Improvisation as System

2020 ◽  
pp. 79-104
Author(s):  
Kristian Kloeckl
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Experimental Work ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
System P ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines the nature of improvisation as a concept and practice, drawing on literature from the social sciences, humanities, performance studies, and the emerging field of critical improvisation. By providing an understanding of the nature of improvisation, some of its key characteristics, and its historical ties with the urban context, this chapter provides a basis for the work with improvisation for the design in a hybrid city context. The radical and experimental work from the 1960s has gained new significance today, and networked information technologies have reached levels of performance and pervasiveness that were unthinkable half a century ago. Past works have used improvisation predominantly as a concept and metaphor. This chapter suggests, instead, that we consider improvisation more thoroughly to inform a method for the design of interactions in hybrid city environments.

scholarly journals Takis Zenetos’s Electronic Urbanism and Tele-Activities: Minimizing Transportation as Social Aspiration

Urban Science ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Marianna Charitonidou
Keyword(s):  
Information Society ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
Working Hours ◽  
Home Office ◽  
The Social ◽  
Residential Units ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Takis Zenetos was enthusiastic about the idea of working from home, and believed that both architecture and urban planning should be reshaped in order to respond to this. He supported the design of special public spaces in residential units, aiming to accommodate the inhabitants during working hours. This article argues that Zenetos’s design for “Electronic Urbanism” was more prophetic, and more pragmatic, than his peers such as Archigram and Constant Nieuwenhuys. Despite the fact that they shared an optimism towards technological developments and megastructure, a main difference between Zenetos’s view and the perspectives of his peers is his rejection of a generalised enthusiasm concerning increasing mobility of people. In opposition with Archigram, Zenetos insisted in minimizing citizens’ mobility and supported the replacement of daily transport with the use advanced information technologies, using terms such as “tele-activity”. Zenetos was convinced that “Electronic Urbanism” would help citizens save the time that they normally used to commute to work, and would allow them to spend this time on more creative activities, at or near their homes. The main interest of “Electronic Urbanism” lies in the fact that it not only constitutes an artistic contribution to experimental architecture, but is also characterized by a new social vision, promising to resynchronize practices of daily life. An aspect that is also examined is the relationship of Zenetos’s ideas and those of the so-called Metabolists in the 1960s in Japan, including Kenzo Tange’s conception of megastructures. Zenetos’s thought is very topical considering the ongoing debates about the advanced information society, especially regarding the social concerns of surveillance, governance, and sovereignty within the context of Big Data. His conception of “tele-activities” provides a fertile terrain for reflecting on potential implications and insights concerning home-office conditions not only within the context of the current pandemic situation but beyond it as well.

Scientific realism and social science

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Keat
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Scientific Realism ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Realist Conception

A central issue in the philosophy of the social sciences is the possibility of naturalism: whether disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, economics and psychology can be ‘scientific’ in broadly the same sense in which this term is applied to physics, chemistry, biology and so on. In the long history of debates about this issue, both naturalists and anti-naturalists have tended to accept a particular view of the natural sciences – the ‘positivist’ conception of science. But the challenges to this previously dominant position in the philosophy of science from around the 1960s made this shared assumption increasingly problematic. It was no longer clear what would be implied by the naturalist requirement that the social sciences should be modelled on the natural sciences. It also became necessary to reconsider the arguments previously employed by anti-naturalists, to see whether these held only on the assumption of a positivist conception of science. If so, a non-positivist naturalism might be defended: a methodological unity of the social and natural sciences based on some alternative to positivism. That this is possible has been argued by scientific realists in the social sciences, drawing on a particular alternative to positivism: the realist conception of science developed in the 1970s by Harré and others.

Individuals and Aggregates

1980 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-250
Author(s):  
Paul F. Bourke ◽  
Donald A. DeBats
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social History ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Electoral Behavior ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Basis ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Vexing Question

After more than a decade's impressive achievement in the “new” social history and the “new” political history, two distinct though related problems require us to reconsider the data appropriate to these inquiries. First, recent commentators (Foner, 1974; Formi-sano, 1976) have pointed to the relative failure of research in these areas to converge, a failure made more obvious in the light of the programmatic optimism of the 1960s which held out the prospect of an integrated approach to the social basis of politics and to the political implications of social structure. Second, there has been in recent years some acknowledgment by historians (see below) of the vexing question of inferences across levels of data, a matter central to other social sciences and particularly pressing for historians of electoral behavior.

scholarly journals Islamic "New Social Movements"? Radical Islam, AL-QA'IDA and Social Movement Theory

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Sutton ◽  
Stephen Vertigans
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Unique Character ◽  
Radical Islam ◽  
Movement Organization ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Social Movement ◽  
Post Industrial

European new social movement (NSM) theory was developed to describe and explain the apparently unique character of the wave of collective action that began in the 1960s and continues to this day. Key characteristics of NSM theory are a post-industrial orientation, middle-class activist core, loose organizational form, use of symbolic direct actions, creation of new identities, and a "self-limiting radicalism." The theory's claims to movement innovation were later criticized by many as exaggerated and ahistorical. However, the filtering down of key NSM elements into social movement studies has led to changing definitions of what social movements actually are and opened up new opportunities for the integration of religious movements into the social movements mainstream. Using the case of radical Islam, and with particular reference to the terrorist social movement organization al-Qa'ida, this article argues that drawing on key features of NSM theory should lead to a better understanding of radical Islam as well as a more realistic explanation of its continuing development and transformation.

scholarly journals Historiography within the structure of history of political and legal doctrines: subject field, objectives, tasks, and functions

2020 ◽  
pp. 126-137
Author(s):  
Sergei Vladimirovich Kodan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Historical Science ◽  
Subject Field ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Context

The scientific context of studying the historiography of the history of political and legal doctrines is associated with its positioning within the structure of the indicated historical legal science, and represents a challenging problematic that orients the researcher towards understanding the processes of development of this science through the prism of historiography as a reflection of its history. This necessitates to determine the subject field, objectives, tasks, and functions of historiography within the structure of the indicated science, which is the key vector of this research. At the same time, the analysis of these questions leans on universal vision of the development of historiography in the social sciences and humanities. The scientific novelty is defined by the fact that the historiographical problematic in the history of political and legal doctrines is studied insufficiently; therefore, this article is the first attempt to position historiography as a scientific discipline of historical legal trend, and present an original perspective on the topic. Emphasis is placed on examination of the key characteristics of historiography as part of history of political and legal doctrines: subject matter, objectives, tasks, and functions. At the same time, the author relies on the historiographical developments in social sciences and humanities, namely in the historical science, based on which presents an original perspective on the role of historiography as a part of history of political and legal doctrines is.

SIM’s Directions: “Back to the Future”

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (7) ◽  
pp. 1418-1425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edwin M. Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Business Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Service Award ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The University

This essay addresses directions for the Social Issues in Management (SIM) Division from the perspective of “Back to the Future.” The author was chair of the SIM Division in 1983 to 1984 and the 1989 recipient of the SIM Division’s Sumner Marcus Distinguished Service Award. The essay reviews the general history of SIM during the 1960s and 1970s in which the University of California, Berkeley, played a key role in organizing conferences. The author explains his approach as an applied empiricist to research concerning SIM. The essentials are power, legitimacy, responsibility, rationality, and values, and understanding how they impact the ongoing day-to-day interactions within, between, and among business organizations, their leadership, and other sectors of society. SIM is a field of diverse inquiry which has been the recipient of perspectives and persons drawn not only from multiple disciplines, particularly from the social sciences, law, and management, but also from the humanities and sciences. SIM is patently multi- and inter-disciplinary.

‘The loss of innocence’ in historical perspective

Antiquity ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 72 (277) ◽  
pp. 694-698 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce G. Trigger
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Archaeological Theory ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Dual Tasks ◽  
Intrinsic Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Single Discipline ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
And Control

The dual tasks of this paper are to examine David Clarke’s ideas about the development of archaeology as they relate both to the era when ‘the loss of innocence’ was written and to what has happened since. In his treatment of the history of archaeology offered in that essay, Clarke subscribed to at least two of the key tenets of the behaviourist and utilitarian approaches that dominated the social sciences in the 1960s: neoevolutionism and ecological determinism.Clarke viewed the development of archaeology as following a unilinear sequence of stages from consciousness through self-consciousness to critical self-consciousness. The first stage began with archaeology defining its subject matter and what archaeologists do. As its database and the procedures required for studying it became more elaborate, self-conscious archaeology emerged as a ‘series of divergent and selfreferencing regional schools … with regionally esteemed bodies of archaeological theory and locally preferred forms of description, interpretation and explanation’ (Clarke 1973: 7). At the stage of critical self-consciousness, regionalism was replaced by a conviction that ‘archaeologists hold most of their problems in common and share large areas of general theory within a single discipline’ (1973: 7). Archaeology was now defined by ‘the characteristic forms of its reasoning, the intrinsic nature of its knowledge and information, and its competing theories of concepts and their relationships’ (1973: 7). Clarke looked forward to a fourth (and ultimate?) phase of self-critical self-consciousncss, when the new archaeology would monitor and control its own development.

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.

Futures Studies

Futures ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 134-147
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Gidley
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Evolution Of Science

This chapter examines and critiques the changing socio-political implications that accompany the shift from the concept of a singular future to the pluralization of futures. From the 1960s onwards, the emergence of multiple futures enabled larger sections of society to envision and create ‘alternative futures’ to the status quo. In this chapter Gidley brings to bear the democratizing effect of multiple possible futures upon the evolution of theory and practice across academic disciplines. In particular, she illuminates how the theory and practice of futures studies has paralleled developments in the evolution of science and the social sciences, to incorporate critical futures, cultural futures, participatory futures, and integral futures. She concludes with reflections about how the field of futures studies will continue to evolve so that it can diversely represent the future conceptualizations and actions of scholars, practitioners, and researchers globally.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Jon Elster
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social System ◽  
Methodological Individualism ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
System P ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
Constitution Making

This chapter compares the making of the American constitution in 1787 and the French constitution in 1791. It discusses aspects of the pre-constitutional systems that would prove relevant for the understanding of the constitution-making processes. It also attempts to practice the union of history and psychology, which are the two main pillars of the social sciences. The chapter focuses on the quest for causality and the quest for agency or methodological individualism. It covers the main features of the prodigiously complex social system of the French ancien régime. It also cites many contemporary texts that illuminate the perverse and sometimes pathological effects of the social system.

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