Download or read book Science Politics and Social Practice written by Robert Sonné Cohen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1995-02-28 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In three volumes, a distinguished group of scholars from a variety of disciplines in the natural and social sciences, the humanities and the arts contribute essays in honor of Robert S. Cohen, on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The range of the essays, as well as their originality, and their critical and historical depth, pay tribute to the extraordinary scope of Professor Cohen's intellectual interests, as a scientist-philosopher and a humanist, and also to his engagement in the world of social and political practice. In Science, Politics and Social Practice, (Volume II of Essays in Honor of Robert S. Cohen), an international group of scholars -- philosophers, sociologists, historians, and political scientists -- discuss issues at the cutting edge of contemporary social and political thought, and its bearing on science. Several essays discuss the relations of Marxism to science, and specifically, to the philosophies of science of Carnap and Popper, as well as Soviet Marxism, and the effects of Stalinism on Soviet science. There are also essays on the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences, on questions of method and aim in historical narrative, on the issue of cultural relativism, and more.
Download or read book Social Practices of Rule making in World Politics written by Mark Raymond and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rule-based global order remains a central object of study in International Relations. Constructivists have identified a number of mechanisms by which actors accomplish both the continuous reproduction and transformation of the rules, institutions, and regimes that constitute their worlds. However, it is less clear how these mechanisms relate to each other--that is, the rules for changing the rules. This book seeks to explain how political actors know which procedural rules to engage in a particular context, and how they know when to utilize one mechanism over another. It argues that actors in world politics are simultaneously engaged in an ongoing social practice of rule-making, interpretation, and application. By identifying and explaining the social practice of rule-making in the international system, this book clarifies why global norms change at particular moments and why particular attempts to change norms might succeed or fail at any given time. Mark Raymond looks at four cases: the social construction of great power management in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars; the creation of a rule against the use of force, except in cases of self-defense and collective security; contestation of the international system by al Qaeda in the period immediately following the 9/11 attacks; and United Nations efforts to establish norms for state conduct in the cyber domain. The book also shows that practices of global governance are centrally concerned with making, interpreting, and applying rules, and argues for placing global governance at the heart of the study of the international system and its dynamics. Finally, it demonstrates the utility of the book's approach for the study of global governance, the international system, and for emerging efforts to identify forms and sites of authority and hierarchy in world politics.
Download or read book Genocide as Social Practice written by Daniel Feierstein and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genocide not only annihilates people but also destroys and reorganizes social relations, using terror as a method. In Genocide as Social Practice, social scientist Daniel Feierstein looks at the policies of state-sponsored repression pursued by the Argentine military dictatorship against political opponents between 1976 and 1983 and those pursued by the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945. He finds similarities, not in the extent of the horror but in terms of the goals of the perpetrators. The Nazis resorted to ruthless methods in part to stifle dissent but even more importantly to reorganize German society into a Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community, in which racial solidarity would supposedly replace class struggle. The situation in Argentina echoes this. After seizing power in 1976, the Argentine military described its own program of forced disappearances, torture, and murder as a “process of national reorganization” aimed at remodeling society on “Western and Christian” lines. For Feierstein, genocide can be considered a technology of power—a form of social engineering—that creates, destroys, or reorganizes relationships within a given society. It influences the ways in which different social groups construct their identity and the identity of others, thus shaping the way that groups interrelate. Feierstein establishes continuity between the “reorganizing genocide” first practiced by the Nazis in concentration camps and the more complex version—complex in terms of the symbolic and material closure of social relationships —later applied in Argentina. In conclusion, he speculates on how to construct a political culture capable of confronting and resisting these trends. First published in Argentina, in Spanish, Genocide as Social Practice has since been translated into many languages, now including this English edition. The book provides a distinctive and valuable look at genocide through the lens of Latin America as well as Europe.
Download or read book The Dynamics of Social Practice written by Elizabeth Shove and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2012-05-17 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyday life is defined and characterised by the rise, transformation and fall of social practices. Using terminology that is both accessible and sophisticated, this essential book guides the reader through a multi-level analysis of this dynamic. In working through core propositions about social practices and how they change the book is clear and accessible; real world examples, including the history of car driving, the emergence of frozen food, and the fate of hula hooping, bring abstract concepts to life and firmly ground them in empirical case-studies and new research. Demonstrating the relevance of social theory for public policy problems, the authors show that the everyday is the basis of social transformation addressing questions such as: how do practices emerge, exist and die? what are the elements from which practices are made? how do practices recruit practitioners? how are elements, practices and the links between them generated, renewed and reproduced? Precise, relevant and persuasive this book will inspire students and researchers from across the social sciences. Elizabeth Shove is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. Mika Pantzar is Research Professor at the National Consumer Research Centre, Helsinki. Matt Watson is Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at University of Sheffield.
Download or read book Social Practices written by Chris Kraus and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on and around art and art practices by the author of I Love Dick. A border isn't a metaphor. Knowing each other for over a decade makes us witnesses to each other's lives. My escape is his prison. We meet in a bar and smoke Marlboros. —from Social Practices Mixing biography, autobiography, fiction, criticism, and conversations among friends, with Social Practices Chris Kraus continues the anthropological exploration of artistic lives and the art world begun in 2004 with Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. Social Practices includes writings from and around the legendary “Chance Event—Three Days in the Desert with Jean Baudrillard” (1996), and “Radical Localism,” an exhibition of art and media from Puerto Nuevo's Mexicali Rose that Kraus co-organized with Marco Vera and Richard Birkett in 2012. Attuned to the odd and the anomalous, Kraus profiles Elias Fontes, an Imperial Valley hay merchant who has become an important collector of contemporary Mexican art, and chronicles the demise of a rural convenience store in northern Minnesota. She considers the work of such major contemporary artists as Jason Rhoades, Channa Horowitz, Simon Denny, Yayoi Kusama, Henry Taylor, Julie Becker, Ryan McGinley, and Leigh Ledare. Although Kraus casts a skeptical eye at the genre that's come to be known as “social practice,” her book is less a critique than a proposition as to how art might be read through desire and circumstance, delirium, gossip, coincidence, and revenge. All art, she implies, is a social practice.
Download or read book Research Design in Political Science written by T. Gschwend and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-10-23 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When embarking on a new research project students face the same core research design issues. This volume provides readers with practical guidelines for both qualitative and quantitative designs, discusses the typical trade-offs involved in choosing them and is rich in examples from actual research.
Download or read book Political Science Research in Practice written by Akan Malici and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nothing rings truer to those teaching political science research methods: students hate taking this course. Tackle the challenge and turn the standard research methods teaching model on its head with Political Science Research in Practice. Akan Malici and Elizabeth S. Smith engage students first with pressing political questions and then demonstrate how a researcher has gone about answering them, walking them through real political science research that contributors have conducted. Through the exemplary use of a comparative case study, field research, interviews, textual and interpretive research, statistical research, survey research, public policy and program evaluation, content analysis, and field experiments, each chapter introduces students to a method of empirical inquiry through a specific topic that will spark their interest and curiosity. Each chapter shows the process of developing a research question, how and why a particular method was used, and the rewards and challenges discovered along the way. Students can better appreciate why we need a science of politics—why methods matter—with these first-hand, issue-based discussions. The second edition now includes: Two completely new chapters on field experiments and a chapter on the textual/interpretative method. New topics, ranging from the Arab Spring to political torture to politically sensitive research in China to social networking and voter turnout. Revised and updated "Exercises and Discussion Questions" sections. Revised and updated "Interested to Know More" and "Recommended Resources" sections.
Download or read book The Social Practice of Human Rights written by Joel R. Pruce and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-16 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Social Practice of Human Rights bridges the conventional scholar-practitioner divide by focusing on the space in between. The volume brings together cutting-edge chapters that together set a new agenda for research, grounded in the practice of critical self-reflection on the strategies that drive communities dedicated to the advocacy and implementation of human rights. The social practice of human rights takes place not in front of a judge, but in the streets and alleys, in the backrooms and out-of-the-way places where change occurs. Contributors to this volume investigate the contexts and efforts of activists and professionals devoted to promoting human rights norms. This research takes as its subject the organizations and movements that shoulder the burden of improving respect for human dignity. It argues that through a constructive critique of these patterns and practices, scholarship can have a positive impact on the political world.
Download or read book The Social Theory of Practices written by Stephen P. Turner and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-03-08 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first analysis and critique of the idea of practice as it has developed in the various theoretical traditions of the social sciences and the humanities. The concept of a practice, understood broadly as a tacit possession that is 'shared' by and the same for different people, has a fatal difficulty, the author argues. This object must in some way be transmitted, 'reproduced', in Bourdieu's famous phrase, in different persons. But there is no plausible mechanism by which such a process occurs. The historical uses of the concept, from Durkheim to Kripke's version of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions that thinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show the ultimate implausibility of the idea of the interpersonal transmission of these supposed objects. Without the notion of 'sameness' the concept of practice collapses into the concept of habit. The conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we do without the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears on social theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannot get beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why the standard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem of relativism depend upon this defective notion.
Download or read book Science Politics and Social Practice written by Robert Sonné Cohen and published by Springer. This book was released on 1995-02-28 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In three volumes, a distinguished group of scholars from a variety of disciplines in the natural and social sciences, the humanities and the arts contribute essays in honor of Robert S. Cohen, on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The range of the essays, as well as their originality, and their critical and historical depth, pay tribute to the extraordinary scope of Professor Cohen's intellectual interests, as a scientist-philosopher and a humanist, and also to his engagement in the world of social and political practice. In Science, Politics and Social Practice, (Volume II of Essays in Honor of Robert S. Cohen), an international group of scholars -- philosophers, sociologists, historians, and political scientists -- discuss issues at the cutting edge of contemporary social and political thought, and its bearing on science. Several essays discuss the relations of Marxism to science, and specifically, to the philosophies of science of Carnap and Popper, as well as Soviet Marxism, and the effects of Stalinism on Soviet science. There are also essays on the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences, on questions of method and aim in historical narrative, on the issue of cultural relativism, and more.
Download or read book The Constitution of Social Practices written by Kevin McMillan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Practices – specific, recurrent types of human action and activity – are perhaps the most fundamental "building blocks" of social reality. This book argues that the detailed empirical study of practices is essential to effective social-scientific inquiry. It develops a philosophical infrastructure for understanding human practices, and argues that practice theory should be the analytical centrepiece of social theory and the philosophy of the social sciences. What would social scientists’ research look like if they took these insights seriously? To answer this question, the book offers an analytical framework to guide empirical research on practices in different times and places. The author explores how practices can be identified, characterised and explained, how they function in concrete contexts and how they might change over time and space. The Constitution of Social Practices lies at the intersection of philosophy, social theory, cultural theory and the social sciences. It is essential reading for scholars in social theory and the philosophy of social science, as well as the broad range of researchers and students across the social sciences and humanities whose work stands to benefit from serious consideration of practices.
Download or read book Critique as Social Practice written by Robin Celikates and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of recent debates about critical theory from Pierre Bourdieu via Luc Boltanski to the Frankfurt School. Robin Celikates investigates the relevance of the self-understanding of ordinary agents and of their practices of critique for the theoretical and emancipatory project of critical theory.
Download or read book Social Theory and Social Practice written by and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Theory and Social Practice is a unique effort at applied social theory. Hans L. Zetterberg believes that social research has now advanced so far that social scientists can give advice without being restricted to new research projects. They can use previously proven theories as the basis for sound practical recommendations. This approach has profound implications in the application of social science to problems in business management, labor strife, government decision-making, in such areas as education, health and human welfare. It remains a pioneering discourse for practitioners of social research and social policy. Zetterberg gives a searching review of the various ways in which social practitioners attempt to use the accumulated knowledge of social science. He proceeds with a compact summary of the knowledge of the academicians of social science, noting that practitioners are often unaware of much useful academic knowledge. The process by which this knowledge is transformed into practical advice is spelled out in detail, and is illustrated with examples from an actual consultation about problems faced by an art museum that wanted to increase its audience. Chapter 1 identifies the problem; chapter 2, "The Knowledge of Social Practitioners," outlines practitioners' reliance on scientific knowledge; chapter 3, "The Knowledge of Social Theorists," discusses sociological terms and sociological law; chapter 4, "The Practical Use of Social Theory through Scholarly Consultants," explores the actual specificity of social theory and its uses, while the concluding chapter examines the uses of consultants, covering some prerequisites for the successful use of applied science. The book rejects the widespread view that in order to put social science to use, we have to popularize its content. Zetterberg's approach is rather to translate a client's problem into a powerful theoretical statement, the solution to which is calculated and then presented to the client as down-to-earth advice. This volume will be of immediate interest to scholars in the field of social theory; to consultants and practitioners who give advice on social problems and policy decisions; and to executives who use advice from social scientists. Hans L. Zetterberg was the founding director of the City University of Stockholm. Earlier he served as a consulting sociologist in New York City and a professor of sociology at Columbia University and then at Ohio State University. He is the author of On Theory and Verification in Sociology, Sexual Life in Sweden, and Before and Beyond the Welfare State. He has been the subject of a festschrift published by Transaction in 1999.
Download or read book Social Practices written by Theodore R. Schatzki and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses key topics in social theory such as the basic structures of social life, the character of human activity, and the nature of individuality. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein, the author develops an account of social existence that argues that social practices are the fundamental phenomenon in social life. This approach offers new insight into the social formation of individuals, surpassing and critiquing the existing practice theories of Bourdieu, Giddens, Lyotard, and Oakeshott.
Download or read book Science and Pseudoscience in Social Work Practice written by Bruce A. Thyer, PhD, LCSW, BCBA-D and published by Springer Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Science is a way of thinking about and investigating the accuracy of assumptions about the world. It is a process for solving problems in which we learn from our mistakes. Social work has a long history of social reform and helping efforts. Let us continue this by paying attention to the important message of this book. --Eileen Gambrill, PhD, School of Social Welfare University of California at Berkeley (From the Foreword) Although many psychosocial interventions used in social work practice have strong research evidence supporting their efficacy, a surprising number do not, potentially resulting in harmful outcomes. In this book, the authors cast a critical eye on the reality of commonly used scientific and pseudoscientific practices in social work today. Stressing the need for separating research-based practices from those not supported by adequate levels of evidence, they examine the scientific and pseudoscientific bases for popular social work interventions used in a variety of treatment settings. The text examines the misuse of legitimate research and describes how social work education training can and should discourage pseudoscience. The concluding chapter describes pathways through which social work practice can become more firmly grounded in contemporary scientific research. This engaging book is intended for courses in critical thinking and evidence-based practice and is a valuable resource for all social work students and practitioners. Key Features: Promotes critical thinking regarding the evidence-based research--or lack thereof--behind a variety of social work interventions Written by renowned social work educators Addresses the history and characteristics of pseudoscience Examines pseudoscience practices in assessment and work with children, adolescents, adults, and individuals with developmental difficulties
Download or read book Field Research in Political Science written by Diana Kapiszewski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-19 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains how field research contributes value to political science by exploring scholars' experiences, detailing exemplary practices, and asserting key principles.
Download or read book Women Succeeding in the Sciences written by Jody Bart and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ample evidence has been provided that women historically have suffered numerous social, political, and institutional barriers to their entrance and success in the sciences. The articles in this anthology refocus the discussion and reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the issues surrounding women in the sciences. While the barriers that women have faced as researchers, subjects of research, students of science, and theorists have been well documented, this anthology breaks new ground. It presents the ways women succeed in the sciences, overcome these historical barriers, and contribute to the social practice of science and the philosophy of science in both theory and practice.
