Theory, Knowledge and Science Commons^™

Public Displays Of Emotion Today: Changing Forms Of Memorializing Death And Disaster, E. Doyle Mccarthy

Sociology Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Social Theory & Its Relation To Social Problems: An Essay About Theory And Research With Social Justice In Mind, Richard K. Caputo

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This essay examines the relationship between social theory and social problems, the truth-value of theories, and the importance of theorizing about the role of the state, i.e., national government, in the resolution of social problems and the achievement of social justice. The author argues that much contemporary social theory has lost its moorings in regard to amelioration ofsocial problems, that Popper's criterion offalsification is a requisitefor more meaningfully applied social theory, and that the state should be part of any social theory meant to address social problems. Moral and political philosophy is used to provide criteria to justify a positive …

From Exceptionalism To Imperialism: Culture, Character, And American Foreign Policy, Meghan Burke, Laura Langman

Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Little Understood Knowledge Trap, Hans-Dieter Evers, Solvay Gerke, Thomas Menkhoff

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

As knowledge increases, we realise how much else we do not know. Successful research always results in new questions. Any knowledge economy must be aware of such unknowns if it is to expand further through research and development. Debate on bridging the digital divide does not take this factor into account. Many of the strategies currently preached are misplaced.

Culture As Deficit: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Concept Of Culture In Contemporary Social Work Discourse, Yoosun Park

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This paper is a critical discourse analysis of the usage of the concept of "culture" in social work discourse. The paper argues that "culture" is inscribed as a marker for difference which has largely replaced the categories of race and ethnicity as the preferred trope of minority status. "Culture" is conceived as an objectifiable body of knowledge constituting the legitimate foundationfor the building of interventions. But such interventions cannot be considered other than an instrument which reinforces the subjugating paradigm from which it is fashioned. The concept of culture, constructed from within an orthodoxic, hegemonic discursive paradigm, is deployed as …

Applying Rawlsian Social Justice To Welfare Reform: An Unexpected Finding For Social Work, Mahasweta M. Banerjee

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This paper sketches social workers' understanding of social justice and reliance on Rawls (1971), highlights findings about "hard to employ" welfare recipients facing welfare reform, and articulates the parameters of Rawlsian justice (Rawls, 1999a; 2001) with particular emphasis on people who have been on welfare for long. The paper shows that social workers do not have any space to maneuver in Rawlsian justice to uphold justice for long-term welfare recipients, and welfare reform's "work first" stipulation does not violate Rawlsian justice. The paper raises some questions about social workers' continued reliance on Rawls. It suggests social workers update the literature …

Third Wave Feminist Identity, Sarah Brightman

Masters Theses

The research I am proposing is to gain a better understanding of current, individual feminist identity and the impact of that identity, more broadly, on current feminism. There is controversy in the current literature about the existence of a third wave of feminism and I believe this research will contribute to this discussion by exploring various individual experiences with feminism and how feminist identity fits into individuals lives. Gaining an understanding of young feminist identity and the individual meaning of feminism might help define the characteristics of this whole new generation of feminists in their own terms. Much progress and …

Insurance Plan For The Gay Man: Who Benefits From Media Stereotypes?, Meghan Burke

Scholarship

The Emmy award-winning Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has been a hit since its dashing entrance onto the reality TV scene. But this entrance came at a politically fragile time for LGBT rights in the United States. On what seems to be the surface, the popularity of the show is a testament to the growing acceptance of queer people in the media and in daily life. But below this surface, I think there’s trouble lurking.

Reading In The Future: Literacy And The Time Of The Internet, David R. Cole

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

David R. Cole's Reading in the Future: Literacy and the Time of the Internet locates the literacies of the internet -- itself read as the end game of western technology or the Machina Mundi, the Great Chain of the World that has a centre that is everywhere and a circumference that is nowhere -- in a contradictory space. But Cole also self-consciously locates his own writing at a moment in time when the initial technological hype of the internet is subsiding in the face of the boredom of informational overload and the internet is emerging as both an unlimited …

Garbage-In, Garbage-Out: Item Generation As A Threat To Construct Validity, Terri A. Scandura Phd, Lucy R. Ford

Management Faculty Articles and Papers

Item generation has received only cursory attention in the research literature, despite the fact that it seems obvious that poorly written items will result in poor psychometric properties of measures. In this paper, we review the literature on item generation, develop a typology of threats to construct validity, and evaluate five commonly used
organizational research measures with respect to typology. Our results demonstrate that the sampled measures have significant problems that may represent threats to construct validity. recommendations for improved item generation practice are offered.

Rehabilitating The Importance Of The Non-Cognitive: An Interview With MichèLe Lamont, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

In spring of 2006, Michèle Lamont, Professor of Sociology and African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, was invited to give a lecture for the New Sociological Imagination Lecture Series, organized by the New School for Social Research. This lecture concerned her book Cream Rising: How Peer Review Finds and Defines Excellence in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, which is to be published by Harvard University Press in 2008. Drawing on 81 interviews with panelists serving on five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions in the social sciences and the humanities, the book analyzes (1) the meaning panelists give to academic excellence—including …

Reading Owen's Between Reason And History: Habermas And The Idea Of Progress , Ali Rizvi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

From the start Habermas' work has been an attempt at synthesising certain core insights from Kant and Hegel, as it is clearly evident from the beginning chapters of his first major work Knowledge and Human Interest (KHI). In the structure of the book Marx's position is as the mediator of Kant and Hegel and all subsequent authors are considered in order to overcome the shortcomings of this Marxian mediation (KHI: chapter 1-11, Habermas, 1982: 239ff Cf. Kortian, 1980).

Portals To Knowledge: Confluence And Conflict Between Enlightenment And Postmodern Currencies, Benjamin G. Lanier-Nabors

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In order to provide any viable critique of twenty-first-century discourses -- whether signified by late capitalism, epistemological hegemony, cultural domination, or globalization (the catch-word for all of these) -- one must not employ an ahistorical or static lens; alternatively, one must dredge up and analyze the sediments that underlie current discourses, and many of these sediments are found in the eighteenth century. More specifically, by reading the thoughts of such writers as Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift, one is forced to read the links and antipathies between the discursive economies of epistemology -- philosophical, scientific, and economic -- …

Cultural Topology: An Introduction To Postmodern Mathematics, Brent M. Blackwell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

This essay develops a new way of thinking about the cultural relationships among and within the sciences and the arts through a new understanding of the term postmodernism that at once derives from literary theory and the mathematical discipline of topology. While topology forms the main vertebra of this connective approach in its capacity as the mathematics of connectivity, quantum mechanics and non-Euclidean geometry -- the atlas and axis of this spinal column -- form the context through which this “postmodern” approach will develop. However, in order to position topology as a “postmodern” branch of mathematics, some brief …

From Guts To God: Credulity, Postmodernism, And Contemporary Physics, Michael Hardin

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In an attempt to remove one of the major misunderstandings made by individuals in the humanities about contemporary physics, the issue of incredulity, this essay examines Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge against contemporary and twentieth-century theories and discoveries in physics. One of the best arguments against incredulity is the frequent use of god as metaphor within physics. In Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, two physicists, argue that the use of metaphor is one of the characteristics of postmodern science; this essay concludes with a discussion of those elements …

To See More Clearly And Broadly: Science And The Postmodern Sentiment, C. Jason Smith, Robert Froemke

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

What we call postmodernism, whether we refer to the sciences or the humanities, is a certain preoccupation with the role of the human observer in the composition and perception -- perhaps even construction -- of reality. The postmodern condition, so to speak, is the moment in history when the hard sciences and the sciences of man seem to be suffering from the same anxieties about the relevance of the self-reflexive interaction between the observer and the subject to the fabric of existence and the web of knowledge. In simplest terms, we would define the postmodern question as this: …

Of Parts And Wholes: Self-Similarity And Synecdoche In Science, Culture And Literature, Dirk Vanderbeke

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The discussion here centers on how self-similarity, or parts resembling a whole, has been a recurring aspect in the most diverse fields of human thinking from antiquity to the present. Primary examples are drawn from physics, biology, cybernetics, alchemy, philosophy, myth and, of course, language and literature. The author argues that self-similar patterns are one of the persistent ways in which the human mind structures its experience and knowledge of the world, and then examines some of the questions that arise when an almost ubiquitous concept, structure or linguistic and literary phenomenon resurfaces in a new guise in …

Cyborg Bodies And Digitized Desires: Posthumanity And Phillip K. Dick, Jennifer Attaway

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The interaction between human beings and intelligent machines has challenged the traditional understanding of what it means to be human. In his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, phillip k. dick rethinks human identity through the positioning of human beings within a technologically mediated reality that displaces the biological body and the spontaneity of human sensation. Written in 1968, dick's novel anticipates the effect of a technologically mediated culture on the formation of a posthuman identity. dick's fictional juxtaposition of the human being and the organically anthropomorphic android complicates conventional implications of embodiment. Androids are physically …

Dead Astronauts, Cyborgs, And The Cape Canaveral Fiction Of J. G. Ballard: A Posthuman Analysis, Melanie Rosen Brown

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In Dead Astronauts, Cyborgs, and the Cape Canaveral Fiction of J.G. Ballard: A Posthuman Analysis, Melanie Rosen Brown explores the ways in which the so-called Cape Canaveral short stories of J.G. Ballard anthologized in the collection Memories of the Space Age exemplify the promises of posthumanity as articulated by posthuman theorists such as Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. Although Ballard's fiction is viewed by many as a needlessly pessimistic and derogatory portrayal of NASA's space program, viewed through a posthuman lens, Ballard's fiction instead reveals him to be optimistic about the future of space exploration -- cautiously …

Schizophrenics, Cyborgs And The Pitfalls Of Posthumanism, Angela Woods

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In Schizophrenics, Cyborgs and the Pitfalls of Posthumanism, Angela Woods invites us to revisit two canonical analyses of the postmodern: Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and Donna Haraway's A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s. Jameson and Haraway introduced to contemporary cultural criticism two posthumanist icons: the schizophrenic, a pathologized victim of postmodernity, and the cyborg, a vision of strategic posthuman subjectivity. In her timely and critical analysis of these articles, Woods challenges the established notion of an oppositional relationship between the schizophrenic and the cyborg. She turns …

Toward A Posthuman Ethics, Dongshin Yi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editor's Introduction]

Setting a posthuman ethics as a goal toward which the collaboration of posthumanism and ethics must move, Yi in his essay, Toward a Posthuman Ethics, points out that the collaboration is detained because current debates on the cyborg harbor on the question of representations and consider how political, social and cultural problems of the human are reconfigured, and possibly resolved, by the cyborg. Thus, the debates are bound to be retrospective in approach and circular in direction, as they fail to recognize new possibilities that the cyborg may present. Arguing that the failure indicates the cyborg is being …

The Infinite Plasticity Of The Digital: Posthuman Possibilities, Embodiment And Technology In William Gibson's Interstitial Trilogy, Tama Leaver

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

Ever since William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his debut novel Neuromancer, his work has been seen by many as a yardstick for postmodern and, more recently, posthuman possibilities. This article critically examines Gibson's second trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties), focusing on the way digital technologies and identity intersect and interact, with particular emphasis on the role of embodiment. Using the work of Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and N. Katherine Hayles, it is argued that while William Gibson's second trilogy is infused with posthuman possibilities, the role of embodiment is …

Expert Knowledge And The Role Of Consultants In An Emerging Knowledge-Based Economy, Hans-Dieter Evers, Thomas Menkhoff

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In the emerging globalised knowledge society/economy, a group of professionals, namely experts and consultants gain in importance. The paper discusses the following issues: Who are these experts and consultants? Why is this group of knowledge workers strategically important and why is their importance - socially in terms of number of persons and economically in terms of output or turnover - growing? How can we explain the increasing professionalisation of consultants? How do they gain their expertise and which role does academic knowledge play in professional attainment? How do consultants package and apply expert knowledge? What are the challenges experts and …

Social Disorganization, Disorder, Social Cohesion, Informal Controls, And Crime: A Reformulation And Test Of Systemic Social Disorganization Theory, Gayle M. Rhineberger

Dissertations

The primary purpose of this dissertation is to modify and test the systemic social disorganization models of crime proposed by Bursik and Grasmick (1993) and Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls (1997), and offer an empirical test of my hypothesized model. Specifically, the model includes traditional indicators of social disorganization (racial/ethnic heterogeneity, socioeconomic status, family disruption, residential stability) as exogenous variables; social and physical disorder, social cohesion, and three levels of informal social control (private, parochial, and public) as intervening mechanisms; and official crime counts and crime victimization as dependent variables.

The data used in this study come from the Project on …

Incorporating Local Knowledge Into Population And Habitat Viability Assessments: Landowners And Tree Kangaroos In Papua New Guinea, Philip J. Nyhus, J Williams, J Borovansky, O Byers, P Miller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Kuhn's Paradigm As A Parable For The Cold War: Incommensurability And Its Discontents From Fuller's Tale Of Harvard To Fleck's Unsung Lvov, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

In a journal issue dedicated to a discussion of Steve Fuller's Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, I argue that Kuhn’s limited acknowledgment of Fleck’s influence on his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was due to a foundational incommensurability between the standard conceptual framework for philosophical studies of science and Fleck’s historico-social and praxis-oriented approach to scientific progress. The incommensurability in question constituted an insurmountable tension between the kind of language and thinking manifest in Fleck’s study and the conceptual language evident in Kuhn and characteristic of one might still call the received view’ in philosophy of science. …

Review Of The Living Legacy Of Marx, Durkheim And Weber. Richard Altschuler (Ed.). Reviewed By Shana Cohen., Shana Cohen

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Book review of Richard Altschuler (Ed.), The Living Legacy of Marx, Durkheim and Weber. New York: Gordion Knot Books, 2000. (2 volumes at $39.95 each in paperback).

The Emotions: Senses Of The Modern Self, E. Doyle Mccarthy

Sociology Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Order Without Rules: Critical Theory And The Logic Of Conversation, James J. Chriss

Sociology & Criminology Faculty Publications

Reviews the book "Order Without Rules: Critical Theory and the Logic of Conversation," by David Bogen.

Book Review: Bogen On Social Theory, Rules, And Order, James Chriss

Sociology & Criminology Faculty Publications

Reviews the book "Order Without Rules: Critical Theory and the Logic of Conversation," by David Bogen.