Social Sciences In Terms Research Articles

Core, periphery and (neo)imperialist International Relations

This article analyzes the core–periphery dynamics that characterize the International Relations discipline. To this end, it explores general insights offered by both science studies and the social sciences in terms of the intellectual division of labor that characterizes knowledge-building throughout the world, and the social mechanisms that reproduce power differentials within given fields of study. These arguments are then applied to International Relations, where specific factors that explain the global South’s role as a periphery to the discipline’s (mainly US) core and the ways in which peripheral communities place themselves vis-à-vis International Relations’ (neo)imperialist structure are both explored.

Employment patterns of UNAM graduates: an assessment of the employability of the media studies graduates of the University of Namibia

The Department of Information and Communication Studies of the University of Namibia was established in 1998. Over the years the Department has grown, surpassing expectations to become the flagship of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in terms of student numbers. This study was carried out in 2009 by the Department of Information and Communication Studies (DICS) and focused on the employment patterns of students who went through its programmes from 2000-2007. The purpose of the study was to obtain feedback from the former students on their current employment, a perspective of their education at the university and what they think may have been missing in their programme which may need to be adjusted to better prepare future students for the job market. Although this study covered graduates of all the programmes in the department, this article will concentrate on graduates of the media studies specialisation (B.A. Media Studies) of the department only.

DESCRIBING URBAN ‘NO MAN'S LAND’ IN AFRICA

Cities as elusive, invisible, yet to come. ‘[T]he city is no-man's land’ (Grace Khunou, p. 240 in Mbembe and Nuttall). ‘Lagos is no man's land’ (heard in Lagos by the present writer, August 2010). A picture of a strangely empty and disrupted man-made landscape (William Kentridge, pp. 349–350 in Mbembe and Nuttall), balanced by a dense but also personless urban scene (by the same author, pp. 35–6 in the same text). … The slippage between conventional social scientific terms of runaway urbanization, the teeming human vitality of African cities, and the elusiveness of the titles, sayings and images of these three books, opens up the rich vein for research and writing into which these authors work their ways. Johannesburg. Kinshasa. Pikine (Dakar). Winterveld (a South African urban area outside Pretoria). Douala. Jeddah. The books reviewed here are based on detailed field research in six particular cities. They all juxtapose the categories of ‘metropolis’ and ‘modernity’ to the category of ‘Africa’, all positing the anomaly this move may represent in the categorical social scientific mind. The subtitles immediately indicate a different starting point from the analytics of population, geography and governance. With an approach through ‘tales’ (De Boeck and Plissart) and ‘reading the city’ (Mbembe and Nuttall), the authors indicate an alternative intellectual reach. They start from visual imagery, the language arts and the social mediations through which the lives lived in urban ‘modern’ Africa are expressed, communicated, understood, configured and conserved. Their aims evoked in my mind the modern art – rather than the analytics – of other cities. So here we have ‘circulation’ and vehicles as symbols and sounds without too much attention to traffic (the Lagos ‘go slow’; the accidents); ‘bodies’ without much attention to food or toilet needs or aging; ‘authority’ evaded or permeating rather than personified in mayors, town councils and multitudes of other officials and employees. In the ether of the invisible, what circulates are symbols and expressions; what emanates from bodies is sexual tension, aesthetic sensibility and physical vulnerability (‘bodies in danger’, De Boeck and Plissart, p. 117); what bears down oppressively is constraint and neglect of all kinds. In brief, what strikes the perceptive mind is precisely what bursts out of the conventional forms and has not yet taken a newly conventionalized shape. Through this orientation, all three books bring the humanities and artistic sensibilities to the question of the spirits, souls, inspirations, dangers, images and memories that inhabit the crowded spaces between buildings and people, insects and people, people and people.

Noam Chomsky and the realist tradition

AbstractThis article examines the assumptions that underlie Noam Chomsky's politics and argues that his analysis of US foreign policy since World War II may best be situated within the realist tradition in international relations. Chomsky's left realism has not been adequately understood or addressed by IR scholars for both political and disciplinary reasons. In opposition to most classical realists, he has insisted that intellectuals should resist rather than serve national power interests. In contrast to most political scientists, he has also refused to theorize, critiquing much of the enterprise of social science in terms of what he sees as highly suspect power interests within the academy. Hostility to Chomsky's normative commitments has consequently prevented IR scholars from discerning key aspects of his project, as well as important historical and theoretical continuities between radical and realist thought.

From Genealogy to Generation: The Birth of Cohort Thinking in Russia

The keywords in my title refer to two distinct ways in which members a society may think about their location in time. One way--genealogy--takes its bearings from lines family descent. The other--generation--finds its units measurement in cohorts people born at approximately the same time. These two approaches have something in common: they both use biological relationships as a way thinking about social relationships. But the differences between them are equally clear. Genealogy provides a sense belonging that defines the people the present in terms their ancestors. Generation is horizontal: it constructs a community coevals. Genealogy concentrates on succession, whereas generation emphasizes simultaneity. Genealogy attaches importance to kin connection; generation potentially transcends kin. Two commonsensical things might be said about this pair concepts with respect to prerevolutionary Russia. First, we might expect Russia to be more genealogically minded than most European societies. This was a place where power was notoriously personalistic; where a group noble families, tightly woven together in their lineage, held sway; and where kin connections mattered far more than merit or rule law or non-kin allegiance. Second, with regard to generation, it is well known that Russia had one the most acute recorded cases generational rebellion--a youth subculture the 1860s that has frequently been cited as the first its kind anywhere in Europe. My primary task in this paper is to account for this apparent discrepancy. How to explain the shift from ancien regime to vanguard? How did Russia move from a vertical to a sense generation: from long chains succession within an overarching kin structure to a sense belonging with one's coevals (cohort thinking). I look at generation not in social-science terms--as a cohort empirically extractable from history--but as an idea. For my purposes, the crucial question is: when does it become important for people to identify themselves in generational rather than in some other terms? This question has a commonsensical kind answer, which may be expressed in one word as modernization. The historiography modern Europe places the birth cohort thinking in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Certain groups in society (in the first instance, young, well-off, well-educated males) were stimulated by new institutions (universities, bureaucracies), places (notably cities), and events (notably the French Revolution) to find a sense solidarity with their coevals that might override previous loyalties such as those within a family, clan, or social estate. Of course, the awareness generational difference was not an invention 1789: generation is discussed as a mechanism political change even in Plato. But the idea usually advanced by scholars is that the revolutionary period brought awareness broad horizontal allegiances, not just difference from the older generation, and that it made generational consciousness a historical phenomenon. Young men were now not simply the sons their fathers but a uniquely situated historical cohort. Following on from this, it would appear that generational issues are articulated with particular vehemence at moments when societies are facing fundamental choices about the allocation collective resources and the redistribution political authority. Prominent examples include countries suffering the teething troubles modernization: France in the few decades following 1789; Germany and Italy in the middle the 19th century; and course, Russia in the late tsarist era. This, broadly speaking, was the line interpretation taken by many distinguished commentators when the academic study generations took off in the postwar era. Lewis S. Feuer, author perhaps the most impressive the many studies generations that were inspired by the protest movements the 1960s, found in Russian history evidence generational conflict of unparalleled intensity resulting from special social circumstances. …

Social Transformation in the Age of Globalization. A Challenge to Reduce Anomie and to Increase Social Capital

Anomie is one of few social scientific terms with a wide claim to explain aspects of social change, in different cultures at different stages of modernization not to say globalization. In the early 1990s the Scientific Board of the Swiss Academy of Development commenced a research project which is still continuing with most of the same researchers but under the name of The International Network for the Assessment of Social Transformation (INAST), based in the Institute of Sociology, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. The work was importantly influenced by Robert K. Merton, an honorary member of the group.

The logic of scientific discovery in critical realist social scientific research

Critical realism claims to bring a significant improvement to social science, especially in comparison with empiricist and interpretive approaches. So far, however, it has fallen short of the high expectations it raises. Critical realist arguments are convincing on the philosophical or meta-theoretical level but the contributions of critical realism to social science in terms of research activities at the field level are less clear. Nonetheless, there is no way back. Moving forward requires that the practice of doing social scientific research be no longer perceived as limited to the justification of specific knowledge claims but must be seen as an integral part of the cycle of scientific discovery.

The Logic of Scientific Discovery in Critical Realist Social Scientific Research

Critical realism claims to bring a significant improvement to social science, especially in comparison with empiricist and interpretive approaches. So far, however, it has fallen short of the high expectations it raises. Critical realist arguments are convincing on the philosophical or meta-theoretical level but the contributions of critical realism to social science in terms of research activities at the field level are less clear. Nonetheless, there is no way back. Moving forward requires that the practice of doing social scientific research be no longer perceived as limited to the justification of specific knowledge claims but must be seen as an integral part of the cycle of scientific discovery.

From Reflective Practice to Practical Wisdom: Three Models of Liberal Teacher Education

INTRODUCTION For many years, philosophy of education enjoyed a place of honor in schools of education. The foundations of education, as the name suggests, were thought to be fundamental to the edifice of educational practice, and philosophy was thought to be the quintessential foundational discipline. If schools of education have, by now, developed a healthy skepticism towards this idea that practices are generated from and built on theories, the irony is that it was philosophers themselves who took the lead in dismantling the foundational metaphor. This is not to say that the activity of theorization is no longer respected in the world of education: just look at the immense scale of the yearly American Educational Research Association conference. But educational research, whether tilted toward the qualitative or quantitative, is largely understood in social scientific terms. When combined with the general tightening of resources across higher education, this makes the place of humanistic inquiry in schools of education rather precarious.

G H Mead och de sociala strukturernas betydelse för individen

This article draws attention to unnoticed aspects of Mead’s social pragmatism. I argue that in his social pragmatism, put in modern social scientific terms, there is a tendency to transcend the dualism between agency and structure. Modern social scientists as Bourdieu, Giddens and Habermas all approach this dualism. Mead’s social pragmatism can be interpreted as an attempt to transcend the dualism by stressing the reciprocity between agency and structure. The article shows that his view is best described in the following way: social structures are both enabling and constraining in relation to the individual. In Mead’s descrip- tion of taking the role of the other, especially the generalized other, and the relationship between ”I” and ”me” it clearly appears how the internalization of social structures is a necessary condition for agency. It also becomes evident how agency or creativity have a vital importance in relation to social structures, particularly for structural change.

SOCIALISATION TO VALUES: COLLECTIVISM AND INDIVIDUALISM IN THE ABC-BOOKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY ESTONIA

1. Introduction Cultural artefacts, educational media, instruments of socialisation--school textbooks are simultaneously all of these. Even the ABC-books (1) serve several functions: they teach first-graders to read and write, and children what their elders want them to (FitzGerald 1979:47). ABC-books (as well as other school textbooks) represent values, attitudes and world views that are considered to be worthy of passing on to the next generation, as a part of socially approved (Schutz 1964). These values are taken for granted by textbook authors, officials, teachers, parents and, finally, by pupils. The values selected for a primer's curriculum thus reflect the moral aims of the educators in that period of time. (For some exemplary studies based on that assumption, see Koski 1998, London 1984.) In addition, the values represented in ABC-books (and other school textbooks) serve as a valuable source of knowledge about societal culture on the macro-level. While aggregated individual culture is observable through averaged micro-data from a questionnaire survey, indicators of societal culture or macro-data are predominantly obtained from textual analyses of curricula, textbooks, media content, etc. Individualistic and collectivist values, in particular, occur quite infrequently in textbook studies or pedagogical research, not to mention the discussion and comparison of (American) individualistic and competitive education vs. (Soviet) collectivist education (see Keltikangas-Jarvinen and Terav 1996, for overview). For psychologists and sociologists, on the other hand, the concepts of individualism and collectivism have served as almost magic words, especially during the last decades (see Kagitcibasi 1997, for overview). The terms have been in extensive use in cross-cultural psychological research as well as in sociological descriptions of the differences between traditional and modern types of societies. Yet this concept, like many other terms in social sciences, is not completely unproblematic. The construct of individualism-collectivism encompasses various meanings and components, as well as different levels of analysis (the individual and the cultural level) (ibid.). The 20th century Estonian society serves as a perfect testing ground for somewhat ambiguous social scientific concepts. During this century, Estonia has gone through radical political and ideological changes. Estonians gained independence from Tsarist Russia in 1918, suffered German and Soviet occupations between 1940 and 1991, regained independence in 1991, and are now building up a new political and economic order (see, e.g., Hoyer et al. 1993, for overview). At the same time, processes of modernisation have taken place, altering people's lifestyle and value orientations. These changes provide a good opportunity for well-grounded longitudinal measurements, which help to estimate the validity of social scientific terms and constructs, including theoretical value axes. This article has several analytical facets. First, it explores the socialising content of the ABC-books of the 20th century Estonia in terms of individualistic and collectivist values. The results are juxtaposed with the ones from some other studies on individualism-collectivism in Estonia, and interpreted in the context of cultural and political transformations that have occurred in Estonian society. Also, I will try to evaluate the usefulness of the individualism-collectivism construct for the interdisciplinary field of textbook analysis. Finally, I will discuss some options in the education of values. 2. Theoretical and empirical background 2.1. School textbooks as instruments of socialisation The function of school textbooks is to represent to each generation of pupils a sanctioned or desired version of human knowledge and culture (de Castell 1991:78). Textbooks and other educational media tell us what educators believed ought to exist, though those materials cannot tell us what we might like to know about a teacher's interaction with pupils, a school's relationship to a community, or a pupil's reception of or reactions to what the school has to offer (Clark 1984:3). …

Sociology in Singapore: Global Discourse in Local Context

AbstractThis paper reviews the development trajectory of sociology as a discipline and its practice in Singapore. Viewing sociology as a global discourse, the paper argues that there have been, at least, three waves in the development of sociological practice in Singapore. These waves mark a shift in research interests that somehow parallel the changing official interest in the findings of sociological research. Such shifts in research interest and changes in curricula reflect important dynamics not only in the relationship between academic knowledge and official need for such knowledge but with time also an increasing appreciation of critical inquiry. This paper argues that there are limitations in viewing sociology simply as a "Western social science" in a "non-Western context". For the clarity of both conceptual and empirical understanding, it may be useful to rethink the relationship between sociological knowledge and power as a dynamic process with some universal features. This would entail going beyond the West versus non-West polarity and assessing the development of social science in terms of the global/local interface.

“The nation’s diet”: an overview of early results

“The nation’s diet” is a six‐year basic social science programme funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, consisting of 16 projects located in universities across England, Scotland and Wales. Explains the overall purpose of this multi‐disciplinary programme in social scientific terms as the examination of the processes affecting human food choice. The programme’s central concern ‐ “why do people eat what they do?” ‐ is amenable to study using a variety of social scientific research approaches, designs and techniques of data collection and analysis. Illustrates this methodological variety selectively in reporting a few of the programme’s early results from three of its projects. The findings confirm that people eat what they do for a multiplicity of reasons in addition to, and sometimes in conflict with, hunger, properties of the food itself or people’s own valuation of health and nutrition.

Self‐organization and Intermittency in Social Systems: Towards a Science of Complexity

The concept of self‐organization proposed by Von Foerster and developed recently by I. Prigogine and the “synergetics” of H. Haken state a framework that promises to be fruitful in the construction of theories synthesizing the microscale and the macroscale points of view in complex systems. This concept may be especially interesting in human sciences, like sociology, where the duality microsociology/ macrosociology remains. Tries to identify explicitly the main features defining the self‐organization of microelements that produce a macroscopic system, and applies the concept to phenomena of social evolution, suggesting a formulation of the micro/macro relationship in social sciences in terms of the probabilistic field theory.

The role of toys in the instigation of playful creativity

Abstract Toys are usually discussed in the social sciences in terms of their realistic or adaptive functions. Viewed as family bonding gifts, as tools of growth, as self‐moving machines, or as consumer objects, they contribute to the normative purposes of culture. The data of the present article demonstrate that these functional paradigms underestimate the extent to which toys are assimilated into and transformed by the child's own imaginative life. Evidence is presented from children's narrative accounts of their favorite play. In addition, this article attempts to deconstruct the paradoxical character of the way in which toy signifiers themselves contribute to the negation of everyday realism.

A Socialist Pluralism of Opinions: Glasnost and Policy-Making under Gorbachev

Alexander Herzen, attempting to explain the sensation occasioned by the publication of Peter Chaadaev's famous "Philosophical Letter" in 1836, characterized it as a "shot that rang out in the dark night." The scandal, he records in his memoirs, testified to the power of the word in a country, shaped by Nicholas I's policies of "official nationality," that had grown disaccustomed to open, independent speech. The essay appeared after a decade in which many of Russia's boldest intellectual spirits had been exiled, a time when "to speak was dangerous-and there was nothing to say anyway." Glasnost' has demonstrated the continuing power of the word in Russia. From the leadership's standpoint, glasnost' is a principal fulcrum in a massive effort at social engineering directed as much at reconstructing Soviet political culture as at reforming the structures of power. As its architects have formulated the matter, glasnost' is narrowing the "gap between words and deeds"-a formula widely used in the late 1970s and early 1980s by both reformist and orthodox wings of the political elite to deplore the disparity between commonly accepted norms of public and private behavior, and the pieties of party-mindedness and collectivism to which everyone was expected to pay obeisance. Alluding to Orwell's famous concept of double-think, the venerable Soviet scholar Igor' Kon analyzed this gap as a problem of social psychology. Double-think he regards as a condition in which "a different meaning is imputed to the same words; and the same person, depending on the situation (for example, at a meeting or at home) with equal sincerity affirms diametrically opposing things."2 This discrepancy was in fact less between "words and deeds," or, in social-scientific terms, culture and behavior, than between two interdependent but opposed codes of language and behavior: one for the realm of the unsanctioned-private, whether collective (such as dissident activity, religion, small-scale graft and illicit enterprise, and large-scale organized crime), or individualistic (including various forms of private rebellion and

Family Well-Being and Quality of Life: Humanistic Concerns of the Family Impact Analyst

The basic tenets of humanistic sociology are explored to investigate their utility for the developing area of family specialization termed family impact analysis. From humanistic literature, it is demonstrated that family impact analysis has the same basic goals as humanistic social science in terms of assessing the impact or consequences of social policy with regard to family well-being and the quality of family life. Family impact analysis and family policy advocacy are shown to be similar as humanistic enterprises. However, the roles of the family impact analyst and the family policy advocate are considered distinct, though complementary, with family impact analysts functioning to explicate policy consequences for families and family policy advocates focusing upon the advocacy of policy creation, or change to further the humanistic goal of family well-being. The issue of the family impact analyst's responsibility for the purpose to which his/her findings are utilized is discussed. It is further demonstrated that family impact analysis can maintain its objectivity as a scientific endeavor while operating as a humanistic enterprise.

On the Metaphysics of Social Psychology: A Critical View

Two contrasting social metaphysics are discussed: the naturalistic and the historical. The naturalistic metaphysics emphasizes general conditions, transhistorical explanations, laws in nature, reductive explanations, positivism, cumulative, and value-free knowledge, whereas the historical emphasizes specificity, historical conditions, man-made laws, descriptive explanation, inference, holism, and value-affected knowledge. An analysis of social psychology and sociology journals suggests that social psychology as a discipline is more naturalistic than historical in its orientation. Social psychology studies tend to be experimental, using students as subjects, small samples, and inferential statistics, and are more discipline-bound in referencing, whereas sociology studies are more descriptive, using structural categories of population as subjects, larger samples, and descriptive statistics, and are more related to other social sciences in terms of referencing. Implications of these results for social psychology are discussed.

Fragmentation in Higher Education as Perceived by Students

Among the clearest statements on fragmentation ? of the higher learning accompanied by practical solution is that of Hutchins1. Thomas3 reviewed not only Hutchins' position but the other major proposals during the past 50 years. The fragmentation problem remains a crucial issue and solutions continue to be advocated.2 The point to which the authors adhere stems from the social-psychological theories that man and his environ ment are an integrated spiritual, social, and physical complex. Fragmentation of the higher learning results from the inability of scholars to perceive man and his environment as an integrated whole. A potential solu tion to the fragmentation problem might be forthcoming from the social sciences in terms of a comprehensive theory of man applied as the unifying principle for the higher learning. Such a theory would integrate man's relation to man (himself and others) and man's relation to his physical and to his spiritual world, thus integrat ing all the essential aspects of higher education. Since instruction should begin where the student is, the starting point must involve the modern student. Based both on the current literary emphasis and on their personal experiences with students the authors suggest that for most students this point of involvement is that of man's relationship to man. In order to investigate this latter suggestion the study here reported was con ducted. The study was designed to seek tentative answers to the following questions: