Bruno Latour once argued that science laboratories actively modify the wider society by displacing crucial actors outside the laboratory into the “field.” This article turns this idea on its head by using the case of geothermal energy utilization to demonstrate that in many cases it is the experimental setup outside the laboratory that is there first, with the activities normally associated with a laboratory setting only being decided upon and implemented post hoc. As soon as the actors involved perceive unknowns (...) and uncertainties, these are relocated to various kinds of closed laboratories to be dealt with in a more controlled environment. This is done, for instance, by inviting stakeholders to laboratory-like settings or by analyzing the geochemical composition of fluids in laboratories. Thus, the risk-laden production of new knowledge by means of real-world experimentation amounts to a practice of relocating the context of discovery in society to laboratories of justification sometimes defined as such post hoc. Experimental processes in society can then be conceptualized as “real” experiments and laboratory activities as merely temporarily subordinated components of the larger experiment. (shrink)

Social scientists are well-trained to observe and chart social trends, but less experienced at presenting scientific findings in formats that can inform social change work. In this article, I propose a new theoretical concept that provides a mechanism by which social science research can be more effectively applied for proactive policy, organizational, and program development. The approach is to use the metaphor of “desire paths” from landscape architecture to show how social scientists can identify and analyze social desire paths that (...) appear on the social structural landscape. Social desire paths usually emerge because existing formal structures do not meet individual or group needs. Such paths are generally started at the individual level, followed by others through individual actions, and ultimately leave an (usually informal) imprint on the social structure, even though the motivations behind those actions are not usually social change. Using what we know about the sociology of interests and what we have learned from trying to apply social science findings to policy, I propose seven criteria for phenomena to be defined as social desire paths. I then apply the criteria to two case studies related to housing, and discuss social desire paths usefulness to social scientists involved in any research that captures interests, deviance, or innovation; and that also has the potential to inform formal structures such as policy, organizations, program development, and participatory democracy. (shrink)

This paper evaluates the potentials of Mullā Şadrā’s philosophy to explain the possibility of the Islamization of philosophy. This contributes to a more general, yet controversial, project in post-revolutionary Iran, namely the Islamization of knowledge, especially in the humanities. If there would be a mechanism through which Islamization of philosophy – as a historical example and as a field of knowledge that provides theoretical grounds of other humanities – can be plausibly explained, then one might think of Islamizing the humanities, (...) as well. One famous explanation in Iran is based on the distinction between contexts of discovery and justification. It explains how a philosopher is permitted to use the Islamic content in the context of discovery – not justification – and how this helps to Islamize philosophy. In this article, we claim a new explanation which is based on Mullā Şadrā’s transcendent philosophy. Such a philosophical explanation not only acknowledges using the Qur’an and authentic narrations in the context of discovery but also necessitates involving revelation as a philosophical criterion in the context of justification and a highly valid epistemic source in producing the new philosophical content. This provides a strong account of the Islamization of philosophy. (shrink)

Resumen: Desde una reflexión teórica, epistemológica y metodológica, este ensayo propone al “abordaje problemático” como metodología para investigar en teoría sociológica. Para esto, se retoman críticamente las postulaciones de Alexander sobre su multidimensionalidad y las de Ritzer acerca de su carácter multiparadigmático. Allí, se señalan ciertos reduccionismos en sus elaboraciones que interpretan a la teoría sociológica desde algunas dicotomías clásicas. En cambio, el abordaje problemático permite dar cuenta de la pluralidad de problemas, presupuestos y análisis que van transformando a la (...) teoría sociológica, la cual tampoco se recorta únicamente por conceptos. Así, se trazan dimensiones y niveles de un problema, que habilitan a comparar perspectivas. Tal trazado es el resultado de un análisis emergente, que las delimita desde los mismos planteos de las perspectivas, al evitar un estudio “interno”, clausurado en un autor, o “externo”, que las interpreta desde una supuesta perspectiva “superadora”. Asimismo, este abordaje y su análisis emergente se ponen a prueba con el problema de las clasificaciones sociales, en el cual se detectan dos dimensiones, atravesadas por dos niveles. El concepto de reclasificaciones sociológicas, como proceso que reclasifica clasificaciones sociales en general, permite una mirada reflexiva sobre la teoría y sus dicotomías.: This essay proposes the “problematic approach” as a methodology to sociological theory. It is based on a critic of Alexander’s multidimensionality and Ritzer’s multiparadigm. The problematic approach allows to account for a diversity of problems, presuppositions and analyses that have been changing sociological theory, which cannot be reduced to concepts. Such is the result of an emergent analysis, limited from the perspectives themselves, as opposed to an “internal” study around an author, and to an “external” one which interprets them from a supposed “superior” perspective. Also, this approach and its emergent analysis are tested through the problem of social classifications, in which two dimensions are crossed by two levels. The concept of sociological reclassifications, as the process that reclassifies general social classifications, allows a reflexive outlook on theory and its dichotomies. (shrink)

Critical realism is a philosophy of science, which has made significant contributions to epistemic debates within sociology. And yet, its contributions to ethnographic explanation have yet to be fully elaborated. Drawing on ethnographic data on the health-seeking behavior of HIV-infected South Africans, the paper compares and contrasts critical realism with grounded theory, extended case method and the pragmatist method of abduction. In so doing, it argues that critical realism makes a significant contribution to causal explanation in ethnographic research in three (...) ways: 1) by linking structure to agency; 2) by accounting for the contingent, conjunctural nature of causality; and 3) by using surprising empirical findings to generate new theory. The paper develops the AART research schema and illustrates its strengths by employing a Bourdieusian field analysis as a model for morphogenetic explanation. (shrink)

Introduction Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy is not very widespread in Swedish academia. Academic philosophy in Sweden is known for having quite rigidly adhered to formal logic and analytical philosophy for several generations. For this reason, pragmatism was never really absorbed by school philosophers, and those who chose to work with such non-analytical ideas were relegated to the outskirts of academia, i.e. they did not achieve a firm academic position. This being said about school philoso...

La teoría del etiquetado es la teoría acerca de cómo la autoidentidad y el comportamiento de los individuos pueden ser determinados o influenciados por los términos usados para describirlos o clasificarlos. La teoría se vuelve importante y conquista su espacio destacándose como una de las más productivas teorías acerca de la desviación. En este estudio, con base en una concepción contemporánea de teoría científica, la de la metateoría estructuralista, es presentada una reconstrucción de la propuesta de Howard Becker/Edwin Lemert, lo (...) que permite explicitar la estructura profunda de la teoría. (shrink)

In International Relations arguments about historical origins provoke theoretical debates, as origins assume an emergent theoretical unit of inquiry - an international order, system, society, etc. - while at the same time defining its core properties and dynamics. By boldly casting the long 19th century as the origin of global modernity and, in turn, the modern international order, Buzan and Lawson's The Global Transformation challenges the romance with Westphalia that undergirds so much of our theorizing. Yet, the contributions to this (...) symposium push deeper than usual, challenging established ways of conceiving change, and suggesting very different models of proper theorizing. While all of the papers ostensibly debate large-scale systems change, three modes of change are in contention: breakpoint, evolutionary, and processual. The further one pushes towards the latter, however, the more elusive the idea of 'system' becomes, eroding the fundamental boundary condition that undergirds the systemic mode of theorizing that dominates the field. Similarly, a persistent theme in these contributions is Buzan and Lawson's purported failure to theorize change. But instead of offering rival theories, contributors advance very different conceptions of theorizing, from pre-observational conceptualization to causal explanation. This not only challenges the field to reflect more systematically on the process of theorizing, but to acknowledge forms of theorizing that it currently brackets. (shrink)

Despite recent interest in political ethnography, most of the reflection has been on the ethnographic aspect of the enterprise with much less emphasis on the question implicit in the first word of the couplet: What is actually political about political ethnography and how much should ethnographers pre-define it? The question is complicated because a central component of the definition of what is political is actually the struggle to define its jurisdiction and how it gets distinguished from what it is not. (...) In this article we aim to show how ethnography can actually lead us out of this conundrum in which the political is paradoxically both predefined and, at the same time, the open question that leads the process of inquiry. We do so by advancing a formal and relational approach that provides us with procedural tools to define the nature and specificity of the political bond not ex ante, but rather during the process of research itself. In the first part of the article we historicize the development of political ethnography as a distinct avenue for inquiry and show what have been the challenges to its normalization. This is followed by the article’s main section, which focuses on the four ways in which what is political has been conceptualized in contemporary socio-ethnographical literature. In the conclusion of the article, we advance a lowest common denominator definition proposal, with examples from other scholars as well as from our own research to illustrate how this approach would work. (shrink)