`Fluid, readable and accessible ... I found the overall quality of the book to be excellent. It provides an overview of major (and preceding) developments in the field of science studies. It examines landmark works, authors, concepts and approaches ... I will certainly use this book as one of the course texts' Eileen Crist, Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society, Virginia Tech Science is at the heart of contemporary society and is therefore central to the social sciences. Yet science (...) studies has often encountered resistance from social scientists. This book attempts to remedy this by giving the most extensive, thorough and best argued account of the field and explaining to social scientists why science matters to them. This is a landmark book that demystifies science studies and successfully bridges the divide between social theory and the sociology of science. Illustrated with relevant, illuminating examples, it provides the ideal guide to science studies and social theory. (shrink)

What are the forces shaping the future of international green politics? This book provides an objective account of the basis of green arguments and their social and political implications. It offers a clear overview of the most pressing environmental threats.

This reconsideration of the descriptive and normative components of my earlier comparisons of Mencius and Aquinas suggests that the strengths of Aquinas’s account were highlighted while some of his shortcomings and the corresponding strengths in Mencius were missing. This is made clear by considering the treatment of their respective ideas about optimal human fulfillment and even clearer by considering their understanding of the relationship between theoretical and literary accounts of that fulfillment. The third subject, their different treatments of people’s failure (...) to attain fulfillment, is more complicated, however, and involves a set of truly vexing issues. (shrink)

A concern central to virtually all full-blooded instances of religious ethics is how persuasively to represent a world central to our fulfillment that far exceeds our normal understanding. The treatment of three kinds of language in an early Daoist text, the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), contains an especially profound discussion and expression of such persuasive presentations in religious ethics. This study examines it and concludes by viewing Dante's Commedia through the perspectives Zhuangzi's ideas and practices present.

An ethics of bewilderment, which differs dramatically from the more familiar ethics of ease, is best understood through poetic presentations. Using examples drawn from Chinese and Western sources—notably Du Fu and Dante—this inquiry treats bewilderment as both an emotion and a virtue. Both these forms of bewilderment involve an acknowledgment of how minimal is the ethical confidence we have, given the feelings we have and the judgments we must make, but they also extend in productive ways the implications of that (...) acknowledgment. (shrink)

A concern central to virtually all full-blooded instances of religious ethics is how persuasively to represent a world central to our fulfillment that far exceeds our normal understanding. The treatment of three kinds of language in an early Daoist text, the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), contains an especially profound discussion and expression of such persuasive presentations in religious ethics. This study examines it and concludes by viewing Dante's Commedia through the perspectives Zhuangzi's ideas and practices present.

Complex tensions define us, and that is why rational evaluative analysis and the deliberate application of principles to cases can, at best, claim to account for only a limited register in the full compass of ethical voice. Close analysis of brief texts from the "Mencius" and Dante's "Inferno" discloses in both an approach to ethical reflection that aims to expand the capacity for virtue, the ethical skillfulness exercised in response and evaluation, through affective engagement of the reader. This approach, a (...) kind of "re- flexive tropology," may involve us in a Han-tan walk. Nevertheless, if virtue and models of the self are interconnected, then right self-understanding is where the foundations of virtue are laid. Because the religious orientation calls into question the false fixities that inform ordinary activities and ordi- nary models of the self, it is crucial to the work of distinguishing among true and false forms of virtue. (shrink)

This article addresses issues of regulatory convergence and Europeanization as they have developed within the agrochemicals sector. Taking the United Kingdom as a case study, the article considers the continuing importance of local and national factors within systems that are ostensibly international and standardized. In particular, the article shows how the embedded social relations of regulatory science in the United Kingdom, including institutional practices, judgments of expertise, and established relationships of trust, result in a “nation centeredness” and divergence of regulatory (...) cultures despite the putative development of a harmonized European framework. It is argued that, as a consequence, the claimed universalism of scientific culture in this area is in tension with the local conditions of its practice and enactment. (shrink)

In the last decade, many arguments have emerged for encouraging public participation in environmental policy making and management While some have argued that, in democratic societies, people simply have a right to a participatory role, others base arguments for public participation on the idea that lay people may have access to knowledge which is unknown to officially sanctioned experts. Local people may count as experts about aspects of their neighbourhood or they may have insights into the behaviour of plant operators (...) that is thought to give rise to pollution. This paper reports on a novel empirical approach to analysing and capturing such 'lay' understandings. This technique, developed in ESRC-funded work in the UK, uses community mapping exercises in urban centres to produce spatial representations of local knowledges about air pollution and related problems of noise and odour. In the paper the technique is outlined, presenting data from the three-city case study. The paper concludes by assessing the ways in which participatory modelling can contribute to the local governance of air quality. (shrink)

The literature on the politics of science and on science policy is dominated by information about large and highly industrialized countries. For example, models of the different forms of science policy administration and management tend to derive from French, U.S., and British exemplars. Yet in the mid-1990s there is a growing number of small nations, all of which are seeking to harness research communities to the cause of socioeconomic development, while still extracting "value for money" from science budgets. This article (...) uses the case study approach—focusing on the political economy of the politics of science in the Irish Republic, chiefly since the 1950s-to analyze the problems faced by science policy agencies and the scientific community in small nations. The study offers analogies and possible insights into the politics of research policy in other small nations ; it also aims to throw light on emerging research policy trends even in bigger countries as the "bargain" between the funders and the performers of research becomes more and more explicit and increasingly subject to economic justifications. (shrink)

William James, concerned with the issue of the applicability of traditional religious virtues to modern society, argues for the significance of ascetic virtues in general and voluntary poverty in particular, not least because of their contribution to the actualization of benevolence. Examining and evaluating his account uncovers the ways in which James is a virtue theorist, some distinctive characteristics of religious virtues, and both the possibilities and difficulties in any modern defense of a traditional virtue that appears as odd as (...) does voluntary poverty. (shrink)