The concept of life plays a crucial role in the debate on synthetic biology. The first part of this chapter outlines the controversial debate on the status of the concept of life in current science and philosophy. Against this background, synthetic biology and the discourse on its scientific and societal consequences is revealed as an exception. Here, the concept of life is not only used as buzzword but also discussed theoretically and links the ethical aspects with the epistemological prerequisites and (...) the ontological consequences of synthetic biology. The second part examines this point of intersection and analyses some of the issues which are discussed in terms of the concept of life. The third part turns to the history of the concept of life. It offers an examination of scientific and philosophical discourses on life at the turn of the 20th century and suggests a surprising result: In the light of this history, synthetic biology leads to well-known debates, arguments, notions and questions. But it is concluded that the concept of life is too ambiguous and controversial to be useful for capturing the actual practice of synthetic biology. In the fourth part I argue that with regard to the ethical evaluation of synthetic biology, the ambiguity of the concept of life is not as problematic as sometimes held because other challenges are more important. The question whether the activity of synthetic biological systems should be conceived as life or not is primarily theoretical. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that there is a bidirectional relationship between gender-based social norms and gender-segregated education policies that excludes girls from knowledge production within the Iranian school system. I argue that gender segregation in education reproduces hermeneutic inequality through the reinforcement of epistemic segregation as a form of epistemic injustice. In particular, I focus on gender-based instructional epistemic injustice, which refers to a set of epistemic practices that actively exclude a student or an education professional in their capacity (...) as a knower from the process of knowledge production within an education system based on gender dynamics, roles, norms, or expectations. This, in addition, has an impact on schoolboys through the reproduction of active ignorance. I conclude that in societies such as Iran, where highly gendered norms play out in the school system and are further reinforced by that system, the result is not limited to gender segregation itself, but extends beyond it to a form of epistemic injustice that wrongs students by reproducing and reinforcing those highly gendered norms. (shrink)

This paper is a complete student-led, student-edited collective writing project (CWP) conducted virtually in Spring 2022 throughout the course Knowledge Socialism taught by professor Michael Peters for the Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal university. The CWP involves 4 international, 5 domestic Ph.D. students, and 2 senior Western scholars as reviewers, revealing their thoughts, arguments, understanding, and criticisms towards the creative economy status in East Asian countries (Japan and China mostly) higher education as reflected in the knowledge socialism narratives. Xiyuan as (...) the lead author, co-editing with Woraport and Stefan, assigned each section to other authors and successfully devoted themself to organizing, proofreading, and revising the paper. Through a month of collective work, the final version of the paper elaborates on the contribution of East Asian creative universities and the economy as a whole to the knowledge socialism through co(labor)ation, with implications to the creative labors cultivation and shifted roles of students. (shrink)

Joining the ongoing academic debates around medical students’ alternative career choices, this research examines the role of family in medical school attendees’ entrepreneurial intention. Specifically, this study decomposes the multidimensionality of family embeddedness and highlights the mediated nature of the family–EI relationship. The empirical analysis relied on data from graduation year medical students from diverse geographical locations and from different institution types in China. These data were collected from a total of 687 questionnaires covering the basic information of individual, parents, (...) and family composition, as well as the measuring scale of EI. Examining medical students’ EI and its antecedents provide a dual-missing-link in the extant knowledge, i.e., it adds the medical school piece to the overall picture of university students’ EI, and equally important, it de-trivializes entrepreneurship from the extant theorizations of medical students’ career choices. This study also bears implications for educators, practitioners, and policymakers interested in better understanding EI of medical school attendees and family embeddedness. (shrink)

Emirbayer and Johnson critique the failure to engage fully Bourdieu’s relational analysis in empirical work, but are weak in giving direction for rectifying the problem. Following their recommendation for studying organizations-in-fields and organizations-as-fields, I argue for the benefits of analogical comparison using case studies of organizations as the units of analysis. Doing so maximizes the number of Bourdieusian concepts that can be deployed in an explanation. Further, it maximizes discovery of the oft-neglected links among history, competition, resources, sites of contestation (...) and struggle, relations of dominance and domination, and reproduction of inequality. Perhaps most important, case studies can identify the connection between macro-, meso-, and micro-level factors in the formation and shaping of habitus. To support my claims empirically, I draw from case study research (Vaughan The challenger launch decision: Risky technology, culture, and deviance at NASA, 1996; Signals and interpretive work: The role of culture in a theory of practical action. pp. 28–56, 2002) that verifies Bourdieu’s as the “Theory of Practical Action” that supplies the micro-level component to the new institutionalism (DiMaggio and Powell, Introduction. pp. 1–41, 1991). (shrink)

This article investigates a puzzle in the rapidly evolving profession of advertising in post-socialist Hungary: young professionals who came of age during the shift to market-driven practices want to produce advertising that is uncompromised by clients and consumers, and to educate others about western modernity. It is their older colleagues—trained during customer-hostile socialism—who emphasize that good professionals serve their clients’ needs. These unexpected generational positions show that 1) professions are more than groups expanding their jurisdiction. They are fields structured by (...) two conflicting demands: autonomy of expertise and dependence on clients. We can explain the puzzle by noting that actors are positioning themselves on one or the other side based on their trajectory or movement in the field relative to other actors. Old and new groups vie for power in the transforming post-socialist professional field, responding to each other’s claims and vulnerabilities, exploiting the professional field’s contradictory demands on its actors. 2) The struggle is not between those who are oriented to the west and those that are not. Rather, the west is both the means and the stake of the struggle over historical continuity and professional power. Imposing a definition of the west is almost the same as imposing a definition of the profession on the field. In this historical case, “field” appears less as a stable structure based on actors’ equipment with capital, than as dynamic relations moved forward by contestation of the field’s relevant capital. (shrink)

Que veut dire « vivre de sa plume»? L'expression a souvent été invoquée par des historiens avançant le récit d'un progrès dans les pratiques littéraires marqué par le passage des écrivains du patronage au marché, afin de définir la « modernité » auctoriale par rapport à un modèle ancien de l'homme de lettres protégé par la noblesse. Or un examen plus attentif montrera que ce progrès vers une autonomie gagnée par la vente des écrits n'est guère aussi évident qu'on a (...) eu tendance à le croire. Cet article étudie donc les ambiguïtés du récit historique implicite dans la notion de « vivre de sa plume ». Il propose ensuite une approche différente qui considère cette représentation non pas comme le reflet d'une nouvelle réalité professionnelle, mais comme un élément dans une nouvelle rhétorique de la présentation de soi en tant qu 'intellectuel. Comme topos, l'image va désigner - et en fait, constituer - à la fois la libération sociale de l'auteur à l'égard de la noblesse et son autorité morale lorsque ses tentatives de vivre de ses écrits échouent et qu'il persiste tout de même à sacrifier son bonheur personnel à son art. (shrink)

There has been an outpouring of research on right-wing populist conservatism since the advent of the Trump presidency and right-wing movements in Europe. Yet, little research has been devoted to divisions among conservatives themselves, especially among conservative academics. Although Trump has maintained remarkable unity within the Republican Party for electoral reasons, he has fostered sharp divisions among conservative intellectuals and academicians. This article compares 102 politically conservative professors who are Trumpists and 80 conservative professors who are anti-Trumpists. All 182 function (...) as public intellectuals who advocate their views in print and digital media. Drawing on recent research in the sociology of intellectuals and particularly Pierre Bourdieu’s analytical field perspective, this article proposes a fielding political identities and practices framework to show how these two groups of professors (Trumpists and anti-Trumpists) differ in where they teach, their intellectual orientations, their scholarly productivity, where they network with think tanks, scholarly professional associations, and government agencies, and their stances on key issues surrounding the Trump presidency. The academic Trumpists embrace the right-wing populist wave mobilized by Trump and the conservative academic critics resist this move. This polarization of views between these two groups of conservative professors is enduring and rooted in two distinct social networks that connect positions in the academic field to affiliations with think tanks, government agencies, and professional associations in the field of power that reinforce their respective political identities. This research contributes to political sociology, the sociology of intellectuals, and the sociology of conservative politics in American higher education. (shrink)

This article describes a logic of distinction and succession within the late-twentieth-century Leningrad-St. Petersburg cultural field, whereby consecutive intelligentsia mainstreams were replaced by their avant-garde peripheries. In this dynamic picture of socio-cultural transformations, I propose a working hypothesis of a repeated stratification of the field into an ‘official’, an ‘unofficial’, and a third ‘non-aligned’ intelligentsia. This hypothesis is tested in reference to the ‘non-aligned’ groups founded by the avant-garde artist and ideologue Timur Novikov (1958–2002). Three major shifts are described: from (...) the politicized late-Brezhnevite early 1980s to the apolitical radicalism of Novikov’s New Artists; from this anarchistic underground, through the perestroika era, to the playful ‘classicism’ of the New Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s; and from this postmodern international orientation to an arch-reactionary, neo-imperial posturing at the turn of the 2000s. Lastly, this ‘non-aligned’ intelligentsia is suggested as a possible precedent, or, indeed, a model for understanding other historically significant avant-garde peripheries, which commonly seek to distinguish themselves from (often mutually-exclusive) centres. (shrink)

Starting from the metaphor of “playing chamber music at a rock festival” used by Peter L. Berger in 1992 to describe the impact of The Social Construction of Reality on US sociology, this article works out how the book’s somewhat puzzling legacy as a bestseller and a classic with remarkably rare direct follow-ups in the US discourse can indeed be conceived. I argue that one needs to take into account the theoretical-historical context in which Berger and Luckmann developed their ideas, (...) including the specific forms of knowledge production in US sociology at the time, the institutional background of the book’s emergence at the New School for Social Research and the author’s biographical trajectories. On this basis, on can explain why Berger and Luckmann’s reformulation of the sociology of knowledge both perfectly met the 1960s Zeitgeist and at the same time remained theoretically marginal. (shrink)

This article responds to the suggestion that C.L.R. James’ discussion of cricket, and particularly his defence of the ‘spirit of the game’, represent an ideological blind-spot on his part. James’ autobiographical account of the cricketing field, it is argued, is comparable to Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the ‘fields’ of culture more generally. In particular, James recognized that what was at stake in the defence of cricketing ethics was a defence of the principle by which the sport was able to operate (...) with a relative autonomy from the forces of political and economic power. It was only in this respect that cricket was able to provide, within contexts such as those of the pre-independence Caribbean, a field on which an expressive critique of those very forces of power was possible. (shrink)

This article responds to the suggestion that C.L.R. James’ discussion of cricket, and particularly his defence of the ‘spirit of the game’, represent an ideological blind-spot on his part. James’ autobiographical account of the cricketing field, it is argued, is comparable to Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the ‘fields’ of culture more generally. In particular, James recognized that what was at stake in the defence of cricketing ethics was a defence of the principle by which the sport was able to operate (...) with a relative autonomy from the forces of political and economic power. It was only in this respect that cricket was able to provide, within contexts such as those of the pre-independence Caribbean, a field on which an expressive critique of those very forces of power was possible. (shrink)

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus claims to solve the problem of the individual/society duality. However, the concept of habitus appears to be inadequate to explain the idiosyncratic features of individual field actors’ practices. In this article, I argue that to explain the particularity of individual habitus, we must appreciate the operationalization of relational logic in field theory. I further argue that individuals learn to prediscursively identify certain types of practices as meaningful for a given field position because of their embodied experiences (...) of movements within the historically specific relational structure of the field. Thus, the same individual can exhibit multiple and even contradictory practices depending on the person’s relational position in the field. I illustrate this insight by discussing the political habitus of the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. (shrink)

We develop a process-based framework, articulating the escalation of difference between “private” self and “public” display as an alternative trajectory in the pursuit of authenticity to alignment and compromise. A parsimonious model presents an endogenous dynamic of binary choice that generates momentum toward polarization. The model is illustrated in the context of “black” metal – a branch of heavy metal music that appeared in Norway in the early 1990s, notorious for its involvement in criminal activities. Using fanzine data, we construct (...) a narrative of how a process of escalation led to innovation and transgression through self-selection and exclusion. The analysis addresses two related theoretical problems – what motivates actors to challenge normative scripts and “burn the bridges” to social acceptance, and why such challenges may prove more effective in achieving recognition than compromise. Examples from politics, culture and sports reinforce the importance of these problems. (shrink)

Biennials – periodic, independent and international exhibitions surveying trends in visual art – have with startling speed become key nodes in linking production, distribution and consumption of contemporary art. Cultural production and consumption have been typically separated in research, neglecting phenomena, like biennials, sitting in between. Biennials have become, however, key sites of both the production of art’s discourse and where that discourse translates into practices of display and contexts of appreciation. They are, this article argues, key sites of art’s (...) symbolic production. Symbolic production is what makes a work, an artist, or even a genre visible and relevant, providing its sense in a system of classifications and, in an exhibition like a biennial, literally giving it a place in the scene. This article proposes a cultural analysis of biennials, focusing on the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895 and the first of the genre, through which we can trace biennials’ rise and transformations. (shrink)

Despite the importance of mass media to deliberative democratic processes, few scholars have focused on how market forces, occupational norms, and competition among outlets affect the quality of media discourse in mainstream and political outlets. Here, I argue that field theory, as outlined by new institutionalism and Pierre Bourdieu, provides a useful theoretical framework for assessing the quality of media discourse in different kinds of media outlets. The value of field theory is that it simultaneously highlights the importance of homogeneity (...) and heterogeneity within a field of action, which provides a framework for discussing the roles different kinds of outlets play in deliberate democratic processes and evaluating the quality of discourse in mainstream and political venues. I illustrate the utility of this conceptualization through an analysis of 1,424 stories on abortion in nine U.S. media outlets and interviews with journalists, editors, and producers in these venues. I find that political media outlets provide higher-quality discourse than that of mainstream venues. Additionally, I find that while market pressures may heighten a focus on conflict in the abortion debate, this emphasis is exacerbated by mainstream journalists themselves, who assume that the general public is familiar with, and has taken a firm position on, abortion. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for deliberative democratic processes. (shrink)

The article focuses on the fact that the consequence of Bourdieu’s death is that we now have to respond specifically to the texts that he produced between 1958 and 2002, rather than to the impact of writing and political action in combination, which was his goal during his life. The article raises general questions about the status of social texts in relation to the practices of philosophy and social scientific enquiry to which Bourdieu must have returned in preparing his final (...) course of lectures, published in 2001 as Science de la science et réflexivité. It then offers three case studies of this relationship in action in Bourdieu’s early work, considering his textual and scientific practices. It discusses aspects of the contemporary philosophical debate about the referentiality of texts at the time of this early work and thus indicates that this was a question of continuous importance in Bourdieu’s work. The article next reflects on the significance of Bourdieu’s thinking in this respect for the ways in which we should now respond to his texts and deploy his concepts empirically. It takes three examples of different ways in which Bourdieu’s texts have become pretexts for further research practice. These are characterized as ‘academic exploitation’, ‘nominal appropriation’ and ‘informed divergence’. The conclusion is that Bourdieu’s work demands a reflexive response, which requires that respondents should analyse rigorously their own situations and the grounds for transferring received concepts, and that this entails detailed attention to both Bourdieu’s texts and the contexts of their production, rather than a superficial exploitation or appropriation of his ‘consecrated’ texts. (shrink)

This e-special issue explores the reception of Bourdieu’s work in one journal, Theory, Culture & Society, which commenced at about the same time that Bourdieu was beginning to acquire an international reputation. It offers a case-study of the English representation of Bourdieu’s work through almost 40 years and focuses on the role of the journal in carrying Bourdieu’s work across cultural boundaries. It introduces the scope of that work but, primarily, it is designed to encourage reference to his texts in (...) the contexts of their production and reception in order to invite new reflection and new evaluation in relation to contemporary problems. (shrink)

The article analyzes two novels of migration by Nigerian women authors in the context of Afropolitanism: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference (2013). It is argued that Afropolitanism obscures the reasons why migration from Africa to the West has been increasing in the decades since independence, rather than decreasing. In comparing the two novels, the article focuses on empathy towards and solidarity between fellow Nigerians, which has been seen by Nigerian philosopher Chielozona Eze as (...) crucial for building African civil society and functional state. (shrink)

This paper discusses Eric Wolf’s (1923–1999) analysis of power in his last monograph, Anthropology (Wolf 1964) and last book Envisioning Power (Wolf 1999). In Anthropology, Wolf (1964: 96) wrote that the “anthropological point of vantage is that of a world culture, struggling to be born.” What is worth studying is human experience in all its variability and complexity. His aim was to set the framework bridging the humanities with anthropology. He never gave up this quest, only expanding it. In the (...) new introduction to his 1964 monograph, thirty years later, he commented that such a synthesis had not occurred. Rather there were growing schisms in the field. In the preface to Envisioning Power, he held that human sciences were unable or unwilling to come to grips with how cultural configurationsintertwine with considerations of power. In 1990 he had addressed the American Anthropological Society, holding that anthropologists favored a view of culture without power, while other social sciences have advanced a concept of ideology without culture. He wrote that his aim in his last book was to explore the connection of ideas and power observed in streams of behavior and recorded texts. Since minds interpose a selective screen between the organism and environment, ideas have content and functions that help bring people together or divide them. While ideas compose the entire range of mental constructs, Wolf understands ideology as configurations or unified schemes to underwrite or manifest power. Power is, according to Wolf, an aspect of all relations among people. Within this framework Wolf analyzes three cases, the Kwakiutl, the Aztecs, and Nazi Germany. The comparisons are very revealing, both the wide differences and similarities in power configurations and in the role of imagination. (shrink)

This article analyses 178 essays written in April 1997, in which Siberian students (15-22-year-olds) described their understandings of Soviet and post-Soviet realities. The main change between the two regimes is perceived in these essays as the change in patterns of consumption. Moreover, as the essays indicate, the new Russian style of consumption, usually associated with the style of the new rich classes in Russia, finds its fullest representation in the figure of the `new Russian' man. The article suggests that students' (...) attempts to envision unfamiliar patterns of wealthy consumption bring with them the reproduction of their own cultural dispositions and habits. Being unable to easily come up with adequate cultural signifiers that could homologically represent the distinctive economic location of the new rich, students chose to follow the path of quantitative rather than qualitative representation, expressing `the taste of luxury' in terms of the `taste of necessity'. Along with this subjective factor, that is, the students' own cultural dispositions, the prominence of the quantitative factor in their descriptions of the new Russian style of consumption is determined by the absence of a developed field of post-Soviet cultural production, which could have provided the new Russian style with distinctive status symbols. (shrink)

The classification of Pentecostal currents and organizations has been widely debated within Pentecostal studies. In contemporary Sweden, the disintegration of historically important boundaries, as well as increased mobility between Pentecostal organizations, illustrates that the issue deserves further attention. If many of the old boundaries are being suspended, how may we distinguish between different Pentecostal varietie-s, and what role do such differences play for today’s mobile practitioners? The present article, which consists of a case study of Stockholm County, approaches the matter (...) from a Bourdieu-influenced perspective, where differences are understood in terms of habitus. The study draws upon fieldwork in 16 congregations, carried out between 2009 and 2013, and concludes that three variations of the habitus can in fact be distinguished in the Pentecostal movement of Stockholm County; low key, grand and informal. The differences between these forms in fact impacts upon patterns of mobility among individual Pentecostalists; most prefer congregations of the same variety, even though there are examples of practitioners who visit other forms of organizations as well. (shrink)

Boundaries have gained analytical prominence in sociology of science. Notably, there have been studies on how academics differentiate themselves from outsiders in order to secure their legitimacy. In university departments, scholars engage in boundary work to defend their intellectual communities and institutional resources. While boundary struggles are characteristic of academia, they rarely result in departmental restructuring. This article examines a case where a theoretical divide between social and cultural anthropologists and biological anthropologists led to a departmental split. The study reveals (...) a shift from peaceful coexistence to a full-blown conflict between two intellectual communities and asks, what circumstances gave rise to the activation of a latent intellectual boundary? Drawing on interview data, I demonstrate how changes in the distribution of faculty and the alignment of intellectual, seniority, and gender differences activated the latent boundary. After its activation, scholars engaged in boundary work and expressed their intellectual differences in faculty meetings and interactions with colleagues, which led to arguments about the department’s identity that hampered the unit’s operation. The study shows how boundary work among scholars can pull apart the fabric of a department, causing intellectual identities to diverge and the organization to split. (shrink)

The article begins with a sociologically triumphalist critique of philosophical aesthetics, grounded in the work of Ernest Gellner and Emile Durkheim. It proceeds to note the practical failure of this kind of sociology to become institutionalized within the wider discipline. It explores a number of possible explanations for this failure, but finally suggests that a normalized sociology of art requires a normalized conception of art itself, such as that tentatively advanced by Pierre Bourdieu and Franco Moretti. The article also has (...) an autobiographical subtext. (shrink)

Many voices and stories have been systematically silenced in interpersonal conversations, political deliberations and historical narratives. Recalcitrant and interrelated patterns of epistemic, political, cultural and economic marginalisation exclude individuals as knowers, citizens, agents. Two questions lie at the centre of this article, which focuses on the epistemically – but also politically, culturally and economically – dominant: How can we sabotage the dominant’s investment in their own ignorance of unjust silencing? How can they be seduced to become acute perceivers of others’ (...) experiences of oppression and reckon with their own participation in it? Situated at the intersection between political theory, aesthetics and epistemology, this article contributes a so-far-unexplored suggestion: that certain literary works create epistemic friction between shared, entrenched prejudices on the one hand, and representations of epistemic exclusion or authority, on the other. Their power to illuminate ideational, moral and experiential limitations makes them valuable tools in problematising, rendering visible and dislocating epistemic injustice, as well as other marginalisations it intersects with. To advance this argument, the article relies on insights from aesthetics, unpacking fiction’s multidimensional epistemic potential. Audre Lorde exemplifies literary works’ ability to seductively sabotage bias and provide audiences with prosthetic visions of unfamiliar experiences of marginalisation. (shrink)

As debate continues around the nature and values of education, it is important to ask the question of what factors motivate a student to engage with the ends of an educational institution. In this paper, a broad, holistic view of learner motivation, derived from Aristotelian ethics, is used to provide a model to drive institutional change. Focussing on the approach of one Higher Education institution to the particular accommodations required for students with disabilities, the paper identifies three factors which motivate (...) students, a failure to engage with the aims and ends of the educational project, a failure to see that a particular learning aim is worth attaining, and a simple lack of will‐power to attain it. To each of these failures a social cause is identified, and a change in both the institutional culture and the individual learner's approach to their education is suggested. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline a general framework for cultural analysis consistent with an “analytic” approach to explanation in social science. The proposed approach provides coherent solutions to thorny problems in cultural theory. These include providing a coherent definition of culture (and the “cultural”), specifying the nature of cultural units (both simple and complex), and outlining the processes making possible episodes of cultural genesis, transformation, and reproduction within bounded units characterized as cultural causal systems.

Sociologists often imagine society as spaces, yet how social spaces are related remains ambiguous in most theories. In developing his field theory, Bourdieu used extensively the concept of homology to describe the structural similarities across fields, but he had not taken seriously the spaces between fields or how fields are related to each other. Adopting the Simmelian approach of formal sociology, this article outlines six basic social forms by which social spaces are related. It argues that relations between social spaces (...) can be understood along two dimensions: heterogeneity and social distance. In terms of heterogeneity, social spaces can be kindred, symbiotic or oppositional. In terms of social distance, they can be linked, nested or overlapping. These social forms of interspatial relations are constituted by the boundary work of a variety of actors, including guardians, brokers and space travellers. The article provides a general vocabulary for thinking about how social spaces are related and how they interact across boundaries. (shrink)

Aesthetics is a vexed topic in philosophy, with a long history. For my purposes, an aesthetic experience is a foundational affective response to an object, to which terms such as “ugly”, “beautiful”, “pretty” or “harmonious” are applied. These terms are derived from a Discourse of aesthetics; some remain constant, others change from generation to generation. Aesthetics and ethics have been linked in Western thought since the days of Plato and Aristotle. This essay examines what is happening to that link in (...) contemporary experience. It emphasises the ways in which the popular media exploit aesthetic appeal to penetrate their market, and to exploit and frame intuitive responses to current and past events. Production values, the artfulness of editors and the financial interests of producers and directors thus do much to determine contemporary aesthetic and ethical judgements. That which is beautifully presented invites the ethical involvement of the audience. Events whose images are beautifully presented constitute “hyperevidence”, a pre-judged, reinforced and amplified illusion of reality and participation. Understanding how aesthetic excellence draws audiences into ethical relationship with what is presented becomes an important part of education in ethics, including bioethics. (shrink)

The paper examines connections between ontology and finance. The ontological debates concerning the role of finance are examined between two opposing schools of thought that can be labelled, very broadly, ‘instrumentalist’ and ‘realist’. These two schools of thought have had momentous repercussions in understanding what is a good society. Each school defines Nature in particular ways which can be explored using ontology and philosophical insight. Our theoretical investigation aims to accommodate Nature in community financial deliberations. A positive role for government (...) is advocated to finance environmental infrastructure initiatives. For example, precautionary strategies to address climate change must be funded. New roles for finance and government are proposed to align human relationships with Nature. Environmental precautionary principles must be developed in conjunction with finance theory to maintain decent standards of living for all. Reliance on impersonal market forces will not be enough to save the planet given the power of some over the many in the neoliberal arena. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the ways in which women narrate a move from a ‘working-class’ position to a position marked (in however fragmentary and complex a way) as ‘middle class’. While such a move might be seen in terms of a straightforward escape from a disadvantaged social position, I argue here that what has to be analysed is the pain and the sense of estrangement associated with this class movement. Drawing on the class narratives of a group of seven (...) white British women, the article uses Bourdieu's concepts of symbolic capital and habitus to explore the cultural and symbolic configurations of class. These configurations may be inscribed into the self, so that the self, itself, is class marked. Since working-class selves are frequently marked in pathological terms, this raises particular difficulties for the idea of an ‘escape’ from such a position. Class in this sense is embedded in people's history and so cannot be so easily ‘escaped’. The usual conventions of life-narratives – in which the self remains the same entity from birth to death and later events are a culmination of earlier ones – are also disrupted in this case. But if a working-class position is marked as pathological, so too is taking on the markers of middle-class existence. To do so is not only to risk ‘getting it wrong’, but it is also to risk the scorn attached to ‘pretentiousness’. There is a particular jeopardy here for women, since it is women who have been especially associated with desires for artefacts associated with bourgeois existence. The article argues for a focus for classed desires and class envy, not in pathological terms, but in terms of a coherent response to political and social exclusions. (shrink)

Seeking to answer the question of what it is that nurses do, scholars researching nursing have worked with theoretical approaches ranging from the more abstract to the concrete: from philosophizing the nature of nursing to emphasizing the interpersonal nature of nursing practice to exploring processes of clinical decision‐making. In this paper, we engage with Bourdieu's theory of practice as an alternative approach that helps to understand the finer points of nurses' everyday practices of nursing as being grounded in an ontology (...) of practice. We first outline the foundations of Bourdieu's thinking as he established both a relational philosophy of science and an embodied philosophy of action to develop the theory of practice around notions of habitus, capital and field. Then, using the inter‐relationships of these key elements of the theory of practice as a ‘toolkit to think with’, we explore an instance of nursing in practice in an acute care setting and show how, in taking account of social context, the dialectics between the elements reveal the social interactions that are accomplished in the doing. Moving to the relationships of these three elements with Bourdieu's further notions of illusio, symbolic power and symbolic violence, we uncover an ontology of nursing practices in the everyday. We conclude by summarising what this ontology of practice has to offer investigations into practices of nursing in any social context. (shrink)

This article develops an analytical framework to study the role of narratives in markets and argues that there is a relationship between the structure and composition of narratives produced by market actors and market dynamics. With respect to theory, the article bridges the perspectives that study markets as cultures and as fields and draws from the organizational studies approach to the analysis of narratives. Two empirical cases of the crises narratives in the emerging contemporary art markets of Russia and India (...) illustrate the use of the framework. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with artists and art dealers as well as observations in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, New Delhi, and Mumbai conducted between April 2012 and June 2013. The article shows that there is a widely shared crisis narrative with a coherent structure in the Indian art market. In contrast, fragmented and contested stories that lack narrative structure dominate in the Russian art market. The analysis of the first case highlights the narrative structure and shows the productive work it does in the Indian market—it provides a moral justification of existing market norms and produces a perspective for the future. The analysis of the second case focuses on the context of narrative production and connects the conflicting interpretations of the crisis in the Russian art market to contested hierarchies and persistent uncertainty. (shrink)

University of Turku, Finland In this article, relationalist approaches to social sciences are analyzed in terms of a conceptual distinction between "philosophizing sociology" and "sociologizing philosophy." These mark two different attitudes toward philosophical metaphysics and ontological commitments. The authors’ own pragmatist methodological relationalism of Deweyan origin is compared with ontologically committed realist approaches, as well as with Bourdieuan methodological relationalism. It is argued that pragmatist philosophy of social sciences is an appropriate tool for assisting social scientists in their methodological work, (...) especially as regards problem-driven case studies. Key Words: metaphysics • pragmatism • realism • relationalism. (shrink)

The article discusses the relevance of ontology, the metaphysical study of being, in social sciences through a comparison of three distinct outlooks: Roy Bhaskar's version of critical realism, a pragmatic realist approach the most renowned representatives of which are Rom Harré and Hilary Putnam, and the authors’ own synthesis of the pragmatist John Dewey's and the neopragmatist Richard Rorty's ideas, here called methodological relationalism. The Bhaskarian critical realism is committed to the heavy ontological furniture of metaphysical transcendentalism, resting on essentialist (...) presumptions of causality and social structures, tacitly creating a dualism between individuals and society. Pragmatic realists, for their part, carry much lighter metaphysical baggage than critical realists and, much in a pragmatist vein, accept the idea that social scientists should study society by studying social life—the interwoven activities of individuals. Nevertheless, pragmatic realists only reluctantly, if at all, renounce the subject–object dualism and its ontological implications. Drawing on the ideas of Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty, the writers outline their own antirepresentationalist, antiessentialist approach to social sciences. The proposed methodological relationalism is a pragmatist approach of Deweyan origin. Based on a Darwinian understanding of human beings as organisms trying to cope with their environment, it emphasises the insight that one can neither step outside one's own action, nor withdraw from the actor's point of view, just as one cannot cognitively step outside language. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine how elementary preservice teachers ( n = 35) experienced museums as potential sites for K-5 students to read museums using two lenses: to learn the history of the place in which they live and examine how museum authors craft texts to tell those stories. Along with exploring historical content, preservice teachers studied the museum as an informational text. Through this experience, preservice teachers discovered: 1) the five informational text structures museum authors used (...) to present information and 2) how museum authors conveyed contemporary and social issues using various forms of writing. Additionally, the museum experience provided a context in which the preservice teachers could engage in critical literacy practices. (shrink)

Do psychological perspectives constitute the only way through which the role of musical creativity in education can be addressed, researched and theorised? This essay attempts to offer an alternative view of musical creativity as a deeply social and political form of human praxis, by proposing a perspective rooted in the thought of the political philosopher and activist Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997). This is done in two steps. First, an attempt is made to place the pursuit of the concept of musical creativity (...) within a larger educational and societal context of conflicting trajectories that run through (a) Modernity and (b) Education. Then, I revisit the issue of educational value of improvising and composing through creating conceptual links between the process of music-making through improvisation and composition and the project of political autonomy as conceived by Castoriadis. By foregrounding instituting imaginary over instituted imaginary, improvising and composing become active processes of positing new legitimacies, and of creating a music-making context that searches for its own foundations. It is in and through creative musical praxis that we can think about issues of hierarchies, musical values, social dimensions of different music-making processes, our relationship to past values and to historical dimensions of music. By arguing that improvisation and composition might be seen as ways of positing the issue of political autonomy in musical terms, this paper emphasises the role of improvisation and composition as a mode of potentially transformative educational practice that may foster the development of critical consciousness, linking music education to a larger project of re-discovering and at the same time re-defining democracy. (shrink)

Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) is a collective noun for all kinds of alternative methods to formal dispute resolution. Business ethics attempts to theorize the different forms of normative coordination of corporate acts that remain within the lifeworld and outside the formal sphere of the legal system. In this context, business ethics could offer a positive approach to ADR, as ADR would be an effective, practical form of casuistry ethics. In this manner, concrete conflicts of interest and disagreements between economic actors (...) could be resolved based on moral intentions and moral validity claims. This approach of ADR through business ethics is confirmed by many articles in business ethical journals. In two important aspects, namely justice and autonomy, law is contrary to ethics. ADR lacks exactly these ethical characteristics; thus the idea that ADR belongs to the discourse of business ethics is misleading. This article will argue that ADR is not in the realm of the ethical, but in the realm of the legal. This critical analysis of ADR will show a deeper dimension in the relationship between business ethics and law, namely the systematic colonization of ethical methods by law. (shrink)