scholarly journals Has Critique Run Out of Steam?—On Discourse Research as Critical Inquiry

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reiner Keller
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Critical Inquiry ◽  
Critical Sociology ◽  
Present Contribution ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
The Social ◽  
Matters Of Concern ◽  
Critical Perspectives

Is there still a role for discourse research today, some 30 years after Michel Foucault’s death? A decade ago, French actor-network theorist Bruno Latour famously declared the end of critique as ethos and practice in the social sciences. What is more, arguments made about the contingency of historical phenomena even arm “enemy” forces. Empirical work therefore should be replaced by a politics of “matters of concern.” French sociologist Luc Boltanski added to this critique of critical perspectives by suggesting that an investigation into social modes of critique should replace critical sociology. The present contribution discusses both critiques of critique and the problems and limitations of the solutions proposed by both Latour and Boltanski. Against this background, and with a focus on discourse research, it stresses the ongoing need for precise empirical work as a condition for the social unfolding of critical perspectives.

Uncertainties Revisited

2019 ◽  
pp. 216-237
Author(s):  
Liesbeth Huybrechts ◽  
Katrien Dreessen ◽  
Selina Schepers
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Uncertainty Model ◽  
The Social ◽  
Matters Of Concern ◽  
Uncertainty Models ◽  
Do So

In this chapter, the authors use actor-network theory (ANT) to explore the relations between uncertainties in co-design processes and the quality of participation. To do so, the authors investigate Latour's discussion uncertainties in relation to social processes: the nature of actors, actions, objects, facts/matters of concern, and the study of the social. To engage with the discussion on uncertainties in co-design and, more specific in infrastructuring, this chapter clusters the diversity of articulations of the role and place of uncertainty in co-design into four uncertainty models: (1) the neoliberal, (2) the management, (3) the disruptive, and (4) the open uncertainty model. To deepen the reflections on the latter, the authors evaluate the relations between the role and place of uncertainty in two infrastructuring processes in the domain of healthcare and the quality of these processes. In the final reflections, the authors elaborate on how ANT supported in developing a “lens” to assess how uncertainties hinder or contribute to the quality of participation.

scholarly journals RESPONSE FUNCTIONS TO CRITICAL SHOCKS IN SOCIAL SCIENCES: AN EMPIRICAL AND NUMERICAL STUDY

2004 ◽  
Vol 15 (06) ◽  
pp. 809-834 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. M. ROEHNER ◽  
D. SORNETTE ◽  
J. V. ANDERSEN
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Numerical Study ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Large Variability ◽  
Future Evolution ◽  
Damage Spreading ◽  
Exogenous Shocks ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Difference

We show that, provided one focuses on properly selected episodes, one can apply to the social sciences the same observational strategy that has proved successful in natural sciences such as astrophysics or geodynamics. For instance, in order to probe the cohesion of a society, one can, in different countries, study the reactions to some huge and sudden exogenous shocks, which we call Dirac shocks. This approach naturally leads to the notion of structural (as opposed or complementary to temporal) forecast. Although structural predictions are by far the most common way to test theories in the natural sciences, they have been much less used in the social sciences. The Dirac shock approach opens the way to testing structural predictions in the social sciences. The examples reported here suggest that critical events are able to reveal pre-existing "cracks" because they probe the social cohesion which is an indicator and predictor of future evolution of the system, and in some cases they foreshadow a bifurcation. We complement our empirical work with numerical simulations of the response function ("damage spreading") to Dirac shocks in the Sznajd model of consensus build-up. We quantify the slow relaxation of the difference between perturbed and unperturbed systems, the conditions under which the consensus is modified by the shock and the large variability from one realization to another.

scholarly journals Transaction Cost Economics: An Assessment of Empirical Research in the Social Sciences

2008 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey T. Macher ◽  
Barak D. Richman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Transaction Cost ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Transaction Cost Economics ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Empirical Literature ◽  
Comprehensive Review ◽  
The Social ◽  
Considerable Support

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the empirical literature in transaction cost economics (TCE) across multiple social science disciplines and business fields. We show how TCE has branched out from its economic roots to examine empirical phenomena in several other areas. We find TCE is increasingly being applied not only to business-related fields such as accounting, finance, marketing, and organizational theory, but also to areas outside of business including political science, law, public policy, and agriculture and health. With few exceptions, however, the use of TCE reasoning to inform empirical research in these areas is piecemeal. We find that there is considerable support of many of the central tenets of TCE, but we also observe a number of lingering theoretical and empirical issues that need to be addressed. We conclude by discussing the implications of these issues and outlining directions for future theoretical and empirical work.

scholarly journals TINA Is Dead: Reflecting on Postcapitalist Futures

Humans ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-46
Author(s):  
Loris Serafino ◽  
Fabrizia Ghezzo
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Relation ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Theoretical Issue ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
Work Production ◽  
Market Relations

Social sciences in recent years have clearly proven that TINA—There Is No Alternative (to capitalism)—is no longer tenable. Today, alterity to capitalism comes in many forms and blossoms from inside its borders. Ethnographies of experimentations that span from ecovillages and community economies to alternative forms of work, production, and consumption are now countless. One common denominator of these experiences is that communal forms of social relation take over market relations. The main theoretical issue raised by this empirical work is whether this ferment of scattered, small scale alternative ways of organizing economy and society can coalesce into a fully fledged postcapitalist future or whether it is doomed to be stay marginal and transient at best. Anthropology can be at the forefront of this theoretical challenge. We close this brief commentary by addressing the importance of a future-oriented thinking in Anthropology and for the social science in general.

scholarly journals Production of truth as reduction of complexity. Understanding society with peripheral critical sociology

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-19
Author(s):  
Philipp Altmann
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Organizational Development ◽  
Global South ◽  
Considerable Effort ◽  
Critical Sociology ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Made In

Truth is always a reduction of complexity. The various aspects of an observed phenomena are reduced to only those that relate to how truth is defined by the observer. In this sense, social sciences create society by applying theories that define what is truth to it. This logic becomes a problem when the social sciences in question do not reflect a wide range of different theories that can complement and criticize each other, providing a more complex observation and, thus, a more complex truth. This is the case with some social sciences of the Global South, especially, in early stages of their institutional and organizational development. However, decisions made in early stages of a system can only be changed with considerable effort later on. There tends to be an effect of path dependency, especially in organizations engaged in social sciences in the Global South. This article will explore the mechanisms of production of truth and thus of reduction of complexity by Marxist critical sociology in Ecuador, between the 1960s and 2010. A focus will be the institutionalization of these mechanisms in organizations and the augmentation of complexity within critical sociology, usually connected to certain ideas of politics and sciences.

Pragmatic Turn in der Verwaltungswissenschaft

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 553-576
Author(s):  
Michael Vollstädt
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Pragmatic Turn ◽  
Administrative Science

The public administration is in a state of change and is confronted with ever new challenges. To cope with that it seems appropriate to incorporate new theories into the field of administrative science. Accordingly, two theory offers from the social sciences are used, the Actor-Network-Theory as well as the Sociology of Conventions, and their utility and limits for public administration theory are examined. The aim is to inaugurate a pragmatic theoretical enrichment for the administration and to show how application-oriented science of public administration can benefit from such a theoretical offer.

Habits of the Heart

2011 ◽  
Vol 637 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica R. Miller ◽  
Ezekiel J. Dixon-Roman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Moral Force ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Future Work

The landscape of youth religious participation is an underengaged area across both the humanities and social science. While the humanities lack empirical data on the changing religious life worlds of youths, existing empirical work in the social sciences suggests that institutional religion buffers criminality and delinquency—a brand of engagement the authors refer to as “buffering transgression.” This is a process that both conceives and privileges religion as an institutional and a moral force responsible for creating prosocial behavior. While empirical studies on youths and religion keep religion arrested to institutional and moral functions, scholars in the humanities work hard to legitimate youth cultural forms, such as hip hop, by conflating its rugged dimensions with a quest (and hope) for democratic sensibilities—a motif the authors suggest is rooted in ideologies of teleological progress. Using the tropes progress, peril, and change, this article explores the utility (and limitations) of empirical work and the often misguided efforts to moralize religion. Here the authors raise queries regarding youth cultural change and religion and quantitatively model youth religious change over 16 years. The implications of these theoretical and empirical interventions point toward future work at the social scientific intersections of religion in culture.

scholarly journals ‘I Saw You’: Searching for Lost Love via Practices of Reading, Writingand Responding

2001 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Laurier ◽  
Angus Whyte
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Public Displays ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social

How do emotions move and how do emotions move us? How are feelings and recognitions distributed socio-materially? Based on a multi-site ethnographic study of a ëromanticí correspondance system, this article explores the themes of love, privacy, identity and public displays. Informed by ethnomethodology and actor- network theory its investigations into these ëinformalí affairs are somewhat unusual in that much of the research carried out by those bodies of work concentrates on ëinstitutionalí settings such as laboratories, offices and courtrooms. In common with ethnomethodology it attempts to re-specify some topics of interest in the social sciences and humanities; in this case, documents and practices of writing and reading those documents. A key element of the approach taken is restoring to reading and writing their situated nature as observable, knowable, distributed community practices. Re- specifying topics for the social sciences involves the detailed description of several situated ways in which the ëromanticí correspondence system is used. Detailing the translations, transformations and transportations of documents as ‘quasi- objects’ through several orderings, the article suggests that documents have no essential meaning and that making them meaningful is part of the work of those settings.

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