scholarly journals Free Money in a Mousetrap of Surveillance Capitalism: Basic Income and Social Theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-224
Author(s):  
Alexander Pavlov
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Basic Income ◽  
Social Time ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Financial Capitalism ◽  
Contemporary Social Theory

The article concerns the social theory of an unconditional basic income (a regular payment to each person regardless of their level of need or employment). The article points out that, during the last three years in Russia, the idea of a basic income has been actively discussed. This applies mainly to economists, whereas the author puts the question of a basic income in the context of Western social theory. In a situation of ever-accelerating changes that affect society (from technologicalization and automation to the reduction of social time), the world faces many global challenges. A basic income is one of them. The article highlights the reasons for the actualization of the topic of a universal basic income in contemporary social theory of the last ten years. These include automation, the transformation of the economy leading to changes in the types of employment, experiments on the implementation of a basic income in some countries, and most importantly, the discussion of “bullshitization”, which has happened to many jobs in the framework of contemporary financial capitalism (David Graeber). It reveals the understanding of a basic income by its key proponents and theorists (Srnicek, Williams, Van Parijs, Vanderborght, Ford, Graeber, Standing, and others), as well as the fact that freedom is often called as the main goal of a basic income implementation. The paper demonstrates that, in fact, we are mostly talking about the imperative of freedom, which is not always properly clarified. However, it does not matter how freedom is understood in the works of basic income theorists since it is unlikely to be realized in modern socio-economic conditions, and because current capitalism has mutated so much that it now uses the very fabric of human experience rather than labor as its raw material. In this context, talks about automation is more of a thought experiment, and therefore the discussion should be shifted to another perspective. Despite the fact that, according to the author’s case, a basic income is not entirely impossible in practice (and even perhaps not being desirable), it provides fruitful material for the development of contemporary social theory.

Imaginary and Rational: From Social Theory to Social Order

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4-1) ◽  
pp. 168-179
Author(s):  
Elena Erokhina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Research Strategies ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
New Research

The article is devoted to the analysis of imagination as a philosophical and sociological concept that played a significant role in the development of social theory in the middle of the 20th century. Exploring the premises of the contradictory relationship between science and society, it is easy to find a connection between the development of science and social change. Currently, it is generally accepted that scientific, including social theories, through the transfer of ideas, transform the social order and, on the contrary, social practices transform knowledge about the world. The article proves that imagination plays a key role in this process. An excursion into the theory of ideas reveals the connection between imagination and irrational and experiential knowledge. The author of the article refers to the works of P. Berger and T. Luckmann, C. Castoriadis and C. Taylor, who showed a direct connection between theoretical ideas and the world of "social imaginary", collective imaginary and social changes. For the first time in the history of mankind, thanks to imagination, society does not see the social order as something immutable. Methodological cases are presented that illustrate the specific role of the concept of imagination as a source of the formation of new research strategies that allow for a new look at the problem of nationalism (social constructivism) and the study of public expectations from the implementation of technological innovations (STS). For decades, Benedict Anderson's work “Imagined Communities” predetermined the interest of researchers of nationalism in social imagination and the collective ideas based on it about the national identity of modern societies, their history and geography. The research of Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim has formed a new track for the study of science as a collective product of public expectations of an imaginary social order, embodied in technological projects. The conclusion is made about the contradictory nature of social expectations based on collective imagination: on the one hand, they strengthen the authority of science in society, on the other hand, they provoke the growth of negative expectations from the introduction of scientific discoveries. The article substantiates the opinion that imagination is an effective tool for assessing the risks of introducing innovations.

Coda

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Grobe
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Campus Sexual Assault ◽  
New Media Art ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Individual

Social media platforms have made confessional speech both ubiquitous and mundane. What, you might ask, is the value of a solo voice amid all this aggregated clamor? This coda begins by comparing several examples of new media art, all of which take others’ social media output as the raw material for art: Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s data-visualization site We Feel Fine (2005), Penelope Umbrico’s Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (2006–present), and Natalie Bookchin’s Testament (2009–present). All of these projects use social media to think through contemporary relations between the individual and the social or political. And so I end by considering what they might have to tell us about confessional politics as they’re practiced in the age of social media: e.g., Occupy Wall Street’s “We are the 99%” meme, the “mattress protests” against campus sexual assault started by Emma Sulkowicz of Columbia University, and a public forum held at Amherst College during the antiracist Uprising of 2015. All of these protests began as local acts, but then reached the world via the Internet. What happens when confessions like these travel through channels that have made confession so mundane?

Cultural Studies/Asian Studies: Alternatives, Intersections, and Contradictions in Asian Social Science

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Clammer
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
World Religions ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Ancient Civilizations

AbstractThe social sciences in Asia face a peculiar theoretical challenge. Heirs to ancient civilizations and traditions of thought and cradles to all of the great world religions, they nevertheless perceive themselves as suffering from a "theoretical deficit". High theory is almost entirely Western and in fact largely European in provenance. This essay is directed to the possibility of constructing an Asian variety of cultural studies as a response to the hegemony of European social theory, and as an attempt to redress the balance of theory-power in the world intellectual economy.

Ethics and aesthetics: the social theory of barbershop harmony

Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liz Garnett
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Relative Paucity ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Until recently, the world of the British barbershop singer was a self-enclosed community whose existence went largely unrecognised both by musicians involved in other genres and by the public at large. In the last few years this has started to change, chiefly due to the participation of barbershop choruses in the televised competition ‘Sainsbury's Choir of the Year’. Encouraged by the success of Shannon Express in 1994, many other choruses entered the 1996 competition, four of them reaching the televised semi-finals, and two the finals. During this increased exposure, it became apparent that television commentators had little idea of what to make of barbershoppers, indeed regarded them as a peculiar, and perhaps rather trivial, breed of performer. This bafflement is not surprising given the genre's relative paucity of exposure either in the mass media or in the musical and musicological press; the plentiful articles written by barbershoppers about their activity and its meanings are almost exclusively addressed to each other, to sustain the community rather than integrate it into wider musical life. The purpose of this paper, however, is not to follow the theme of these intra-community articles in arguing that barbershop harmony should actually be regarded as a serious and worthy art, or to explain to a bewildered world what this genre is actually about; rather, it aims to explore the way that barbershop singers theorise themselves and their activity to provide a case study in the relationship between social and musical values. That is, I am not writing as an apologist for a hitherto distinctly insular practice, but exploiting that very insularity as a means to pursue a potentially very broad question within a self-limited field of enquiry.

Death and Mastery

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Y. Fong
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Drive Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Advanced Capitalism ◽  
The One

In this masterful and enlivening study of the ways in which the concepts of death and mastery have been elaborated in Freudian and post-Freudian social theory, Ben Fong has given us the means to think about human nature and human community now, under conditions of advanced capitalism, without succumbing to the scientism of the new neurobiology or to the social constructivism of recent historicist social and cultural theory. The argument turns on the ambiguity embedded in the notion of mastery: on the one hand, the capacity to engage creatively with the world, to master the tasks of living a historical form of life; on the other, the temptation to enslave, to compel others to exercise this competence in one's place. Fong is able to analyze with remarkable lucidity a complex array of individual and social phenomena by fleshing out the imbrications of these twinned responses to what Freud called the drives' demand for work. Fong makes abundantly clear that drive theory and social theory are strongest when thought together.

scholarly journals Modernity and human rights: beyond a simple association

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (43) ◽  
pp. 99
Author(s):  
Leno Francisco Danner
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Basic Income ◽  
Normative Model ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Institutional Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Beginning with the Jürgen Habermas’ reconstruction of a normative model of European cultural modernity as basis to a contemporary notion of epistemological-moral universalism as condition to critic, to integration and to intervention, which leads to the affirmation that democracy and human rights represent the modernity’s fundamental legacy, I will discuss that such theoretical reconstruction only can be possible from a historical-sociological blindness which is based on the separation between a normative notion of European cultural modernity and the Realpolitik of colonialism – just from this theoretical-political standpoint it is possible to sustain a universalistic normative paradigm which is capable to ground the criticism, the integration and the intervention of all social-cultural contexts, which means that modern culture and normativism can serve as medium and guide of all particular cultures, at least in a strong way. Against that optimistic role of the Habermasian normative model of European cultural modernity, I will argue that democracy and human rights as modernity’s legacy have basically two tasks in the contemporary Realpolitik: first, to restrain the modernity’s totalizing tendency to rationalization and to globalization, i.e. its movement of assimilation of all cultures and societies in a model of epistemological, cultural and economic universalism; and to ground an international institutional politics based on the social-economic reparation for the colonialism, which implies in a universalistic extension of the social rights to all people in the world (for example, the Philippe van Parijs’ idea of basic income).

scholarly journals Urbanization before Cities: Lessons for Social Theory from the Evolution of Cities

2012 ◽  
pp. 211-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fertile Crescent ◽  
The World ◽  
Process Of Urbanization

This article examines the role of the world-system in the structure of cities. Data from the evolution of cities in the Fertile Crescent shows that a number of traits of modern cities were also present in the earliest cities. Specifically, mass production, social differentiation and inequality, cultural mechanisms utilized for social control, and a tendency – even a need – for territorial expansion were all characteristic of ancient cities. Such characteristics of cities are rooted in the process of urbanization, understood here as the creation and maintenance of networks of economic and cultural exchange amongst communities in disparate regions. Citiesare understood as “nodes” in this system of exchange. It is argued that urbanization predatescities by thousands of years, and that the social dynamics arising from urbanization must be teased out of the data in order to understand cities better.

scholarly journals Risk and Social Theory in Environmental Management

2012 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Management ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Applied Research ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Risk And Uncertainty ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Solid Foundation

Risk and Social Theory in Environmental Management marks a timely contribution, given that environmental management is no longer just about protecting pristine ecosystems and endangered species from anthropogenic harm; it is about calculating and managing the risks to human communities of rapid environmental and technological change. Firstly, the book provides a solid foundation of the social theory underpinning the nature of risk, then presents a re-thinking of key concepts and methods in order to take more seriously the biophysical embeddedness of human society. Secondly, it presents a rich set of case studies from Australia and around the world, drawing on the latest applied research conducted by leading research institutions. In so doing, the book identifies the tensions that arise from decision-making over risk and uncertainty in a contested policy environment, and provides crucial insights for addressing on-ground problems in an integrated way.

How do we know what we know? Epistemic tensions in social and cultural research on gambling 1980-2000

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia M. McGowan
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Narrow Range ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Culturally Informed ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Epistemic Cultures ◽  
Contemporary Social Theory

This project seeks to answer the question, how do we know what we know about gambling? With reference to a systematic review of the gambling research literature that addresses social and cultural topics and issues, this paper explores the epistemic cultures that created and gave authority to knowledge about gambling presented in scholarly research published between 1980 and 2000. From small beginnings in the 1980s, scholarly research in this area exploded during the 1990s and was dominated by surveys describing the distribution of problem and pathological forms. The trend in gambling research is towards an increasingly narrow range of topics, focused on pathology, and curiously disengaged from advances in contemporary social theory. The paper concludes with a plea for nuanced, politically engaged, and culturally informed gambling research grounded in the social, cultural, historical, and everyday contexts in which gambling is embedded.

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