Social Theorists Research Articles

Understanding Novak’s Spirit of democratic capitalism through “the corporation”

Abstract Many social theorists hold that the corporation is the key institution of the modern world. Novak wrote four books on the corporation, viewing it as the chief instrument of innovation within “democratic capitalism”, and the concrete entity in which its three systems (political, economic, moral-cultural) converge. We look at Novak’s account with its roots in Maritain, and at Novak’s intention to ground this account in the ideals of the American Founding, and in a Christian understanding of grace. “The corporation” turns out to be an excellent pathway into Novak’s thought and a safeguard against some fundamental mistakes in interpreting him.

تێرۆریزم وەک شیکردنەوەی جیهان لە هزری سیاسیی ژان بۆدریار دا

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) is one of the most famous contemporary French social theorists and culturologist, and contemporary social thought is inseparable from the works of this French thinker, who had a significant impact on the emergence of postmodern thought. . After the events of September 11, 2001 (9/11), the phenomenon of terrorism became one of the main philosophical-political theses of this thinker. And hence a kind of terrorism emerged, which became a phenomenon and laid the foundation for the political thought of Jean Baudrillard to read the political situation of the world. In this research, we emphasize that the attack on the two towers in Manhattan, New York, was to destroy the global political and economic power that supervised all global economic and political movements. Therefore, the understandings of Jean Baudrillard's views are based on a philosophical-political foundation, where political and ideological aspects are discussed in such a way that opens the door to understanding the political worldview of this French thinker on the phenomenon of terrorism and Western globalization. Today many ask why there should be terrorists activities? What do the terrorists want from the West? Baudrillard's studies of terrorism, which are part of his political thought, may be a good path to answering these questions. Because in Baudrillard's political thought, terrorism is a phenomenon that is analyzed and through it he analyzes the world. Another aspect of Baudrillard's political thought on terrorism suggests that globalization itself is largely responsible for injustices and terrorist attacks. Therefore, this research shows the importance given to the phenomenon of terrorism after the events of September 11 in Baudrillard's political thought as an analysis of the world that has two main objectives. The first objective is to work on Baudrillard's analysis of this type of terrorism. The second is that another type of terrorism is being discussed, which Western globalization discourse hides at its heart.

On Enmity, Terror and Fear

In this article, HARM presents a small excerpt from Ernst E. Boesch’s book “Von Kunst bis Terror - Über den Zwiespalt in der Kultur” [From art to terror - On the dichotomy in culture], published in 2005. The editors of HARM want to draw attention to a psychologist and social theorist who saw himself as a cultural psychologist and, as such, wanted to show how much more complex, ambivalent, opaque and unpredictable human thinking, feeling, behaviour, and actions are than mainstream psychology — which models and primarily quantifies and measures — would have us believe. This, according to one of his convictions which continues to shape modern cultural psychology, is because it recognises humans not primarily as natural creatures, but also as cultural beings who, as beings gifted with special language, are entangled in an indissoluble network of meaningful symbolic worlds and thus are capable of manifold processes of sense-making. In order to depict and reconstruct these entanglements and to understand their significance for human experience, attitudes and actions, Boesch argues that hermeneutic-interpretative procedures are required which, we are convinced, also contribute significantly to refining the depiction and analysis of phenomena that are relevant in the context of HARM. — Boesch’s text is preceded by a brief introduction to his life, his thinking and the selected text.

The emergence of social order in everyday interacting: re-conceptualizing a venerable sociological concept in light of conversation analysis

For more than a century social theorists have asked how order at the macro-social level is related to human activity at the micro-social level. Among their answers are accounts of macro-level social order as emerging in micro-level relations among individuals. Sawyer’s account of macro-level emergence in micro-level interaction rests on the individual’s understandings of interactional frames. However, Rawls draws on Garfinkel and Sacks to argue that sociologist’s accounts of the macro-level interaction order need to be grounded in observable, micro-level social practices, instead of using conceptual abstractions like frames. Arundale’s Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communicating is grounded in research on observable social practices in Conversation Analysis, and offers an account of the emergence, in particular episodes of everyday interacting, of properties that define micro-level social systems. That account provides the basis for an account of the emergence, in recurrent micro-level interacting over time and space, of properties that define macro-level social systems. The basic idea is not new: what is new is accounting for the emergence of macro-level social order in terms of the recurrent emergence of micro-level social order as participants engage observable social practices in everyday interacting. Re-conceptualizing the emergence of macro-social order addresses sociology’s longstanding puzzlement regarding the macro–micro link, and points to needed research.

Research on the Professionalization and Professionalization Construction Path of College Counselor Team

According to the document spirit of the Ministry of Education's "Regulations on the construction of counselors in colleges and universities", college counselors are the organizers, implementors, guides and guides of ideological and political education of college students. College counselors shoulder the responsibility of teaching and educating people, teaching students to deal with people, training students to endure hardships, experience students' perseverance, shape noble moral sentiments, guide them to establish a correct world outlook, outlook on life and values, and promote students' all-round development. Lead students to learn new ideas, new thoughts and new strategies, guide students to practice core socialist values, and help students strengthen their confidence in the path, theory, system and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Counselors should grasp students' ideological dynamics, behavioral conditions, public opinion management and supervision, and guide students to deal with specific problems in ideological understanding, career planning, value orientation, study and life, career selection and friends. This paper takes Guangzhou Huashang Vocational College as an example to explore the effective way to realize the relevant construction.

‘The natural leader of the proletariat’: Eduard Bernstein on trade unions and the path to socialist cooperation

ABSTRACT This paper offers a reinterpretation of Eduard Bernstein’s theory of evolutionary socialism. It does so by examining the leading role that he envisioned for unions of skilled workers in the socialist movement. During his time in London in the 1890s, Bernstein’s engagement with English Fabianism led him to emphasize the proletariat’s differentiated nature. He claimed skilled workers most readily organized and became the first proletarians to develop class consciousness. Unskilled workers, on the other hand, remained largely unorganized and estranged from the socialist movement. Bernstein opposed the socialist political strategy of nationalization because it would subordinate unskilled workers to party revolutionaries rather than realize cooperative self-government in industry. This focus on promoting industrial self-government made Bernstein stress the importance of workers’ further unionization and adoption of skilled unionists’ method of collective bargaining. This would produce socialist cooperation because it facilitated cooperative wage determination. In Bernstein’s view, skilled unionists influenced the socialist party to take political action to organize and elevate more proletarians to class consciousness. In contrast to those who claim Bernstein prioritized the party’s autonomous ethical appeals and legislation, I emphasize his focus on union-party interactions and defense of unions as central for the advance into socialism’s cooperative society.

Digital platforms, surveillance and processes of demoralization

While digital platforms have become an increasingly important research area in the information systems discipline, the existing literature does not conceptualize a theoretical link between platforms and morality. This paper theorizes such a link by drawing on Jensen’s (2010) conceptualization of processes of demoralization to operationalize two notions from critical social theorist Zygmunt Bauman: workers’ moral impulse and moral ambivalence. We conducted a case study of a large luxury resort hotel to examine how digital platforms (specifically TripAdvisor and WhatsApp) facilitate surveillance. Our findings show how digital platform-facilitated synoptic and panoptic forms of surveillance can suppress workers’ moral impulse and foster moral ambivalence towards such issues as invading others’ privacy, pressuring others outside working hours, and increasing surveillance in the workplace. This paper offers a novel perspective on theorizing the links between digital platforms, surveillance, and workers’ morality and highlights some unintended consequences.

Beyond the "inimitable" Goffman: from "social theory" to social theorizing in a Goffmanesque manner.

Erving Goffman's status as a great social scientist today seems relatively secure. Many commentators highlight his extraordinary capacities to pinpoint the fine-grained details of human behavior in the "interaction order". But if Goffman's brilliance in this respect was deeply rooted in his various and interlocking personal, existential, social, and intellectual idiosyncrasies, and his intellectual practice is inimitable, the degree to which anyone else could, or should try to, imitate Goffman's intellectual practice today, remains an open question. This is especially so when we consider that such practice was grounded in notably wide reading across disciplines and in world literature, a highly developed analytical manner that was inseparable from a notable literary talent in composing published texts, and an open-mindedness about the gathering of data sources in ways that some today find methodologically much too promiscuous. The paper initially considers these issues: the multiple "Goffmans" that exegetes and commentators have identified; how such persons have claimed Goffman to be essentially of one or more theoretical persuasions; and how various social theorists have drawn upon Goffman's work. It then moves on to argue that a Goffmanesque kind of social theorizing, is not only possible (if difficult) today, but also vital too. Such theorizing insists on the ongoing role of literary-intellectual and metaphorical ways of thinking and writing, at a time when these are becoming apparently less crucial in studies of human interaction. No matter how technologically advanced such studies may become, they still require some of the intellectual and literary flair that Goffman brought to his scholarly doings. Goffmanesque theorizing can inform new insights into various domains, including the very nature of social change.

Exemplary differences: ethnicity, mythic histories, and essentialism in Khovd, Mongolia

AbstractThis article provides an ethnographic account of understandings of ‘ethnic’ difference in Khovd province, Mongolia. It attempts to use said material to challenge the terms of debate within the current concern with ‘essentialism’ in social theory. It is in agreement with constructivist‐inspired observations by anthropologists that so‐called ethnic groups in Mongolia exist partly as ideological ascriptions arising from historical and contemporary political interests. Yet there is an intellectual tension, which sees the anthropologist engaged in the politically important task of the de‐essentialization of identities, on behalf of people who claim said identities as their essence. This article neither accepts ethnic groups as somehow unproblematically real, nor positions such ideas purely as a target for deconstruction. Rather, it provides an account of times when moralized understandings of ethnic difference in the medium of mythic‐historical exemplars are mobilized and examines their impact on social life. It shows that certain forms of essentialism may contain affordances that amplify social and political possibilities, rather than violently close them down. The final provocation is that anthropologists and social theorists would do better to examine the precise nature and effects of particular instances of essentialism rather than instinctively demolish them in general.

Who Are You Calling Vulgar? Lukács, Kautsky, and the Beginnings of “Western Marxism”

This essay reads Georg Lukács’s early thought in light of his vexed relationship to the Social Democratic theorist Karl Kautsky. Though Lukács criticized Kautsky as the archetypal “vulgar Marxist,” Lukács’s larger project of promoting “class consciousness” follows from Kautsky’s own political and pedagogical work. For Kautsky, Social Democratic intellectuals had to transmute proletarian “class instinct” into class consciousness by disseminating a simplified version of scientific socialism, transmitting the conclusions but not the method of Marxist thought. But because Lukács had defined “vulgar Marxism” as the forgetting of Marx’s method in favor of his conclusions, “vulgar Marxism” turned out to be both the precondition and an obstacle to proletarian class consciousness and thus to revolutionary action. The essay then reads Lukács’s changing understanding of the role of the party as a response to this impasse: a response that can help us understand the heterogeneous tradition of “Western Marxism.”

European madness 1910-1980: lessons for today from Alastair Morgan's Continental Philosophy of Psychiatry: The Lure of Madness.

In Continental Philosophy of Psychiatry: The Lure of Madness Alastair Morgan surveys the contributions of a loosely conceived school of psychiatrists, philosophers and social theorists to understanding and responding to madness during the years 1910-1980. Taking my cue from him, I highlight some of the contributors discussed in Morgan's book and reflect that although madness may be difficult or even impossible to articulate effectively in discourse it remains a 'limit experience' which demarcates and illuminates the contours of other thinking and being, including reason and activism. I discuss social and cultural factors that have dulled clinicians' sensitivities to the sounds of madness in recent decades and advocate the need for a reappraisal of our expertise and for a new activism today. What may at first appear as a failed clinical-philosophical tradition remains of professional relevance in today's rapidly transforming circumstances of practice both as inspiration and as cautionary tale.

Развитие взглядов К. Маркса на историческую свободу в трех социальных формах

Nowadays, under the order of the logical expansion of Western capital, human beings are faced with various survival problems. Whether it is the natural environment, ecology, energy or social, financial, economic crisis, crisis of faith, etc., the root causes of unfavorable scenarios are closely related to the lifestyle dominated by the logic of capital. By analyzing and modernly exploring the Marxist concept of freedom in three major social forms, the authors have tried to find a new way to resolve the above-mentioned existential crisis. At the same time, the discussion of Marx’s concept of historical freedom is significant for the modern theory of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Marx’s view of freedom is the theoretical system of Marx’s (Engels) basic views on the root of human freedom, the essence of freedom, the basic content of freedom, the value function of free-dom and the way to realize freedom. To fully understand K. Marx’s point of view on this issue, it is necessary to associate his theory of three social formations with the study of human freedom in the process of historical de-velopment. The theory of the three major social formations is an extremely important content of Marx’s view of history.

Eğitim Felsefesinde Birey Yaşamını Toplumsal Boyutta Şekillendiren Kavramların İncelenmesi

In this study, it is aimed to examine the concepts that shape individual life in the social dimension in the philosophy of education. Although the roots of the principles of a democratic society and the tradition of democracy go back to Ancient Greek society on the basis of educational philosophy, the problem of democracy was studied by political thinkers from a broad perspective until the nineteenth century, democracy was generally accepted as the administration of the masses, who were unenlightened and remained ignorant, and for some reason was rejected. Those who advocate libertarian thought express the virtues of democracy, which takes its place in the entire spectrum of ideology, such as liberal, conservative, socialist, capitalist and fascists, and try to prove their own understanding of democracy. Democracy and democratic governance in its general expression were fully rooted in Ancient Greece. Like the concepts of autocracy, aristocracy and bureaucracy, democracy is derived from the concept of kraytos, which means power and rule in Ancient Greek. There is a close relationship between the theories of freedom in parallel with the modern understanding of democracy and representative thought. Dec. When citizens are not directly in the administration, the claim that politicians serve the people they represent becomes the basis of democracy. How accurate and possible it is for a single person to represent others is a matter open to debate. In everyday use, representation, like a painting that reflects an individual or a natural being, means to depict and bring to peace. Although those who criticize equality as a generally accepted conceptual integrity sometimes try to reduce this concept to uniformity by associating it with community engineering and attempts to put everything in the same shape to facilitate their work, no important political scientist and social theorist have agreed with the idea of equality in the absolute sense, which is valid for everything. There is no real unity of words about how and in what way the concept of justice is exactly what it is. In everyday use, justice is used ambiguously in the sense of mercy, right, morally correct honesty. Justice is a norm term that is moral. Fair also means what is morally good; unfair means what is morally bad. However, justice does not mean morality alone, it defines certain moral decisions related to the distribution of reward and punishment by feature. Key Words: Philosophy of Education, Individual Life, Democracy, Equality, Justice

A Caliphate of Ideas? Islamic Politics in Dialogue with Contemporary Marxism

This article deconstructs the conceptual framework of the social theorist Salman Sayyid by critically examining his work on the political and hegemony in relation to the thought of the post-Marxist philosopher Ernesto Laclau. Sayyid elaborates a theory of the political that necessitates a communal break with existing society, a move very similar to Laclau and post-Marxist thought more generally. In analyzing Sayyid’s theories of the caliphate with Laclau’s conception of hegemonic struggle, the author suggests that the construction of any caliphate should think about the question of solidarity with “plebs” or those discarded from the system of capitalism. The article concludes with an analysis of how Sayyid’s theoretical praxis can be applied in American Muslim political activism through the concept of the counterpublic.

On the Possibility of Scientific Socialism. S. N. Bulgakov vs K. Marx

The article deals with criticism by the great Russian philosopher S. N. Bulgakov’s ideas of scientific socialism in his major work “Philosophy of Economics”. Attention is drawn to the fact that Bulgakov’s philosophical basis for this criticism is an indication of the primacy of the theme of justice in a socialist society, which is rationalized in the theory of scientific socialism. Bulgakov shows that in the very history of Marxism, the focus on justice predetermines the desire to build a theory of scientific socialism. Another topic discussed by the philosopher in the framework of his criticism of the idea of scientific socialism is the illegitimacy of Marxism’s assertion about the existence of laws of a natural historical type, in accordance with which the development of society as a whole takes place and which are considered in Marxism as the basis for the possibility of scientific substantiation of the inevitable onset of a future just society. . According to Bulgakov, the scientific nature of social policy is determined by relying not on such laws, but on statistical generalizations, a kind of empirical patterns that express the development trends of certain aspects of social life in specific conditions and in a specific historical period. Another subject of Bulgakov’s criticism is the desire to talk about the development of society as a whole. Scientific research, in his opinion, should be specific and deal with specific aspects of public life. The whole cannot be the subject of scientific research. The article draws attention to the similarity of Bulgakov’s views to the views of K. Popper, set forth by him a quarter of a century after the Russian philosopher in his work “The Poverty of Historicism”. Popper criticizes historicism, by which he understands the concept of the natural development of society as a whole, which inevitably turns into utopianism. Attempts to talk about society as a whole and try to transform it as a whole, he defines as holism, which he contrasts with “partial engineering”. The author of the article notes that the views of these two thinkers, which reveal an undoubted similarity, deserve to be presented in modern discussions about the possibility of social prediction.

From ChatGPT to China’ Sci-Tech: Implications for Chinese Higher Education

Abstract The advent of transformative technologies, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool, significantly impacts the future of education, society, and the economy. Drawing on the theory of knowledge socialism and public goods, this paper critically examines the potential impact of ChatGPT in the context of China’s high-tech development and higher education. We believe these technologies resonate with the principles of knowledge socialism by promoting decentralization, openness, and collective intelligence and are poised to reshape the education sector and beyond. The non-competitive and non-exclusive nature of ChatGPT makes it a public good with significant social benefits. In the educational domain, it has the potential to revolutionize teaching and learning by providing students with convenient, personalized learning experiences, real-time feedback, and multilingual support. However, despite its benefits, educators, and users must work to overcome its limitations, such as limited expertise, language understanding, reasoning skills, and potential risks associated with privacy, security, and misinformation. This article discusses the need to prepare students for a future heavily impacted by ai, which requires a reassessment of digital literacy and competencies. Doing so would require leveraging ai tools and promoting human-centered approaches, developing higher-order thinking skills, emphasizing emotional education, and teaching academic ethics. In addition, introducing ai tools like ChatGPT in higher education requires regulation to prevent plagiarism and improve independent problem-solving. This paper further explores the impact of ChatGPT on China’s technological development. The global attention attracted by ChatGPT has stimulated the growth of the ai industry and prompted the emergence of domestic products and applications in countries such as China. It is critical to harmonize the enforcement of competition laws and capitalize on the contributions of sizable enterprises in the realm of technological innovation and research.

Amartya Sen as a social and political theorist – on personhood, democracy, and ‘description as choice’

ABSTRACT Economist-philosopher Amartya Sen's writings on social and political issues have attracted wide audiences. Section 2 introduces his contributions on: how people reason as agents within society; social determinants of people's (lack of) access to goods and of the effective freedoms and agency they enjoy or lack; and associated advocacy of self-specification of identity and high expectations for ‘voice’ and reasoning democracy. Section 3 considers his relation to social theory, his tools for theorizing action in society, and his limited degree of attention to work by sociologists and to capitalism and power structures. Section 4 characterizes a style marked by conceptual refinement, emphases on complexity and individuality, including personal individuality, and reformist optimism. Section 5 shows the features from Sections 3 and 4 at work in his conception of personhood that advocates freedom to make a reasoned composition of personal identity. Similarly, Section 6 addresses his conception of public reasoning and neglect of the sociology of democracy. It contrasts the ideal of a reasoning polity with features in many countries. Sen's programmes for critical autonomy in personhood and for reasoned politics play, nevertheless, a normic role, while his analytical formats help investigation of obstacles to more widespread agency, voice, and democratic participation.

A LONGITUDINAL APPROACH TO ONLINE “COLLECTIVE IDENTITY WORK”: THE CASE OF THE GILETS JAUNES IN THE VAR DEPARTMENT*

Social movement theorists have highlighted the importance of accounting for the fluidity of collective identities and the ways in which they change over time. Capitalizing on the availability of social media data and the shift from collective to connective action, new methods can be used to model identity change over a medium-to-long time span. We analyze Facebook data to make the case that a complex and longitudinal approach to the study of collective identity is not only possible but also necessary. Our analyses explore the formation and transformation of identity in the context of a local branch of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement in France. By employing a mixed-method design that combines automated topic modeling, content analysis, and dictionary-based linguistic inquiry, we show how collective identities are discussed through complex and conflictual processes that form perpetual identity work.

혁명가의 책 읽기

This article examined how the socialist literary movement in colonial Korea in the 1920s imagined and recognized the “mass reader”. Socialist theory was embraced by colonial Korea as an alternative perspective for imagining the self-renovation and emancipation of non-Western colonized peoples. The fact that the magazine Kong-Je used disparate ideas as resources to unpack the meaning of labor, workers, and the labor movement is evidence that the concern of early socialists was not to accurately translate a particular theory. The magazine Kong-Je sought to address its unspecified readers as “workers” by providing them with an epistemological framework to critically perceive reality. Socialist theory was not used as an abstract theory, but as a theoretical framework for recognizing and critiquing real-world problems, and as a tool for critiquing existing perspectives on interpreting reality.
 In this respect, Yeom Sang-seop and Kim Hwa-san's critique of the socialist literary movement did not deny the possibility of socialist literature; they appropriated socialism as a theory and questioned what the goals of the socialist literary movement should be. This article examines Yeom Sang-sup's appropriation of socialist ideas and his literary theory based on them, focusing on a review he published in 1927. For him, socialism was about overcoming the notion of suppressing the “mental activity” of colonized Koreans, and therefore socialist literature should be read by readers to provide them with a critical lens through which to read reality. Kim Ki-jin's literary path in the 1920s resonated with Yeom Sang-sup's literary beliefs, as he saw the main purpose of the socialist literary movement as “educating” the masses, and constantly emphasized that literature had to be read to someone. These statements are not easily found in the socialist literary discourse produced in Korea at the time, and were made possible by applying Western “universal theories” of socialist ideology and its literary applications to the realities of colonial Korea.

习近平“两个结合”重要论断的逻辑取向与实践方向

“Two Combinations” is an important instruction given by General Secretary Xi Jinping to continue to promote the Sinicization of Marxism in the new era. It points out the way forward for the future development direction of China’s scientific socialist theory. Exploring the logical orientation and the practical direction of the “Two Combinations” is conducive to helping it to advance smoothly. Promoting the “two combinations” is actually a logical construction that should be and is necessary. It is the implementation of Marxist theory, the observance of historical experience, and the recognition of the great practice of the new era. From a practical perspective, to promote the “Two Combinations”, we must resolutely maintain the foundation of scientific socialism, resolutely maintain the true nature of contemporary Chinese society, and persist in exploring the outstanding cultural characteristics of China, thereby contributing a steady stream of new impetus to the Sinicization of Marxism.