identity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakub Čapek ◽  
Sophie Loidolt
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
The Self ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Social ◽  
Phenomenological Perspective ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Continental Tradition ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Temporal Becoming

AbstractThis special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question (as suggested by thinkers such as MacIntyre, Ricœur and Taylor). These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: (a) debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; (b) questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and (c) the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective.

Social Ontology and Model-Building: A Response to Epstein

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-192
Author(s):  
Nadia Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Model Building ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Model Construction ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social

Brian Epstein has recently argued that a thoroughly microfoundationalist approach towards economics is unconvincing for metaphysical reasons. Generally, Epstein argues that for an improvement in the methodology of social science we must adopt social ontology as the foundation of social sciences; that is, the standing microfoundationalist debate could be solved by fixing economics’ ontology. However, as I show in this paper, fixing the social ontology prior to the process of model construction is optional instead of necessary and that metaphysical-ontological commitments are often the outcome of model construction, not its starting point. By focusing on the practice of modeling in economics the paper provides a useful inroad into the debate about the role of metaphysics in the natural and social sciences more generally.

scholarly journals Literary Anthropology

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Máiréad Nic Craith ◽  
Laurent Sebastian Fournier
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Performances ◽  
Textual Strategies

This special issue on anthropology and literature invited proposals for original contributions focusing on relationships between anthropology and literature. We were especially interested in the following questions: what role does literature play in anthropology? Can literature be considered as ethnography? What are the relationships between anthropology and literature, past and present? Are anthropology and anthropological motives used in literature? We also looked for critical readings of writers as anthropologists and critical readings of anthropologists as writers. Moreover, we wanted to assess the influence of literature on the invention of traditions, rituals and cultural performances. All these different questions and topics are clearly connected with the study of literacy, illiteracy and popular culture. They also lead to questions regarding potential textual strategies for ethnography and the possibilities of bringing together the field of anthropology (more associated with the social sciences) and literary studies (traditionally part of the humanities).

Editorial: Refashioning stories for celebrity counterpublics

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina Moro ◽  
Samita Nandy ◽  
Kiera Obbard ◽  
Andrew Zolides
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Ted Talks

Using celebrity narratives as a starting point, this Special Issue explores the social significance of storytelling for social change. It builds on the 8th Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies conference, which brought together scholars and media practitioners to explore how narratives inspired by the lives of celebrities, public intellectuals, critics and activists offer useful rhetorical tools to better understand dominant ideologies. This editorial further problematizes what it means to be a popular ‘storyteller’ using the critical lens of celebrity activism and life-writing. Throughout the issue, contributors analyse the politics of representation at play within a wide range of glamourous narratives, including documentaries, memoirs, TED talks, stand-up performances and award acceptance speeches in Hollywood and beyond. The studies show how we can strategically use aesthetic communication to shape identity politics in public personas and bring urgent social change in an image-driven celebrity culture.

Politics, Economics, and Political Economy

1973 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-279
Author(s):  
Trevor Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Thomas Kuhn ◽  
Widespread Adoption ◽  
The Social ◽  
Small Measure ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Critical Literature

DISSATISFACTION WITH ESTABLISHED MODES OF SCHOLARSHIP IS A contemporary manifestation common to all the social sciences in varying degrees. In the terminology of Thomas Kuhn, which in its widespread adoption seems in no small measure to have contribted to the new waves of methodological consciousness, the prevailing ‘paradigms’, which were largely consolidated in the 1950s, are being explicitly and often vehemently challenged. A burgeoning critical literature is readily apparent throughout the social sciences and, for that matter, beyond.

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