scholarly journals It’s All about Distinction: The Lifestyle Embeddedness of Fair Trade Consumption

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (19) ◽  
pp. 10997
Author(s):  
Patrick Schenk ◽  
Jörg Rössel ◽  
Sebastian Weingartner
Keyword(s):  
Fair Trade ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Ethical Consumption ◽  
High Status ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Social ◽  
Resource Endowment ◽  
High Level

Social scientists have argued that ethical consumption is embedded into broader lifestyles running across various domains of social life. For instance, fair trade consumption might be part of a distinctive lifestyle, including behaviors such as going to fancy restaurants or the opera. We, therefore, investigate the relationships of the main dimensions of broader lifestyles to various aspects of fair trade consumption—from purchase frequency, to visiting specialized stores, to the identification with fair trade. The analysis relies on data collected in the Summer of 2011 in Zurich, Switzerland. Since per capita consumption of fair trade products in this country was on a comparatively high level, the results are also important for other societies experiencing only currently the mainstreaming of fair trade. The first dimension, distinctiveness of lifestyles, denoting orientations and behaviors with high social prestige in society, emerges as a substantial and important determinant of all included aspects of fair trade consumption. The second dimension, modernity, is only correlated with a subset of these aspects. These effects are robust, even when taking ethical and political orientations and resource endowment into account. Hence, differences between lifestyle groups do not simply reflect the social position of high-status consumers or their ethical and political views. They reflect orientations, mental representations and routines specific to these social groups. Broader lifestyles are, therefore, a relevant addition to explanations of fair trade consumption.

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF ACADEMIC DISCOURSE: REFLECTIONS ON THE ANALYSIS OF PIETY POLITICS

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-415
Author(s):  
Dunya D. Cakir
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Academic Discourse ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Women Intellectuals ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Discourses ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Intellectual Activism

AbstractExamining the writings of prominent Islamist women intellectuals in Turkey, including Fatma Barbarosoğlu, Cihan Aktaş, Yıldız Ramazanoğlu, and Nazife Şişman, this article explores the repercussions of their intellectual activism for how scholars understand and study piety politics. These Islamist women intellectuals, whose discourse and subjectivities have been translated into analytical categories by scholars of piety politics, contest the terms of their encounters with academics and, more broadly, the conversion of Muslim women into objects of research. Their writings shed light on the complex interpretative interplay between academic and lay discourse when the objects of scholarly study speak back to social scientists. I argue that these kinds of critical engagements between Islamist women intellectuals and social scientific discourses attest to the mobility and circularity of social scientific categories, which have infused and reconstituted Islamist debates in Turkey. Rather than uncritically endorse or dispute these intellectuals’ interpretations of social scientific accounts, I leverage their claims to underscore the social life of academic discourse and to promote an enriched vision of piety politics and reflexive methodology.

Globalizations

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jürgen Osterhammel
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
World History ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Characteristic Features

The revival of world history towards the end of the twentieth century was intimately connected with the rise of a new master concept in the social sciences: globalization. Historians and social scientists responded to the same generational experience that the interconnectedness of social life on the planet had arrived at a new level of intensity. The conclusions drawn from this insight in the various academic disciplines diverged considerably. The early theorists of globalization in sociology, political science, and economics disdained a historical perspective. The new concept seemed ideally suited to grasp the characteristic features of contemporary society. It helped to pinpoint the very essence of present-day modernity. Globalization opened up a way towards the social science mainstream, provided elements of a fresh terminology to a field that had suffered for a long time from an excess of descriptive simplicity.

scholarly journals THE ELEMENTS OF TRADİTİON AND MODERNİSM İN NİNETEENTH CENTURY AZERBAİJANİ LİTERATURE: EAST - WEST THOUGHT AND RELİGİOUS-MYTHOLOGİCAL MOTİVES

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aytan Hajiyeva
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Philosophy Of Life ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Angle Of View ◽  
Peculiar Phenomenon

The literary orientation based on common principles is determined on the same cultural, ethical and aesthetic traditions, the same outlook, philosophy of life, related principles of creativity and the unified social, cultural and historical environment. Public and political views also usually act as a powerful driving force. The nineteenth century literature is one of the stages distinguished with ideological and aesthetic achievements of the Azerbaijani literary culture which has rich history. Emerging as a reflection of new historical conditions, this literature attracts attention as an original and peculiar phenomenon because of its literary and poetic qualities. Literature that reflects the world through literary paints depending on the angle of view, approach, ethno-cultural thinking, is also of interest as the product of its formation era and environment. As fiction or poetic literature reflects life, it is important to understand the reflection of the social, socio-historical processes, to “catch the pulse" of  life, and to address worldwide problems that are relevant for all periods. The writer's social life, social activities, and communication circle sometimes play a decisive role in issues such as being more aware of problems and finding ways to solve them. Azerbaijani literature which has historically been at different stages of development, has not only gained new qualities, but also has been able to preserve the existing tradition, influenced by different literary trends and different socio-cultural processes.

scholarly journals Ferdinand Tönnies és a korai társadalomtudományok, I. rész

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (21) ◽  
pp. 232-241
Author(s):  
Endre Kiss
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
Community Theory ◽  
Open Relationship ◽  
Clear Idea ◽  
Relationship Structure ◽  
The Right

The theory of society-community stands in the centre of the „social” life. It however also stands in the centre of Tönnies’s positive work itself. This potentiation gives this theory a vitality that is looking for its equivalent and to which little is changed if its presence is not perceived accordingly in every corresponding context. Tönnies is one of the first most important social scientists, who was primarily concerned with being able to investigate society with a strictly scientific character. So he was already therefore much more interested in the optimal way of knowledge than in the diverse concrete results or even in the theoretical possibility of generalization of these results. The society-community theory is an epochal achievement, its result one of the bases of the social existence. It is certainly there, that the rare „open relationship structure” of both these categories is playing. Like many others, we decide to campaign against the political instrumentalization of the society-community theory, there is by no means any denying the fact, that it has extremely deeply secured this dichotomy in the structure-building principles of the political discourse. We see the force of the debate on the ideal level: diabolization and idealization are alternating in symmetrical order obvious. The first social scientists were in multiple paradoxical situations. The first paradox consisted in the fact, that had a very clear idea of a „science” of the society. Because however, such a „science” was not yet existing, they were constrained to make „philosophically” the first steps, but of course not how the „right” philosophers would have done them. The other paradox and eternally opened question are why the „society” as the object remained temporally so much behind the „nature” as an object. It is also hardly less interesting, why the new social sciences did not already emerge in Marx’s environment. The historically belated social science experiences in the medium of this situation a vocation to become a pioneer. Simmel also adheres consistently to his often formulated youth insight that a „new science” will emerge in any case around the society.

scholarly journals A Pragmatist's Guide to Prediction in the Social Sciences

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark D. Verhagen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Simple Technique ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Out Of Sample ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Many

Making out-of-sample predictions is an under-utilised tool in the social sciences, often for the wrong reasons. Many social scientists confuse prediction with unnecessarily complicated methods, or narrowly predicting the future. This is unfortunate, because prediction understood as the simple process of evaluating a model outside of the sample used for estimation is a much more general, and disarmingly simple technique that brings a host of benefits to our empirical workflow. One needn't use complicated methods or be solely concerned with predicting the future to use prediction, nor is it necessary to resolve the centuries-old philosophical debate between prediction and explanation to appreciate its benefits. Prediction can and should be used as a simple complement to the rich methodological tradition in the social sciences, and is equally applicable across a vast multitude of modelling approaches, owing to its simplicity and intuitive nature. For all its simplicity, the value of prediction should not be underestimated. Prediction can address some of the most enduring sources of criticism plaguing the social sciences, like lack of external validity and the use of overly simplistic models to capture social life. In this paper, I illustrate these benefits with a host of empirical examples that merely skim the surface of the many and varied ways in which prediction can be applied, staking the claim that prediction is one of those illustrious `free lunches' that can greatly benefit the empirical social sciences.

scholarly journals Introduction

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-77
Author(s):  
Ronald S. Stade
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Creative Thinking ◽  
Political Correctness ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
The Military

Concepts have cultural biographies and social lives. Some concepts become social and political keywords that can be both indicative of and instrumental in social and political conflicts. (It might even be possible to speak of conceptual violence.) But they are not just contentious; they also tend to be contested. Contentious and contested concepts have been studied by historians and social scientists from varying temporal and spatial horizons. It is a research area that lends itself to cross-disciplinary approaches, as is demonstrated in the three contributions to this section, the first of which investigates the Russian obsession with the concept of “Europe.” The second contribution to the section explores the military roots of the concept of “creative thinking,” and the final contribution examines the social life of “political correctness” as a fighting word.

scholarly journals The social life of time and methods: Studying London’s temporal architectures

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 604-631
Author(s):  
Ella Harris ◽  
Rebecca Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Temporal Logics ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Rhythms

This paper contributes to work on the social life of time. It focuses on how time is doubled; produced by, and productive of, the relations and processes it operates through. In particular, it explores the methodological implications of this conception of time for how social scientists may study the doubledness of time. It draws on an allied move within the social sciences to see methods as themselves doubled, as both emerging from and constitutive of the social worlds that they seek to understand. We detail our own very different methodological experiments with studying the social life of time in London, engaging interactive documentary to elucidate nonlinear imaginaries of space-time in London’s pop-up culture (Ella Harris) and encountering time on a series of walks along a particular stretch of road in south east London (Beckie Coleman). While clearly different projects in terms of their content, ambition and scope, in bringing these projects together, we show the ability of our methods to grasp and perform from multiple angles and scales what Sharma (2014) calls ‘temporal architectures’. Temporal architectures, composed of elements including the built environment, commodities, services, technologies and labour, are infrastructures that enable social rhythms and temporal logics and that can entail a politicized valuing of the time of certain groups over others. We aim to contribute to an expanded and enriched conceptualisation of methods for exploring time, considering what our studies might offer to work on the doubled social life of time and methods, and highlighting in particular their implications for an engagement with a politics of time and temporality.

Reconsidering Race

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Louis Gates, Jr
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Age Of Discovery ◽  
The Way

Race is one of the most elusive phenomena of social life. While we generally know it when we see it, it's not an easy concept to define. Social science literature has argued that race is a Western, sociopolitical concept that emerged with the birth of modern imperialism, whether in the sixteenth century (the Age of Discovery) or the eighteenth century (the Age of Enlightenment). This book points out that there is a disjuncture between the way race is conceptualized in the social science and medical literature: some of the modern sciences employ racial and ethnic categories. As such, race has a physical, as opposed to a purely social, dimension. The book argues that in order to more fully understand what we mean by race, social scientists need to engage genetics, medicine, and health. To be sure, the long shadow of eugenics and the Nazi use of scientific racism have cast a pall over the effort to understand this complicated relationship between social science and race. But while the text rejects pseudoscience and hierarchical ways of looking at race, it makes the claim that it is time to reassess the Western-based, social construction paradigm. The chapters in this book consider three fundamental tensions in thinking about race: one between theories that see race as fixed or malleable; a second between the idea that race is a universal but modern Western concept and the idea that it has a deeper and more complicated cultural history; and a third between sociopolitical and biological/biomedical concepts of race. Arguing that race is not merely socially constructed, the chapters offer a collection of views on the way that social scientists must reconsider the idea of race in the age of genomics.

scholarly journals A Century of Dialogue around Durkheim as a Founding Father of the Social Sciences

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-200
Author(s):  
Wim van Binsbergen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
World War ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Theory Of Religion ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dominant Theory

Abstract In 2012 social scientists, philosophers and religious scientists celebrated the centennial of the publication of one of the most seminal books in the modern study of religion, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, by the then leading French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s (1858–1917); in 2017, we commemorated that author’s untimely death at age 59, broken by World War I in which he lost his only son and many of his beloved students. Educated, first as a Rabinnical student then as a modern philosopher, Durkheim earned his place among French thinkers primarily as a “founding father” of the social sciences. Having recently (on the basis of a life-long preoccupation) devoted a book-length study to Durkheim’s religion theory, I intend in this essay to highlight major aspects of Durkheim as an exponent of French thought. I shall first briefly situate Durkheim in his time and age, with special emphasis on his political views and his ethnic identity as a secularised Jew. Then I turn to Durkheim’s relation with the discipline in which he was originally trained, philosophy. I shall pay attention to the complex relationship between Durkheim and Kant and further highlight his dualism, epistemology, and views on primitive classification, as well as his puzzling realism, the place of emergence in his thought, and his moralist tendencies. I shall finally articulate Durkheim’s transition to sociology and how he gave over the torch of emerging sociology to his main students, having thus created an adequate context in which to discuss Durkheim’s final masterpiece (Les formes) and the still dominant theory of religion it expounds.

METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF GENDER PEDAGOGY

2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-19
Author(s):  
A.K. Iigibaeva ◽  
◽  
A.D. Toleukhanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Educational System ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Spiritual Values ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Level Of Activity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
High Level

The high level of activity in the social life of both men and women in modern conditions requires new methodological approaches to the study of gender issues. Of particular importance is the issue of studying the experience of implementing a gender approach in the educational system. The article analyzes the main theoretical approaches in research on gender pedagogy in the context of cultural and national values. An excursion into the history of the problem is made.Based on the analysis of scientific research by Russian and domestic scientists, an attempt is made to determine the main methodological approaches in gender pedagogy. In considering this issue, special attention should be paid to the historical, cultural and spiritual values of the ethnic group, together with modern socio-cultural realities.The need for interdisciplinary research on gender issues is being updated. The high level of activity in the social life of both men and women requires new methodological approaches in the study of gender issues. Of particular importance is the issue of studying the experience of implementing a gender approach in the educational system. The article analyzes the main theoretical approaches in gender pedagogy of Russian and Kazakh researchers in the context of cultural and nationalvalues.

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