Social Science Discourse Research Articles

Writing the Social Text: Poetics and Politics in Social Science Discourse. Edited by Richard Harvey Brown. Aldine de Gruyter, 1992. 230 pp. Cloth, $42.95; paper, $21.95

Journal Article Writing the Social Text: Poetics and Politics in Social Science Discourse.Edited by Richard Harvey Brown. Aldine de Gruyter, 1992. 230 pp. Cloth, $42.95; paper, $21.95 Get access James J. Dowd James J. Dowd University of Georgia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 72, Issue 4, June 1994, Pages 1268–1269, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/72.4.1268 Published: 01 June 1994

Reflexivity and Agency in Rhetoric and Pedagogy

Richard Harvey Brown, ed. Writing the Social Text: Poetics and Politics in Social Science Discourse. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992. 240 pages. $42.95 and $21.95. Marie Secor and Davida Charney, eds. Constructing Rhetorical Education. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. 360 pages. $24.95. William B. Stanley. Curriculum for Utopia: Social Reconstructionism and Critical Pedagogy in the Postmodern Era. Albany: SUNY P, 1992. 266 pages. $49.50 and $16.95.

地理学と都市問題:

In this conceptual investigation, a set of hypotheses on potential socio-historical aspects and conditions of the establishment of the urban question are proposed through examining each concept of urban space explicitly or implicitly presupposed within corresponding urban geographical studies. One of the preliminary hypotheses on the relative novelty of the establishment of urban studies and theoretical formulation on the urban question is that this socio-historically specific domain formation as the amalgamation of urban studies and the urban question may have been related to the birth of the modern nation-state as a distinct socio-political and territorial surveillance institution. Urban space, under this institution, is seen as a function concomitant with the degree of its efficiency from the vantage point of social control and/or surveillance. The social scientific discourses on urban space are hence doomed to conceptualize it in its totality until it has become relevant. The general theory of urban space has contributed most effectively to the formation of a socio-historically specific domain of which raison d'etre tends to be taken-for-granted with scarce doubts. From the early Chicago sociologists to not a few of contemporary urbanologists, the main direction of research has been consistently to develop this general theory of urban space, with little concern for the sociohistorically specific conditions for its overall establishment. In reality, this has created an irresolvable tension between seeing urban space socially and seeing social groups spatially, and resulted in a miscellaneous chaotic conceptualization of modern urban space which has, indeed, gradually been formed through the duration of the modern era. Given that this kind of historical specificity surrounds the discursive formation of the urban question and its subsequent domain formation, we may as well redirect our geo-historically sensitive research interests towards the very politico-juridical and administrative processes through which the modern nation state has succeeded in transforming existing historical urban space with its socio-historically and culturally specific social relations, and finally incorporating it as a territorially distinct organizational unit, that is the urban municipal corporation, for its socio-political constitution as well as governance.

Engineers, intellectuals and the state: assessing technology in the Weimar Republic

Dierkes, M., Knie, A. and Wagner, P., 1990. Engineers, intellectuals and the state: assessing technology in the Weimar Republic. Industrial Crisis Quarterly, 4: 155-174.Political debate about technological development has intensified in the Fed eral Republic of Germany since the 1970s, questioning in particular the ade quacy of the modes of regulation governing the use of new technologies. Against this background, this paper reassesses the discussion about the relation be tween technology and politics during the Weimar Republic, with a view to plac ing the present disputes in a broader political context.The analysis starts with a look at the mode of technological regulation in use at the end of the 19th century, which restricted political measures to the setting of legal frames and did not allow detailed guidelines to be laid down. Critical debates on this mode became one of the dominant political themes during the 1920s. Social science and philosophical discourses on the cultural crises of mass society had a particular impact in these debates. Proposals which stemmed from this intellectual milieu contrasted with the old concepts in their strong affinity to ideas of the authoritarian state. Some of these proposals are described, and related to the actual measures taken by parliament and government to regulate the introduction of new technologies.

Imaging process as ethnographic inquiry

This paper considers the predicament of ethnographic photography in the current period of paradigm transition. The dominant mode of ethnographic imaging has remained severely constrained by the genre conventions of documentary, and so the practice was relegated to the poetic margins of social science discourse. But, as this paper argues, the paradox of visual representation is not inherent in the medium, rather it stems from the imaging process as formalist aesthetic. An alternative formulation involves foregrounding the process itself as a system of communication, thereby severing the photograph's ontological commitment to reality.

Alienation and the adversary culture

T he word alienation is probably used less frequently in social science and intellectual discourse than it used to be (say, ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago), but the basic attitudes and ideas associated with the concept are very much with us. Alienation, or estrangement, qualifies one for "'membership" in the adversary culture, Alienation has increasingly come to mean an articulated discontent with existing social institutions and prevailing values, or with the gap between the ceremonial values and institutional realities. It is an outlook or state of mind that leads to or entails viewing one's own society with deep misgivings and suspicion; to be estranged means believing that the prevailing social order is deeply flawed, unjust, corrupt, and irrational, calculated to constrain or reduce human satisfactions. Such alienation readily shades into a chronic, low grade moral indignation and awareness of the ubiquitousness of injustice. The type of people who most frequently display these attitudes and beliefs are intellectuals, aspiring intellectuals, or quasi-intellectuals--sometimes also thought of as members of the "new class." They have been adept and vocal at expressing the discontents of life in the countries of the West and have invested prodigious energies in making inventories of the ills of these societies. Although the alienated outlook is infused with elements of social determin i sm-soc ie ty is held responsible for much personal unhappiness and failure--the estranged individual may lead a satisfactory personal life. Estrangement thus understood gives rise to the social-critical role. For many intellectuals such a role has come to play an important part in maintaining and enhancing their self-esteem. Bruno Bettelheim suggests another path to understanding the concept. Acording to him "alienation . . . is an estrangement from the world we live in, and from our inner life; it is also an inability to establish harmony within ourselves and between our inner self and our way of life in this world." These comments echo a conversation I had with him in the summer of 1986 in which he also emphasized his belief that, by and large, those who vehemently reject their social-cultural environment (that is, are alienated) are not happy people, not at peace with themselves, but deeply dissatisfied both with their personal lives and social environment. Bettelheim seems to believe that personal dissatisfaction precedes or underlies the social political kind and becomes projected upon the social setting. David M. Potter, the American historian, had expressed somewhat similar views, suggesting reasons that in the modern world personal unhappiness is more readily converted into social criticism:

The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975

Our ideas of tradition, culture, and ideology found their places in the social scientific discourse of the 1950s and 1960s as part of modernization theory. This supposed theory was heir to ancient occidental habits of mythological thinking about history, as is well known.1 But the reorientation of these ideas in the postwar years was guided more specifically by the novel division of the globe into three conceptual “worlds” in response to the Cold War.