Next SectionWainwright and Gallagher propose that when child protection concerns emerge significant difficulties arise for General Practitioners because of conflicts between the individual interests of children and parents who are their patients and the Paramountcy Principle. From a psychodynamic perspective their analysis does not give sufficient weight to the nature of personal as opposed to interpersonal conflict of a conscious or unconscious nature. When issues of major import arise, ordinary parenting inevitably involves parents in putting their children's needs first if (...) competing possibilities occur. It is an over-simplification to present this as a conflict between the interests of children and parents. Parents' own best interests are served by securing their children's safety and welfare. An appreciation of this is crucial in order to implement child protection procedures appropriately. Errors may occur because the complex emotions and relationships involved lead professionals to experience themselves as potential agents of harm rather than benefit. (shrink)

Evaluative and normative terms and concepts are often said to be "essentially contestable". This notion has been used in political and legal theory and applied ethics to analyse disputes concerning the proper usage of terms like democracy, freedom, genocide, rape, coercion, and the rule of law. Many philosophers have also thought that essential contestability tells us something important about the evaluative in particular. Gallie (who coined the term), for instance, argues that the central structural features of essentially contestable concepts secure (...) their evaluativeness. I'll argue that these (widely held) central features are exemplified by many evaluative and non-evaluative terms alike, owing to more general factors (such as multidimensionality) which have nothing in particular to do with being evaluative. The role of these factors in semantic interpretation is subject to a certain kind of "metasemantic" disputes which have the features of the disputes characteristically admitted by essentially contestable concepts (whether evaluative or not) and which can be similarly substantive and worthwhile. In closing I'll discuss how my argument shows that our understanding of evaluative disagreement needs refinement. The overall upshot is that essential contestability shows nothing deep or distinctive about the evaluative in particular. (shrink)

Discourse and rhetoric of service-user involvement are pervasive in all mental health services that see themselves as promoting a Recovery ethos. Yet, for the service-user movement internationally, ‘Recovery’ was articulated as an alternative discourse of overcoming and resisting an institutionalized and oppressive psychiatric model of care. Power is all pervasive within mental health services yet often overlooked in official discourse on user-involvement. Critical research is required to expose the unacknowledged structural and power constraints on participants. My research problematizes practices of (...) user involvement in one mental health service area in Ireland. Part I of this article examines the background context of policies and practices of user-involvement from the service-user perspective and explains developments in relation to service-user involvement in the case of Ireland. Participants in my study articulate their motivation for engagement with mental health service reform in terms of the right to participate in social justice terms, of wanting to improve services and humanise care. Power dynamics emerge as one of the primary obstacles to equitable involvement. Part II of this article presents an explanatory framework of power, using a model developed in the field of development studies; Gaventa’s (2006) ‘power cube.’ The three dimensions of the cube represent the forms, spaces and levels of power. The explanatory potential of this model to highlight how hidden and invisible power operates in mental health services is illustrated by selected comments from the same participants. The power cube is a useful tool to illuminate the dynamics occurring in service-user involvement spaces. Showing how different forms of power operate in the spaces and levels of mental health involvement can develop service-users’ awareness of the hidden and invisible aspects of power. Through this awareness, they can strategize around their potential to influence decision-making in mental health services. (shrink)

The concept of agency, although central to many sociological debates, has remained frustratingly elusive to pin down. This article is an attempt to open up what has been called the "black box" of personal agency by distinguishing clearly between two contrasting conceptions of the phenomenon. These two conceptions are very apparent in the manner in which the concept is defined in sociological reference works, resembling as it does a similar contrast in the treatment of the concept of power. The two (...) are referred to as type 1 and type 2 or the power of agency as compared with agentic power, the essential contrast being that the first refers to an actor's ability to initiate and maintain a program of action while the second refers to an actor's ability to act independently of the constraining power of social structure. The nature of these two forms of personal agency is then illustrated by referring to material taken from Weber's essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, this essay itself being understood as an argument that focuses on the crucial role played by an increase in the power of agency in ushering in the modern world. Finally, it is argued that these two conceptions of agency possess no given logical relationship with each other, it being perfectly possible for individuals to be possessed of considerable power of agency while lacking agentic power, and vice versa. It is therefore concluded that it is important, in all discussions of human agency, to distinguish clearly between these two forms. (shrink)

Over the past 10 years the sales of Fair Trade goods - particularly those carrying the Fair Trade Labelling Organizations International (FLO) certification mark - have grown exponentially. Academic interest in Fair Trade has also grown significantly over the past decade with researchers analysing the model from a wide range of theoretical perspectives. Whilst Fair Trade is generally acknowledged as a new supply chain model, it has tended to be studied at the micro/organisational level rather than at the macro/systems level. (...) As a consequence, its wider impact as institutional innovation at the field level appears to have been under-theorised so far. In order to address this research gap, this article uses a neo-institutionalist perspective to analyse Fair Trade not simply as a new exchange model working within existing organisational and economic structures, but rather as an agent of institutional entrepreneurship at, and beyond, the field level. From this latter perspective, Fair Trade brings a new set of transformational meanings to extant exchange and consumption models and reforms fields of economic exchange by disrupting and then re-assembling key institutional elements around modern consumption to roll back commodity fetishism and reconnect consumers and producers. The type of institutional change driven by Fair Trade can be seen as a form of social entrepreneurship. (shrink)

This synthesis of 5 prominent conflict management paradigms uses power differential as the single most contributing variable to their process and outcome of conflict. Efforts of scholars to integrate or synthesize conflict paradigms have been unsuccessful or clumsy by the scholars’ own assessments. The 5 selected paradigms represent an interdisciplinary set of normative and descriptive paradigms from different social contexts and intellectual frameworks. The 5 share the common traits of rival goals, three levels of socially constructed power differential, and outcomes (...) relative to the total value of the rival goal. An inverse relationship between power differential and the total value of conflict outcomes is supported by all 5 paradigms and empirical data. Explanatory metatheory is the methodology used for synthesis. An increase in power differential results in a decrease in total value of the rival goal. Power differential is constructed using Max Weber’s ideal-type method. The power differentials are abstracted from the paradigms themselves. Empirical work form secondary sources and case studies complete the analysis. (shrink)

What constitutes numerically one and the same tradition diachronically, at different times? This question is the focus of often violent dispute in societies. Is it capable of a rational resolution? Many accounts attempt that resolution with a diagnosis of ambiguity of the disputed concept-Islam, Marxism, or democracy for example. The diagnosis offered is in terms of vagueness, namely the vague criteria for sameness or similarity of central beliefs and practices.

Despite the variety of competing interpretations of domination, a common feature of the most influential analyses of the concept is their reliance on a normative criterion: the detrimental effect of domination on those subject to it. This article offers a non-evaluative, non-consequence-based definition of domination, in line with the perspective on power developed by the theory of the social exchange. Domination, it is argued, should be seen as a structural property of a power relation, and consists in an extreme inequality (...) in the social distribution of power. It is contended, accordingly, that the postulation of a society in which domination is avoided (or minimized) should rely on the ideal of the minimization of inequality, and, more specifically, that it should be based on a distributional pattern of maximally equal social resources. (shrink)

The concept of the ‘stakeholder’ has become central to business, yet there is no common consensus as to what the concept of a stakeholder means, with hundreds of different published definitions suggested. Whilst every concept is liable to be contested, for stakeholder research, this is problematic for both theoretical and empirical analysis. This article explores whether this lack of consensus is conceptual confusion, which would benefit from further debate to try to reach a higher degree of elucidation, or whether the (...) stakeholder concept is essentially contested, rendering the quest to seek a singular definition unfeasible. The theory of essentially contested concepts was proposed by Gallie (Proc Aristot Soc 56:167–198, 1956 ). The seven criteria Gallie prescribes for evaluating essentially contested concepts are applied to the stakeholder concept. The analysis suggests that this concept is an essentially contested concept and this explains the degree of definitional variation. (shrink)

The article defends ubuntu against the assault by Enslin and Horsthemke (Comp Educ 40(4):545–558, 2004 ). It challenges claims that the Africanist/Afrocentrist project, in which the philosophy of ubuntu is central, faces numerous problems, involves substantial political, moral, epistemological and educational errors, and should therefore not be the basis for education for democratic citizenship in the South African context. The article finds coincidence between some of the values implicit in ubuntu and some of the values that are enshrined in the (...) constitution of South Africa and that on that basis argues that ubuntu has the potential to serve as a moral theory and a public policy. The educational upshot of this article’s argument is that South Africa’s educational policy framework not only places a high premium on ubuntu, which it conceives as human dignity, but it also requires the schooling system to promote ubuntu-oriented attributes and dispositions among the learners. The article finds similarities between ubuntu and bildung, whose key advocates, among others was German scholar and intellectual Wilhelm von Humboldt. It argues that it would be ethnocentric, and indeed silly to suggest that the ubuntu ethic of caring and sharing is uniquely African when some of the values which it seeks to promote can also be traced in various Eurasian philosophies. (shrink)

This paper argues that feminists have yet to develop a satisfactory account of power. Existing feminist accounts of power tend to have a one-sided emphasis either on power as domination or on power as empowerment. This conceptual one-sided-ness must be overcome if feminists are to develop an account complex enough to illuminate women's diverse experiences with power. Such an account is sketched here.

The lack of consistency between people’s engagement in ethical issues and their food choices has received considerable attention. Consumption as “choice” dominates this discourse, understood as decision-making at the point of purchase. But ideas concentrating on individual choice are problematic when trying to understand how social and ethical issues emerge and are dealt with in the practices of buying and eating food. I argue in this paper that “consumer choice” is better understood as a political ideology addressing a particular way (...) in which everyday practices can be directed so as to solve social problems. It is a way that makes questions of power particularly challenging. Some assume consumer sovereignty, emphasizing consumer choice as a reflection of neoliberal deregulation and commercialization. Others worry that ongoing changes increase consumers’ powerlessness. None of these seem to capture that there is active regulation, where public as well as commercial and civil actors are making strong efforts to make people do the right thing—voluntarily. Labeling is the key measure. In practice, the individualized and rationalized model of responsibility depends not only on market opportunities, but even political and social expectations and trust. People may lack concrete capabilities and power to follow up on moral calls, but they may also have a different understanding of who is responsible and what is a “good deed,” or their actions may, in a Foucauldian sense, represent resistance. The paper will, with examples from European empirical studies, discuss how mobilization as well as inertia and disinterest emerge within specific political constellations and practical contexts. (shrink)

I argue that law is not best considered an essentially contested concept. After first explaining the notion of essential contestability and disaggregating the concept of law into several related concepts, I show that the most basic and general concept of law does not fit within the criteria generally offered for essential contestation. I then buttress this claim with the additional explanation that essential contestation is itself a framework for understanding complex concepts and therefore should only be applied when it is (...) useful to gain a greater understanding of uses of the concept to which it is applied (adducing criteria for making such judgments of usefulness). With that in mind, I then show that applying the appellation of essential contestation to the concept of law does not helpfully illuminate the most general concept of law (usually of most interest to legal philosophers) and therefore it should not be used, while allowing that it might be more useful for the related concept of the rule of law. (shrink)

This dissertation shows how initial conditions play a special role in the explanation of contingent and irregular outcomes, including, in the form of geographic context, the special case of uneven development in the social sciences. The dissertation develops a general theory of this role, recognizes its empirical limitations in the social sciences, and considers how it might be applied to the question of uneven development. The primary purpose of the dissertation is to identify and correct theoretical problems in the study (...) of uneven development; it is not intended to be an empirical study. Chapter 1 introduces the basic problem, and discusses why it has become especially salient in debates concerning uneven development. Chapter 2 develops an argument for the importance of initial conditions in the philosophy of science, developed specifically in the context of the Bhaskar/Cartwright ‘open systems’ (and by extension, ‘exogenous factor’) emphasis on the ubiquity of contingency in the universe and rejection of explanation based on laws of nature (regularity accounts) of causation. Chapter 3 makes three claims concerning the concept of contingency, especially as related to the study of society: 1) that there are eight distinct uses of the word contingency, and its many meanings are detrimental to clarity of discussion and thought in history and the social sciences; 2) that it is possible to impose some order on these different uses through developing a classification of contingency into three types based on assumptions concerning possible worlds and determinism; 3) that one of the classes is a special use of the word without relevance to the social sciences, while the two remaining classes are nothing more than a variety of the ‘no hidden factors’ argument in the debate on indeterminism and determinism (and thus related to the concept of spacetime trajectories caused by initial conditions and the interference of these in the form of ‘exogenous factors’ with ‘open systems’). Chapter 4 The concept of explanation based on initial conditions together with laws of nature is widely associated with determinism. In the social sciences determinism has frequently been rejected due to the moral dilemmas it is perceived as presenting. Chapter 4 considers problems with this view. Chapter 5 considers attitudes among geographers, economists, and historians towards using geographic factors as initial conditions in explanation and how they might acceptably be used, in particular their role in ‘anchoring’ aspatial theories of social processes to real-world distributions. Chapter 6 considers the relationship of the statistical methods common in development studies with the trend towards integrating geographical factors into econometric development studies. It introduces the statistical argument on ‘apparent populations’ that arrives at conclusions concerning determinism consistent with Chapters 2 and 3 of the dissertation. The need for the visual interpretation of data with descriptive statistics and maps and their utility in the study of uneven development is discussed with a number of examples. Chapter 7 applies these concepts to the ‘institutions versus geography’ debate in development studies, using Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson’s 2002 ‘reversal of fortune’ argument as a primary example. Chapter 8 considers possible directions for future work, both theoretical and empirical. Chapter 9 concludes with a discussion of additional possible objections to the use of initial conditions as exogenous factors in explanation. (shrink)

Ethics are, of course, a fundamental part of professional practice. There are different philosophical schools of thought relating to ethics and, although there are often degrees of overlap, they are characterized more by difference than harmony. Among these philosophical schools, one school that has received relatively little attention in the professional literature (and a waning level of interest in the philosophical literature) is that of existentialism. This article outlines some of the main points of ethical theory in the works of (...) Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the founders of existentialist thought, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the best known of the existentialist thinkers, as well as other contributors to existentialist thought. Possible developments in existentialist ethical theory since the time of Sartre are also sketched out, and these are linked to contemporary social work concerns. (shrink)

Both modernist and post-modern social criticism of power presuppose that agents frequently consent to power relations, which a political theorist may wish to critique. This raises the question: from what normative position can one critique power which is, as a sociological fact, legitimate in the eyes of those who reproduce it? This paper argues that "symbolic violence" is a useful metaphor for providing such a normative grounding. In order to provide an epistemological basis of critique, it is further argued that (...) social actors have multiple interpretative horizons available to them as part of their everyday social practices. Thus, they are not caught in a preconstituted web of meaning from which there is no escape, as is sometimes implicit in the over-socialized perceptions of agency associated with post-modernism. (shrink)

This essay examines the controversy over the attempt to establish rules governing global capital flows in the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), which became a target of “antiglobalization” activism. Making sense of the activists' concerns about the MAI requires understanding how the emergence of transnational standards in contemporary globalization constitutes an exercise in power. I develop the concept of “network power” to explain the way in which the rise of a single coordinating standard for global activity can be experienced as (...) coercive, as it eclipses alternative standards and abrogates the genuinely free choice among different conventions. Using a network‐power analysis, I reinterpret the controversy over the MAI as a concern about the processes by which neoliberal globalization is being brought about. (shrink)

After recognizing that technologies are socially constructed, questions arise concerning how technologies should be constructed, by what processes, and granting how much influence to whom. Because partisanship, uncertainty, and disagreement are inevitable in trying to answer these questions, reconstructivist scholarship should embrace the desirability of thoughtful partisanship, should focus on strategies for coping intelligently with uncertainties, and should make central the study of social processes for coping with disagreement regarding technoscience and its utilization. That often will entail siding with have-nots, (...) meaning that reconstructivist scholars often will be opposing the behaviors of government, business, and technoscientific elites. Because reconstructivists normally will be outnumbered, we need to devote more systematic professional attention to setting our collective agenda concerning what is most worth researching. (shrink)

This article explores the difficulties raised for social scientific investigation by the absence of experiment, critically reviewing realist responses to the problem such as those offered by Bhaskar, Collier and Sayer. It suggests that realist arguments for a shift from prediction to explanation, the use of abstraction, and reliance upon interpretive forms of investigation fail to demonstrate that these approaches compensate for the lack of experimental control. Instead, it is argued that the search for regularities, when suitably conceived, provides the (...) best alternative to experiment for the social sciences. (shrink)

I develop an egalitarian account of what's objectionable about coercion. The account is rooted in the idea that certain relationships, like those of master to slave or lord to peasant, are relationships of subordination or domination. These relationships are morally objectionable. Such relationships are in part constituted by asymmetries of power. A master subordinates a slave because the master has more power over the slave than vice versa. Coercion is objectionable, I argue, because it creates such asymmetries of power and (...) so creates relationships of subordination. This account, moreover, illuminates what's wrong with blackmail, exploitation, withholding aid, and compulsion. (shrink)

Some take seriously the possibility of artificial intelligence (AI) takeover, where AI systems seize power in a way that leads to human disempowerment. Assessing the likelihood of takeover requires answering empirical questions about the future of AI technologies and the context in which AI will operate. In many cases, philosophers are poorly placed to answer these questions. However, some prior questions are more amenable to philosophical techniques. What does it mean to speak of AI empowerment and human disempowerment? And what (...) empirical claims must hold for the former to lead to the latter? In this paper, I address these questions, providing foundations for further evaluation of the likelihood of takeover. (shrink)

Since management is about influencing - influencing people who work in the organization, the structure and practices of the organization, as well as its environment - how ‘influencing’ is understood evidently makes a huge difference. The still popular empiricist concept of cause-effect relations as presupposing regularities is mistaken, since it forms no sufficient basis for action in new and unique situations. As alternative notions of causation, the paper discusses the Critical Realist conception of causal powers and the counterfactual conditional view, (...) arguing that the classical notion of power (dunamis in Greek; power, potentiality, possibility, ability, capacity, capability in English) offers the most fruitful analysis of causal relations for managerial purposes. The paper presents the four ontological features of power scrutinised already by Aristotle in his Metaphysics and Physics, and actively discussed in current philosophy of science. These are the potentiality-actuality distinction, full power as consisting of an active and a receptive component, the distinction of rational and non-rational powers, and the idea of hierarchy of powers. These ontological distinctions suit management contexts not only because they allow room for new unique decision-making situations, but primarily because they imply invaluable practical advice. The relevance of the power ontology for management is illustrated in the context of the Bohm and the new Timeout dialogue. The paper concludes with a summary of the practical implications of the classical power ontology to management and the adoption of dialogical practices to managerial expertise. (shrink)

Recognition is one of the most ambivalent concepts in political and social thought. While it is a condition for individual freedom, the subject’s demand for recognition can be exploited as an instrument for reproducing domination. Axel Honneth addresses this issue and offers the concept of ideological recognition: Recognition is ideological when the addressees accept it from their subjective point of view but is unjustified from an objective point of view. Using the examples of the recognition of femininity, I argue that (...) Honneth’s account fails not only to offer the objective normative standard that delineates between morally justified and unjustified recognition, but also to descriptively explain why the addressees of ideological recognition accept their identities as having positive qualities. To overcome these problems, I provide an alternative, epistemic structural account. First, my account offers the concept of epistemic trust and identifies the objective injustice that Honneth’s account cannot capture. Second, my account offers the concept of structural power and discusses the problem of internalization of problematic identities. Furthermore, I argue that epistemic structural account has theoretical and practical benefits for analyzing domination and advancing the task of critique by explaining the ideological recognition in the case of racial identity, for example. (shrink)

The emerging discourse of hopeful tourism (Hunter 1997; Lee et al. 2017; Pritchard, Morgan, and Ateljevic 2011; Sampaio, Thomas, and Font 2012; Schultz et al. 2005; Tolkach, Pratt, and Zeng 2017) h...

Sociologists have long studied the ways people resist oppression but have devoted far less empirical attention to the ways people resign to it. As a result, researchers have neglected the mechanisms of resignation and how people narrate their lived experiences. Drawing on 81 interviews with parents with past child protective services cases, this article provides an empirical account of resignation in an institutional setting, documenting how parents understand relinquishing their rights as a process of personalization, calculation, or socialization. Phenomenologically, parents (...) typically confronted multiple barriers and setbacks simultaneously, the combined weight of which pressured them to “give up,” interpreting structural and institutional pressures as individual choice. This article accordingly identifies resignation as a crucial feature of democratic governance. (shrink)

I propose a new concept of solidarity, which I call “solidarity from below,” that highlights an aspect of solidarity widely recognized in popular uses of the term, but which has hitherto been neglected in the philosophical literature. Solidarity from below is the collective ability of otherwise powerless people to organize themselves for transformative social change. I situate this concept with respect to four distinct but intertwined questions that have motivated extant theorizing about solidarity. I explain what it means to conceptualize (...) solidarity from below as a form of power, rather than as a feeling, disposition, duty, or scheme of social arrangements. Finally, I suggest that the moral-relational aspects of solidarity emerge secondarily from the process of collective power, and not the other way around. (shrink)

Social scientists, political scientists and philosophers debate key concepts such as democracy, power and autonomy. Contested concepts like these pose questions: Are terms such as “democracy” hopelessly ambiguous? How can two theorists defend alternative accounts of democracy without talking past each other? How can we understand debates in which theorists disagree about what democracy is? This paper first discusses the popular strategy to answer these questions by appealing to Rawls’s distinction between concepts and conceptions. According to this approach, defenders of (...) rival conceptions of, e.g. justice can disagree without talking past each other because they share the concept of justice. It is argued that this idea is attractive but limited in application and that it fails to do justice to the dynamic and normative aspects of concept formation. Reflective equilibrium is then suggested as an alternative approach. It replaces the static contrast between a conceptual ‘core’ and competing conceptions by a dynamic perspective of concept formation as a partly normative undertaking: pre-theoretic language use and commitments can provide a shared starting point for developing alternative accounts which yield different concepts of, e.g. justice. This perspective provides a new understanding of how it is possible that different theorists defend rival accounts of, e.g. justice, without talking past each other. (shrink)

During the second half of the 20th century education has been recognized as a human right in several international conventions, and the UN also holds that “Education shall be free” and that “Elementary education shall be compulsory” (UN, 1948, Article 26). The education-as-a-human right-project could be viewed as a good intention of global inclusion in recognizing that all individuals have a right to education in virtue of being humans, and the idea of education as a human right thus has a (...) tremendous global significance. However, if we look at this more critically, the education-as-a-human right-project, may not only be grounded in altruistic good intensions for the disadvantaged. The term “elementary education”, or sometimes “primary education”, which is used in several human rights-documents seems to suggest that it is some sort of formalized education. It would be useful however to make a distinction between formal and informal education, as well as between teaching, learning, education and schooling, in the discussion of the right to education and specifically in the discussion concerning education as a “human right”. There is obviously a difference between the right to teach, the right to learn, the right to education and the right to schooling. And how are these rights related to compulsory schooling, compulsory education and the supposed duty to teach and duty to learn? A further concern is what makes this a human right rather than for example a juridical right as a citizen. By addressing these questions within a theoretical framework of social ontology and ameliorative conceptual analysis I believe that we can find new ways of dealing with fundamental problems within philosophy of education such as the nature, purpose and aims of education as well as the right to education. (shrink)

The ethics of artificial intelligence is an upcoming field of research that deals with the ethical assessment of emerging AI applications and addresses the new kinds of moral questions that the advent of AI raises. The argument presented in this article is that, even though there exist different approaches and subfields within the ethics of AI, the field resembles a critical theory. Just like a critical theory, the ethics of AI aims to diagnose as well as change society and is (...) fundamentally concerned with human emancipation and empowerment. This is shown through a power analysis that defines the most commonly addressed ethical principles and topics within the field of AI ethics as either to do with relational power or with dispositional power. Moreover, it is concluded that recognizing AI ethics as a critical theory and borrowing insights from the tradition of critical theory can help the field forward. (shrink)

This article challenges the association between realist methodology and ideals of legitimacy. Many who seek a more “realistic” or “political” approach to political theory replace the familiar orientation towards a state of justice with a structurally similar orientation towards a state of legitimacy. As a result, they fail to provide more reliable practical guidance, and wrongly displace radical demands. Rather than orienting action towards any state of affairs, I suggest that a more practically useful approach to political theory would directly (...) address judgments, by comparing the concrete possibilities for action faced by real political actors. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been recently conceptualized and studied as a political phenomenon. Most debates in this scholarship have thus far focused on normative issues. Less attention has been paid to the explanatory potential of CSR research grounded in political theory and philosophy. In this article, we conduct a pragmatist reading of political scholarship on CSR and seek to deploy existing knowledge for research pursuing political explanation. We argue that the political ontologies that underlie scholarship on CSR can be (...) used to transform normative and descriptive research also for explanatory uses. We show how ontologies vary in terms of potential research objects and scopes of political explanation, and argue that the main types of political-ontological stances adopted in scholarship on CSR, foundational and post-foundational stances, offer explanatory analysis of different schematic guidelines. Our pragmatist reading of previous research and an empirical case illustration of political explanation of change in corporate responsibility in the biofuel industry demonstrate the opportunities, limitations, and challenges different political-ontological commitments provide for political explanation. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to a discussion in philosophy of technology by focusing on the epistemological status of the example. Of the various developments in the emerging, inchoate field of philosophy of technology, the “empirical turn” stands out as having left the most enduring mark on the trajectory contemporary research takes. From a historical point of view, the empirical turn can best be understood as a corrective to the overly “transcendentalizing” tendencies of “classical” philosophers of technology, such as Heidegger. (...) Empirically oriented philosophy of technology emphasizes actual technologies through case-study research into the formation of technical objects and systems and how they, for example, transform our perceptions and conceptions or pass on and propagate relations of power. This paper explores the point of convergence of classical and contemporary approaches by means of the notion of the “example” or “paradigm.” It starts with a discussion of the quintessential modern philosopher of technology, Martin Heidegger, and his thinking about technology in terms of the ontological difference. Heidegger’s framing of technology in terms of this difference places the weight of intelligibility entirely on the side of being, to such an extent that his examples become heuristic rather than constitutive. The second part of the paper discusses the methodological and epistemological import of the “example” and the form of intelligibility it affords. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Agamben, we argue that the example offers an alternative way of understanding the study of technologies from that of empirical case studies. (shrink)

Film festivals have become key agents in the movie business, with major competitive festivals enjoying outstanding importance. Based on this assumption, this paper focuses on the example of Germany and asks to what extent the Berlin International Film Festival offers a venue for domestic films, and which types of filmmakers, in particular, benefit from this springboard and gatekeeping mechanism. More precisely, given the diverging interests confronting the Berlinale as a platform for the film community, a quantitative program analysis was conducted (...) of the festival’s most significant sections (Competition, Panorama, Forum, Generation, Perspective German Cinema, Lola@Berlinale) from 1980 to 2016. The findings demonstrate that even good-faith efforts to strengthen domestic filmmaking in regard to weight and diversity have hardly changed the power structures that underlie the curatorial decision-making process. Respectively, the share of national film productions has been stagnating for many years. Moreover, female and young filmmakers are still broadly underrepresented. (shrink)

From the foundation of self-determination theory and existing literature on forms of power, we empirically explored relationships between followers’ perceptions of their leader’s use of various forms of power, followers’ self-reported motivational outlooks, and followers’ favorable work intentions. Using survey data collected from two studies of working professionals, we apply path analysis and hierarchical multiple regression to analyze variance among constructs of interest. We found that followers’ perceptions of hard power use by their leaders (i.e., reward, coercive, and legitimate power) (...) was often related to higher levels of sub-optimal motivation in followers (i.e., amotivation, external regulation, and introjected regulation). However, followers who perceived their leaders used soft power (i.e., expert, referent, and informational power) often experienced higher levels of optimal motivation (i.e., identified regulation and intrinsic motivation), but further investigation of soft power use is warranted. The quality of followers’ motivational outlooks was also related to intentions to perform favorably for their organizations. (shrink)

Although scholarship in the social construction of technology has contributed much to illuminating technological development, most work using this theoretical approach is committed to an agency-centered approach. SCOT scholars have made only limited contributions to illustrating the influence of social structures. In this article, the authors argue for the importance of structural concepts to understanding technological development. They summarize the SCOT conceptual framework defined by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker and survey some of the methodological and explanatory difficulties that arise (...) with their approach. Then the authors present concepts from organizational sociology and political economy that illuminate structural influences in shaping phenomena of interest to SCOT scholars. These structural concepts can be applied to the study of the design, development, and transformation of technology. The authors conclude that the limited amount of scholarship on structural factors in the social shaping of technological development presents numerous opportunities for research. (shrink)

Discursive deference in the governance of science and technology is rebalancing from expert analysis toward participatory deliberation. Linear, scientistic conceptions of innovation are giving ground to more plural, socially situated understandings. Yet, growing recognition of social agency in technology choice is countered by persistently deterministic notions of technological progress. This article addresses this increasingly stark disjuncture. Distinguishing between “appraisal” and “commitment” in technology choice, it highlights contrasting implications of normative, instrumental, and substantive imperatives in appraisal. Focusing on the role of (...) power, it identifies key commonalities transcending the analysis/participation dichotomy. Each is equally susceptible to instrumental framing for variously weak and strong forms of justification. To address the disjuncture, it is concluded that greater appreciation is required—in both analytic and participatory appraisal—to facilitating the opening up of governance commitments on science and technology. (shrink)

Constructivist technology studies have often cast government as one “social group” among many, reflecting a liberal pluralist view of politics. This article argues, in contrast, that due to the conceptions of citizenship conveyed by policy designs, governments have a special role to play in the shaping of new technologies. This argument is illustrated in the case of the controversial 1996 decision by the California Air Resources Board to significantly revise its electric vehicle program. The article shows that the board’s decision (...) changed the image of citizenship conveyed by its policy design, thus influencing the civic values embedded within electric vehicle technology. (shrink)

Two contrasting theories-actor-network theory and nondecision making-are separately applied to the same case study, namely, technologies for automatically identifying road vehicles. By this process, the strengths and weaknesses of each approach are highlighted: The actor-network approach is useful for understanding local processes but lacks tools for easily illuminating patterns across countries; by contrast, the concept of nondecision making is useful for explaining the general lack of implementation of technology for automatic vehicle identification but not for explaining variations between developments in (...) different countries. This study highlights the importance of attempting to compare theories by using the same case study. (shrink)

The past twenty years have been an incredibly productive period in science studies. Still, because recent work in science studies puts a spotlight on agency and enabling situa tions, many practitioners in the field ignore, underplay, or dismiss the possibility that historically established, structurally stable attributes of the world may systemically shape practice at the laboratory level. This article questions this general position. Draw ing on data from a participant observation study of a university biology laboratory, it describes five features (...) of the institutional landscape that shape this laboratory's practice. (shrink)

This article reviews arguments that, in the process of action formation and ascription, the relative status of the participants with respect to a projected action can adjust or trump the action stance conveyed by the linguistic form of the utterance. In general, congruency between status and stance is preferred, and linguistic form is a fairly reliable guide to action ascription. However incongruities between stance and status result in action ascriptions that are at variance with the action stance that is otherwise (...) conveyed in the turn. This argument is presented, first, in relation to epistemic status and stance where the process is argued to be both fundamental and universal across all declarative and interrogative utterances. Some consequences of this way of viewing action are discussed. The argument is then briefly extended to deontics and benefactives. (shrink)