How may emergent biotechnologies impact upon our relations with other animals? To what extent are any changes indicative of new relations between society and nature? This paper critically explores which sociological tools can contribute to an understanding of the technologisation of animal bodies. By drawing upon interview data with animal scientists I argue that such technologies are being partly shaped by broader changes in agriculture. The complexity of genomics trajectories in animal science is partly fashioned through the deligitimisation of (...) the productivist paradigm but continue to sit in tension around particular conceptions of sustainability in farm animal production.In spite of this deligitimisation process genomics is now being framed in the context of a new productivism (termed the livestock revolution) bound up in projected global changes in animal consumption during the first half of the 21st century. This potentially jars against both social trends that seek to re-enchant animal life and sustainability discourses which include social and environmental contexts. Nevertheless the possibility of a new productivism is supported by various interconnected trends including the emergence of a discourse of the 'bioeconomy' and a liberal regulatory apparatus for farm animal breeding technologies. Ultimately an understanding of the possibility of emerging new bio-capitalisations on animal life should be set in a broader context of competing agricultural paradigms as well as ongoing tensions over 'naturalness' in human/animal relations. (shrink)

`In the grand tradition of classical social theory, Barry Smart challenges us to face up to the ambivalences of the contemporary moment and to take responsibility for our individual and social existence' - Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles ` a brilliant excursus through modern social theory, Smart’s book should be read and re-read for its careful analysis of the dilemmas of morality in postmodernism' - Bryan S. Turner, Deakin University Through a critical discussion of the 'ambivalent fruits' of (...) social analysis, exemplified in particular by the work of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Vattimo, Beck, Bourdieu, Goffman, Giddens, Levinas and Bauman, this book submits that an important responsibility of social enquiry today is to engage critically with the moral difficulties and ethical dilemmas which have arisen in relation to modernity. Facing Modernity offers a wide-ranging analysis of the ways in which issues of reflexivity, ethics and moral responsibility inform social and political thought. This is illustrated with the examples of risk society, modern forms of subjectivity and the problematic relationship between care of the self and a concern for others, the fashioning of the body, the idea and the practice of justice, and the communitarian call to regulate the pursuit of self interest and rediscover 'community'. A comprehensive overview of the ambiguities and moral dilemmas of modernity, this book will be essential reading for students of sociology, social theory and cultural studies. (shrink)

This paper argues that ambivalence can serve as a proxy for consensus-based debates in public discourse as it allows for individuals to maintain flexible and analytic perspectives on matters that otherwise appear contradictory. In particular, an affirmative understanding of ambivalence will be presented to supplement the highly influential Habermasian approach by drawing from sociological theories of ambivalence found in the work of Simmel, Bauman and Kołakowski. While the theme of ambivalence is not completely absent from (...) Habermas’s work on the public sphere, it is typically described as a structural consequence of contradiction rather than a form of action that is capable of working with and around inconsistencies in ethics, knowledge and social values. This allows for participation to be sustained through contradiction, rather than being withdrawn in frustration, while also encouraging open-minded judgements capable of avoiding forms of fanaticism. (shrink)

In this article, I present a sociological approach to the problem of meaningful work that dwells on its broad social and cultural sources, as opposed to the focus on subjective and organizational factors currently prevailing in the field. Specifically, I consider two sociological perspectives, those of community and autonomy, as important conceptual tools for understanding the ambivalent character of modern culture in providing individuals with a sense of meaningfulness of their activities. I also review some of the existing (...) research on meaningful work and interpret it through this conceptual distinction, both to show the latter’s relevance for the field and to identify the gaps it might help fill. As a result, based on the sociological perspectives, I propose a general conceptual model and discuss five directions to further advance the theoretical comprehension of meaningful work, and I suggest some implications of these perspectives for normative business ethics. (shrink)

La sociologie classique a utilisé la notion d’ambivalence sociale pour désigner la combinaison, nécessaire, mais chargée de conflit, entre l’obéissance aux normes et la volonté d’affirmer sa liberté. Il faut distinguer cette notion de celle d’ambivalence culturelle, qui désigne la nécessité de suivre à la fois des exigences culturelles opposées, en particulier dans un rapport majorité/minorité. La figure de l’étranger dessinée par Georg Simmel est l’exemple type de cette ambivalence, source de frustrations, mais qui néanmoins représente la (...) moins mauvaise solution possible. Après des siècles de raisonnements fondés sur la notion « ou... ou », nous ressentons la nécessité de nous placer en situation d’ambivalence.The notion of sociological ambivalence has been widely used to refer to the conflict-permeated combination of compliance with norms and search for individual autonomy. We must draw a distinction between this kind of ambivalence and a cultural ambivalence relating to the coexistence of two cultures to be inevitably found in a majority/minority relationship. The figure of the stranger designed by Georg Simmel is a classical example of this ambivalence, which induces frustrations, but represents the most acceptable solution possible. After centuries of dialectical thinking of the « either-or » type, we feel the urge to put ourselves in a situation of ambivalence. (shrink)

Research on economization processes is increasingly taking seriously the social and material processes through which various policy domains are transformed into economic problems and solutions. This article engages “Value Added Modeling” (VAM) in teacher evaluation systems as a case study in economization. VAM is a statistical technology for evaluating the effectiveness of schoolteachers using student test scores, which wrests authority for the determination of quality teaching away from education professionals and toward quantitative economic modelers. Mobilizing field theory, we trace a (...) half century of changing relationships among economists, other academics, and various policy audiences (from media to philanthropists to state and federal government) in struggles to define education policy concerning teacher quality. We show that economization is a set of overlapping, sometimes contradictory processes that can take different forms: in this case, the spread of an “economic style of reasoning” or the establishment of “economic policy devices.” The case of VAM shows stages of economization in which processes first proceeded independently of one another, then interacted in contradictory ways, and finally, mutually reinforced one another. What primarily drove these interactions was the struggle for scientific capital within the economics discipline and the changing place of education policy and VAM within it. Ultimately, VAM’s original role as a policy device for evaluating and selecting individual teachers has foundered even as it has become an important tool for economists to accrue scientific capital and expand their style of reasoning to broader audiences. (shrink)

This article explores how our understanding of ambivalence would shift if we saw it as an inherent and essential part of the ordinary work of education. Following Bauman's sociology of the stranger and Derrida's deconstructions of hospitality, the article unfolds in three parts. In the first part we discuss the preconditions of modern education which since the Enlightenment has been guided by the postulate that there is and ought to be a rational order in the social world. In the (...) second part we consider the intolerance of strangers the modern will-to-order has caused. Since the stranger appears as a liminal category that falls between the boundaries of already established social categories, she can only be viewed as an antithesis of a well-ordered society. In the third part we ask how educational spaces hospitable to strangers can be opened up, and argue that we would do better not to construe living with ambivalence as a problem, but as a quest for humanity and justice. (shrink)

Small things loom large as a distinct category in social and cultural analysis. However, the social construction and effects of this idiom of scale commonly remain vague and underexplored. Bringing the literature on quantification in conversation with the literature on scale-making, this article offers a theoretically-informed analysis of how smallness consolidates as a publicly salient social attribute, and how it feeds collective narratives. The empirical focus is on American Jewry – an ethnoreligious minority group whose leaders and experts have invested (...) in its quantification, including its representation as a small population. Drawing on a variety of texts and images, as well as on interviews and fieldwork, I show that American Jewish research bodies and public figures engage in a myriad of comparative arithmetic exercises and spectacles of scale to assert the smallness of the population. Deploying smallness as a generative narrative tool allows them to engage with the ambivalences implicated in the American-Jewish post-Holocaust, minority, and diasporic experience. In particular, exercises around notions of numerical negligibility, disproportional success, and numerical inferiority elicit protean narratives around endangerment, power, and a questioned diasporic future. The broader theoretical intervention of this article is to offer scalemaking as a valuable prism for understanding the narrative potency and poignancy of arithmetically-based constructs such as smallness. Instead of emphasizing the assumed epistemological strengths of numbers, this article considers the narrative work that statistics do when they lend themselves to multimodal scaling. It argues that through scaling, statistics are infused with perspective, relevance and meaning, descriptively and prescriptively. (shrink)

The BBC is an exemplary institution in the government of culture. In the context of the neo-liberalism of the 1990s it became also a key experimental site for the development of a new culture of government, one in which notions of markets, efficiency, accountability and audit were translated into the public sector. The focus of this paper is an analysis, based on ethnographic research, of the BBC's culture of markets, accountability and audit in the mid to late nineties. Indebted in (...) part to the Foucauldian concern with the relations between forms of political rationality and specific technologies of government, the paper charts the substance and the anti-creative effects of these techniques. But it stresses also their contestability and negotiability, how they evoke ambivalance and coexist with diverse forms of resistance. In particular, through the case of the BBC, the paper sketches the contours of a sociology of reflexivity based on a more differentiated account of reflexivity than is found in the speculative, often normatively-directed writings of Beck, Giddens and Lash. It points to the layering of reflexivities in and around the contemporary BBC, and to the competing and antagonistic reflexivities that may inhabit any social space. (shrink)

The American death penalty is peculiar insofar as it is the only capital punishment system still in use in the West. It is peculiar insofar as the forms through which it is now enacted seem ambivalent and poorly adapted to the stated purposes of criminal justice. And it is peculiar insofar as it seems, somehow, to be connected to the South's ?peculiar institution? of slavery and its legacy of racial violence, though the precise relationship is by no means clear. ? (...) The aim of this book ? is to describe and explain the peculiar institution of American capital punishment in all its complex, controversial detail and to explore its relationship to the society that sustains it. ? The perspective pursued here develops a detailed description of death penalty practices and an explanatory account of their sources, uses, and meanings. In place of moral and legal argument, it provides historical and sociological analysis. Instead of discussing capital punishment in general it analyzes American capital punishment in particular. And rather than argue for the institution's reform or its retention, it describes exactly how it came to be retained and reformed in its present form. What is offered here, in short, is neither apology nor critique but a sociological history of an institution that forms a puzzling part of our present. (shrink)

This article develops a sociological theory of ambivalence to explain several puzzling and contradictory ethical attitudes of business people: (1) a simultaneous disposition to comparatively more self-interested and more charitable behavior than many other occupational groups and (2) a moderate level of receptiveness to inculcation of moral principles through social channels such as higher education. We test the theory by comparing the way that business students rate the ethical acceptability of various ethically challenging scenarios with the way that (...) criminal justice students rate these same scenarios. We also explore the malleability of ethical views by measuring differences between the responses of sophomores and seniors. The data generally support hypotheses based on a theory of ambivalence. At the same time, however, we also report on findings that suggest alternative explanations to ambivalence. (shrink)

Like some other human sciences, sociology has had a recurrent concern to clarify the ambivalent relationship between its professional accounts of social reality on the one hand and lay understandings of social reality on the other. Sociological ethnographers have claimed to accomplish this clarification by including in their accounts both direct representation and responsive interpretation of the vernacular voice of those human subjects whose actions and understandings comprise the focus of their inquiries. I briefly examine some of the practical (...) and textual strategies by which studies have accomplished this. I go on to note that the authenticity of ethnographic work has itself become a matter of dispute on the grounds of the ineradicable asymmetry between the professional voice of the researcher and the vernacular voice of research subjects. Drawing on work in literary theory, anthropology and feminist scholarship, a favoured solution to this problem has argued for the necessity of acknowledging the essentially dialogical character of the relationship between researchers and subjects and also of finding ways to make ethnographic texts reflect this character. This article draws attention to an alternative set of professional practices that prefer ‘co-construction’ to ‘dialogue’ as a term of art. Its use encourages and facilitates the close and detailed examination of the multiple ways in which subjects already speak of and for themselves and others within the local sites of their real-world activities. Studies of these matters accord the vernacular voice of human subjects renewed significance for sociological investigation as part of a radical ‘respecification’ of prior understandings of the proper relationship between vernacular and professional accounts of social reality. The article assesses the upshot of these claims for the current practice and future prospects of sociology as one of the human sciences. (shrink)

Ethical reflection deals not only with the moral standing and handling of animals, it should also include a critical analysis of the underlying relationship. Anthropological, psychological, and sociological aspects of the human–animal-relationship should be taken into account. Two conditions, asymmetry and ambivalence, are taken as the historical and empirical basis for reflections on the human–animal-relationship in late modern societies. These conditions explain the variety of moral practice, apart from paradoxes, and provide a framework to systematize animal ethical problems (...) in a broader field. This allows the development of ideal relationships as moral orientation across anthropocentric or sentientistic ethical theories. These ideal relationships are called the patronage-model, the friendship-model and the partnership-model. The ethical problem of creating transgenic animals is discussed in the light of these ideal relationships. (shrink)

The author analyses how debate over the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has tended to privilege certain conceptions of psychiatric diagnosis over others, as well as to polarise positions regarding psychiatric diagnosis. The article aims to muddy the black and white tenor of many discussions regarding psychiatric diagnosis by moving away from the preoccupation with diagnosis as classification and refocusing attention on diagnosis as a temporally and spatially complex, as well as highly mediated process. (...) The article draws on historical, sociological and first-person perspectives regarding psychiatric diagnosis in order to emphasise the conceptual—and potentially ethical—benefits of ambivalence vis-à-vis the achievements and problems of psychiatric diagnosis. (shrink)

Coming out, or the disclosure of a minority identity, features prominently across disciplines, including several subfields of sociological research. In the context of sexuality, theoretical arguments offer competing predictions. Some studies propose that coming out is increasingly an unremarkable life transition as the stigma associated with non-heterosexualities attenuates, while others posit entrenched discrimination. Rather than testing these theories or providing incremental evidence in support of one position, we use 52 in-depth interviews with recently-out individuals to explain how identity disclosures (...) in the present moment can validate plural possibilities. Our findings show that ambivalence is the core narrative which animates the contemporary coming out process. Respondents identify three interpretive frameworks that structure their experience of sexuality as at once incidental and central: generational differences, identity misrecognitions, and interfacing with institutions. We also detail a fourth theme, intersectionality, which shows the analytic limits of ambivalence in the coming out process. These patterns suggest more broadly that sexuality, like ethnicity, may provide symbolic resources—“distinguishing but not defining”—in the service of crafting a modern sexual self. (shrink)

Definition of the problemThe article addresses the relationship between reproduction, time and the good life. Services offered by reproductive medicine and conceptions of the good life in time influence each other reciprocally. This interaction is characterised by implicit and explicit normative settings and expectations of appropriate temporality.ArgumentsWe first discuss the significance of time for the life course and for parenthood from a sociological and social psychological perspective. Reproductive medicine can increase the options for becoming a parent and thus for (...) life-time autonomy. However, in the context of societal imperatives for optimisation and efficiency, it can also have opposite effects and increase heteronomy. Overall, this leads to changed forms of adaptation and self-determination, new dilemmas and ambivalences in the temporal optimisation of parenthood.ConclusionsAgainst this background, we explain how the ethics of reproductive medicine could benefit from interdisciplinary research that focuses on life in its temporal course. (shrink)

Social types, or types of persons, occupy a curious place in the history of sociology. There has never been any agreement on how they should be used, or what their import is. Yet the problems surrounding their use are instructive, symptomatic of key ambivalences at the heart of the sociological enterprise. These include a tension between theories of social order that privilege the division of labour and those that focus on large-scale cultural complexes; a tension between the analysis of (...) society in terms of social groups and an acknowledgement of modern individualism; sociology’s location somewhere between literature and science; and sociology’s awkward response to the claim – made by both Catholic conservatives and Marxists – that modern industrial and post-industrial society cannot be a society of estates. These ambivalences may help to explain why the attempts to use social types for the purpose of cultural diagnosis – from the interesting portrait of arbitrarily selected positions in the division of labour to more ambitious guesswork about modern culture’s dominant ‘characters’ – have been unconvincing. (shrink)

The French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre developed an account of modernity that combined rigorous critique, a rejection of nostalgia, left pessimism or transcendental appeals, and the search for utopian potentialities in the hidden recesses of the everyday. This article will focus on a topic that is arguably central to his ‘critique of everyday life’ but has been entirely overlooked in the literature thus far: that of boredom. Although often dismissed as trivial, boredom can be understood as a touchstone through (...) which we can grasp much wider anxieties, socio-cultural changes and subjective crises that are intrinsic to our experience of modernity. Curiously, although Lefebvre was very interested in boredom, he did not analyse it systematically, and he used terms like ‘boring’ or ‘boredom’ in loose, elliptical and seemingly contradictory ways. Such a lack of clarity reveals his ambivalence about this phenomenon, but also highlights a subtle pattern of differentiation he makes between particular modalities of boredom that can be highly illuminating. Through a careful reading of the full range of Lefebvre’s writings, we can begin to understand how he discriminates between different experiences and expressions of boredom, some of which are unambiguously negative, whereas others are judged more positively. With respect to the latter, as he says in Introduction to Modernity, under certain conditions boredom can be full of desires, frustrations and possibilities. Through such an investigation, we start to glimpse latent connections between boredom and utopian propensities that caught the attention not only of Lefebvre but also such thinkers as Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. (shrink)

Problem: Is Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems based on a constructivist or on a realist epistemology? Luhmann’s own elaborations seem to oscillate between both standpoints. Method: The argumentation provided in this article starts with a detailed reconstruction of Luhmann’s epistemology and of Luhmann’s criticism towards radical constructivism and then examines the consequences for a comparison of systems theory and (radical) constructivism. Results: Although Luhmann’s operative constructivism can be distinguished from radical constructivism, the differences are not considered fundamental. Luhmann’s epistemology (...) is clearly nearer to constructivism than to realism and it shares most of constructivism’s key concepts, such as self-referential logic, a strict relation between observer and observed, and the relativism of reality construction. Implications: Luhmann’s criticism of radical constructivism must be understood in the context of his sociological background. Most of his arguments against radical constructivism can be considered apprehensions of misleading interpretations of radical constructivism rather than of substantial criticism. They may help to clarify a radical constructivist epistemology. Constructivist content: The paper attempts to check whether Luhmann’s theory of social theory is based on (radical) constructivist epistemology. (shrink)

In their pursuit of addressing social and environmental challenges, social entrepreneurs should be social transformers emancipating stakeholders. Rosa’s critical theorizing in philosophy and sociology points the ways to expanding the conventional conception of social entrepreneurship to include long-term social transformation. Modifying Rosa, social entrepreneurship is not anti-capitalist but reforms capitalism. The key relevant concepts in Rosa are resonance, alienation, ambivalence, vulnerability, dynamic stabilization through the triple A of appropriation, acceleration, and activation, and emancipatory interest. We consider social entrepreneurs as (...) resonant actors, they satisfy threefold resonance preconditions: cognitive, material, and social. As a matter of fact, they are rejecting alienation through their effort to provide others with a high(er) social value. Rosa’s theoretical framework is a new and inspiring phenomenological and critical lens that is worth studying in relationship to a social entrepreneurship point of view because social entrepreneurs are facing huge challenges and multiple paradoxes that Rosa’s thinking enables their better understanding. An essential precondition of the resonance of social entrepreneurs is their vulnerability, which is strengthened by the escalatory logic of acceleration of the world fostering ambivalence. Entering in resonance with the world is a cause and a consequence of vulnerability. Only a vulnerable social entrepreneur can experience resonant actions as a prerequisite to reach the “good life”. Our findings underline the necessity to reconcile Rosa’s theoretical analysis with the effectual logic of social entrepreneurship in which it is necessary for social entrepreneurs to resonate with all stakeholders to gain legitimacy and be able to identify the sources of their true “emancipatory interest” in long-term social transformation. (shrink)

In the first place, I discuss the main papers and books on Durkheim published in recent years, where no attention is given to the phenomenological interpretations of his work. Then I expose different phenomenological readings of Durkheim, some of them positive, some negative, some ambivalent. Later I find that there is in Durkheim an implicit practice of phenomenology, inspired by Descartes’ Meditations on first philosophy. Consequently, I support Tyriakian’s thesis that there is in Durkheim an implicit phenomenological approach, despite his (...) positivism. Then I wonder whether this tacit approach produces a phenomenological ontology of the social world. I find that it actually does, especially in what regards to social facts considered as things. I argue that Durkheim’s conception of social things is consistent with Husserl’s notion of ideal objectivities. I conclude that Durkheim’s rule of considering social facts as things is part of his phenomenological legacy and that it does not contradict the idea that they also are “states lived”. (shrink)

The part anger plays in motivating political action is frequently noted, but less is said about ways in which anger continues to be a part of how people do politics. This article critically assesses approaches to emotions that emphasize managing anger in accordance with ‘feeling rules’. It reflects on the utility of Marxist notions of conflict as the engine of change for the understanding of how anger operates in political life. This involves understanding the ambivalence of anger and its (...) operation within particular power relations. Shifting sets of conventions have had some continuity in discouraging women in Western nations (particularly white and middle-class women) from showing anger. But clearly, women do get angry and feminists have drawn on anger in acting politically. New Zealand feminist writings from the ‘second wave’ are taken as illustrative of the common difficulties Western feminists faced in dealing with anger. These difficulties were due to trying to juggle social conventions about femininity, the political ideal of sisterhood, and the realities of dealing with other women in often new and experimental political processes. Anger could be personalized and hurtful, but in certain cases its expression was constructive in producing more respectful relations. Exploring these cases makes it clear how anger produces, and is produced by, relations with others. (shrink)

In this extraordinary work, Peter Alexander Meyers shows how the centerpiece of the Enlightenment—_society _as the symbol of collective human life and as the fundamental domain of human practice—was primarily composed and animated by its most ambivalent figure: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Displaying this new _society_ as an evolving field of interdependence, _Abandoned to Ourselves_ traces the emergence and moral significance of dependence itself within Rousseau’s encounters with a variety of discourses of order, including theology, natural philosophy, and music. Underpinning this whole (...) scene we discover a modernizing conception of the human Will, one that runs far deeper than Rousseau’s most famous trope, the “general Will.” As _Abandoned to Ourselves_ weaves together historical acuity with theoretical insight, readers will find here elements for a reconstructed sociology inclusive of things and persons and, as a consequence, a new foundation for contemporary political theory. (shrink)

The acquisition of genetic information (GI) confronts both the affected individuals and healthcare providers with difficult, ambivalent decisions. Genetic responsibility (GR) has become a key concept in both ethical and socioempirical literature addressing how and by whom decision-making with respect to the morality of GI is approached. However, despite its prominence, the precise meaning of the concept of GR remains vague. Therefore, we conducted a systematic literature review on the usage of the concept of GR in qualitative, socioempirical studies, to (...) identify the main interpretations and to provide conceptual clarification. The review identified 75 studies with primarily an Anglo-American setting. The studies focused on several agents: the individual, the family, the parent, the healthcare professional, and the institution and refer to the concept of GR on the basis of either a rational/principle-oriented approach or an affective/relational approach. A subtype of the rational/principle-oriented approach is the reactive approach. The review shows how the concept of GR is useful for analyzing and theorizing about socioempirical findings within qualitative socioempirical studies and also reveals conceptual deficits in terms of insufficient theoretical accuracy and heterogeneity, and in the rarity of reflection on cultural variance. The vagueness and multiplicity of meanings for GR in socioempirical studies can be avoided by more normative-theoretical explication of the underlying premises. This would provide a higher degree of differentiation of empirical findings. Thereby, the complex findings associated with the individual and social implications of genetic testing in empirical studies can be better addressed from a theoretical point of view and can subsequently have a stronger impact on normative and policy debates. (shrink)

Drawing on Butler’s theoretical background, research on the ethics of violence has focused on the importance of dominant society-wide schemes and norms in building individuals’ moral sense of violence. Studies explain how violence is normalized and made socially acceptable. In our analysis, we build on the pragmatic sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot that places particular importance on the fact that fairness must always be appreciated in situations and provide a “grammar” to describe competing normative approaches. Studying rugby, we show how (...) the different market players (consumers, broadcasters, journalists) justify the violence that occurs during rugby matches. We contribute to the literature on the ethics of violence by providing a pragmatic understanding of violence. We contribute to the economies of worth by investigating violence in a regime of justice and justification work in a reality test (in contrast to a test of worth). This understanding of violence enables us to offer some recommendations to encourage more responsible justification work about violence. (shrink)

This book represents emerging alternative perspectives to the "constructivist" orthodoxy that currently dominates the field of science and technology studies. Various contributions from distinguished Americans and Europeans in the field, provide arguments and evidence that it is not enough simply to say that science is "socially situated." Controversial Science focuses on important political, ethical, and broadly normative considerations that have yet to be given their due, but which point to a more realistic and critical perspective on science policy.

This research investigates sociological ambivalence in negotiating care work in Japanese families. Women and their aging parents experience ambivalence based on conflicting norms of filial obligation, gender ideology, and cultural beliefs about the parent—child bond. Analysis of in-depth interview data showed ambivalence was based on conflict between norms and cultural beliefs and intergenerational differences in norms of caregiving. Not only are norms of care work in Japan gendered, but they also create conflicting demands for women who (...) are torn among providing care for their parents, providing care for their in-laws, and changing expectations for women in contemporary Japan. In the families studied, norms of filial obligation were challenged, but gendered definitions of care work were left largely intact. These findings challenge theories of elder care that identify a hierarchy of preferred caregivers based on filial obligation and gender. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman's sociology has had a paradoxical reception, widespread, yet elusive. Partly this is due to its diversity, partly due to Bauman's style, which is often provocative rather than soothing. Whatever the case, Bauman's work is among the most important sources for critical sociology today. This exploratory essay, a flag for a book in progress called Modernity as Ambivalence - Zygmunt Bauman's Sociology indicates some key co-ordinates: modernity and the postmodern, sociology and socialism, Marxism and after, via a scanner (...) of some of the major works, especially Legislators and Interpreters, through Modernity and Ambivalence. Bauman's work is evocative not only because of its critical or historical sensibilities, but also because of its existential and anthropological clues. (shrink)

"This interesting volume of essays on contemporary religion and its ambivalent relationship to modernity not only serves as a testimony to the intellectual influence of Robert Bellah, it establishes a new school of comparative religious and social thought. This Bellahian school--at the intersection of sociological, theological, and contemporary philosophical thinking--has roots in Durkheim and Weber, borrows insights from Marx, Foucault, and Bourdieu, and finds its clearest voice in the writings of Bellah himself. The essays by some of Bellah's colleagues (...) and former students that have been gathered in this volume address some of the most sagacious of these Bellahian themes: the religious dimension of contemporary civil societies, the relationship between religious and capitalist values, the cultural critique of modernity, and the moral visions that hold a promise of civic renewal."—Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (California, 2000). "This highly readable collection of original, thought-provoking essays by leading scholars provides fresh insights into the issues that Robert Bellah has addressed so fruitfully in his long career. Readers will learn much about such issues as how Calvinism contributed to political revolution, why democracies require an enlarged sense of political community, how the religious foundations of Japan and the United States differ, and what it means to be a Christian and an American."—Benton Johnson, coauthor of Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Protestant Baby Boomers (1994) and author of Functionalism in Modern Sociology: Understanding Talcott Parsons (1975). (shrink)

The ambivalence of human-animal-relationships culminates in our eating habits; most people disapprove of factory farming, but most animal products that are consumed come from factory farming. While psychology and sociology offer several theoretical explanations for this phenomenon our study presents an experimental approach: an attempt to challenge people’s attitude by confronting them with the animals’ perspective of the consumption process. We confronted our participants with a fictional scenario that could result in them being turned into an animal. In the (...) scenario, a wicked fairy forces them to choose a ticket. Depending on their choice of ticket they have equal chances of becoming a human being with a certain consumption behaviour (meat eater, organic eater, vegetarian, vegan) or, correspondingly, becoming a certain kind of animal (factory farmed meat animal, organically farmed meat animal, animal for dairy/egg production, free living animal). Our results indicate a strong discrepancy between people’s actual consumption habits (mostly regular meat eaters) and their choices in the experiment (strong preferences for the organic or vegan life style). The data reveal a broad spectrum of explanations for people’s decisions in the experiment. We investigated the influence of four different factors on the participant’s choices in addition to reasons they gave as open-ended answers. Correspondingly, different coping strategies to overcome the tension (cognitive dissonance) between real-life consumption choices and attitudes towards nonhuman animals could be detected. Furthermore, many participants indicated a lack of knowledge concerning living conditions in farming but also concerning capacities and properties of nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Given the contemporary ambivalent standpoints toward the future of artificial intelligence, recently denoted as the phenomenon of Singularitarianism, Gregory Bateson’s core theories of ecology of mind, schismogenesis, and double bind, are hereby revisited, taken out of their respective sociological, anthropological, and psychotherapeutic contexts and recontextualized in the field of Roboethics as to a twofold aim: the proposal of a rigid ethical standpoint toward both artificial and non-artificial agents, and an explanatory analysis of the reasons bringing about such a polarized (...) outcome of contradictory views in regard to the future of robots. Firstly, the paper applies the Batesonian ecology of mind for constructing a unified roboethical framework which endorses a flat ontology embracing multiple forms of agency, borrowing elements from Floridi’s information ethics, classic virtue ethics, Felix Guattari’s ecosophy, Braidotti’s posthumanism, and the Japanese animist doctrine of Rinri. The proposed framework wishes to act as a pragmatic solution to the endless dispute regarding the nature of consciousness or the natural/artificial dichotomy and as a further argumentation against the recognition of future artificial agency as a potential existential threat. Secondly, schismogenic analysis is employed to describe the emergence of the hostile human–robot cultural contact, tracing its origins in the early scientific discourse of man–machine symbiosis up to the contemporary countermeasures against superintelligent agents. Thirdly, Bateson’s double bind theory is utilized as an analytic methodological tool of humanity’s collective agency, leading to the hypothesis of collective schizophrenic symptomatology, due to the constancy and intensity of confronting messages emitted by either proponents or opponents of artificial intelligence. The double bind’s treatment is the mirroring “therapeutic double bind,” and the article concludes in proposing the conceptual pragmatic imperative necessary for such a condition to follow: humanity’s conscience of habitualizing danger and familiarization with its possible future extinction, as the result of a progressive blurrification between natural and artificial agency, succeeded by a totally non-organic intelligent form of agency. (shrink)

The noble aim of sociologists to "tell the truth" has sometimes involved ignoble assumptions about human beings. In this major discussion of truth in the social science, Ross Abbinnett traces the debate on truth from the "objectifying powers" of Kant through more than 200 years of critique and reformulation to the unraveling of truth by Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida. Truth and Social Science gives students an exciting and accessible guide to the main sociological treatments of truth and can also (...) be read as an account of the collapse of modernity and the rise of new forms of thought, which treat difference and ambivalence as positive values. The book will be of interest to students of sociology, social theory, and philosophy. (shrink)

Given the contemporary ambivalent standpoints toward the future of artificial intelligence, recently denoted as the phenomenon of Singularitarianism, Gregory Bateson’s core theories of ecology of mind, schismogenesis, and double bind, are hereby revisited, taken out of their respective sociological, anthropological, and psychotherapeutic contexts and recontextualized in the field of Roboethics as to a twofold aim: (a) the proposal of a rigid ethical standpoint toward both artificial and non-artificial agents, and (b) an explanatory analysis of the reasons bringing about such (...) a polarized outcome of contradictory views in regard to the future of robots. Firstly, the paper applies the Batesonian ecology of mind for constructing a unified roboethical framework which endorses a flat ontology embracing multiple forms of agency, borrowing elements from Floridi’s information ethics, classic virtue ethics, Felix Guattari’s ecosophy, Braidotti’s posthumanism, and the Japanese animist doctrine of Rinri. The proposed framework wishes to act as a pragmatic solution to the endless dispute regarding the nature of consciousness or the natural/artificial dichotomy and as a further argumentation against the recognition of future artificial agency as a potential existential threat. Secondly, schismogenic analysis is employed to describe the emergence of the hostile human–robot cultural contact, tracing its origins in the early scientific discourse of man–machine symbiosis up to the contemporary countermeasures against superintelligent agents. Thirdly, Bateson’s double bind theory is utilized as an analytic methodological tool of humanity’s collective agency, leading to the hypothesis of collective schizophrenic symptomatology, due to the constancy and intensity of confronting messages emitted by either proponents or opponents of artificial intelligence. The double bind’s treatment is the mirroring “therapeutic double bind,” and the article concludes in proposing the conceptual pragmatic imperative necessary for such a condition to follow: humanity’s conscience of habitualizing danger and familiarization with its possible future extinction, as the result of a progressive blurrification between natural and artificial agency, succeeded by a totally non-organic intelligent form of agency. (shrink)

An early work in which Baudrillard became Baudrillard. When Fatal Strategies was first published in French in 1983, it represented a turning point for Jean Baudrillard: an utterly original, and for many readers, utterly bizarre book that offered a theory as proliferative, ecstatic, and hallucinatory as the postmodern world it endeavored to describe. Arguing against the predetermined outcomes of dialectical thought with his renowned, wry, ambivalent passion, with this volume Jean Baudrillard mounted an attack against the “false problems” posed by (...) Western philosophy. If his Marxist days were firmly behind him, Baudrillard here indicated that metaphysics had also gone the way of sociology and politics: the contemporary world demanded nothing less than Pataphysics, Alfred Jarry's absurdist philosphy that described the laws of the universe supplementary to this one. In effect, with Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard became Baudrillard. In his extrapolationist manner, Baudrillard sought to replace Western philosophy's circular arguments with a ritualistic Theater of Cruelty. Using this line of thought developed in Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard went on, throughout the 1980s, to find new and shatteringly accurate ways of discussing American corporatocracy, arms build-up, and hostage taking. Fatal Strategies asserts a profound critique of American politics, and it is an important step towards his examination of evil.Jean Baudrillard was a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity who challenged all existing theories of contemporary society with humor and precision. An outsider in the French intellectual establishment, he was internationally renowned as a twenty-first century visionary, reporter, and provocateur. His Simulations instantly became a cult classic and made him a controversial voice in the world of politics and art. (shrink)

Interviews with 41 nonbinary individuals reveal a considerable amount of ambivalence among nonbinary people regarding transgender identification. There is also disagreement about which model of transgender legitimacy determines group membership: the binary and medicalized model or the umbrella model. Those who do not identify as transgender either do not consider themselves to be “trans enough” to claim group membership alongside trans men and trans women or otherwise consider their gender experience to be qualitatively different from the transgender experience. Meanwhile, (...) those who do identify as transgender credit the umbrella model as authoritative while acknowledging that their claims to group membership are often resisted by those who uphold the binary transgender model. Finally, those who defy an easy yes/no transgender categorization schema qualify their transgender identification with admissions of doubt that they are really “trans enough” to claim the label or through linguistic practices that position themselves as tangentially transgender or as distinctly nonbinary transgender. This range of responses illuminates the diverse gender identities that coexist among nonbinary people that cannot be neatly sorted into a man/woman or cisgender/transgender binary. Research on the sociology of gender must expand beyond both of these binary frameworks to reflect the reality of gender diversity. (shrink)

This article differentiates between three different axes of conflict in world risk society. The first axis is that of ecological conflicts, which are by their very essence global. The second is global financial crises, which, in a first stage, can be individualized and nationalized. And the third, which suddenly broke upon us on September 11th, is the threat of transnational terror networks, which empowers governments and states. Two sets of implications are drawn: first, there are the political dynamics of world (...) risk society. In an age where trust and faith in God, class and progress have largely disappeared, humanity's common fear has proved the last - ambivalent - resource for making new bonds. Second, the methodological nationalism that preoccupies the sociological imagination has to be overcome and a `methodological cosmopolitism' has to be created. (shrink)

This article differentiates between three different axes of conflict in world risk society. The first axis is that of ecological conflicts, which are by their very essence global. The second is global financial crises, which, in a first stage, can be individualized and nationalized. And the third, which suddenly broke upon us on September 11th, is the threat of transnational terror networks, which empowers governments and states. Two sets of implications are drawn: first, there are the political dynamics of world (...) risk society. In an age where trust and faith in God, class and progress have largely disappeared, humanity's common fear has proved the last - ambivalent - resource for making new bonds. Second, the methodological nationalism that preoccupies the sociological imagination has to be overcome and a `methodological cosmopolitism' has to be created. (shrink)

Western society today is less unified by a set of core values than ever before. Undoubtedly, the concept of moral consensus is a difficult one in a liberal, democratic and pluralistic society. But it is imperative to avoid a rigid majoritarianism where sensitive personal values are at stake, as in bioethics. Bioethics has become an influential part of public and professional discussions of health care. It has helped frame issues of moral values and medicine as part of a more general (...) effort to find consensus about some of the most perplexing questions of our time. But why is it thought that a moral consensus is important or that it deserves respect? How does moral consensus acquire legitimacy in a society that includes diverse value systems? How is moral consensus possible and how do small groups help create or distort consensus processes? Written by a medical school professor trained in philosophy, this timely work tackles these questions from philosophical, historical, and social scientific standpoints. It begins by describing the traditional ambivalence about consensus in Western culture as well as the uncertain relationship in modernity between consensus and expertise. After outlining the current bioethical consensus, the book gives philosophical and political analyses of the idea of consensus, then assesses the role of consensus in national ethics commissions and in the ethics committee movement. Moreno constructs an original, naturalistic philosophy of moral consensus, referred to as "bioethical naturalism", and then applies sociology and social psychology to actual consensus processes. The book concludes with an account of bioethics as a consensus-oriented social reform movement. This insightful volume will be essential reading for bioethicists, philosophers, physicians, members of ethics committees, and all those concerned with ethical and social issues in health care. (shrink)