Imagining Generations and Social Change

2018 ◽  
pp. 11-35
Author(s):  
Peter Hart-Brinson
Keyword(s):  
Generation X ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Gay Marriage ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Generational Change ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Generational Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific Research ◽  
Social Scientific

This chapter explains the generational theory of Karl Mannheim and enumerates five challenges that scholars face when studying generational change. It shows how these changes have impeded social scientific research on generations and why research on Millennials, Generation X, and other broad cohorts is flawed from its first premises. To counteract the existing generational mythology, this chapter outlines what is required to produce social scientific studies of generational change. Recent scholarship on the “social generation” provides a theoretical and methodological opening for finally solving Mannheim’s “problem of generations.” Building on cross-disciplinary scholarship on the cognitive and cultural dimensions of the process of imagination, this chapter argues that the “social imagination” is the key concept that helps explain how public opinion about gay marriage changed.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Peter Hart-Brinson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gay Marriage ◽  
Generational Change ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Generational Theory ◽  
Cultural Schemas ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

This chapter introduces the concepts of generational change, generational theory, and the social imagination, and it describes how they can help us understand the evolution of public opinion about gay marriage in the United States and the role that public opinion played in the legalization of gay marriage. It introduces the thesis that the changing social imagination was the key cultural and cognitive development that led young cohorts to develop more supportive attitudes about gay marriage while also causing older cohorts to rethink their prior opinions. It explains how the imagination both produces and draws from the cultural schemas that we use to make sense of the world and why different groups can develop different cultural schemas. It concludes by describing the overall plan of the book and the author’s standpoint.

scholarly journals Sosiologiese en antropologiese insigte en die studie van die Hebreeuse Bybel: 'n Bestekopname1

2000 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Kruger
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Social Scientific Study ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific Research ◽  
Social Scientific

Sociological and anthropological insights and the study of the Hebrew Bible: A review. This article reviews the main trends in the social-scientific study of the Hebrew Bible. It focuses on the following central issues: the theoretical principles underlying this approach, anthropologists and the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew Bible and comparative anthropology, anthropological evidence from African cultures, and the Hebrew Bible in social-scientific research: perils and prospects.

Gender as a Social Structure

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara J. Risman
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Personality Trait ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Doing Gender ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific Research ◽  
Social Scientific

The chapter reviews the social scientific research on gender beginning with biological theories and then moving on to psychological ones. Attention then moves to sociological theories developed as alternatives to understanding gender as a personality trait. The chapter then covers the “doing gender” and structuralist theories developed in the 20th century. Risman suggests that integrative frameworks, including her own, emerged toward the end of the 20th century. In this chapter, Risman offers a revision to her framework conceptualizing gender as a social structure with consequences for individual selves, interactional expectations of others, and institutions and organizations. With this revision, Risman differentiates between the material and cultural elements of each level of the gender structure.

scholarly journals De-Signing the Object of Sociology: Toward an ‘Idiotic’ Methodology

2012 ◽  
Vol 60 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 166-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Michael
Keyword(s):  
Energy Demand ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Everyday Objects ◽  
Demand Reduction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific Research ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Isabelle Stengers ◽  
Speculative Design

This paper outlines a version of ‘live sociology’ that enacts and engages with the openness and processuality of events. This is initially explored through a focus on everyday objects that, in their relationality, ‘misbehave’, potentially challenging standard sociological framings. Drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers, it is suggested that such objects can be understood as ‘idiotic’ – possessed of an incommensurability that enables social scientists to ‘slow down’ and reflect upon ‘what is busily being done’ (not least by the social scientists themselves). This responsiveness to the idiot object is then contrasted to the proactive idiocy of Speculative Design. Here, artefacts – probes and prototypes – are designed to have oblique and ambiguous functions that allow both their users and designers to open up what is at stake in particular events. Examples taken from past and current research are used to illustrate how speculative designs can open up what ‘the neighbourhood’ and ‘energy demand reduction’ can be. The paper ends with a discussion of a possible ‘idiotic methodology’ and its implications for the conceptual and practical doings of social scientific research.

scholarly journals Transcending objectivism, subjectivism, and the knowledge in-between: the subject in/of ‘strong reflexivity’

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
INANNA HAMATI-ATAYA
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Research ◽  
Object Relation ◽  
Strong Version ◽  
Epistemic Principle ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Scientific Research ◽  
Social Scientific

AbstractThis article addresses theproblématiqueof the subject and the subject-object dichotomy from a post-objectivist, reflexivist perspective informed by a ‘strong’ version of reflexivity. It clarifies the rationale and epistemic-ontological requirements of strong reflexivity comparatively, through a discussion of autoethnography and autobiography, taken as representatives of other variants of reflexive scholarship. By deconstructing the ontological, epistemic, and reflexive statuses of the subject in the auto-ethnographic and auto-biographical variants, the article shows that the move from objectivism to post-objectivism can entail different reconfigurations of the subject-object relation, some of which can lead to subjectivism or an implicit positivist view of the subject. Strong reflexivity provides a coherent and empowering critique of objectivism because it consistently turns the ontological fact of the social situatedness of knowledge into an epistemic principle of social-scientific research, thereby providing reflexivist scholars with a critique of objectivism from within that allows them to reclaim the philosophical, social, and ethical dimensions of objectivity rather than surrender them to the dominant neopositivist tradition.

Social-Scientific Research Competency

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 737-750 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Gess ◽  
Christoph Geiger ◽  
Matthias Ziegler
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Test Scores ◽  
Research Performance ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Research Education ◽  
Crystallized Intelligence ◽  
Research Competency ◽  
Social Scientific Research ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Education Courses

Abstract. Although the development of research competency is an important goal of higher education in social sciences, instruments to measure this outcome often depend on the students’ self-ratings. To provide empirical evidence for the utility of a newly developed instrument for the objective measurement of social-scientific research competency, two validation studies across two independent samples were conducted. Study 1 ( n = 675) provided evidence for unidimensionality, expected differences in test scores between differently advanced groups of students as well as incremental validities over and above self-perceived research self-efficacy. In Study 2 ( n = 82) it was demonstrated that the competency measured indeed is social-scientific and relations to facets of fluid and crystallized intelligence were analyzed. Overall, the results indicate that the test scores reflected a trainable, social-scientific, knowledge-related construct relevant to research performance. These are promising results for the application of the instrument in the evaluation of research education courses in higher education.

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