Context Of Social Action Research Articles

The Truth of Nonviolence

In The Force of Nonviolence, Judith Butler presents five key interventions to the field of nonviolence philosophy: (1) a critique of social contract theory for the way it imagines human beings as independent, (2) an approach to nonviolence based in the preservation of life within a context of social action, (3) the advancement of Butler’s alternative framework of equal grievability, (4) the claim that violence is difficult to define independently of social context, and (5) a Freudian analysis of the death drive that offers a strategy for disrupting violence. In response to each of these interventions, this article argues that: (1) social contract theory is a heuristic for justifying the existence of a state, (2) Gandhi’s concept of truth provides a more comprehensive approach to nonviolence that concerns the whole self and all beings, (3) a concept of function would make a better guide to human responsibility, (4) violence can be defined independently of social framework, and (5) without reliance on the concept of a death drive, there are nonviolent remedies for social attitudes of aggression as found in the work of Jane Addams and William James.

Crime reporting behavior and Black’s Behavior of Law

This study seeks to extend the theoretical explanation of victims’ crime reporting behavior to a social-structural framework by partially using Black’s Behavior of Law theory in a non-western context. Black’s theory of law postulated that police reporting varied according to five aspects of social life: stratification, morphology, culture, organization and social control. Drawing on the most recent victimization survey conducted in Taiwan, this study focuses on victim reporting of assault, robbery and larceny. Some findings replicated the expectations proposed by Black’s propositions, but others were contrary to expectations. Female robbery victims reported to the police approximately three times more than males. The plausible reason might involve the notion of relational distance taken from Black’s morphology perspective. It was also found that the severity of infraction was positively related to crime reporting. The coexistence of a strong effect of the variable ‘crime seriousness’ and the statistical significance of Black’s social dimensions might imply that Black’s theory has value in forming the broad social context of social action but is insufficient as an explanation of individual behavior.

Taming Prometheus: Talk About Safety and Culture

Talk of safety culture has emerged as a common trope in contemporary scholarship and popular media as an explanation for accidents and as a recipe for improvement in complex sociotechnical systems. Three conceptions of culture appear in talk about safety: culture as causal attitude, culture as engineered organization, and culture as emergent and indeterminate. If we understand culture as sociologists and anthropologists theorize as an indissoluble dialectic of system and practice, as both the product and context of social action, the first two perspectives deploying standard causal logics fail to provide persuasive accounts. Displaying affinities with individualist and reductionist epistemologies, safety culture is frequently operationalized in terms of the attitudes and behaviors of individual actors, often the lowest-level actors, with the least authority, in the organizational hierarchy. Sociological critiques claim that culture is emergent and indeterminate and cannot be instrumentalized to prevent technological accidents. Research should explore the features of complex systems that have been elided in the talk of safety culture: normative heterogeneity and conflict, inequalities in power and authority, and competing sets of legitimate interests within organizations.

The complexity of family policy reform: The case of Norway

That ‘politics matters’ has become a central assumption in the booming welfare state literature in recent years. Sometimes policies do not matter much, however. A key argument in this paper is that family policies are becoming increasingly complex and diversified, and that the practical implications of policies have to be analysed in relation to the wider social, economic and political context. In the present case study of a cash-for-care reform introduced in Norway in 1998, the relationship between policy reform and mothers’ employment practices is explored. Against expectations, and after a heated and polarised public debate, the reform turns out to have very modest effects. The analysis aims at identifying the constellation of factors that can explain the unexpected outcome, locating them in the interplay of the reform’s intent and content, and divergences between policy assumptions and mothers’ actual context of social action.

Rational Fools or Foolish Rationalists?: Bringing Meaning Back In

Weber connected intentionality to interpretation. The concept of attribution links his conception of cultural sciences to his definition of culture.' He conceived of means-end rationality as a possible of action (Weber 1922). Contemporary rational choice analysts in sociology have had less to say about meaning, or about methodological issues raised by the imputation of subjective (Boudon 1977, 1979; Corsi 1981; Elster 1978, 1979, 1982; Heckathorn 1988; Rusconi 1984; Szaniawsky 1979). The possibility of interpretation within a specifically sociological frame of reference, the traditional problem of sociological interpretation, is nevertheless raised anew by the program of rational choice analysis. The program is ultimately dependent on the factual assumptions about the intentions and meanings that rational agents attach to their actions and the actions of others (Burns 1990; Sciolla and Ricolfi 1989). The mutual relevance of the two programs, however, has not been assessed clearly. The aim of this paper is to clarify these relations. Put differently, it is to reassess the Weberian lesson from a contemporary perspective. Imputing intentions-attributing content to actions-has a traditional place in sociological explanation (Cicourel 1964, 1973; Harre and Secord 1972; Parsons and Shils 1951; C. Taylor 1964; R. Taylor 1966; von Wright 1971). For Weber and the interpretive sociologists, imputations of intentions or (more generally) the bestowal of on actions is a means to, or a part of, the explanation of a phenomenon constituted as an object of knowledge through the principle of value relevance. Verstehende sociology is characterized by the explicit theoretical linking of the phenomenon of interest to agents' bestowals of meaning. Meaning bestowal (or intention formation) is considered as one of the conditions for (the possibility of) the empirical occurrence of a particular course of action. For Weber, the theoretical construction of action was achieved through the ideal types of traditional, affectual, means-end rational, and value-rational action (1922). The kind of meaning relevant for the sociological interpreter is that which bears on the interpreter's sociological purposes as defined by his or her theoretical framework. No model of man (Simon 1957) is required, any more than access to true or objective is required. What is needed is an account of the context of social action, a theory of the conditions under which action becomes