Praxeologische Feldforschung – Reichweite, Tragweite, Importanz und Relevanz als Analysekategorien

Opening the 'Black Box' of User Agency: A Critical Cultural Studies Approach to Web 2.0

This chapter introduces the practice theory developed by Theodore Schatzki and highlights its implications for organization studies. In particular, it shows how his theory contributes to our understanding of the micro-foundations of organizations, the embeddedness of organizations in their wider social context, and the temporal and spatial dimensions of organizations. It also discusses how Schatzki’s theory can be applied in empirical research on organizations.

Given the excessive power of Google and other large technology firms, transparency and accountability have turned into matters of great concern for organization scholars. So far, most studies adopt either a causal or critical perspective on the relationship between the two concepts. These perspectives are pitted against each other but share some basic assumptions – a fact which limits organization theory’s ability to fully grasp the management of (digital) visibilities. To address these limitations, we therefore propose a third, constructive perspective on these concepts. A constructive perspective turns transparency and accountability from analytic resources into topics of inquiry, allowing organization scholars to study how people in and around organizations put them to work and with what consequences. We introduce sites of ethical contestation as a new methodological strategy to conduct surprising and unintuitive empirical research from a constructive perspective.

The issue of gender equality is not something new today. This issue has been widely discussed in a series of interesting stories full of meaning, one of which is in the form of a film. This research explores the representation of gender equality in the Barbie film released in 2023 and directed by Greta Gerwig from a constructivist perspective. The Barbie film is mass media that influences people's perceptions of gender bias. In the context of constructivism, films are considered the result of construction by media professionals, which can strengthen or change gender stereotypes that already exist in society. The research method used is a qualitative approach with Roland Barthes' semiotic analysis. The constructivism paradigm is used to understand how reality is understood and constructed by research subjects. The research subject is the representation of gender equality in the Barbie film narrative, while the research object is the dialogues in the film that will be analyzed. The results of the analysis show that the Barbie film depicts excessive expectations placed on women and criticizes views that trivialize or simplify issues of gender equality. The conclusion of this research is that the Barbie film as part of mass media depicts gender equality issues in a complex way and triggers critical thinking about gender stereotypes in society.

ABSTRACTBrian Epstein’s The Ant Trap is a praiseworthy addition to literature on social ontology and the philosophy of social sciences. Its central aim is to challenge received views about the social world – views with which social scientists and philosophers have aimed to answer questions about the nature of social science and about those things that social sciences aim to model and explain, like social facts, objects and phenomena. The received views that Epstein critiques deal with these issues in an overly people-centered manner. After all, even though social facts and phenomena clearly involve individual people arranged in certain ways, we must still spell out how people are involved in social facts and phenomena. There are many metaphysical questions about social properties, relations, dependence, constitution, causation, and facts that cannot be answered (for instance) just be looking at individual people alone. In order to answer questions about (e.g.) how one social entity depends for its existence on another, we need different metaphysical tools. Epstein thus holds that social ontological explanations would greatly benefit from making use of the theoretical toolkit that contemporary analytical metaphysics has to offer. He focuses specifically on two metaphysical instruments: grounding and anchoring. This paper examines Epstein’s understanding and use of these tools. I contend that Epstein is exactly right to say that contemporary metaphysics contains many theoretical instruments that can be fruitfully applied to social ontological analyses. However, I am unconvinced that Epstein’s tools achieve what they set out to do. In particular, I will address two issues: (1) How is grounding for Epstein meant to work? (2) Is anchoring distinct from grounding, and a relation that we need in social ontology?

This article offers critical and constructive perspectives essential to understanding living bodies, and, in effect, to showing that kinesthesia, tactility and affectivity matter because they are central to animate life. Critical perspectives focus on practices that distance us from the lived realities of animate nature, on insights into those realities, and on ways in which language is intimately related to those realities. Constructive perspectives focus on ontogenetic studies that empirically testify to our being animate organisms from the start. The studies validate Husserl’s insight into the developmental progression from ‘I move’ to ‘I do’ to ‘I can’. On the basis of these perspectives, concluding observations focus on the mutual validation of empirical and phenomenological research, on the distinction between movement and objects in motion, on the distinction between perceiving and feeling one’s body, and on the distinction between having a body and being a body.

Complex legal issues often involve contested facts that require expert knowledge. In such cases, legal decision makers look to experts from fields as diverse as the behavioral, social, biomedical, or physical sciences to help settle disputes. More Than the Law provides a fascinating and accessible introduction for students and other readers to the ways in which behavioral and social knowledge can and should inform legal decisions, as well as ways in which such knowledge can be misused. Eleven different stories are presented, highlighting major legal decisions such as mandatory testing for drug use in schools, abortion, use of the death penalty, and jury selection, among others. Chapters include a presentation of each decision and an analysis that critically explores the behavioral and social facts relevant to the case. Through these stories, students will discover the complexities and problems that can result from the application of behavioral science to legal decisions. Behavioral and social science experts will come to understand the special duty they bear to provide legal decision makers with the most accurate information available. And empirical researchers will recognize vast opportunities for research that could have a real impact in the courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies. This exceptional book fills a gap in the field of legal studies, offering a sophisticated examination of the use of behavioral and social science facts in judicial, legislative, and administrative determinations.

Abstract. Conceptualised from a practice theory perspective, "landscape" can be employed as an overarching term encompassing otherwise divergent perspectives within geographies of memory: landscape of memory can denote social practice, meaningful materiality, individual experience, and collective imaginations as constituent of localised memory. Using Theodore Schatzki's practice theory, landscapes of memory are described as a social phenomenon: practices of memory contextualise certain places as meaningful in relation to the past. In turning to small Cold War munitions bunkers, by way of example, it is demonstrated how this perspective broadens the scope of geographies of memory to include everyday practices and their relation to collective memories.

In this article, we argue that the resourcification of wind is based on a specific entanglement of different property objects - in particular wind, land and wind turbines - and property holders. We depart from an understanding of property as a social phenomenon that is enacted through social practices and thereby becomes relevant within an arrangement of different entities (human, non-human and material) by structuring the relations between these entities. We propose a practice theoretical approach based on Theodore Schatzki's concept of practice-arrangement constellations for understanding how property becomes relevant through socio-material relations which enable the resourcification of wind. Based on this theoretical approach, we show how different entities and practices bring about chains of property objects that enable the transformation of wind into electricity. With our conceptual considerations concerning property chains we hope to deepen the discussion around the significance of property in the resourcification of renewable energy sources.

The article analyses the moral action to reveal the elements of tension and interaction between the individual and the society by comparing theories of Vytautas Kavolis and of Emile Durkheim. Social action and moral action are different analytical categories. The problem arises when it is necessary to establish links between these concepts. The article is based on the position that moral action and social action has a relation as part and a whole, has a different study objects, but obeys the same study method. According to Durkheim‘ s definitions of social fact and of moral fact, social fact is a broader category that includes the moral facts. It is shown that the facts includes social phenomena feathuring the expediency of performed actions of individuals. Therefore, social action is interpreted by adapting the definition of a social fact, as appropriate, moral action is interpreted by definition of moral fact. The aim is to identify the characteristics, conditions, and factors of moral action. Theories of moral action of Durkheim and of Kavolis are analyzed. French sociologist distinguishes social power to encourage an individual to behave in one way or another. Durkheim indicates that the social power works in society as in individuals by using an association method. Kavolis emphasizes the inner imperative which is a basis for moral action, arising from the conscious individual, performed after internalisation of moral principle itself. However, the individual and society have different goals. An individual seeks to realize the freedom as creative potential. The society requires the individual to obey historically formed norms and rules of conduct. On the other hand, the individual performing a moral action is always influenced by the social environment and his actions always have social impact.

For better or worse, it has become difficult to conduct research in the social sciences without encountering gender, even well beyond fields that specifically focus on it. Since the advent of gender studies as a discipline, the concept has gained momentum both as a social fact and structure of social action, and as the analytic category through which these are conceptualised. This special issue of the BMS is embedded in the idea that the analysis of gender itself is indissociable from the history of the concept, and that the increasing spread of this notion throughout society has an impact on the way(s) gender is investigated. In the space of just a few decades the world has evolved from one in which researchers were working to give consistency to a nameless force, to one which is now gender conscious, where gender is mobilised, criticised, claimed, resisted, and debated. In a gender conscious world, the rules of research are changing. The notion of gender consciousness that is proposed here borrows carefully from research in the sociology of law developed under the name legal consciousness studies (LCS). The fact that there are different definitions of gender that compete with each other does not prevent us from considering that there is gender, and we may even consider that the proliferation of definitions participates in the stability of the social phenomenon we are studying, just as, for the theorists of LCS, the multiple representations of the law contribute to its hegemony. One of the central issues here is the problematization of the dialectic between categories of practice and categories of analysis, with a focus on the methodological and epistemological questions of these studies. This ‘return to the field’ will provide answers to these questions, beginning with a personal summary overview of what feminist epistemologies (I) and feminist methodologies (II) have contributed to social sciences, before moving on to contemporary research questions that emerge through the prism of gender consciousness (III).

Over recent decades, the concept of religion has been critically examined and deconstructed. Its usefulness as an analytical category has been questioned (Fitzgerald 2000, 2007a, 2011; McCutcheon 1997, 2001; Arnal and McCutcheon 2013). These scholars critically approach the use of the term from a postcolonial perspective, which was famously taken by Edward Said, and from a poststructuralist perspective, exemplified by Foucaultian discourse analysis. The category of religion, as the binary opposite of the secular, is a by-product of the specific historical and cultural circumstances of Western modernity (Asad 1993, 2003; Cavanaugh 2009; Nongbri 2013). When its Western imperial legacy is revealed, its cross-cultural applications attract postcolonial critiques (Fitzgerald 2007b). In many parts of the world, there was no equivalent word for ‘religion,’ but the concept of religion was often imposed upon various cultures by Western colonial powers (Chidester 1996; Josephson 2012). What these critical perspectives indicate is that ‘religion’ is a socially constructed category and that its social construction should be the subject of critical examination (Johansen 2011; Jeldtoft and Johansen 2012).

Globalization implies a general shift in spatio-temporal relations and the simultaneous deterritorialization of cultural phenomena orchestrated by the multiple global flows of people, ideas, and fashions. Within the context of globalization, it is troublesome for social scientists to continue using the “urban–rural” dichotomy as distinctive analytical and methodological categories because it tends to suggest a contingency in the pattern and character of social phenomena. This article sets out to theoretically rethink this conceptualization because of the multi-stranded and culturally embedded nature of human behavior in both space and time which has led to difficulties in delineating rigid subject boundaries today unlike in the past. Drawing on empirical data from diverse social phenomena, but particularly from the urban procurement and consumption of medicinal plant recipes, “dualistic” religious inclination and urban agriculture, we demonstrate that the geographic, spatio-temporal conceptualization of distinctive urban and rural phenomena are problematic. We suggest the notions of “urban-ruralism” and “rural-urbanism” as theoretical and methodological reconceptualizations to capture multiple embedded processes and to show that there exists a type of behavioral continuum/consistency because individuals have adopted hyphenated identities.

This article extends the concept of events to bring cultural analysis to bear on political explanation and privileges “thick description” and narrative as methodological tools. Drawing on the views of Emile Durkheim, it argues that events constitute “social facts”—phenomena with sufficient identity and coherence that the social collectivity recognizes them as discrete and important. The article first considers the tension between the political and the cultural using a metaphor from sports and biology that unites agency and nature. It then discusses the intersection of events and experience as an analytic category that incorporates the “counterfactual” turn in historical analysis by drawing on William Sewell’s sociological theory of events. It also argues for the existence of “political facts” and concludes by proposing an analytic typology of political facts based on the classification of events along a temporal or spatial axis.

Tort law judging in the United Kingdom includes judicial ‘truth claims’ or ‘social facts’ about the world, society, and institutional and human behaviour. Although corrective justice and rights scholars assert tort law is autonomous and internally referential, social facts can be influential in tort decisions. While there is some evidence of judicial use of empirical research, many social facts are based on judicial notice, judicial common sense, and intuition. Social facts, often based on judicial common sense, play a role in tort judging. However, they can also be fertile ground for the introduction of cognitive bias and judicial error. The role of social facts in tort judging is not confined to ‘policy’ reasoning but includes social framework, context, and background. Emerging research on judicial cognition can help explain the nature and impact of common‐sense social facts. There is a need to consider potential responses to judicial use of social facts and judicial cognition.