"First Published in 1992, Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.".

Beginning with women's experience, the author examines the field's actual practices of reasoning and conceptualization. She argues that standard sociological methods of inquiry make use of ideological practices, transforming the actualities of people's lives into a formalized picture lacking subjects and subjectivity. The method of Smith recommends anchors a Marxist materialism, based in people's activities, to a woman's stand-point based in experience. She uses this method in a radically original way to explore ideology and objectified knowledge as the conceptual practices (...) of ruling. Smith is equally concerned with the application of sociological ideology to the human service bureacracy and the way institutions of mental health reconstruct women's lives. She provides meticulous accounts of the ways in which police reports, government statistics, hospital records, and pschiatric files are ideologically interpreted, transforming a person's life history in the process. In a revelatory chapter on the biographer Quentin Bell's account of Virginia Woolf's suicide, the author demonstrates how the text implicates the reader in the objectification of Woolf's "psychiatric problems." Highly critical of current sociological practices, The Conceptual Practices of Power both recommends and exemplifies the alternative approach that Smith presented in her earlier work, That Everyday World as Problematic, also published by Northeastern University Press. (shrink)

Sandra Harding here develops further the themes first addressed in her widely influential book, The Science Question in Feminism, and conducts a compelling analysis of feminist theories on the philosophical problem of how we know what we ...

A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice". The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs are firmly fixed in the student's mind. Scientists take great pains to defend the assumption that scientists know what the world is like...To this end, "normal science" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research (...) is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education". (shrink)

"Fresh, original, and brings together in one place a set of authors who are very important to the field." -- Mary Margaret Fonow, coeditor of Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research "Finally, a collection dedicated to demonstrating precisely what it means to do feminist research " -- Madonna Harrington Meyer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign How likely is feminist research to promote change in society? Are some research methods more successful at bringing about change than others? Contributors to this (...) volume discuss principles of feminist inquiry, providing examples from their own experience and evaluating research practices for their potential to promote social change. The twelve chapters cover methodologies including ethnographic study, in-depth interviewing, naming, and going public. Also explored are consultative relationships between academic researchers and activist organizations, participatory and advocacy research processes, and coalition building. (shrink)

I. Nature as a System of Production and Reproduction 1. Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic 2. The Past Is the Contested Zone 3. The Biological Enterprise II. Contested Readings: Narrative Natures 4. In the Beginning Was the Word 5. The Contest for Primate Nature 6. Reading Buchi Emecheta III. Differential Politics of Innappropriate/d Others 7. ’Gender’ for a Marxist Dictionary 8. A Cyborg Manifesto 9. Situated Knowledges 10. The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies.

Post-modernism offers a revolutionary approach to the study of society: in questioning the validity of modern science and the notion of objective knowledge, this movement discards history, rejects humanism, and resists any truth claims. In this comprehensive assessment of post-modernism, Pauline Rosenau traces its origins in the humanities and describes how its key concepts are today being applied to, and are restructuring, the social sciences. Serving as neither an opponent nor an apologist for the movement, she cuts through post-modernism's often (...) incomprehensible jargon in order to offer all readers a lucid exposition of its propositions. Rosenau shows how the post-modern challenge to reason and rational organization radiates across academic fields. For example, in psychology it questions the conscious, logical, coherent subject; in public administration it encourages a retreat from central planning and from reliance on specialists; in political science it calls into question the authority of hierarchical, bureaucratic decision-making structures that function in carefully defined spheres; in anthropology it inspires the protection of local, primitive cultures from First World attempts to reorganize them. In all of the social sciences, she argues, post-modernism repudiates representative democracy and plays havoc with the very meaning of "left-wing" and "right-wing." Rosenau also highlights how post-modernism has inspired a new generation of social movements, ranging from New Age sensitivities to Third World fundamentalism. In weighing its strengths and weaknesses, the author examines two major tendencies within post-modernism, the largely European, skeptical form and the predominantly Anglo-North-American form, which suggests alternative political, social, and cultural projects. She draws examples from anthropology, economics, geography, history, international relations, law, planning, political science, psychology, sociology, urban studies, and women's studies, and provides a glossary of post-modern terms to assist the uninitiated reader with special meanings not found in standard dictionaries. (shrink)

Many feminists have aruged that researchers must “give voice” to hitherto silenced women by adopting “the view from below.” Critically reviewing the literature on feminist methodology, the author argues that this perspective, while absolutely essential, is not sufficient. Confining research to induction-based methods ignores the limits to such research: Ideologies of oppression are often internalized, while the underlying structures of oppression are hidden. Marxist approaches may help reveal hidden determinants of oppression, but they risk exacerbating inequalities between researcher and researched. (...) Women's experience of a world shaped by structures of inequality produces contradictory relationships among researcher and researched and requires a methodology that deals with difference and the blindness of privilege among women. Women's oppression is “a complex of many contradictions” and necessitates a new standpoint-based methodology, created by researchers and participants of diverse race, class, and other oppressed groups, refocusing and re-visioning knowledge based on theory, action, and experience. (shrink)