This article attempts to assess Mario Bunge’s important but widely neglected criticisms of dialectics. It begins by providing a contextualized interpretation of Friedrich Engels’s metaphysics of the dialectics of nature before embarking on a detailed discussion of Leon Trotsky’s and contemporary “dialectical” scientists’ views on materialist dialectics. It argues that while some of Bunge’s criticisms are eminently sensible, the principles underlying the works of dialectical scientists are compatible with Bunge’s emergentist and systemic approach and can shed light on such issues (...) as the levels of organization, the diachronic and synchronic aspects of emergence, and the individualism-holism-systemism trilemma. This article also submits that dialectics is best interpreted as a guideline for a philosophy of change instead of a magical wand that liberates the investigator from study of facts. Understood as something that serves heuristic purposes, dialectics can be sensibly utilized by scientists to shore up or refine their methodological principles and thereby to facilitate empirical research. (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)

The concept of social structure is ill defined in the literature despite the perennial problem and ongoing discussion about the relationship between agency and structure. In this paper I will provide an outline of what the term social structure means, but my main focus will be on emphasizing the value of the concept for nursing research and demonstrate how its erasure in some research negatively effects on our understanding of the nurses' role in clinical practice. For example, qualitative research in (...) nursing has largely focused on agency through such theories as phenomenology, hermeneutics, and symbolic interactionism. The result is that social structure may be erased or seen as epiphenomena of agency. My purpose is to provide a theoretical discussion of social structure and how such a discussion can help us to understand how nurses live and experience clinical practice. While not denying the importance of agency, I will argue that the thinned out approach to social structure places limits on our understanding of the constraints nurses experience in their working lives. The result is that nurses' attitudes and clinical failings are individualized, resulting in ever more calls for improved education, when a more thorough examination of structural issues may elucidate more fundamental problems. (shrink)

This paper combines the use of gift theory and the metatheory of the Morphogenetic Approach as a framework for the proposal that the relationship between unpaid interns and ‘employers’ may be conceptualized as a form of transactional, but asymmetrical, gift-exchange. The article begins by applying insights from gift theory to the findings of a range of studies into unpaid internships. It is argued that, while interns are the initial gift-givers in delivering unpaid labour, ‘employers’ often demonstrate weak reciprocation in terms (...) of offering paid work. Following that, the article combines gift analysis with the Morphogenetic Approach. This framework offers ontological depth to the substantive propositions of gift theory, and provides conceptual tools to study the interplay between structure/culture and agency that form the intern-‘employer’ relationship. The contribution of this article lies in the combined use of two key theoretical perspectives to a problematic not previously examined through such concepts. (shrink)

It is the intention here to ‘apply’ certain meta-concepts from Owen’s [2014] Genetic-Social framework together with some ‘new’ constructs, to the study of virtual and hybrid cyber-criminologies associated with Sheila Brown [2006, 2013]. It is strongly suggested that far from playing down or ignoring ‘the merging of the human and the technical through sociotechnical environments such as the dissolution of the body into information, disembodied entities, digitalizing the human, simulated consciousness and cybernetics’ [Brown, 2013:488], critics are correct to view this (...) ‘new’ school of criminological theorising as ‘old wine in new bottles’ [Brown, ibid]. It is argued here that Brown’s virtual/hybrid criminologies revolve around an under-theorised and reified concept of agency. Drawing upon the model of agency favoured in the Genetic-Social framework in which an actor is conceived as an entity capable of formulating and acting upon decisions, and incorporating selected insights from neuroscience which suggest that we need to reformulate the concept of agency as neuro-agency, in tandem with considering the ‘hybrid’ in terms of Heidegger’s Dasein, it is suggested that virtual and hybrid criminologies, in common with the related actor-network theories [Callon and Latour, 1981] and posthuman agency theories [Pickering, 1993, 1995a, 1995b, 2001] should be repudiated. It is contended here that we need a non-reified concept of agency which reflects the influence of neurons, and the mutuality between genes and environment, together with the concept from Heidegger [2010] that being is time. The so-called ‘merged’ human-technical hybrid in reality is an example of symbolic thinking. No machinery or cyborg has the capability of formulating and acting upon decisions without human programming, and no cyborg qualifies as Dasein. As Heidegger [ibid] suggests, to be is to exist temporally in the stretch between birth and death. In reality there is no ‘merging’ of the human and the technical. We also consider the implications for social policy inherent in Brown’s [2013: 488] contention that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish ‘human agency and culpability’ from ‘non-human objects and technology’. (shrink)

This article argues for the value of working with conflicts in social practice as resources for collaboration, learning and development. The interest in conflicts in social practice is rooted in a preoccupation with social power relations and how to understand and analyse power relations from a subject-science perspective. Following this interest, a methodological framework, best described as a kind of ‘mobile ethnography’, is discussed and exemplified through an empirical example. A preliminary conceptual framework for understanding power as a capacity for (...) action is presented. The overarching ambition of the article is to consider what democratic collaboration and coexistence entails and how it might be supported conceptually and analytically by the notion of conflicts as heuristics for social inquiry and by the notion of power as a capacity for action and social participation. (shrink)