Suitable for students and scholars, this title challenges the assumption that skepticism, rather than established belief, lies at the heart of scientific discovery.

In an increasingly globalised world, economic and cultural imperatives can be seen as two of the most powerful forces shaping human behaviour. This book considers the relationship between economics and culture both as areas of intellectual discourse, and as systems of societal organisation. Adopting a broad definition of culture, it explores the economic dimensions of culture, and the cultural context of economics. The book is built on a foundation of value theory, developing the twin notions of economic and cultural value (...) as underlying principles for integrating the two fields. Ideas of cultural capital and sustainability are discussed, especially as means of analysing the particular problems of cultural heritage, drawing parallels with the treatment of natural capital in ecological economics. The book goes on to discuss the economics of creativity in the production of cultural goods and services; culture in economic development; the cultural industries; and cultural policy. (shrink)

The question "what is art?" is often said to be venerable and vexing. In fact, the following answer to the question should be obvious: (R) item x is a work of art if and only if x is a work in practice P and P is one of the arts. Yet (R) has appeared so far from obvious that nobody has given it a moment's thought. The trouble is not that anyone might seriously deny the truth of (R), but rather (...) that they will find it uninformative. After all, the vexing question is pressed upon us by radical changes in art of the avant-garde, and (R) offers no resources to address these changes. With that in mind, here is the case for (R). The challenges posed by the avant-garde are real enough and they need to be addressed, but the vexing question is the wrong question to ask to address them. It does not follow that the question has no good answer. On the contrary, (R) is all the answer we need, if we do not need an answer that addresses the challenges posed by the avant-garde. Moreover, (R) points to a question that we do need answered. So, not only is it true but, in addition, (R) is as informative as we need. (shrink)

In this major book Martha Nussbaum, one of the most innovative and influential philosophical voices of our time, proposes a kind of feminism that is genuinely international, argues for an ethical underpinning to all thought about development planning and public policy, and dramatically moves beyond the abstractions of economists and philosophers to embed thought about justice in the concrete reality of the struggles of poor women. Nussbaum argues that international political and economic thought must be sensitive to gender difference as (...) a problem of justice, and that feminist thought must begin to focus on the problems of women in the third world. Taking as her point of departure the predicament of poor women in India, she shows how philosophy should undergird basic constitutional principles that should be respected and implemented by all governments, and used as a comparative measure of quality of life across nations. (shrink)

This is Jürgen Habermas's most concrete historical-sociological book and one of the key contributions to political thought in the postwar period. It will be a revelation to those who have known Habermas only through his theoretical writing to find his later interests in problems of legitimation and communication foreshadowed in this lucid study of the origins, nature, and evolution of public opinion in democratic societies.

A seminal figure in the field of public management, Mark H. Moore presents his summation of fifteen years of research, observation, and teaching about what public sector executives should do to improve the performance of public enterprises. Useful for both practicing public executives and those who teach them, this book explicates some of the richest of several hundred cases used at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and illuminates their broader lessons for government managers. Moore addresses four questions that have long (...) bedeviled public administration: What should citizens and their representatives expect and demand from public executives? What sources can public managers consult to learn what is valuable for them to produce? How should public managers cope with inconsistent and fickle political mandates? How can public managers find room to innovate? Moore’s answers respond to the well-understood difficulties of managing public enterprises in modern society by recommending specific, concrete changes in the practices of individual public managers: how they envision what is valuable to produce, how they engage their political overseers, and how they deliver services and fulfill obligations to clients. Following Moore’s cases, we witness dilemmas faced by a cross-section of public managers: William Ruckelshaus and the Environmental Protection Agency; Jerome Miller and the Department of Youth Services; Miles Mahoney and the Park Plaza Redevelopment Project; David Sencer and the swine flu scare; Lee Brown and the Houston Police Department; Harry Spence and the Boston Housing Authority. Their work, together with Moore’s analysis, reveals how public managers can achieve their true goal of producing public value. (shrink)

What must the United States do to remain the global superpower and stop alienating the rest of the world? The author of the bestselling "The Paradox of American Power" has one clear answer: soft power.

Aesthetic alienation may be described as the paradoxical relationship whereby art and truth have come to be divorced from one another while nonetheless remaining entwined. J. M. Bernstein not only finds the separation of art and truth problematic, but also contends that we continue to experience art as sensuous and particular, thus complicating and challenging the cultural self-understanding of modernity. Bernstein focuses on the work of four key philosophers—Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, and Adorno—and provides powerful new interpretations of their views. Bernstein (...) shows how each of the three post-Kantian aesthetics to construct a philosophical language that can criticize and displace the categorical assumption of modernity. He also examines in detail their responses to questions concerning the relations among art, philosophy, and politics in modern societies. (shrink)

We present a theory of human artistic experience and the neural mechanisms that mediate it. Any theory of art has to ideally have three components. The logic of art: whether there are universal rules or principles; The evolutionary rationale: why did these rules evolve and why do they have the form that they do; What is the brain circuitry involved? Our paper begins with a quest for artistic universals and proposes a list of ‘Eight laws of artistic experience’ -- a (...) set of heuristics that artists either consciously or unconsciously deploy to optimally titillate the visual areas of the brain. One of these principles is a psychological phenomenon called the peak shift effect: If a rat is rewarded for discriminating a rectangle from a square, it will respond even more vigorously to a rectangle that is longer and skinnier that the prototype. We suggest that this principle explains not only caricatures, but many other aspects of art. Example: An evocative sketch of a female nude may be one which selectively accentuates those feminine form-attributes that allow one to discriminate it from a male figure; a Boucher, a Van Gogh, or a Monet may be a caricature in ‘colour space’ rather than form space. Even abstract art may employ ‘supernormal’ stimuli to excite form areas in the brain more strongly than natural stimuli. Second, we suggest that grouping is a very basic principle. The different extrastriate visual areas may have evolved specifically to extract correlations in different domains , and discovering and linking multiple features into unitary clusters -- objects -- is facilitated and reinforced by direct connections from these areas to limbic structures. In general, when object-like entities are partially discerned at any stage in the visual hierarchy, messages are sent back to earlier stages to alert them to certain locations or features in order to look for additional evidence for the object . Finally, given constraints on allocation of attentional resources, art is most appealing if it produces heightened activity in a single dimension rather than redundant activation of multiple modules. This idea may help explain the effectiveness of outline drawings and sketches, the savant syndrome in autists, and the sudden emergence of artistic talent in fronto-temporal dementia. In addition to these three basic principles we propose five others, constituting a total of ‘eight laws of aesthetic experience’. (shrink)

This paper explores the distinctive features of the critical agenda associated with the ‘Social Life of Methods’. I argue that although this perspective can be associated with the increasing interest, often associated with scholars in Science and Technology Studies, to reflect on how methods can become objects of inquiry, it also needs to be rooted in the current crisis of positivist methods. I identify the challenge for positivism in terms of the decreasing ability of its procedures to effectively organize increasingly (...) ‘lively’ sources of standardized data, which can now be assembled using aesthetic registers. In developing this argument, I dispute the idea that this development is due to historical shifts linked to the way that methodological devices are playing an increasingly significant role in contemporary social life, which might be argued by writers such as Thrift or Castells. I also argue that by opening up issues of method to the aesthetic, we also recast the relationship between theory and method, pointing to the exhaustion of a certain kind of cultural theory within the social sciences. I contextualize these issues by considering how methods are implicated in the intellectual differentiation between scientific and humanities expertise. Rather than conceiving the ‘Social Life of Methods’ in terms of the rise of instrumentalist modes of governance, it is preferable to place it within the dialectic of transparency and the relationship between the implicit and explicit. These issues are addressed through introducing the papers in the special issue. (shrink)

The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences provides a remarkable comparative assessment of the variations of positivism and alternative epistemologies in the contemporary human sciences. Often declared obsolete, positivism is alive and well in a number of the fields; in others, its influence is significantly diminished. The essays in this collection investigate its mutations in form and degree across the social science disciplines. Looking at methodological assumptions field by field, individual essays address anthropology, area studies, economics, history, the philosophy (...) of science, political science and political theory, and sociology. Essayists trace disciplinary developments through the long twentieth century, focusing on the decades since World War II. Contributors explore and contrast some of the major alternatives to positivist epistemologies, including Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, narrative theory, and actor-network theory. Almost all the essays are written by well-known practitioners of the fields discussed. Some essayists approach positivism and anti-positivism via close readings of texts influential in their respective disciplines. Some engage in ethnographies of the present-day human sciences; others are more historical in method. All of them critique contemporary social scientific practice. Together, they trace a trajectory of thought and method running from the past through the present and pointing toward possible futures. Contributors. Andrew Abbott, Daniel Breslau, Michael Burawoy, Andrew Collier , Michael Dutton, Geoff Eley, Anthony Elliott, Stephen Engelmann, Sandra Harding, Emily Hauptmann, Webb Keane, Tony Lawson, Sophia Mihic, Philip Mirowski, Timothy Mitchell, William H. Sewell Jr., Margaret R. Somers, George Steinmetz, Elizabeth Wingrove. (shrink)

This book reformulates the sociological subdiscipline known as the sociology of knowledge. Knowledge is presented as more than ideology, including as well false consciousness, propaganda, science and art.

The present volume brings Arendt's notes for these lectures together with other of her texts on the topic of judging and provides important clues to the likely direction of Arendt's thinking in this area.

In Jacobsen, M.H. (ed.): Sociologies of the Unnoticed. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008.

In recent years, more and more people have started talking about the necessity of reconciling phenomenology with the project of naturalization. Is it possible to bridge the gap between phenomenological analyses and naturalistic models of consciousness? Is it possible to naturalize phenomenology? Given the transcendental philosophically motivated anti-naturalism found in many phenomenologists such a naturalization proposal might seem doomed from the very start, but in this paper I will examine and evaluate some possible alternatives.

This article presents an interview method which enables us to bring a person, who may not even have been trained, to become aware of his or her subjective experience, and describe it with great precision. It is focused on the difficulties of becoming aware of one’s subjective experience and describing it, and on the processes used by this interview technique to overcome each of these difficulties. The article ends with a discussion of the criteria governing the validity of the descriptions (...) obtained, and then with a brief review of the functions of these descriptions. (shrink)

_Mirroring and Attunement_ offers a new approach to psychoanalysis, artistic creation and religion. Viewing these activities from a broadly relational perspective, Wright proposes that each provides a medium for creative dialogue: the artist discovers himself within his self-created forms, the religious person through an internal dialogue with ‘God’, and the analysand through the inter-subjective medium of the analysis. Building on the work of Winnicott, Stern and Langer, the author argues that each activity is rooted in the infant’s preverbal relationship with (...) the mother who ‘holds’ the emerging self in an ambience of mirroring forms, thereby providing a ‘place’ for the self to ‘be’. He suggests that the need for subjective reflection persists throughout the life cycle and that psychoanalysis, artistic creation and religion can be seen as cultural attempts to provide the self with resonant containment. They thus provide renewed opportunities for holding and emotional growth. _Mirroring and Attunement_ will provide essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and art therapists and be of interest to anyone working at the interface between psychoanalysis, art and religion. _ _. (shrink)

An account of the emergence and disintegration of.

Feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and Marxism, among other critical approaches, have undermined traditional notions of aesthetics in recent decades. But questions of aesthetic judgment and pleasure persist, and many critics now seek a "return to aesthetics" or a "return to beauty." Janet Wolff advances a "postcritical" aesthetics grounded in shared values that are negotiated in the context of community. She relates this approach to contemporary debates about a committed politics similarly founded on the abandonment of certainty. Neither universalist nor relativist, the (...) "aesthetics of uncertainty" provides a discourse on beauty that contemporary critics can engage with and offers a basis for judgment that is committed to assigning value to works of art. Wolff explores her position through a range of topics: the question of beauty in relation to feminist critique; the problematic status of twentieth-century English art, visual representations of the Holocaust, Jewish identity as portrayed by the artist R. B. Kitaj, refugee artists and modernism in 1940s Britain, and the nature and appeal of imagistic thinking in sociology. She addresses the desire for certainty and the timeliness of doubt and concludes with a meditation on the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, arguing that ethical issues are very much implicated in aesthetic discourse. (shrink)

This article reports research in three Nottingham schools, concerned with (1) 'The school as fertile ground: how the ethos of a school enables everyone in it to benefit from the presence of artists in class'; (2) 'Children on the edge: how the arts reach those children who otherwise exclude themselves from class activities, for any reason' and (3) 'Children's voices and choices: how even very young children can learn to express their wishes, and then have them realised through arts projects'. (...) The research methodology was rooted in two modes of inquiry, philosophical investigation and action research. The article draws on this research to argue that arts-based work in school has helped disadvantaged and/or disaffected children to engage in activities (both arts-based and others), and to be able to lay the groundwork for exercising voice and agency as they did so. If social justice is to flourish there is a need for particular kinds of public spaces and a need to create conditions such that children can learn to participate in those spaces, whether or not they are comfortable with the usual settings for 'rational argument' or 'deliberative democracy'. It is suggested that arts-based education, in some forms, is one good way of creating these conditions. (shrink)

This new edition of Karen O'Reilly's popular Ethnographic Methods provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the technical, practical and philosophical issues that arise when employing traditional and innovative research methods in relation to human agents. Using a wide range of case studies and source material to illustrate the dilemmas and resolutions that an ethnographic researcher may encounter, this textbook guides the reader from the initial design and planning stages through to the analysis and writing-up. It explores the historical and (...) philosophical foundations of ethnographic research and goes on to cover a range of relevant topics such as participant observation, qualitative interviews, (focus) group interviews and visual data collection and analysis. Having been substantially revised and updated, the second edition includes new discussions of emerging practices such as reflexive ethnography and autoethnographic accounts, as well as an entire chapter dedicated to new directions in the field - including virtual, mobile, multi-sited and global ethnography. (shrink)

Vico's earliest extant scholarly works, the six orations on humanistic education, offer the first statement of ideas that Vico would continue to refine throughout his life. Delivered between 1699 and 1707 to usher in the new academic year at the University of Naples, the orations are brought together here for the first time in English in an authoritative translation based on Gian Galeazzo Visconti's 1982 Latin/Italian edition. In the lectures, Vico draws liberally on the classical philosophical and legal traditions as (...) he explores the relationship between the Greek dictum "Know thyself" and liberal education. As he sets forth the values and goals of a humanist curriculum, Vico reveals the beginnings of the anti-Cartesian position he will pursue in On the Study Methods of Our Time (1709). Also found in the orations are glimpses of Vico's later views on the theory of interpretation and on the nature of language, imagination, and human creativity, along with many themes that were to be fully developed in his magnum opus, the New Science (1744). On Humanistic Education joins a number of translations of Vico's works available in paperback from Cornell--On the Study Methods of Our Time, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, the New Science, and The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. It will be welcomed by Vichians and their students, intellectual historians, and others in the fields of philosophy, literary theory, history and methods of education, classics, and rhetoric. (shrink)

In recent years more and more people have started talking about the necessity ofreconciliating phenomenology with the project of naturalization. Is it possible to bridge the gap between phenomenological analyses and naturalipossible to naturalize phenomenology? In their long introduction to the book NaturalizingPhenomenology published by Stanford University Press in 1999, the four coPetitot, Francisco Varela, Bernard Pachoud might be seen as a kind of manifesto for this new approach. An examination of this introduction is consequently a good starting point for (...) a discussion of the issue. (shrink)

Does strolling through an art museum, admiring the old masters, improve us morally and spiritually? Would government subsidies of "high art" (such as big-city opera houses) be better spent on local community art projects? In What Good are the Arts? John Carey--one of Britain's most respected literary critics--offers a delightfully skeptical look at the nature of art. In particular, he cuts through the cant surrounding the fine arts, debunking claims that the arts make us better people or that judgements about (...) art are anything more than personal opinion. Indeed, Carey argues that there are no absolute values in the arts and that we cannot call other people's aesthetic choices "mistaken" or "incorrect," however much we dislike them. Along the way, Carey reveals the flaws in the aesthetic theories of everyone from Emanuel Kant to Arthur C. Danto, and he skewers the claims of "high-art advocates" such as Jeannette Winterson. But Carey does argue strongly for the value of art as an activity and for the superiority of one art in particular: literature. Literature, he contends, is the only art capable of reasoning, and the only art that can criticize. Language is the medium that we use to convey ideas, and the usual ingredients of other arts--objects, noises, light effects--cannot replicate this function. Literature has the ability to inspire the mind and the heart towards practical ends far better than any work of conceptual art. Here then is a lively and stimulating invitation to debate the value of art, a provocative book that will pique the interest of anyone who loves painting, music, or literature. (shrink)

This innovative volume is an extended intellectual conversation about the ways personal lives are being undone and remade today. Examining the ethnography of the modern subject, this preeminent group of scholars probes the continuity and diversity of modes of personhood across a range of Western and non-Western societies. Contributors consider what happens to individual subjectivity when stable or imagined environments such as nations and communities are transformed or displaced by free trade economics, terrorism, and war; how new information and medical (...) technologies reshape the relation one has to oneself; and which forms of subjectivity and life possibilities are produced against a world in pieces. The transdisciplinary conversation includes anthropologists, historians of science, psychologists, a literary critic, a philosopher, physicians, and an economist. The authors touch on how we think and write about contingency, human agency, and ethics today. (shrink)

A fresh look at the rationale for, and distinctiveness of, ethnographic research. The policy and political implications of ethnography are a particular focus of attention.

This selection of Bertolt Brecht's critical writing charts the development of his thinking on theatre and aesthetics over four decades.

This article begins with discussions of rationalist, a priori and empiricist, a posteriori thinking in philosophy. It then argues that classically, sociology is rationalist or a priori. Sociology — Weber, Simmel, Durkheim and Marx — moves from Kant's epistemological a priori to the social a priori. It moves from the question of how knowledge is possible to the question of how society is possible. This question of the possibility of society becomes quickly one of social control and social order in (...) functionalism and Parsons. The article argues instead for an aposteriorist, de facto empiricist sociology that breaks with this ultimately normative question. This aposteriorist sociology would instead investigate social processes in their very factuality, their open-endedness, complexity, and path dependency. A priorism in sociology, I would argue, is dominant in both positivism and phenomenology. The article opposes to phenomenology's transcendentaI rationalism a `transcendental empiricism' that is illustrated with Edmund Burke's English and aposteriori aesthetics of the sublime. Sociology today needs to be relevant to study of `emerging' nations like China. The article argues for an aposteriorist, empiricist sociology here, and looks at debates on property law in today's China. Here we look at rationalist and a priori notions of clear, distinct and divisible property in Continental reception of Roman law. We counterpose to this English, empiricist (a posteriori) Common Law notions of property as a bundle of rights, in which property is not clear and distinct but vague like a boundary object. We look at how this is instantiated in China. With François Jullien, we contrast a Chinese, effectively empiricist, aposteriorist notion of the universal to Western rationalist and a priori universalism. We look at the implications for international geopolitics and a possible Chinese route to democracy. With Jullien, we counterpose an aposteriorist Chinese notion of `activity' to the Western a priori notions of `action' found in Weber and Parsons. The Chinese `activity' is more processual, more relational, less goal-oriented, more path-dependent than our Western notion of `action'. The article argues that in the twenty-first century when national social control is partly displaced by global uncertainty, and when the ascendancy of the West is coming increasingly under question, that such an empiricist, aposteriorist sociology is suitable. (shrink)

This article is prompted by the observation that many accounts of the value of the arts and culture have failed to engage first-order, empirical data and to take full account of the experiences of those directly involved in cultural activities and practices. This neglect is the result of a complex path dependency. The more obvious explanation is that the current situation is caused by too much humanism in the field of cultural studies, that is, the tendency to think of cultural (...) value as an “‘ineffable’ human moment which somehow lies outside this purview of representational method”. This may well be true in some cases but it is not the main reason why empirical and experiential data have been lacking. The absence of the phenomenological dimension is, to the contrary, best explained by not enough humanism in cultural studies. The reluctance to embrace the first-person perspective was motivated by an anxiety that this would make cultural theorists and sociologists complicit with the “dubious” theories of subjecthood originating in idealism. The default outcome of this has been the preponderance of structuralism in cultural studies which led to anti-empiricism and “theoretical heavy breathing”. I argue that to overcome the current impasse, cultural theorists and the theorists of cultural value specifically must revisit this self-incurred suspicion of first-order constructs and address their unease with the category of experience by actively engaging first-person data. In short, the remedy I prescribe is to embrace elements of empirical, phenomenological sociology as part of the methodological framework. Looking at three projects funded by the AHRC Cultural Value Project, I show how this can be practically achieved. I conclude with some reflections on how the considerations presented here might have broader implications for the future research into cultural value, sociological inquiry and cultural policy. (shrink)