Thinking In Social Sciences Research Articles

The Effect of Steam Approach to Economics Media Based on Bima Local Wisdom in Elementary Schools

The purpose of this article is to contribute new learning concepts about critical thinking in social sciences, especially economics, as well as the belief that social character is not developed in Indonesian schools. We investigated how primary school teachers self-reported applying what they had learned about economics to their daily social views. With the aid of educational media, this experimental study aimed to ascertain the extent to which the STEAM method influences the meaning of studying economics from early in life. According to the findings, very few pupils comprehend how economics affects both the environment and them in day-to-day living. Not only did we discover that the STEAM technique had a significant effect on pupils' thinking processes. However, they also discover the impact of their characters. There are significant differences in the level of understanding of learning, one of which is influenced by local wisdom. The implications of these findings for sharpening primary school pupils' comprehension of social science courses are explored. We suggest that social science learning be implemented using many of the latest approaches. Focusing on improving character based on local culture is not enough to use the traditional approach that has been implemented so far.

Against Common Sense: On the Utopian Aspect of Concepts

AbstractBy supplementing the work of Schutz, the article critically contests the methodological requirement, widely accepted within phenomenological sociology, that social scientific constructs be consistent with the constructs of common-sense experience of social reality. First, the article proposes that insofar as our everyday ways of speaking and thinking perceive the world as consisting of static and self-consistent entities, adhering to the methodological requirement makes research vulnerable to substantialist assumptions. To be able to account for how things change and involve other entities in their make-up therefore ultimately requires going against common sense along the lines of processual-relational thinking. Second, the article suggests that adhering too strictly to the methodological requirement easily renders social scientific concepts reactive and representational, trapped within the present and the actual. Against this, the article argues for a view of concepts as active and creative, stressing their utopian aspects. Social scientific thinking that gravitates towards creation emphasises potentiality and the future instead of perpetuating the actual and the present: it engages with present practices, institutions, and structures for the benefit of the future. Instead of merely describing or representing the social world as it is, its concepts present a challenge to what is, and thereby open up new ways of thinking, acting, and being and potentially “give a new event to things”.

The Assemblage and Dismantling of Access Barriers in Administrative Bureaucracies: Constructing the Problem of Diversity in the German Welfare State.

The article extends the literature on the construction of "diversity management" by personnel managers in corporate America. Such research has highlighted that Human Resource (HR) specialists draw heavily on social-scientific thinking in implementing various remedies against discrimination. However, it has paid less attention to how such esoteric views of reality, comprising such "things" as "structural barriers" impeding occupational advancement and "diversity sensitivity," have been successfully established as a self-evident reality in the workplace. In order to more thoroughly investigate how the world of diversity management is established outside the circle of academic specialists, the article employs perspectives from science and technology studies on the ways in which sociotechnical assemblages, i.e., networks of human actors and material devices, enact scientific ontologies. It applies such perspectives to a German case of diversity management, a program of "intercultural opening" that seeks to make bureaucracies of the welfare state more accessible to immigrants. The article delineates the specific ontology behind this version of diversity management, rooted in sociological perspectives on social mobility, and explores the various techniques and instruments through which officers of intercultural opening establish this ontology as a visible reality in municipal administrations.

Problematising current coaching strategies from a worldview perspective

Orientation: Leaders need goodness-of-fit with the context in which they are leading, and coaching is considered an effective strategy to achieve this.Research purpose: To critically problematise current dominant coaching strategies in terms of their underlying worldviews, in order to assess their potential effectiveness and relevance in enhancing context‒leadership goodness-of-fit, given the emerging context faced by leaders.Motivation for the study: The current ever-changing context of leaders requires different thinking, including with regard to coaching. The framework of the coaching landscape, with its associated building blocks, provides the conceptual framework for the review of current coaching strategies. Three dominant worldviews that have historically influenced the thinking in social sciences are employed in this review, namely Newtonian, general systems theory and complexity or chaos (second-order systemic thinking).Research approach/design and method: This was a critical conceptual study aimed at problematising the worldviews informing the currently dominant coaching strategies.Main findings: The problematising of the worldviews underlying the dominant coaching strategies revealed that these strategies are not always informed by a worldview congruent with that demanded by the qualities and features of the world that leaders currently face. There is a pressing need for a coaching strategy informed by a complexity or chaos (second-order systemic) worldview, which better meets the emerging contextual demands and requirements imposed on leaders in practice.Practical/managerial implications: A different coaching strategy, called systemic coaching, is proposed.Contribution/value-add: The proposed systemic coaching strategy is highly suitable to bringing about improved goodness-of-fit between the leader and the emerging context.

Multicultural Politics of Recognition and Postcolonial Citizenship

One of the current debates in the social sciences is related to the linkage between aspects of ethnicity, race and cultural diversity, related to citizenship, the issue of inclusiveness and political community. This debate is inseparable from the tendency of the liberal democratic system today which currently dominates the dynamics of social science thinking. This debate is related to fact that these various aspects are often encountered in an understanding that seems to tend to be dichotomous. This condition makes discussion about these aspects encourage desire to examine them in various theories and various frameworks of thought. One perspective that is offered to examine the debate is structuralism which is then linked to normative theories of multiculturalism and is accompanied by the presence of postcolonial criticism of ethnic and racial hierarchies in politics as discussed very well in this book by Rachel Busbridge.

Institutions: a promising topic insufficiently clarified

The basic question of sociology is what sets of rules and order are used in society and how they are maintained. One possible answer is based on the concept of institutions, which still provokes theoretical discussions due to, among other things, a certain ambiguity, since the term ‘institution’ is, figuratively speaking, shrouded in a kind of fog that prevents it from being captured in any direct, clear way. Today, ambitions of philosophy, political science, anthropology or mathematical game theory, which try to solve this problem outside the sociological framework, contribute to the deepening of the ambiguities surrounding the concept of institutions. Some approaches tend to define institutions as a cyber black box with inputs and outputs, whose working remains largely hidden (especially philosophical and mathematical approaches strive to find some common universal principle or even mathematical formula). From the perspective of general sociological theory, the article considers the topic of institutions. The author identifies this topic as a central issue that needs to be reconsidered in sociology. The starting point of the article is the analysis of concepts related to the topic, their definitions and paradigmatic integration. In the following part, the author considers the theoretical interpretations in the works of Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, John Searle, and the concepts inspired by game theories and rational behaviour theories. After that, ten basic issues of the current approaches are identified. The author pays particular attention to the fact that methodological individualism tends to dominate, which explains the ignorance of certain issues, especially of a holistic and macro-social nature, thus, leading to some problematic simplifications. The article shows what needs to be changed in the current social-scientific thinking on institutions in order to develop a more appropriate starting point for the further development of sociological theory.

Max Weber and the chemistry of the Protestant ethic

This article aims to reconstruct a possible interpretation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism through the concept of elective affinity, which, as I have read, records fundamental implications for social science thinking. I argue that, in contrast to mechanical descriptions, Weber’s model sought to capture social phenomena through interactions between elements with heterogeneous qualitative properties. This effort, in turn, bears a very strong resemblance to the operation of social science models examining the functioning of complex systems. In line with this, I proceed as follows: first, I briefly outline the backbone of the argument of The Protestant Ethic, and then, through the concept of elective affinity, show how it can be fitted into one of the defining lines of current social science approaches. In line with this, I attempt to discuss the argument of The Protestant Ethic in the context of agent-based models. I argue that Weber’s approach can be seen as essentially a prototype of agent-based modeling.

From the Elephant Man to Barbie Girl: Dissecting the Freak from the Margins to the Mainstream

From the Elephant Man to Barbie Girl: Dissecting the Freak from the Margins to the Mainstream

Introduction: making the case for qualitative interviews

ABSTRACT We introduce four papers comprising a Themed Section for this issue of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, which together ‘Make the Case for Qualitative Interviews’. Here our aim is to show how this collection provides a timely contribution to key debates concerning the value of qualitative interviews, particularly as these are employed and analysed in much recent social scientific thinking. We explore ways to move beyond recent, sometimes constraining and occasionally dismissive, approaches to interviews in the social sciences through reframing and reconfiguring central questions germane to these debates. We also seek to challenge a broader neo-liberal trend towards valuing quantitative over depth qualitative research. Through this Introduction, and the collection of papers that follows, we seek to re-establish the value of qualitative interviews by shifting the focus from a preoccupation with what interviews can be said to do, towards questions centring on what can be done with interviews.

Lecture as an Event in Postdigital Education: a Dyadic Teaching Diary

In this experimental text, we reflect in the form of a dyadic teaching diary upon a course we recently taught together on the ‘sociological imagination’. One of the main aims we set for the class was to ponder how the social scientific imagination could be enriched, and figure out ways to stress its social and political relevance. From the pedagogical point of view, we wanted to create a course which would disrupt the students’ oft-criticized routine of rote-learning, and in which they would learn to use digital platforms for the purpose of producing and sharing knowledge, meet each other, and have their social scientific thinking refreshed and perhaps even renewed. In pondering the weeks spent together with our students, we suggest that what gradually happened in our ‘postdigital classroom’ and outside of it was an Event—something surprising and unexpected that could not be controlled entirely.

FICTIONING SOCIAL THEORY: THE USE OF FICTION TO ENRICH, INFORM, AND CHALLENGE THE THEORETICAL IMAGINATION. Introduction

The introduction to the special issue taps into discussions about the inseparability of science and fiction. Commencing from the idea that scientific statements are distinguished from fiction only a posteriori, not a priori, the piece asks, how fiction could be used as a theoretical resource in social scientific thinking. Could it inform, enrich, extend, intensify, and challenge the sociological imagination? Besides rejecting any clear-cut separation of social science and fictional and artistic forms, the text seeks to unsettle our certainty as to what counts as “fact” and what as “fiction” in the first place. It also suggests that examining the relationship of sociology and fictional and artistic forms helps us unsettle the institutionalized disciplinary ways of ordering knowledge and thought and that there may be a poetics or fiction to be uncovered in sociological scholarship, as sociology is also a form of storytelling.

Another workplace is possible: Learning to own and changing subjectivities in American employee owned companies

Work life in America, as the literature would have it at least, is pretty uniformly miserable. This article will draw on the literature on practice-based learning as well as democratic political change, in order to help show and theorize a way in which capitalist firms form employee owned trusts (an Employee Stock Ownership Plan), and develop an “ownership culture.” Employee Stock Ownership Plans with an ownership culture are fairly wide spread, tend to pay people more, and seem to create an environment in which people are happy to work. While Employee Stock Ownership Plans are not a panacea for all that troubles us, they do seem to go a fair ways towards mitigating some of the work-place-based misery and larger patterns of material inequality that comes with our contemporary moment, and they seem to have been missing from social-scientific thinking about contemporary economic organizing and its possibilities for change.

“Altogether a Different Thing”: The Emerging Social Sciences and the New Universalisms of Religious Belief in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim

Winter Jade Werner, “‘Altogether a Different Thing’: The Emerging Social Sciences and the New Universalisms of Religious Belief in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim” (pp. 293–325) In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the needs of some religious practitioners began to conflict with secular scholars in the developing social science disciplines. According to the secular scholars of these disciplines, religion was subordinate to culture; it functioned to delimit one social group from another. A number of religious practitioners, including Protestant missionaries and Hindu reformers, challenged this scientific delineation of religion as particular and “cultural,” asserting instead what I call “new universalisms” of religious belief. I contextualize Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) within this historical moment. Kim, I argue, thematizes and works through these competing discourses. In particular, the novel suggests the enormous potency of the new discourses of religious belief in advancing forms of universalism that challenged and looked to transcend categories of identity as imposed by social scientific thinking. I conclude with an examination of Kim’s epigraphs, showing that their relationship to the main narrative formally enacts the agonistic relationship between the two modern universalisms of religious belief and social scientific thinking.

Thinking Theoretically about Religiosity, Secularity and Pluralism in the Global East

This paper addresses the religiosity, secularity and pluralism of the global East from a theoretical perspective. To do so it draws from work undertaken by the author within the International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP), paying particular attention to the material on religion, diversity and pluralism. The final section of the article demonstrates the rootedness of social scientific thinking in the European Enlightenment and the consequences of this heritage for the understanding of religion in other parts of the world including East Asia. There are no easy answers to the questions posed by the mismatch between theory and data; there are, however, pointers towards more constructive ways forward—ways which respond sensitively to the context under review, maintaining nonetheless a high degree of scientific rigour.

Animals

What role do nonhuman animals play in human social life? This question has long interested anthropologists, who have provided various answers, themselves reflective of broader theoretical trends within the discipline. For much of the twentieth century, animals were regarded as material and/or conceptual resources for humans, with different anthropologists regarding one or the other aspect as more important. More recently, anthropologists have sought to incorporate animals into their accounts as participants in human social life, rather than merely resources. Such approaches question the human exceptionalism of conventional social scientific thinking. Given the roots of sociocultural anthropology in this exceptionalism, however, attempts to move beyond it within the discipline encounter certain methodological and analytic problems, the proposed solutions to which have taken a variety of forms.

The mind–body problem and social science: Motivating a quantum social theory

AbstractThis comment addresses some of the critiques of “Quantum Mind and Social Science” by the other contributors, with special reference to the challenge that the mind‐body problem poses to conventional, classical thinking about social science. A quantum social ontology transcends those challenges, and in the process could transform social scientific thinking across the board. As an example the essay concludes with a consideration of the physics of social structure.

Kolonialita jako druhá tvář modernity. K současné latinskoamerické postkoloniální kritice modernity

The paper focuses on the Latin American perspective on modernity, especially on the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano’s notion of coloniality. Coloniality is explained as a theoretical framework for critical reflection of modernity with an emphasis on the forms of knowledge (episteme) and on non-Western, more specifically Latin American historical experiences and perspectives. The aim is to introduce some Latin American efforts to critically understand coloniality as the other face of modernity and to develop a distinctive critique of capitalism, globalisation and Eurocentrism in their historical dynamics. In the first part, the paper briefly introduces Latin America as a geocultural place and a object of social research in a historical perspective. Special attention is paid to the question of racial classification and authenticity. In the second part, the paper focuses on the notion of coloniality as it was conceptualised by A. Quijano and by other Latin American authors. In the third and fourth parts, the paper deals with the problem of coloniality in wider epistemic contexts of modern social sciences and in relation to the notion of alterity and to the question of decolonisation of social scientific thinking. The final discussion addresses some of inspirational and problematic points of this conception such as problems of decolonisation, intellectual dependency and critique, and the problem of conceptualisation of differences in scientific discourses.

EPISTEMIC NORMS AND THE "EPISTEMIC GAME" THEY REGULATE: THE BASIC STRUCTURED EPISTEMIC COSTS AND BENEFITS

Abstract This paper is a beginning--an initial attempt to think of the function and character of epistemic norms as a kind of social norm. We draw on social scientific thinking about social norms and the social games to which they respond. Assume that people individually follow epistemic norms for the sake of acquiring a stock of true beliefs. When they live in groups and share information with each other, they will in turn produce a shared store of true beliefs, an epistemic public good. True beliefs, produced individually or in groups, constitute an epistemic good—one commonly stockpiled and distributed within a community. Epistemic norms can then be understood as a kind of socially developed and transmitted normative sensibility having to do with the production of this individual and public good. Epistemic norms should serve to regulate this practice—coordinating the practice of individuals so as to afford the benefits of life in an interdependent epistemic community—and to manage the risks of being epistemically dependent on others within such a community. Here, we provide some attempts to characterize the central aspects of "the epistemic game"—the epistemic choice situation confronted by communities of epistemic agents.

Sympathetic introspection as method and practice: Cooley's contributions to critical qualitative inquiry and the theory of mind debate

AbstractIn the work of Charles H. Cooley, sympathy is (1) a central subject matter of sociology and social psychology (as the faculty humans use to acquire knowledge of other humans), (2) a descriptive and explanatory method similar to “interpretive understanding,” and (3) an evaluative method used for social critique and arguments for social reforms (as the basis for making moral judgments). The latter feature of the value‐orienting qualitative method of sympathetic introspection is pertinent in light of discussions regarding the development of a critical qualitative methodology. The uniqueness of Cooley's method, when compared to value‐neutral approaches in the interpretive tradition, is its theoretically‐ and methodologically‐grounded license for social scientific thinking to cultivate concern for the people it studies, with the following practical implication: arguments for social reforms rooted in a form of knowledge that embeds individuals in the social whole. Further, Cooley's notion of sympathy contributes to the theory of mind debate by theorizing both a philosophical‐anthropological and sociological foundation for attributing mental states to others in order to participate in social action.

Varietals of Capitalism: A Political Economy of the Changing Wine Industry. By Xabier Itçaina, Antoine Roger, and Andy Smith. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2016. Pp. v+266. $45.00.

<i>Varietals of Capitalism: A Political Economy of the Changing Wine Industry</i>. By Xabier Itçaina, Antoine Roger, and Andy Smith. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2016. Pp. v+266. $45.00.