30,862 research outputs found
Discourse Analysis: varieties and methods
This paper presents and analyses six key approaches to discourse analysis, including political discourse theory, rhetorical political analysis, the discourse historical approach in critical discourse analysis, interpretive policy analysis, discursive psychology and Q methodology. It highlights differences and similarities between the approaches along three distinctive dimensions, namely, ontology, focus and purpose. Our analysis reveals the difficulty of arriving at a fundamental matrix of dimensions which would satisfactorily allow one to organize all approaches in a coherent theoretical framework. However, it does not preclude various theoretical articulations between the different approaches, provided one takes a problem-driven approach to social science as one?s starting-point
Theorizing ideas and discourse in political science: intersubjectivity, neo-institutionalisms, and the power of ideas
Oscar Larssonâs (2015) essay condemns discursive institutionalism for the âsinâ of subjectivism. In reality, however, discursive institutionalism emphasizes the intersubjective nature of ideas through its theorization of agentsâ âbackground ideational abilitiesâ and âforeground discursive abilities.â It also avoids relativism by means of Wittgensteinâs distinction between experiences of everyday life and pictures of the world. Contrary to Larsson, what truly separates post-structuralism from discursive institutionalism is the respective approachesâ theorization of the relationship of power to ideas, with discursive institutionalists mainly focused on persuasive power through ideas, while post-structuralists focus on the structural power in ideas or on coercive power over ideas
An emergence perspective on entrepreneurship: processes, structure and methodology
This paper explores entrepreneurship from the perspective of emergence, drawing on literature in
complexity theory, social theory and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is conceptualised as the
production of emergence, or emergent properties, via a simple model of initial conditions, processes of
emergence that produces emergent properties at multiple levels (new phenomena such as products,
services, firms, networks, patterns of behaviour, identities). Conceptualisation through emergence thus
embraces actors, context, processes and (structural) outcomes. This paper builds on previous work that
theorises the relationship between entrepreneurship and social change. We extend that work by
considering the methodological implications of relating processes of entrepreneurship to the emergence
of new phenomena
Chomsky and Foucault on Human Nature and Politics
Permission granted by Social Theory and Practice Journal, Department of Philosophy, Florida State UniversityIn 1971, Dutch television held a series of interviews and discussions with noted intellectuals of the day to discuss a wide range of issues regarding contemporary social and philosophical affairs. Perhaps the most significant of these encounters was the meeting between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. It brought together arguably the two most prominent Western intellectual-activists of the day in a debate that illustrates clearly the lineage of thought within which each writer is situated. Nominally the discussion was in two parts: the first an examination of the origins or production of knowledge, with particular concern for the natural sciences, the second explicitly focused on the role and practice of oppositional politics within Western capitalist democraciesâin part a response to the unfolding Vietnam Wa
On the Nature of Social and Institutional Reality
What is the nature of the social reality? How do the major social institutions like money or law exist? What are the limits of individualistically-oriented social theories?These and related problems are intensely discussed in philosophy, in legal theory and in the methodology of social sciences. This collection brings together the different traditions of the contemporary discussion. It includes thought-provoking articles by John Searle, Margaret Gilbert, Ota Weinberger, Raimo Tuomela, Eerik Lagerspetz, Michael Quante, Cristina Redondo and Paolo Comanducci.
âWonderful selection of articles that contribute in important ways to the growing field of social ontology... A âmust-haveâ for anyone working on issues of social ontology.â
Deborah Tollefsen, University of Memphi
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Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL
Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N
Creative methodologies for understanding a creative industry
The chapter presents a conceptual framework for the identification and analysis of value creating and value capture systems within creative industry contexts based on theoretical and empirical studies. It provides a âdigital economyâ perspective of the creative industries as a micro-level example of a wider analytical problem, which is how society changes itself. The increasing level of innovation and creativity produces greater levels of instability in social structures (habits, norms etc.) Completely new industries can arise (and âcreativelyâ destroy old ones) as new stabilised patterns form, particularly where entry costs are tumbling, such as digital milieu. Observations of workshops over several days with creative groups, interviews with creative enterprises, literature reviews on creative industries, business models and value systems have informed the analysis and conceptualisation. As a result we present a conceptual framework that we suggest can capture how novelty arises as emergent order over time. We have extended previous work that investigates the significance of emergence in theorising entrepreneurship into an exploration of how to articulate the creation and flow of value and effective ontology in a creative landscape. In the digital economy, the creative industries revolve around dynamic, innovative and often unorthodox collaborations, whereby numerous large, small and micro-businesses come together for the duration of a project, then disband and form new partnerships for the next project. Research designs must therefore address multiple contexts and levels presenting an analytical challenge to researchers. Methodologically, we suggest that the framework has analytical potential to support the collection of data: ordering and categorising empirical observations concerning how different phenomena emerge over time across multiple levels of analysis and contexts. Conceptually, the work broadens the notions of âbusiness modelâ to consider value creating systems and particular states reached by those systems in their evolution. The work contributes new concepts for researchers in this field and a wider framework for practitioners and policy makers
Self as social practice: rewriting the feminine in qualitative organizational research
This paper offers a reflexive discussion of the paradox of researching others and offering to represent multiple voices whilst suppressing the voice of the researcher. Martinâs (2002) injunction to repair research accounts by âletting the âIâ back inâ is problematised by identifying four typically unacknowledged discursive subject positions which constitute the multiple nature of the âIâ in such texts: the empirical âeyeâ, the analytical I, the authorial I and the I as semiotic shifter. It is argued that this shifting multiplicity is stabilised by the relationship between self and research text being corporeally grounded and gendered. From this discussion, three possible approaches to gender are considered: the discursive/textual approach (as developed inter alia by Foucault); the performance/social practice approach (as developed inter alia by Judith Butler) and the corporeal multiplicity approach (as developed inter alia by Elizabeth Grosz and Dorothea Olkowski). The paper concludes by suggesting a tripartite approach to writing self-multiplicity in research which extends the possibilities opened up by the social practice approach: re-citing (redeploying discursive resources in intertextuality); re-siting (changing the positioning of the self in power relations by reinscribing); and re-sighting (opening up new, virtual visions of possibility)
Processes endure, whereas events occur
In this essay, we aim to help clarify the nature of so-called 'occurrences' by attributing distinct modes of existence and persistence to processes and events. In doing so, we break with the perdurantism claimed by DOLCEâs authors and we distance ourselves from mereological analyzes like those recently conducted by Guarino to distinguish between 'processes' and 'episodes'. In line with the works of Stout and Galton, we first bring closer (physical) processes and objects in their way of enduring by proposing for processes a notion of dynamic presence (contrasting with a static presence for objects). Then, on the events side, we attribute to them the status of abstract entities by identifying them with objects of thought (by individual and collective subjects), and this allows us to distinguish for themselves between existence and occurrence. We therefore identify them with psychological (or even social) endurants, which may contingently occur
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