Download or read book The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences written by George Steinmetz and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-05-16 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences provides a remarkable comparative assessment of the variations of positivism and alternative epistemologies in the contemporary human sciences. Often declared obsolete, positivism is alive and well in a number of the fields; in others, its influence is significantly diminished. The essays in this collection investigate its mutations in form and degree across the social science disciplines. Looking at methodological assumptions field by field, individual essays address anthropology, area studies, economics, history, the philosophy of science, political science and political theory, and sociology. Essayists trace disciplinary developments through the long twentieth century, focusing on the decades since World War II. Contributors explore and contrast some of the major alternatives to positivist epistemologies, including Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, narrative theory, and actor-network theory. Almost all the essays are written by well-known practitioners of the fields discussed. Some essayists approach positivism and anti-positivism via close readings of texts influential in their respective disciplines. Some engage in ethnographies of the present-day human sciences; others are more historical in method. All of them critique contemporary social scientific practice. Together, they trace a trajectory of thought and method running from the past through the present and pointing toward possible futures. Contributors. Andrew Abbott, Daniel Breslau, Michael Burawoy, Andrew Collier , Michael Dutton, Geoff Eley, Anthony Elliott, Stephen Engelmann, Sandra Harding, Emily Hauptmann, Webb Keane, Tony Lawson, Sophia Mihic, Philip Mirowski, Timothy Mitchell, William H. Sewell Jr., Margaret R. Somers, George Steinmetz, Elizabeth Wingrove
Download or read book Social Sciences for an Other Politics written by Ana Cecilia Dinerstein and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book opens up a unique intellectual space where eleven female scholar-activists explore alternative forms of theorising social reality. These‘Women on the Verge’ demonstrate that a new radical subject– one that is plural, prefigurative, decolonial, ethical, ecological, communal and democratic- is in the making, but is unrecognisable with old analytical tools. Of central concern to the book is the resistance of some social scientists, many of them critical theorists, to learning about this radical subject and to interrogating the concepts, methodologies and epistemologies used to grasp it. Echoing the experiential critique of capitalist-colonial society that is taking place at the grassroots, the authors examine how to create hope, decolonise critique and denaturalise society. They also address the various dimensions of the social (re)production of life, including women in development, the commons, and nature. Finally, they discuss the dynamics of prefiguration by social movements, critiquing social movement theory in the process. This thought-provoking edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of gender studies, social, Marxist and Feminist theory, postcolonial studies and politics.
Download or read book Social Science for What written by Mark Solovey and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the NSF became an important yet controversial patron for the social sciences, influencing debates over their scientific status and social relevance. In the early Cold War years, the U.S. government established the National Science Foundation (NSF), a civilian agency that soon became widely known for its dedication to supporting first-rate science. The agency's 1950 enabling legislation made no mention of the social sciences, although it included a vague reference to "other sciences." Nevertheless, as Mark Solovey shows in this book, the NSF also soon became a major--albeit controversial--source of public funding for them.
Download or read book Another Politics written by Chris Dixon and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amidst war, economic meltdown, and ecological crisis, a "new spirit of radicalism is blooming" from New York to Cairo, according to Chris Dixon. In Another Politics, he examines the trajectory of efforts that contributed to the radicalism of Occupy Wall Street and other recent movement upsurges. Drawing on voices of leading organizers across the United States and Canada, he delivers an engaging presentation of the histories and principles that shape many contemporary struggles. Dixon outlines the work of activists aligned with anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-oppression politics and discusses the lessons they are learning in their efforts to create social transformation. The book explores solutions to the key challenge for today’s activists, organizers, fighters, and dreamers: building a substantive link between the work of "against," which fights ruling institutions, and the work of "beyond," which develops liberatory alternatives.
Download or read book Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research written by Daniel Beland and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-10 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing about ideas, John Maynard Keynes noted that they are "more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else." One would expect, therefore, that political science--a discipline that focuses specifically on the nature of power--would have a healthy respect for the role of ideas. However, for a variety of reasons--not least of which is the influence of rational choice theory, which presumes that individuals are self-maximizing rational actors--this is not the case, and the literature on the topic is fairly thin. As the stellar cast of contributors to this volume show, ideas are in fact powerful shapers of political and social life. In Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, Daniel Béland and Robert Henry Cox have gathered leading scholars from a variety of subdisciplines in political science and sociology to provide a general overview of the theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues raised by social science research on ideas and politics. Throughout, they hone in on three central questions. What is the theoretical basis for studying ideas in politics? What are the best methods? What sort of empirical puzzles can be solved by examining ideas and related phenomena such as discourse, policy paradigms, and framing processes? In sum, this is a state-of-the-art academic work on both the role of ideas in politics and the analytical utility that derives from studying them.
Download or read book Avoiding Politics written by Nina Eliasoph and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-08-13 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nina Eliasoph's vivid portrait of American civic life reveals an intriguing culture of political avoidance. Despite the importance for democracy of open-ended political conversation among ordinary citizens, many Americans try hard to avoid appearing to care about politics. To discover how, where and why Americans create this culture of avoidance, the author accompanied suburban volunteers, activists, and recreation club members for over two years, listening to them talk - and avoid talking - about the wider world, together and in encounters with government, media, and corporate authorities. She shows how citizens create and express ideas in everyday life, contrasting their privately expressed convictions with their lack of public political engagement. Her book challenges received ideas about culture, power and democracy, while exposing the hard work of producing apathy.
Download or read book Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity written by Mitchell Bryan Hart and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the emergence and development of an organized, institutionalized Jewish social science, and explores the increasing importance of statistics and other modes of analysis for Jewish elites throughout Europe and the United States. The Zionist movement provided the initial impetus as it looked to the social sciences to provide the knowledge of contemporary Jewish life deemed necessary for nationalist revival. The social sciences offered empirical evidence of the ambiguous condition of the Jewish diaspora, and also charted emancipation and assimilation, viewed as dissolutions of and threats to Jewish identity. Liberal, assimilationist scholars also utilized social science data to demonstrate the continuing viability of Jewish life in the diaspora. Jewish social science grew out of a sustained effort to understand and explain the effects of modernization on Jewry. Above all, Jewish scholars sought to give the enormous transformations undergone by Jewry in the nineteenth century a larger meaning and significance
Download or read book political science is for everybody written by amy l. atchison and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first intersectionality-mainstreamed textbook written for introductory political science courses.
Download or read book Politics in Time written by Paul Pierson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book represents the most systematic examination to date of the often-invoked but rarely examined declaration that "history matters." Most contemporary social scientists unconsciously take a "snapshot" view of the social world. Yet the meaning of social events or processes is frequently distorted when they are ripped from their temporal context. Paul Pierson argues that placing politics in time--constructing "moving pictures" rather than snapshots--can vastly enrich our understanding of complex social dynamics, and greatly improve the theories and methods that we use to explain them. Politics in Time opens a new window on the temporal aspects of the social world. It explores a range of important features and implications of evolving social processes: the variety of processes that unfold over significant periods of time, the circumstances under which such different processes are likely to occur, and above all, the significance of these temporal dimensions of social life for our understanding of important political and social outcomes. Ranging widely across the social sciences, Pierson's analysis reveals the high price social science pays when it becomes ahistorical. And it provides a wealth of ideas for restoring our sense of historical process. By placing politics back in time, Pierson's book is destined to have a resounding and enduring impact on the work of scholars and students in fields from political science, history, and sociology to economics and policy analysis.
Download or read book The Politics of Social Policy in the United States written by Margaret Weir and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1988-05-21 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revised papers from the second and third of three conference held in Chicago throughout 1984-1985, and sponsored by the Project on the Federal Social Role. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Download or read book Politics and Paradigms written by Andrew C. Janos and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent economic and political developments in the Third World and in Communist and advanced industrial societies have challenged some of the most cherished assumptions of social science, forcing social scientists to rethink many of the categories of their discipline. In a concisely written and provocative book, the author traces this process of rethinking. He does so by going back to the nineteenth-century origins of political sociology and economy, and by exploring more recent attempts by American scholarship to fashion from the writings of Smith, Marx, Spencer, Weber, and Durkheim a new universal theory of modernization and political change. The author argues that these attempts led to a new intellectual crisis, which could be resolved only by a "paradigm shift," that is, by refocusing the discipline from the classical concept of social relations to a new global concept of the division of labor and systems of exchange. Overall, the volume may be read both as an intellectual history of modern political science, and as an attempt to fashion an analytical tool for empirical research. As such, it will be of interest to students of political philosophy as well as of comparative politics.
Download or read book Applying Social Science written by David Byrne and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2011-02-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important book examines how social science is applied now and how it might be applied in the future in relation to social transformation in a time of crisis.
Download or read book The Politics of Expertise written by Stephen P. Turner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects case studies and theoretical papers on expertise, focusing on four major themes: legitimation, the aggregation of knowledge, the distribution of knowledge and the distribution of power. It focuses on the institutional means by which the distribution of knowledge and the distribution of power are connected, and how the problems of aggregating knowledge and legitimating it are solved by these structures. The radical novelty of this approach is that it places the traditional discussion of expertise in democracy into a much larger framework of knowledge and power relations, and in addition begins to raise the questions of epistemology that a serious account of these problems requires.
Download or read book Universities and Empire written by Christopher Simpson and published by . This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the politics of intellectual life during the Cold War, and the effects of U.S. intelligence and propaganda agencies on academic culture and intellectual life
Download or read book Social Science and Political Theory written by W. G. Runciman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1969-05-02 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1969 study considers the relation of sociology to political philosophy and extends traditional political philosophy in the direction of contemporary developments.
Download or read book The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States 1910 1950 written by Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this history of the social and human sciences in Mexico and the United States, Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt reveals intricate connections among the development of science, the concept of race, and policies toward indigenous peoples. Focusing on the anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, physicians, and other experts who collaborated across borders from the Mexican Revolution through World War II, Rosemblatt traces how intellectuals on both sides of the Rio Grande forged shared networks in which they discussed indigenous peoples and other ethnic minorities. In doing so, Rosemblatt argues, they refashioned race as a scientific category and consolidated their influence within their respective national policy circles. Postrevolutionary Mexican experts aimed to transform their country into a modern secular state with a dynamic economy, and central to this endeavor was learning how to "manage" racial difference and social welfare. The same concern animated U.S. New Deal policies toward Native Americans. The scientists' border-crossing conceptions of modernity, race, evolution, and pluralism were not simple one-way impositions or appropriations, and they had significant effects. In the United States, the resulting approaches to the management of Native American affairs later shaped policies toward immigrants and black Americans, while in Mexico, officials rejected policy prescriptions they associated with U.S. intellectual imperialism and racial segregation.
Download or read book International Development and the Social Sciences written by Frederick Cooper and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This superb collection assembles a number of stimulating and theoretically current contributions by outstanding scholars."—Angelique Haugerud, author of The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya
