The Imposter as Social Theory

2021 ◽  

Edited by expert scholars, this volume explores the 'imposter' through empirical cases, including click farms, bikers, business leaders and fraudulent scientists, providing insights into the social relations and cultural forms from which they emerge.

Inter ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (20) ◽  
pp. 97-113
Author(s):  
Sergey V. Startsev

The article analyzes the biographical case of cancer with problematized attitude to traditional medicine. The author examines the biographical choices of the informant and the problem of not following the medicalist treatment strategy. Optics using analytic methods and social theory, the author seeks to show that living biographer’s disease and agree with the diagnosis of a life inextricably linked with the social relations within which these terms aventureuse, namely in the framework of relations “doctor-patient”. The analysis of this social dyad using the methods of anthropology and narratology brings us closer to the understanding of disease as a phenomenon mediated by the cultural codes of society, the dominant model of which is the biomedical paradigm of studying the “diseased body”.


Author(s):  
Michael Mawson

This chapter explores how Bonhoeffer develops and deepens his theological engagement with social theory in his hamartiology or doctrine of sin. Bonhoeffer is clear that the fall into sin has radically disrupted and overturned primal social relations and formations (of the kind outlined in his chapter on creation). With the fall, the kinds of persons and relations evident in the primal state are replaced with sinful individuals who wilfully pursue their own isolation and solitude. Moreover, this chapter shows how Bonhoeffer, in critical dialogue with Augustine, draws in and reworks the social-philosophical concept of the ‘collective person’ to provide an account of how sin might be understood as simultaneously universal and personal. For Bonhoeffer, sin is universal in a way that makes individual acts of sin inevitable, but without thereby undermining the culpability of individuals for their sinful acts.


Author(s):  
Stefan Nygård

This introductory chapter surveys the notoriously ambivalent concept of debt. It connects different approaches to debt in social theory and anthropology to the book’s focus on how past debts are mobilised in political debates in the present, and how the ‘North’ has been portrayed as indebted to the ‘South’ for its development, and vice versa. Both questions are framed by the way in which understandings of debt tend to gravitate towards reciprocity or domination. In view of its fundamental ambiguity, debt thus underpins both social cohesion and fragmentation. While it has the capacity to sustain social relations by joining together the two parties of a debt relation, it also contains the risk of deteriorating into domination and bargaining. A tension between debt as the glue of social bonds and debt as hierarchy consequently runs through the social history of the concept. Applied to regional and global North-South relations, discussions on debt have often centred on the question of retribution, involving difficult disputes over possible ways of settling debts in the present for injustices incurred in the past.


Sociology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 711-726
Author(s):  
Marek Korczynski ◽  
Andreas Wittel

One of the most important focuses in social theory within the last decade has been upon the commons. We contribute to the emerging scholarship on the commons. We point out that this literature tends to neglect the workplace. We then argue that the workplace should be included as a potentially important arena of commoning. Going to studies of the workplace, we find that scholarship has implicitly found key emergent elements of commoning within the social relations of work. We develop a concept of the workplace commons, and consider arguments that the workplace commons is merely a fix for capitalism.


1996 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Carabine

This article argues that there is a lack of theorizing about sexuality within social policy in what is referred to as the mainstream and more surprisingly within feminist social policy. This is particularly surprising given the presence of sexuality in recent as well as past social policies as well as in social theory. The purpose of this article is not merely to argue that a relationship between sexuality and social policy should be examined but rather to explore and outline the specific nature of the relationship and its implications for both sexuality and the discipline of social policy. Specifically, how do prevalent sexuality discourses inform and constitute social policy and what are the social relations involved in this process? Correspondingly, what role does social policy play in constituting what we know to be the ‘truths’ of sexuality? What exclusions and inclusions result from these dominant social relations and discourses when ‘played’ through social policy? That sexuality has failed to be analytically incorporated within the discipline of social policy is addressed. First, reasons for the lack of theorizing are explored. Specifically, the historical development of the discipline and the formation of an implicit consensus about what constitute the real concerns of welfare. Second, there is an examination of the ways feminist social policy has or has not engaged with sexuality. The final section posits an emergent framework for integrating sexuality into social policy analyses and critiques.


2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 216-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Cook

Abstract. In family systems, it is possible for one to put oneself at risk by eliciting aversive, high-risk behaviors from others ( Cook, Kenny, & Goldstein, 1991 ). Consequently, it is desirable that family assessments should clarify the direction of effects when evaluating family dynamics. In this paper a new method of family assessment will be presented that identifies bidirectional influence processes in family relationships. Based on the Social Relations Model (SRM: Kenny & La Voie, 1984 ), the SRM Family Assessment provides information about the give and take of family dynamics at three levels of analysis: group, individual, and dyad. The method will be briefly illustrated by the assessment of a family from the PIER Program, a randomized clinical trial of an intervention to prevent the onset of psychosis in high-risk young people.


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