Download or read book The Social Misconstruction of Reality written by Richard F. Hamilton and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hamilton finds that despite critiques by historians, some scholars continue to believe Max Weber's claim that a strong linkage between Protestantism and worldly success led to the rise of the capitalist West. Similarly, many academics still argue the discredited view that the German lower middle class voted overwhelmingly for the Nazis.
Download or read book The Dialogical Turn written by Charles Camic and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2003-12-09 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its birth, sociology has struggled vainly to achieve an encompassing intellectual 'synthesis' as it has fought against the explosion of ideas about the social world. This volume considers an alternative response that has recently developed to conditions of intellectual fragmentation: 'the dialogical turn,' a sociological approach that welcomes a plurality of orientations and perspectives as the essential basis for establishing productive dialogue. This volume explores this exciting approach, building on the ideas of Donald N. Levine, whose extensive writings on the forms and functions of intellectual dialogue provide the point of departure for an internationally renowned group of scholars. Their innovative chapters assess the role of sociology in the conversation across contemporary academic disciplines, exploring the fundamental structural and conceptual reconstructions now taking place in the social sciences.
Download or read book The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis written by Lynn Chancer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-08-05 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of 18 contributions by well-known scholars in and outside the US, The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis shows how sociology has much to gain from incorporating rather than overlooking or marginalizing psychoanalysis and psychosocial approaches to a wide range of social topics.
Download or read book Ritual Politics and Power written by David I. Kertzer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the history and purpose of political rituals, discusses examples from Aztec cannibal rites to presidential inauguration, and argues that the use of ritual determines the success of political groups.
Download or read book Miseducating Americans written by Richard F. Hamilton and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2015-01-31 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Miseducating Americans, Richard F. Hamilton examines accounts of American history appearing in textbooks and popular accounts and compares these with the reports contained in scholarly monographs. The task: to determine how certain myths and misconstructions became accepted as recorded history. Hamilton provides much needed correction of those misleading accounts. Was America historically the “land of the free?” Not if you take into account slavery, discrimination, and post-Civil War segregation policies. Was America in the late nineteenth century truly expansionist, as American textbooks imply, or did it actually capitalize on unexpected political and economic opportunities, like Russia’s desire to rid itself of Alaska? Was the acquisition of the Philippines a zealous profit-seeking effort aiming for “the China market,” or the fortuitous consequences of a move against Spain during the Spanish-American War? Miseducating Americans debunks many commonly accepted explanations of historical facts. It contends that many accounts are oversimplifications, and some are one-sided depictions of virtue. Hamilton traces the sources of these misconstructions, which mostly come from history textbooks written by authors aiming for “popular audiences.” He then offers explanations as to how and why the inaccuracies have been repeated and passed on.
Download or read book Historical Developments and Theoretical Approaches in Sociology Volume I written by Charles Crothers and published by EOLSS Publications. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical Developments and Theoretical Approaches in Sociology in two volumes is a component of Encyclopedia of Social Sciences and Humanities in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty Encyclopedias. Sociology is one of several social science disciplines and smaller bodies of knowledge which seeks to understand the patterns in social life. There is a broad congruence between the objective configurations of social life and the components of the disciplines studying them, the body of sociological knowledge is socially constructed and the pathways to its gaining of knowledge influenced by a variety of factors. Moreover, since social life is ever-changing, sociology often has to scramble to catch-up with the changing social world. This work is built up around four broad topics, the first providing important shared contextual material and then followed by three broad levels of social analysis: with each of these four parts containing a number of chapters with more specific and in-depth information. The theme essay provides a general introduction and overview of the theme as a whole. In total, the work holds 40 contributions written by a selection of many international renowned specialists from 12 countries. It was important to obtain a wide range of viewpoints giving the ways in which social issues arise quite differently in a range of countries. These two volumes are aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College Students Educators, Professional Practitioners, Research Personnel and Policy Analysts, Managers, and Decision Makers, NGOs and GOs.
Download or read book Comparative Politics written by Mark Irving Lichbach and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revised edition of Comparative Politics offers an assessment of the past decade of scholarship in comparative politics.
Download or read book 21st Century Sociology A Reference Handbook written by Clifton D. Bryant and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2007 with total page 1346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book Intelligent Research Design written by Bob Hancké and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-07-17 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers advice to doctoral researchers and graduate and advanced undergraduate students on how to embark on their research. Based on a decade of teaching early-stage researchers in the social sciences at the LSE and other universities, and written with the central problems of beginning researchers in mind, Bob Hancké guides them through the process of thinking about the links between theory, cases and data, and to do so in a way that helps to turn their initial plausible ideas into convincing arguments. This lively book, deliberately jargon-free and with a hands-on, pragmatic approach to research design, addresses the problems that research students face - or ignore, often at their peril - in the course of their first few years. Its central message is that research is a complex and iterative process in which researchers construct every relevant part of their project with one goal in mind: make a persuasive point. They define the question they ask and the debate they engage, construct their cases and data to answer that question, and write it up as an argument that brings out the strengths of their research design. It addresses such key issues as statistical versus configurational approaches, time in social science research, different types of case studies and comparative research, and a critical approach to data. The Appendix gives tips on presenting and discussing papers, and on crafting research proposals.
Download or read book The Origin of Values written by Raymond Boudon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Values have always been a central topic in both philosophy and the social sciences. Statements about what is good or bad, fair or unfair, legitimate or illegitimate, express clear beliefs about human existence. The fact that values differ from culture to culture and century to century opens many questions. In The Origin of Values, Raymond Boudon offers empirical, data-based analysis of existing theories about values, while developing his own perspective as to why people accept or reject value statements. Boudon classifies the main theories of value, including those based on firm belief, social or biological factors, and rational or utilitarian attitudes. He discusses the popular and widely influential Rational Choice Model and critiques the postmodernist approach. Boudon investigates why relativism has become so powerful and contrasts it with the naturalism represented by the work of James Q. Wilson on moral sensibility. He follows with a constructive attempt to develop a new theory, beginning with Weber's idea of non-instrumental rationality as the basis for a more complex idea of rationality. Applying Boudon's own and existing theories of value to political issues and social ideas—the end of apartheid, the death penalty, multiculturalism, communitarianism—The Origin of Values is a significant work. Boudon fulfills a major task of social science: explanation of collective belief. His book will be of interest to sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, and political scientists.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics written by Carles Boix and published by Oxford Handbooks Online. This book was released on 2007 with total page 1035 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science is a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. Each volume focuses on a particular part of the discipline, with volumes on Public Policy, Political Theory, Political Economy, Contextual Political Analysis, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Law and Politics, Political Behavior, Political Institutions, and Political Methodology. The project as a whole is under the General Editorship of Robert E. Goodin, with each volume being edited by a distinguished international group of specialists in their respective fields. The books set out not just to report on the discipline, but to shape it. The series will be an indispensable point of reference for anyone working in political science and adjacent disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics offers a critical survey of the field of empirical political science through the collection of a set of chapters written by forty-seven top scholars in the discipline of comparative politics. Part I includes chapters surveying the key research methodologies employed in comparative politics (the comparative method; the use of history; the practice and status of case-study research; the contributions of field research) and assessing the possibility of constructing a science of comparative politics. Parts II to IV examine the foundations of political order: the origins of states and the extent to which they relate to war and to economic development; the sources of compliance or political obligation among citizens; democratic transitions, the role of civic culture; authoritarianism; revolutions; civil wars and contentious politics. Parts V and VI explore the mobilization, representation and coordination of political demands. Part V considers why parties emerge, the forms they take and the ways in which voters choose parties. It then includes chapters on collective action, social movements and political participation. Part VI opens up with essays on the mechanisms through which political demands are aggregated and coordinated. This sets the agenda to the systematic exploration of the workings and effects of particular institutions: electoral systems, federalism, legislative-executive relationships, the judiciary and bureaucracy. Finally, Part VII is organized around the burgeoning literature on macropolitical economy of the last two decades.
Download or read book Evolution Versus Revolution written by Melvyn L. Fein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolutionary and evolutionary theorists have very different views about change; Fein writes in favour of evolution. He proposes an integrated model of social evolution, one that accounts for the complexity, inconclusiveness, and impediments that characterize social transformations.This multi-dimensional approach recognizes that change is always saturated in conflict. Major changes are rarely initiated by conscious decisions that are automatically implemented; power and morality generally control the direction that significant alterations take. Fein explains how the social generalist dilemma places our need for both flexibility and stability in opposition to each other such that non-rational mechanisms are needed to produce a solution. He also describes how an "inverse force rule" dictates that small societies are bound together by strong social forces, whereas large ones are secured by weak forces. This suggests that social roles are likely to become professionalized over time.If social change is, in fact, analogous to natural rather than artificial selection, we may be in the midst of an only partially predictable middle class revolution. Indeed, the current impasse between liberals and conservatives may be evidence that we are in the consolidation phase of this process. Should this be the case, a paradigm shift, not a classical revolution, is in our future.
Download or read book Acts of Faith written by Rodney Stark and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-08 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The authors offer a new, comprehensive paradigm for the social scientific study of religion. The book sets out to explain *why* people are religious and have the need to be religious, without discrediting organized religions as something foolish or irrational"--Résumé de l'éditeur.
Download or read book The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm written by K. Durkin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-09-04 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, shortlisted for the British Sociological Association's Philip Abrams Memorial Prize (2015), argues that Fromm is a vital and largely overlooked contribution to twentieth-century intellectual history, and one who offers a refreshingly reconfigured form of humanism that is capable of reintegrating explicitly humanist analytical categories and schemas back into social theoretical (and scientific) considerations.
Download or read book The Radical Middle Class written by Robert D. Johnston and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America has a long tradition of middle-class radicalism, albeit one that intellectual orthodoxy has tended to obscure. The Radical Middle Class seeks to uncover the democratic, populist, and even anticapitalist legacy of the middle class. By examining in particular the independent small business sector or petite bourgeoisie, using Progressive Era Portland, Oregon, as a case study, Robert Johnston shows that class still matters in America. But it matters only if the politics and culture of the leading player in affairs of class, the middle class, is dramatically reconceived. This book is a powerful combination of intellectual, business, labor, medical, and, above all, political history. Its author also humanizes the middle class by describing the lives of four small business owners: Harry Lane, Will Daly, William U'Ren, and Lora Little. Lane was Portland's reform mayor before becoming one of only six senators to vote against U.S. entry into World War I. Daly was Oregon's most prominent labor leader and a onetime Socialist. U'Ren was the national architect of the direct democracy movement. Little was a leading antivaccinationist. The Radical Middle Class further explores the Portland Ku Klux Klan and concludes with a national overview of the American middle class from the Progressive Era to the present. With its engaging narrative, conceptual richness, and daring argumentation, it will be welcomed by all who understand that reexamining the middle class can yield not only better scholarship but firmer grounds for democratic hope.
Download or read book Doing Time written by Rita Felski and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2000-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Doing Time, Rita Felski argues that it makes little sense to think of the modern and postmodern as antithetical ideas. Rather, we need a historical perspective attentive to the leaky boundaries between different times as well as the many cultural and political differences within a single time.
Download or read book A Cultural Theory of International Relations written by Richard Ned Lebow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-11 with total page 775 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original theory of politics and international relations based on ancient Greek ideas of human motivation.
