scholarly journals Max Weber and 21st-Century Modern

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 212-230
Author(s):  
Peter Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Present Condition ◽  
Comparative Sociology ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Complicated Manner ◽  
The Given

In a rather complicated manner, Max Weber’s writings contain general theoretical reflections that are now incorporated in the canon of sociological theory, in the analyses of social change in the form of historical and comparative sociology, and in reflections on political events, all in the guise of the diagnosis and critique of his own historical age. This article attempts to draw conclusions from the tensions between these aspects in Weber’s work by trying to discover how such a sophisticated combination of cognitive goals is possible today, and what limits it encounters. What the “light of great cultural problems” falls upon, what elements of the past determine the present, and what events are particularly important for understanding of a certain age are questions whose answers must regularly be sought anew. The author relies on the concept of “modernity”, or rather, on the field of interpretation arising around this term. He assumes that the given field is wide enough to better understand our present condition by means of this term. In the meantime, the author believes that for this understanding to be successful, present-day modernity must be appropriately positioned in this field theoretically, historically, and as the diagnosis of our age.

Changing trends in Spanish library services: Conceptualization and measurement in official statistics

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Villarroya ◽  
Victoria Ateca-Amestoy
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Public Libraries ◽  
Library Services ◽  
Cultural Participation ◽  
Official Statistics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Changing Trends ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Source Of Information

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how public libraries have been conceptualized and measured in official Spanish statistics over the past 15 years. This allows us to reflect on the transformation of the very nature and aims of libraries during the first 15 years of the 21st century. We examine the main official statistical source of information on cultural participation, the Survey on Cultural Habits and Practices in Spain, and track the impact of social change and digitization on library services. By analysing the 2002–2003, 2006–2007, 2010–2011 and 2014–2015 surveys, we monitor changes in the questionnaires and in the derived indicators, and relate the findings to general trends and challenges for public libraries in contemporary societies.

Social Change and the Family

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Harris ◽  
Nickie Charles ◽  
Charlotte Davies
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Original Study ◽  
Family Networks ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family

This paper explores the social change of the past 40 years through reporting the results of a restudy. It argues that social change can be understood, culturally, as involving a process of de-institutionalisation and, structurally, as involving differentiation within elementary family groups as well as within extended family networks. Family change is set in the context of changes in the housing and labour markets and the demographic, industrial and occupational changes of the past 40 years. These changes are associated with increases in women's economic activity rates and a decrease in their ‘degree of domesticity’. They are also associated with increasing differentiation within families such that occupational heterogeneity is now found at the heart of the elementary family as well as within kinship groupings as was the case 40 years ago. Thus the trend towards increased differentiation identified in the original study (Rosser and Harris: The Family and Social Change) has continued into the 21st century. This is associated with a de-institutionalisation of family life and an increasing need for partners to negotiate participation in both productive and reproductive work.

Food and social change: Culinary elites, contested technologies, food movements and embodied social change in food practices

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-519
Author(s):  
Renata Motta ◽  
Eloísa Martín
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Food Studies ◽  
Social Mobilization ◽  
Comparative Sociology ◽  
Level Change ◽  
Food Movements ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Basic Issue ◽  
Theories Of Change

In this introduction, we have asked a very classical sociological question and brought together interdisciplinary efforts to critically approach it, focusing on a basic issue: food. We briefly reconstruct the main approaches to social change in sociological theory and then identify main themes with which food studies have contributed to this debate. If, to avoid normative and formal approaches, theories of change require contextualization in order to keep their explanatory value, this volume brings historical and geographical context to provide an analysis of social change through the lenses of food. Methodologically, articles offer diverse approaches to food, allowing different kinds of perspectives on change. While statistical analysis or historically comparative sociology will provide correlational snapshots and structural transformations, ethnographies necessarily deal with change happening in the everyday. The articles in this monograph have been organized into four broad groups: (1) national cuisines as elite projects of social change; (2) science and technology as contested tools for social change; (3) social mobilization and food movements as agents of social change; and (4) micro- and macro-level change and beyond: culinary subjectivities, embodied social change and food transition.

Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Prevailing View ◽  
The Way

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry

Moving Figures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey Kai Nelson Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sixth Generation ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Structures Of Feeling ◽  
Raymond Williams

This book examines how the films of the Chinese Sixth Generation filmmaker Jia Zhangke evoke the affective “felt” experience of China’s contemporary social and economic transformations, by examining the class figures of worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual, and entrepreneur that are found in the films. Each chapter analyzes a figure’s socio-historical context, its filmic representation, and its recurring cinematic tropes in order to understand how they create what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling” – feelings that concretize around particular times, places, generations, and classes that are captured and evoked in art – and charts how this felt experience has changed over the past forty years of China’s economic reforms. The book argues that that Jia’s cinema should be understood not just as narratives that represent Chinese social change, but also as an effort to engage the audience’s emotional responses during this period of China’s massive and fast-paced transformation.

Acquiring penmanship and writing skills from the first to fifth grade of primary school: Joined-up writing vs. Comenia Script

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Olga Kučerová ◽  
Anna Kucharská
Keyword(s):  
Primary School ◽  
Error Rate ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
Fifth Grade ◽  
Point Scale ◽  
The Past ◽  
School Year ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Developmental Dynamics ◽  
The Given

Abstract The project presented here deals with a typical human means of communication – writing. The aim of the project is to map the developmental dynamics of handwriting from the first to the fifth grade of primary school. The question remains topical because of the fact that several systems of writing have been used in the past few years. Our project focuses on comparing the systems of joined-up handwriting (the standard Latin alphabet) and the most widespread form of printed handwriting: Comenia Script. The research can be marked as sectional; pupils took a writing exam at the beginning and at the end of the 2015/2016 school year. The total number of respondents was 624 pupils, evenly distributed according to the school year, system of writing and gender. To evaluate handwriting, the evaluation scale of Veverková and Kucharská (2012) was adjusted to include a description of phenomena related to graphomotor and grammatical aspects of writing, including the overall error rate and work with errors. Each area that was observed included a series of indicators through which it was possible to create a comprehensive image of the form handwriting took in the given period. Each indicator was independently classified on a three-point scale. Thanks to that, a comprehensive image of the form of writing of a contemporary pupil emerged.

Overseas Development Administration. A Guide to Social Analysis for Projects in Developing Countries. London: HMSO. 1995. viii+248 pages. Hardbound. £18.95.

1996 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-190
Author(s):  
Mir Annice Mahmood
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Development Projects ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Economic Perspective ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Overseas Development

This book, hereinafter referred to as the Guide, has been developed for those social analysts (e.g., anthropologists, sociologists, and human geographers) who have had little or no practical experience in applying their knowledge as development practitioners. In the past, development projects would be analysed from a narrow financial and economic perspective. But with the evolution of thinking on development, this narrow financial and economic aspect has now been broadened to include the impact on society as the very meaning of development has now come to symbolise social change. Thus, development is not restricted only to plans and figures; the human environment in its entirety is now considered for analysis while designing and implementing development projects.

The Perils and Promises of Disability Biography

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim E. Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
The Past ◽  
Helen Keller ◽  
Rigorous Study ◽  
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Biographical scholarship provides a means by which to understand the past. Disability biography writes disabled people into historical narratives and cultural discourses, acknowledging power, action, and consequence. Disability biography also analyzes the role of ableism in shaping relationships, systems of power, and societal ideals. When written with skilled storytelling, rigorous study, nuance, and insight, disability biography enriches analyses of people living in the past. Disability biography makes clear the multiple ways by which individuals and communities labor, make kinship, persevere, and both resist and create social change. When using a disability analysis, biographies of disabled people (particularly people famous for their disability, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Helen Keller) reveal the relationality and historically embedded nature of disability. In an ableist world, such acts can be revolutionary.

scholarly journals Criminology: Some lines of flight

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Julie Berg ◽  
Clifford Shearing
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Energy Systems ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Smart Phones ◽  
40Th Anniversary ◽  
The Past ◽  
Domain Of Existence ◽  
James Lovelock ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Space Of Flows

The 40th Anniversary Edition of Taylor, Walton and Young’s New Criminology, published in 2013, opened with these words: ‘The New Criminology was written at a particular time and place, it was a product of 1968 and its aftermath; a world turned upside down’. We are at a similar moment today. Several developments have been, and are turning, our 21st century world upside down. Among the most profound has been the emergence of a new earth, that the ‘Anthropocene’ references, and ‘cyberspace’, a term first used in the 1960s, which James Lovelock has recently termed a ‘Novacene’, a world that includes both human and artificial intelligences. We live today on an earth that is proving to be very different to the Holocene earth, our home for the past 12,000 years. To appreciate the Novacene one need only think of our ‘smart’ phones. This world constitutes a novel domain of existence that Castells has conceived of as a terrain of ‘material arrangements that allow for simultaneity of social practices without territorial contiguity’ – a world of sprawling material infrastructures, that has enabled a ‘space of flows’, through which massive amounts of information travel. Like the Anthropocene, the Novacene has brought with it novel ‘harmscapes’, for example, attacks on energy systems. In this paper, we consider how criminology has responded to these harmscapes brought on by these new worlds. We identify ‘lines of flight’ that are emerging, as these challenges are being met by criminological thinkers who are developing the conceptual trajectories that are shaping 21st century criminologies.

The Convent of Santa Clara, the Elite and Social Change in Eighteenth Century Querétaro

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELLEN GUNNARSDÓTTIR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

This article focuses on the changes that occurred within Querétaro's elite from the late Habsburg to the high Bourbon period in colonial Mexico from the perspective of its relationship to the convent of Santa Clara. It explores how creole elite families of landed background with firm roots in the early seventeenth century, tied together through marriage, entrepreneurship and membership in Santa Clara were slowly pushed out of the city's economic and administrative circles by a new Bourbon elite which broke with the social strategies of the past by not sheltering its daughters in the city's most opulent convent.

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