scholarly journals A New Role for Management of the Social Sciences in an Age of Complexity

2016 ◽  
pp. 51-61
Author(s):  
Jody Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
World View ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Inquiry Science ◽  
Organic World ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Way

A particular scientific world view has become dominant, influential and successful in modern sciences today. Science and technology have transformed the way we view ourselves, our societies and our place in the cosmos. However, just as science and technology seem to be at the peak of their power, unexpected problems are disrupting the sciences from within. This reflects a deeper and more serious problem regarding scientific inquiry. Science is being held back by old assumptions that have become dogmas, the biggest of which is that science already knows all the answers, and only the details need to be worked out. A transformational paradigm shift is required from a mechanistic world view to an organic world view to better address the challenges of the new millenium.

Complexity, Science and the Public

2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 113-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristian Suteanu
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Unexpected Result ◽  
Multiple Relationships ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Measurability Problem ◽  
Rule Out ◽  
The Way

This article addresses complexity by selecting some of its key aspects that share a common feature: the power to change. They seem to change not only the way the world is approached by scientists, but also the way this approach, the resulting perspectives and their multiple relationships, are interpreted. These main aspects are: (1) the challenge of measurability, with an unexpected result that escapes the gravitational field of the measurability problem; (2) the meaning of reproducibility and the redrawn boundaries of scientific inquiry, with implications for the social sciences; (3) the altered expectations concerning prediction, which seem to break with a glorious tradition of unquestioned technological success; and (4) the discovery of all-embracing patterns of events that unavoidably include large events, possibly perceived as ‘crises’, which one may hope to understand and confront, rather than rule out. The resulting geography, with its new landmarks, new relationships among its elements and new means of orientation, is expected to reach the public sooner or later, even if the effect – according to complexity theory itself – cannot be foreseen in detail. All these fibres of change are considered in the context of a fresh meaning of time and of a topology dominated by network concepts.

The Metaphysics of Experience

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Kraus
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
World View ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Organic World ◽  
The Social

This book styles itself as “a Sherpa guide to Process and Reality, whose function is to assist the serious reader in grasping the meaning of the text and to prevent falls into misinterpretation.” Although originally published in 1925, Process and Reality has perhaps even more relevance to the contemporary scene in physics, biology, psychology, and the social sciences than it had in the mid-twenties. Hence, its internal difficulty, its quasi-inaccessibility, is all the more tragic, since, unlike most metaphysical endeavors, it is capable of interpreting and unifying theories in the above sciences in terms of an organic world view, instead of selecting one theory as the paradigm and reducing all others to it. Because Alfred North Whitehead is so crucial to modern philosophy, this book plays an important role in making Process and Reality accessible to a wider readership.

scholarly journals Perspective by incongruity in the performance of dialectical ironic analysis: a disciplined approach

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cate Watson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World View ◽  
Social World ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Perspective By Incongruity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sociological Thought ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
The Way

The importance of dialectic to sociological thought has been recognised by many of the discipline’s most eminent thinkers. Adopting a dialectical world view infused with irony provokes insights revealing logical contradictions, so opening up possibilities for the development of alternative interpretations of the social world. There is, however, very little in the way of method to support the development of dialectical irony as a key analytical tool for the social sciences. This article seeks to remedy this deficit. Drawing on three key examples (trained incapacity, functional stupidity and interpassivity) the article examines Kenneth Burke’s ‘perspective by incongruity’ as a means for interrogating the dialectical moment, so contributing towards the development of dialectical ironic analysis within a methodology of humour.

Futures Honed

Futures ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 118-134
Author(s):  
Barbara Adam
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
The Past ◽  
Writing Theory ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
The Way

This chapter comprises an interview between Barbara Adam and the editors, and is followed by Adam’s ‘Honing Futures’, which is presented in four short verses of distilled theory. In the interview Adam reflects on thirty-five years of futures-thinking rooted in her deeply original work on time and temporality, and her innovative response to qualitative and linear definitions of time within the social sciences. The interview continues with a discussion of the way Adam’s thinking on futures intersects in her work with ideas of ethics and collective responsibility politics and concludes with a brief rationale for writing theory in verse form. In ‘Honing Futures’, a piece of futures theory verse form, Adam charts the movements and moments in considerations of the Not Yet and futurity’s active creation: from pluralized imaginings of the future, to an increasingly tangible and narrower anticipated future, to future-making as designing and reality-creating performance. Collectively, the verses identify the varied complex interdependencies of time, space, and matter with the past and future in all iterations of honing and making futures.

scholarly journals From the Social History of the Reformation (1960-1980) to the Reformation as Communication Process (1990-2000)

HISTOREIN ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Costas Gaganakis
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Communication Process ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

<p>This article attempts to chart the “paradigm shift” from social history, dominant until the early 1980s, to new cultural history and the various interpretive trends it engendered in the 1990s and 2000s. The privileged field of investigation is the history of the Protestant Reformation, particularly in its urban aspect. The discussion starts with the publication of Bernd Moeller’s pivotal <em>Reichsstadt und Reformation </em>in the early 1960s – which paved the way for the triumphant invasion of social history in a field previously dominated by ecclesiastical or political historians, and profoundly imbued with doctrinal prerogatives – and culminates in the critical presentation of interpretive trends that appear to dominate in the 2010s, particularly the view and investigation of the Reformation as communication process.</p>

scholarly journals We Need to Talk about Impact: Why Social Policy Academics need to Engage with the UK's Research Impact Agenda

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATHERINE E. SMITH ◽  
ELLEN STEWART
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Health Inequalities ◽  
Research Impact ◽  
Policy Response ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Policy Relevance ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

AbstractOf all the social sciences, social policy is one of the most obviously policy-orientated. One might, therefore, expect a research and funding agenda which prioritises and rewards policy relevance to garner an enthusiastic response among social policy scholars. Yet, the social policy response to the way in which major funders and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) are now prioritising ‘impact’ has been remarkably muted. Elsewhere in the social sciences, ‘research impact’ is being widely debated and a wealth of concerns about the way in which this agenda is being pursued are being articulated. Here, we argue there is an urgent need for social policy academics to join this debate. First, we employ interviews with academics involved in health inequalities research, undertaken between 2004 and 2015, to explore perceptions, and experiences, of the ‘impact agenda’ (an analysis which is informed by a review of guidelines for assessing ‘impact’ and relevant academic literature). Next, we analyse high- and low-scoring REF2014 impact case studies to assess whether these concerns appear justified. We conclude by outlining how social policy expertise might usefully contribute to efforts to encourage, measure and reward research ‘impact’.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Paradigm Shift for the Future

2021 ◽  
pp. 173-201
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Political Events ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Way

Through case studies of incidents around the world where the social media platforms have been used and abused for ulterior purposes, Chapter 6 highlights the lessons that can be learned. For good or for ill, the author elaborates on the way social media has been used as an arbiter to inflict various forms of political influence and how we may have become desensitized due to the popularity of the social media platforms themselves. A searching view is provided that there is now a propensity by foreign states to use social media to influence the user base of sovereign countries during key political events. This type of activity now justifies a paradigm shift in relation to our perception and utilization of computerized devices for the future.

New Outlines of Structural Sociology, 1945–70

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-85
Author(s):  
J.P.S. Uberoi
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Scientific Theory ◽  
World View ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Indian Point

This chapter presents a discussion of international intellectual trends in the social sciences, theoretical and empirical studies in India, the question of independence of mind or home rule in intellectual institutions. Following the swarajist project outlined earlier of viewing Europe and its systems of knowledge and practices from an independent Indian point of view, this chapter is in effect a research outline for a new structural sociology in India. We are introduced to structuralism as it exists in the world, its scope and definition and as a methodology for the social sciences. This is followed by the approach to structuralism as scientific theory, method and as philosophical world view. Finally discusses are the principles of structural analysis, structuralism in language, literature and culture, in social structure, with regard to society and the individual, religion, philosophy, politics, sociology and social-anthropology.

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