It can be argued that Nancy Fraser's work integrates the concepts of recognition and redistribution by questioning the definition of the concept of recognition in order to bring it closer to the practical scope of redistribution. One of the difficulties raised by the concept of recognition is that it can appear as a kind of social monism by presenting culture as the main factor behind all social criticism, and thus, behind all kinds of claims and conflicts. However, it is possible (...) to acknowledge the theoretical significance of the economy as well. Instead of a monistic framework, we should adopt a dualistic one, founded less on the distinction between economy and culture than on the analysis of their imbrications. Both economy, and status as defined in cultural, ethnic, or sexual approaches to recognition, could work together to minimize the importance of the civil and political rights defended by liberal thinkers. (shrink)

In this article I undertake an analysis of erotic sexual intercourse - commonly, and more accurately, designated as love-making - in the spirit of Durkheim's social analysis of religion. Thus, based on a phenomenological semiotic analysis of the peculiar things we do and feel in the course of making love, I propose, first, to uncover the implicit `logic' that generates and governs these distinctly sociable doings and sociable feelings. Second, I proceed to suggest that the sameself logic, albeit in an (...) attenuated version, also generates and governs the broad class of `social occasions proper', and that this homology calls for gathering erotic and social occasions under one and the same rubric, which I propose to call the `socio-erotic' (since the term `social' has been denatured through overuse). Third, I conclude with a discussion of how socio-erotic domains fit into a larger world structured and governed mainly by interest-driven and power-driven conflictual fields. (shrink)

`The Clothes Have No Emperor' means to say that Bourdieu's criticism of American imperialism is an understandable slip of his brilliant visual sociology. He writes to those of a disposition to agree completely because they know the facts all the better. Bourdieu may well be the only person alive today who has so perfectly combined theoretical, empirical and political work. Why then has he allowed this critique to be published for all the world to see? Not, I think, because he (...) is wrong, but because the entailments of his own visual sociology do not translate well from place to place. Bourdieu has taught us that the sociology of social space is the next necessary step for those who would become public intellectuals. The question is how to think and speak of the world as such. Bourdieu has given us the outlines of a beginning, but this little essay in question shows that there is more work yet to be done. (shrink)

This article is concerned with Niklas Luhmann's theory of art which he formulated in the 1990s, based on his general theory of autopoietic systems. This theory regards modern society as a functionally differentiated formation whose sub-systems operate according to their inner principles of communication. According to this, the domain of art can also be seen as an operationally closed and self-referential communicative system. The basic problem in these notions lies in the way in which their description of the relationships existing (...) between different systems is only in very narrow terms. Consequently they partially ignore the present process of de-differentiation which has noticeably changed the status of art in society. Instead, Luhmann's ideas expressly emphasize that functional differentiation is an ongoing process. In order to describe the process of de-differentiation, social theory does not need to abandon the concept of autopoiesis, but it does need to understand social systems as interlaced formations which, to an increasing extent, contain common normative and organizational constituents. Because social systems are not altogether self-referential formations, the concept of autopoiesis can describe them only in part. This particular concept of system has been developed in particular by Richard Münch, and as such it forms a productive alternative to the theory of autopoietic social systems. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to shed light on Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of language. Although he has dedicated a significant part of his work to the study of language and even though his analysis of language has been extensively discussed in the literature, almost no attention has been paid to the fact that Bourdieu’s account of language is based on a number of ontological presuppositions, that is, on a set of universal assumptions about the very nature of language. (...) This article aims to fill this gap in the literature by offering a detailed overview of 10 key features which, from a Bourdieusian point of view, can be regarded as inherent in language. On the basis of this enquiry, the study seeks to demonstrate that—contrary to common belief—there is not only a Bourdieusian sociology of language but also a Bourdieusian philosophy of language, which provides a useful theoretical framework for examining the unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation. The paper draws to a close by reflecting on the flaws and limitations of Bourdieu’s approach to language. (shrink)

This article argues that the implications of the recent eclipse of the construct of the `primitive' for the practice of the human sciences have not been adequately pondered. It asks, therefore, why and how the myth of primitiveness has been sustained by the human sciences, and what purposes it has served for the modern West's self-understanding. To attempt to answer such a query, the article pursues two principal lines of inquiry. In order to appreciate what is potentially being lost, the (...) space that may be closing up as a result of the death of the `primitive', the first part of the article strives to demonstrate the latter's significance for the self-critique of modern ways of thinking and acting by historiographically reconstructing its changing roles within and representations by the human sciences. In the second section, it is contended that the eclipse of primitiveness has created a potentially problematic situation for the human sciences, since the cross-cultural mode of critique cultivated through this myth risks being neglected in a post-`primitive' age. All in all, then, the article claims that continued engagement with cultural alterity is essential for the human sciences after primitiveness, and that such an engagement can be sustained by an understanding of the different ways in which the `primitive' has been defined and has functioned over the course of the modern era. (shrink)

The study “Psychoanalysis—its image and its public” intimates that common sense is increasingly informed by science. But common sense asserts its autonomy and, in turn, may affect the trajectory of science. This is a process that leads to many differentiations—in common sense, in scientific innovation and in political and regulatory structures. Bauer and Gaskell's toblerone model of triangles of mediation provided a distillation of their reading of “La Psychanalyse.” Here it was argued that representations are multi-modal phenomena necessitating the use (...) of multiple methodologies .In this paper we briefly summarise these arguments and elaborate ways in which social representation theory can be considered a progressive research programme. “Progressive” because as the theory has developed it has extended the range and depth of its conceptual basis; it provides a new synthesis for the social scientific understanding of the phenomena of common sense and of representation; it acts as an antidote to the reductionism of public opinion and, finally, it is a stimulus to depart from disciplinary silos. However, there remain unresolved issues: how to segment the relevant social milieus and how to close the feedback loop from common sense to science? (shrink)

Material culture, strictly speaking, is substance culture. Nevertheless, studies on material culture are almost exclusively concerned with things. The specificities in the perception of substances and the related everyday practices are rarely taken into consideration. Although this can be explained by the history of anthropology, the bias towards associating material culture with “formed matter” is a foundational shortcoming. In consequence, particular perspectives on the material remain understudied, and the cultural relevance of substances as such is rarely taken into consideration. Taking (...) a perspective grounded in anthropology and phenomenology, this article intends to provide new approaches to substances that elucidate the particular modes of their perception, reveal their characteristics and reflect on particular notions implicit to substances. The final section of this contribution discusses two exemplary studies on substances and proposes transformation and incorporation as new fields of research that would contribute to a more explicit engagement with substances in material culture studies. (shrink)

Abstract This essay argues that one way of understanding Gramsci today is as an organic intellectual of a class of managerial cadre which develops in advanced capitalism. With the growth of monopolistic structures and a deepening state role in capitalist society, a separate class of mediating functionaries emerges, entrusted with managerial tasks in running the economy and the state. The problems of conquering power from the perspective of this ?new middle class? that concerned Gramsci, were also those of the neo?Machiavellian (...) thinkers, Mosca, Michels, Pareto and Sorel around the turn of the twentieth century. From opposed political angles, they and Gramsci shared the concern with occupying the centre ground and mediate the extremes in a complex society. Today?s Gramscianism appeals to the same set of concerns. (shrink)

The opposition between constraint and free necessity leads Spinoza's commentators to conceive of ethical liberation as a reconciliation with one's self against alienations due to external causes, and to confuse constraint with contrariety. Analysis of the word coactus in Spinoza's works shows that finite modes can't exist and can't free themselves without constraints, which are not always a source of contrariety. Such an analysis is close to those of Émile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu.

Recently, there has been much research into conceptual engineering in connection with feminist inquiry and activism, most notably involving gender issues, but also sexism and misogyny. Our paper contributes to this research by explicating, in a principled manner, a series of other concepts important for feminist research and activism, to wit, feminist political identity terms. More specifically, we show how the popular Conceptual Spaces Framework (CSF) can be used to identify and regiment concepts that are central to feminist research, focusing (...) especially on feminism in France. According to the CSF, concepts can be represented geometrically, as regions in similarity spaces. A particular strength of the CSF framework is its empirically-focused methodology, which allows researchers to infer the boundaries of concepts from empirical data, thus eliminating the need to strongly rely on intuitions about meanings. This is shown to be especially valuable for the explication of concepts relating to feminist political identity, given that the intuitions of feminist scholars and activists about what would appear to be core concepts in the area tend to be poorly aligned or even conflicting. We report the results from an empirical categorization study conducted among French feminists and show how they support the view that the CSF can contribute to both the conceptual engineering project and our understanding of the structure of social reality. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to gain an in-depth understanding of the eating lives of low-income single mothers in Japan. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine low-income single mothers living in the three largest urban areas (Tokyo, Hanshin [Osaka and Kobe] and Nagoya) in Japan. Framed by the capability approach and sociology of food, their dietary norms and practices, as well as underlying factors that impact the norm-practice gap were analysed across nine dimensions: meal frequency, place of eating, meal (...) timing, duration, persons to eat with, procurement method, food quality, meal content and pleasure of eating. These mothers were deprived of various types of capabilities, extending not only from the quantity and nutritional aspects of food, but also to spatial, temporal, qualitative and affective aspects. Aside from financial constraints, eight other factors (time, maternal health, parenting difficulties, children’s tastes, gendered norms, cooking abilities, food aid and local food environment) were identified as influencing their capabilities to eat well. The findings challenge the view that food poverty is the deprivation of economic resources required to ensure a sufficient amount of food. Social interventions that go beyond monetary aid and food provision need to be proposed. (shrink)

Written in the form of a dialogue with Brussels sociologist Dieter Vandebroeck, this article retraces the social and intellectual trajectory of Loïc Wacquant as stepping stone to reviewing and discussing the major concepts coined and theoretical propositions elaborated in the course of his research on comparative urban marginality, racial domination, the ghetto, the penal state, neoliberalism, and carnality. This provides an opportunity to specify the relationships between ethnography, history and theory; the dialectic of domination and resistance; the role of public (...) (dis)honor in social life; the uses of Bourdieu's bureaucratic field; and the social and academic conditions of incubation, diffusion, and death of scholarly myths such as the “underclass.” The article closes on a call to clearly distinguish the rhetorical, metaphorical, and analytical usages of concepts and reaffirms the need for epistemic reflexivity as sine qua non for the articulation of robust scientific problematics. (shrink)

The high rate of inequality in South Africa is rooted in colonial dispossession and racial exploitation, and still runs primarily along the racial divide. Policy initiatives taken to redress past economic injustices through the black economic empowerment (BEE) have failed to bring economic transformation. Using the twin lenses of epistemic violence and racial capitalism, this study analyses how entangled interests aimed to co-opt the ruling party elite by the apartheid-era business elite led to the BEE impasse. The pervasiveness of cultural (...) alienation in BEE failure suggests that a shift to restorative justice is necessary to break from the impasse. (shrink)

Narrative fictions have surely become the single most widespread source of entertainment in the world. In their free time, humans read novels and comics, watch movies and TV series, and play video games: they consume stories that they know to be false. Such behaviors are expanding at lightning speed in modern societies. Yet, the question of the origin of fictions has been an evolutionary puzzle for decades: Are fictions biological adaptations, or the by-products of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for another (...) purpose? The absence of any consensus in cognitive science has made it difficult to explain how narrative fictions evolve culturally. We argue that current conflicting hypotheses are partly wrong, and partly right: narrative fictions areby-productsof the human mind, because they obviously co-opt some pre-existing cognitive preferences and mechanisms, such as our interest for social information, and our abilities to do mindreading and to imagine counterfactuals. But humans reap some fitness benefits from producing and consuming such appealing cultural items, making fictionsadaptive. To reconcile these two views, we put forward the hypothesis that narrative fictions are best seen asentertainment technologiesthat is, as items crafted by some people for the proximate goal to grab the attention of other people, and with the ultimate goal to fulfill other evolutionary-relevant functions that become easier once other people’s attention is caught. This hypothesis explains why fictions are filled with exaggerated and entertaining stimuli, why they fit so well the changing preferences of the audience they target, and why producers constantly make their fictions more attractive as time goes by, in a cumulative manner. (shrink)

We propose an approach reconciling the ultimate-level explanations proposed by Savage et al. and Mehr et al. as to why music evolved. We also question the current adaptationist view of culture, which too often fails to disentangle distinct fitness benefits.

In this paper, we provide a pragmatist conceptualization of affective habits as relatively flexible ways of channeling affectivity. Our proposal, grounded in a conception of sensibility and habits derived from John Dewey, suggests understanding affective scaffoldings in a novel and broader sense by re-orienting the debate from objects to interactions. We claim that habits play a positive role in supporting and orienting human sensibility, allowing us to avoid any residue of dualism between internalist and externalist conceptions of affectivity. We provide (...) pragmatist tools for understanding the environment's role in shaping our feelings, emotions, moods, and affective behaviors. However, we contend that in addition to environment, the continuous and recursive affective transaction between agent and environment are also crucially involved. We claim that habits are transformative, which is especially evident when we consider that emotions are often the result of a crisis in habitual behavior and successively play a role in prompting changes of habits. The final upshot is a conceptualization of affective habits as pervasive tools for feelings that scaffold human conduct as well as key features in the transformation of behaviors. (shrink)

Trying to reduce the divide between culture and science, this article follows the producer of popular records, as an interface between music and its market. Like the innovator when he does not obey scientific, technical, and commercial reasons in succession, but reshapes them all together through a double task of giving its form to the product and the interesting people within it, the producer represents the public to the artist and the music to the media. First in a local scale, (...) then in larger and larger ones, alone with the singer, in the studio, and into the media, this sociology of the intermediary shows the producer experimentally organizing, as in a laboratory, a complete production-consumption cycle. Success is then not the mysterious leap to the public, but the last extension of an equation into which the public has been incorporated in many forms from the very beginning. (shrink)

Most of the existing studies on Bourdieu and the digital regards the social and class distinctions in the use of digital technologies, thus presupposing a certain transparency of technologies themselves. Our proposal is to refer to this attitude as “Bourdieu outside the digital.” Yet in this paper, another perspective called “Bourdieu inside the digital” is developed, which moves the focus on the effects of some emerging technologies on social distinctions and discrimination. The main hypothesis is that algorithms of machine learning (...) are producers and reproducers of habitus. Although their results present a greater granularity with respect to the standard techniques of the past, these algorithms still reduce individuals to categories, general trends, classes, and behaviors. Such a reduction has flattening effects on the individuals’ self-understanding, especially in terms of identity and interaction with the social world. This is the phenomenon described in the article as the “personalization without personality,” whose consequences are both existential and social-political. This idea will be illustrated through qualitative and comparative analysis between the correspondence analysis and the multiple correspondence analysis used by Bourdieu in his works and some of those techniques that are performed today in big data analytics. (shrink)

This paper is intended to draw the main theoretical lines of the notion of value, in order to avoid some flaws in the quantitative surveys on values as well as in some qualitative studies of value judgements. Through a number of redefinitions based on a pragmatic approach, inspired not only by Dewey’s concept of ‘valuation’ but also by the new French pragmatic sociology and by the pragmatist trend in linguistics, it tries to specify the conditions under which sociology can address (...) the notion of ‘value’ while avoiding their reduction to scholarly supports for morals or normative guides for action and evaluation. Meanwhile, it tries to construct a unified concept of value that would work for all the concerned disciplines: not only sociology but also economics, psychology, anthropology, and even philosophy. (shrink)

Digital communication now pervades all spheres of life, creating new possibilities for commodification: personal data and communication are the new resources of surplus value. This in turn brings about a totally new category of threats to privacy. With recourse to the culture industry critique of early critical theory, this article seeks to challenge basic theoretical assumptions held within a liberal account of privacy. It draws the attention to the entanglement of technical and socio-economic transformations and aims at elaborating an alternative (...) framing which takes into account that privacy is not in the first place a pre-political space for individual freedom but a constituted sphere in which social power relations are reproduced in a particularly deceitful way. With recourse to positions of critical theory, this article revisits the conceptual ambiguity of liberation and oppression and looks to draft prospects for a socio-theoretical justification and critique of privacy, updated for the digital age. Following the tradition of critical theory, the argument focuses on (new) forms of domination in and by privacy. It aims to prepare the ground for a critique of the social’s increasing commodification as well as an idea of privacy understood as reflexive participation in social practices. (shrink)

This paper develops a formal model of the subtle meaning differences that exist between grammatical alternatives in socially conditioned variation and how these variants can be used by speakers as resources for constructing personal linguistic styles. More specifically, this paper introduces a new formal system, called social meaning games, which allows for the unification of variationist sociolinguistics and game-theoretic pragmatics, two fields that have had very little interaction in the past. Although remarks have been made concerning the possible usefulness of (...) game-theoretic tools in the analysis of certain kinds of socially conditioned linguistic phenomena :645–668, 1977; Dror et al. in Lang Linguist Compass 7:561–579, 2013; in Lang Linguist Compass 8:230–242, 2014; Clark in Meaningful games: Exploring language with game theory, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014, among others), a general framework uniting game-theoretic pragmatics and quantitative sociolinguistics has yet to be developed. This paper constructs such a framework through giving a formalization of the Third Wave approach to the meaning of variation using signalling games and a probabilistic approach to speaker/listener beliefs of the kind commonly used in the Bayesian game-theoretic pragmatics framework :3–44, 2016, for recent overviews). (shrink)

The article consists of a brief biographical account of Immanuel Kant’s life and career, followed by a discussion of his basic philosophy, and a brief discussion of his pivotal point in the history of Rhetoric and Communicology. A major figure in the European Enlightenment period of Philosophy, his Collected Writings were first published in 1900 constituting 29 volumes. He wrote three major works that are foundational to the development of Western philosophy and the human sciences. Often just referred to as (...) the “Three Critiques” informally, the First, the Second, and the Third. These are respectively: The Critique of Pure Reason focused on issues in logic, The Critique of Practical Reason relating ethical guidelines, and The Critique of Judgment exploring issues of aesthetics. He is most famous for his philosophy of transcendental idealism. This version of idealism argues that in logic statements are analytic or synthetic. He further argues that statements are a priori or a posteriori. Models of rhetoric, phenomenological methodology, and the contemporary Perspectives Model of interpersonal communicology are included as the Kantian legacy in the US. Notes provide a guide to edition and philological issues in the Kantian corpus, especially for the hermeneutics of Vorstellung versus Darstellung. (shrink)

In this work, starting from the social practice theory, we identified two kinds of creativity. A \textit{situational creativity} that takes place when a social practice is performed and a \textit{creativity of habit} that concerns the agents’ capacity of evoking different practices from habit. To test this hypothesis the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (Verbal Form A) was analyzed in the light of praxeology.

This paper aims to provide autonomy-based reasons in favour of limitarianism. Limitarianism affirms it is of primary moral importance that no one gets too much. The paper challenges the standard assumption that having more material resources always increases autonomy. It expounds five mechanisms through which having too much material wealth might undermine autonomy. If these hypotheses are true, a theory of justice guided by a concern for autonomy will support a limitarian distribution of wealth. Finally, the paper discusses two issues (...) autonomy-based limitarianism would raise. First, insofar as coercion invades autonomy, do autonomy-based reasons legitimate coercive measures to secure a limitarian distribution of wealth? Second, is a limitarian ethos consistent with the incentive to produce enough wealth to secure distributive justice? (shrink)

We present an investigation of the ways in which speakers' subjective perspectives are likely to affect the meaning of gradable adjectives like tall or heavy. We present the results of a study showing that people tend to use themselves as a yardstick when ascribing these adjectives to human figures of varied measurements: subjects' height and weight requirements for applying tall and heavy are found to be positively correlated with their personal measurements. We draw more general lessons regarding the definition of (...) subjectivity and the ways in which a standard of comparison and a significant deviation from that standard are specified. (shrink)

This article argues against Jon Elster’s contention that there is a fundamental incompatibility between, on the one hand, autonomy and rationality, and, on the other hand, adaptation to the conditions of one’s existence in the sense that one’s desires or preferences are adjusted to what it is possible to achieve. It is claimed that Elster’s conclusions are premised on a defective conception of human faculties and powers, including a defective conception of human experience and rationality. Moreover, the claim is made (...) that these defects are also characteristic of “rational choice theory” more generally. (shrink)

From an outsider's perspective, today's Popular China might appear as a self-confident and triumphant country. However, a large-scale examination of the country's recent moral controversies reveals a very different picture, one that has much to do with the widespread local public perception of an ongoing “moral crisis”, whose examination requires careful attention placed on the ethical and affective aspects of the everyday lives of today's Chinese people. In this article, I propose to examine the anguish that Chinese bachelor youths and (...) their concerned parents undergo and express, as they are confronted with the difficult process of finding a suitable mate for marriage. I examine the fears their celibacy generates, the mutual distrust that participants taking part in bachelors’ parents gatherings demonstrate, and the disputes these encounters engage. I analyze the moral world of today's urban China from the perspective of the very feelings and affects that pervade it. Highlighting the ways in which my interlocutors shared their emotions with me along the course of my fieldwork, carried out in the cities of Beijing and Chengdu, I will insist on the importance of these affects within an anthropological approach. The moral sensitivities contained in the maintenance of the economic and social situations of one's family reveal themselves as an exceptional resource for knowledge. By examining the political economy of sentiments within which parents and their children find themselves entrapped, I argue that we can gain a deeper understanding of the concrete consequences of today's societal transformations. (shrink)

This project reflects on the way in which students in a situation of social risk construct their identity. Based on the reflections and theories originating from research conducted on individuals and collective groups in a situation of social exclusion due to disability, social class or ethnicity, this paper will analyse the conflicts these students have to deal with when constructing their identity. It also examines the challenge that education has to face to turn those conflicts into opportunities that will help (...) to build life projects with which they can freely identify. For this reason, from a critical perspective, the school’s role in constructing identity will be analysed, as will the way in which it affects children and adolescents from minority groups. In the same way, we will study and put forward some different channels aimed at providing more equal educational attention to those identities that are depreciated in neoliberal society. (shrink)

ArgumentIt seems theoretically convenient to construe knowledge practices in financial markets and organizations as “applied economics.” Alternatively or additionally, one might argue that practitioners draw on economic knowledge in order to systematically orient their actions towards profit-maximization; models, then, are understood as devices that make calculative rationality possible. However, empirical studies do not entirely confirm these theoretical positions: Practitioners’ actual calculations are often not “framed” by models; organizations and institutions influence the choice and adoption of models; and different professional groups (...) in financial markets have diverging attitudes towards model calculations. In order to account for this diversity, this article proposes the concept ofcultures of economic and financial expertise; the concept focuses on the patterns of knowledge practices and knowledge-related self-definitions of groups within financial organizations and markets; it also facilitates an analysis of the relations between and, more specifically, the hierarchies among different practices and identities. The article then goes on to explore the process of foreign exchange forecasting in a particular bank. The description immediately reveals that two groups are involved in this process: economists and analysts. These groups maintain quite different practices and self-descriptions in relation to models: While the economists in the bank use the models as organizational resources for consistent forecasting procedures and observe data with the help of simple model structures, analysts approach model forecasts from the perspective of critics: They see limits in the variable-centered, as opposed to a “thematic” approach and they disregard a model's imposed temporality. Nevertheless, analysts use model forecasts as anchors for developing their own “paths” and stories about possible future expectation changes in the markets. The specific division of labor between economists and analysts, and specifically the dominant role of analysts in the forecasting process, fit into a larger picture: The rise of institutional investors in the foreign exchange markets and their demand for genuine market knowledge for speculative investment projects has contributed to the rise and dominance of analysts’ culture. (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)

Résumé: L’école républicaine « à la française » se donnait officiellement pour objectif de former le citoyen. Elle a connu de multiples réformes durant ces dernières décennies, et on perçoit mieux aujourd’hui sa transformation (d’ores et déjà bien avancée) en une école d’inspiration néolibérale visant la fabrication d’individus aptes à s’incorporer dans la machine économique. La façon dont l’école publique et laïque s’acquittait de ses missions principales se voit ainsi malmenée, ce qui se traduit par des zones de tension, tant (...) au niveau idéologique que sur le terrain. Abstract: Republican schooling «à la française» was officially meant to educate the citizen. It has known a number of reforms in recent decades. The neo-liberalization transformation of the French education system is now well advanced and one can see more clearly that schooling is being designed to produce individuals formatted for the economic machine. The former process by which the state schools (which are non-denominational schools) used to achieve their main missions is being shaken, and this causes tensions both on an ideological level and in schools. (shrink)

From its early origins to the present, the development of mainstream economic theory has taken a direction which has excluded the analysis of human needs as a basis for social policy. The problems associated with this orientation are increasingly recognized both by economists and non-economists. As Sen points out, it is indeed strange for a discipline concerned with the well-being of people to neglect the question of needs. Currently, some writers such as Doyal and Gough, post-Keynesian economists such as Lavoie, (...) and those such as Davis and O'Boyle who work in the newly emerging school of social economics have begun to address the question of human needs, especially in relation to problems of policy assessment and evaluation. The approaches of some development economists who have dealt with similar issues were also instrumental in drawing attention to the significance of the long-neglected concept of needs. (shrink)

The framework in which, better than in any other, cultural complexity becomes clear as a network of perspectives is the city: it is here that the greatest variety of subcultures, together with the widest range of contrasting modalities, seems able to handle its meaning. The city is at the same time an active place of cultural production and a passive and active place of memory keeping. It fuels styles and models of sensitivity also, and especially, through art and architecture. Therefore, (...) it becomes itself a cultural model able to orient taste, but also to continually disorient it through agency. Starting from the revitalization of the cultural capital of the cities, art can play the important role of cultural magnet by catalyzing moods and emotions, conveying otherwise chaotic needs and languages, promoting new tolerance and social and cultural integration. However, in the meantime, from a secluded and distinct place that organizes the use of cultural and artistic products within recognizable boundaries, the city is becoming an undifferentiated place, a city-beyond, scattered and/or boundless. Characterized by the undifferentiated and the mutant, the uncertain and the liquid, the deformable and the relative, the space of art perception will be rethought within and without the city. (shrink)

Belgian data from the PIDOP project show that boys are more involved than girls in illegal political actions, namely the production of graffiti and other acts of “incivility”. These activities must be considered in both groups as complementary to conventional political and social participation and not as their opposite. The main explanatory factor is the level of the perceived efficaciousness of such actions. The lack of trust in institutions and the level of awareness of societal discrimination play no significant explanatory (...) role. In males, the involvement level in these activities depends on feelings of personal discrimination and on the lack of freedom concerning individual choice, confirming the theory of societal vulnerability and Honneth’s theory of recognition. This level also increases along with increasing opportunities to make acquaintances and have fun in the neighbourhood. In females, this involvement is explained by the distance with regard to pro-sociality level. (shrink)

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

We received several commentaries both challenging and supporting our hypothesis. We thank the commentators for their thoughtful contributions, bringing together alternative hypotheses, complementary explanations, and appropriate corrections to our model. Here, we explain further our hypothesis, using more explicitly the framework of evolutionary social sciences. We first explain what we believe is the ultimate function of fiction in general (i.e., entertainment) and how this hypothesis differs from other evolutionary hypotheses put forward by several commentators. We then turn to the proximate (...) features that make imaginary worlds entertaining and, therefore, culturally successful. We finally explore how these insights may explain the distribution of imaginary worlds across time, space, age, and social classes. (shrink)

This article underlines the relevance of Mikel Dufrenne's early works (published between 1946 and 1953) for contemporary social sciences. Indeed, Dufrenne was interested in American cultural anthropology, and in Abram Kardiner's concept of “basic personality” in particular. Dufrenne tested Kardiner's concept against Kant's transcendental tradition and the phenomenological theory of Mitsein (the concept of being-with). More importantly, in this article, I demonstrate that Dufrenne's project raises the psychological question of the historicity of categories of experience.

ABSTRACT This article questions Metz’s purification of the evaluative subject, and wishes to pose the theological question concerning the meaning of life from a normative and social conception of subjectivity. Before asking whether or not God is indispensable to the meaning of life, it is first necessary to identify the ways in which God is hidden in the fundamental evaluations that the contemporary subject makes in the globalized capitalist world.

This article sets out to define an approach to discourse that takes into account the characteristics of the phenomenon of social communication. First, the article examines different conceptions of discourse analysis such as `cognitive', `representational' and `communicational'. These distinctions are made using various criteria: definitions of the subject of analysis, the nature of the speaker, the corpus of data resulting from the discourse. This is followed by an examination of the types of competence that have to be satisfied by speakers (...) if they are to produce a speech act: for example, `situational', `discursive', `semantic' and `semiolinguistic competence'. The article then analyses how speakers stage their discourse, i.e. their consideration of the constraints of the communicative situation and their use of `discursive strategies'. The article concludes by demonstrating the necessity of relating the `communicative situation' to the `positioning' of the speaker. (shrink)