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Author: R. Keith Sawyer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2005-10-27
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9780521844642
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book argues that societies are complex dynamical systems that can be understood through the concept of emergence.
Author: Dave Elder-Vass
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010-06-17
Total Pages: 235
ISBN-13: 1139488198
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The problem of structure and agency has been the subject of intense debate in the social sciences for over 100 years. This book offers a solution. Using a critical realist version of the theory of emergence, Dave Elder-Vass argues that, instead of ascribing causal significance to an abstract notion of social structure or a monolithic concept of society, we must recognise that it is specific groups of people that have social structural power. Some of these groups are entities with emergent causal powers, distinct from those of human individuals. Yet these powers also depend on the contributions of human individuals, and this book examines the mechanisms through which interactions between human individuals generate the causal powers of some types of social structures. The Causal Power of Social Structures makes particularly important contributions to the theory of human agency and to our understanding of normative institutions.
Author: Thomas L. Haskell
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2001-01-03
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780801865732
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The history of the rise of "social science." Thomas L. Haskell's The Emergence of Professional Social Science signaled the beginning of his distinguished career as a historian of ideas and critic of historical logic. His first book, now available in this paperback edition with a new preface by the author, explores the background and premises of the American Social Science Association (ASSA)—the first American group dedicated to the "scientific" study of humanity and society. Haskell thus helps us to understand a sea change in American intellectual life—the rise of this thing called "social science," the power and implications of the new trend toward secular professionalism, and, ultimately, how it happened that commonsense modes of explanation in terms of conscious choices by individuals came to be overshadowed by a mode of explanation that systematically construes people as creatures of circumstance. How, Haskell asks in his conclusion, did the development of modern society alter "the way we explain human affairs and conceive of man?" This edition includes a new appendix, listing all articles appearing in the Journal of Social Science from 1869 to 1901.
Author: adrienne maree brown
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2017-03-20
Total Pages: 210
ISBN-13: 1849352615
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the tradition of Octavia Butler, here is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help to shape the futures we want. Change is constant. The world, our bodies, and our minds are in a constant state of flux. They are a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, Emergent Strategy teaches us to map and assess the swirling structures and to read them as they happen, all the better to shape that which ultimately shapes us, personally and politically. A resolutely materialist spirituality based equally on science and science fiction: a wild feminist and afro-futurist ride! adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a social justice facilitator, healer, and doula living in Detroit.
Author: Michael Hechter
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published:
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 9780202368986
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This is the first book to present a synthesis of rational choice theory and sociological perspectives for the analysis of social institutions. The origin of social institutions is an old concern in social theory. Currently it has re-emerged as one of the most intensely debated issues in social science. Among economists and rational choice theorists, there is growing awareness that most, if not all, of the social outcomes that are of interest to explain are at least partly a function of institutional constraints. Yet the role of institutions is negligible both in general equilibrium theory and in most neoclassical economic models. There is a burgeoning substantive interest in institutions ranging from social movements, to formal organizations, to states, and even international regimes. Rational choice theorists have made great strides in elucidating the effects of institutions on a variety of social outcomes, but they have paid insufficient attention to the social dynamics that lead to the emergence of these institutions. Typically, these institutions have been assumed to be a given, rather than considered as outcomes requiring explanation in their own right. Sociological theorists, in contrast, have long appreciated the role of social structural constraints in the determination of outcomes but have neglected the role of individual agents. Michael Hechter is professor emeritus in the department of Sociology at the University of Washington. He is the author of numerous books. He became an Elected Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and has been featured in Who's Who. He is also currently on editorial boards for a numerous amount of journals. Karl-Dieter Opp is professor of sociology at Univesitat Leipzig. He has been a Fellow of the European Academy of Sociology since 1999 and has been member of the Council and Treasurer since 2000. He is also current on the advisory board for the magazine Mind and Society. Reinhard Wippler is professor of theoretical sociology at the University of Utrecht and scientific director of the Interuniversity Center for Sociological Theory and Methodology.
Author: Carlo Borzaga
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 400
ISBN-13: 9780415339216
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book investigates the remarkable growth of the 'third sector', focusing on social enterprises, their characteristics, their contribution and their future prospects.
Author: Kristin Ross
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2020-05-05
Total Pages: 282
ISBN-13: 1789603714
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The 1870s in France - Rimbaud's moment, and the subject of this book - is a decade virtually ignored in most standard histories in France. Yet it was the moment of two significant spatial events: France's expansion on a global scale, and, in the spring of 1871, the brief existence on the Paris Commune - the construction of the revolutionary urban space. Arguing that space, as a social fact, is always political and strategic, Kristin Ross has written a book that is at once a history and geography of the Commune's anarchist culture - its political language and social relations, its values, strategies, and stances. Central to her analysis of the Commune as a social space and oppositional culture is a close textual reading of Arthur Rimabaud's poetry. His poems - a common thread running through the book - are one set of documents among many in Ross's recreation of the Communard experience. Rimbaud, Paul Lafargue, and the social geographer lise Reclus serve as emblematic figures moving within and on the periphery of the Commune; in their resistance to the logic and economy of the capitalist conception of work, in their challenge to work itself as a term of identity, all three posed a threat to the existing order. Ross looks at these and other emancipatory notions as aspects of Communard life, each with an analogous strategy in Rimbaud's poetry. Applying contemporary theory, to a wealth of little-known archival material, she has written a fresh, persuasive, and original book.
Author: John Gledhill
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 366
ISBN-13: 0415122554
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The traditional Eurocentric view of state formation and the rise of civilization is challenged in this broad-ranging book. Bringing archaeological research into contact with the work of ethno-historians and anthropologists, it generates a discussion of fundamental concepts rather than a search for modern analogies for processes that occurred in the past.
Author: John F. Padgett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-10-14
Total Pages: 607
ISBN-13: 0691148872
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The social sciences have sophisticated models of choice and equilibrium but little understanding of the emergence of novelty. Where do new alternatives, new organizational forms, and new types of people come from? Combining biochemical insights about the origin of life with innovative and historically oriented social network analyses, John Padgett and Walter Powell develop a theory about the emergence of organizational, market, and biographical novelty from the coevolution of multiple social networks. In the short run, they argue, actors make relations, but in the long run, they argue, actors make actors. Organizational novelty arises from spillover across intertwined networks, which tips reproducing biographical and production flows. This theory is developed through formal deductive modeling and through a wide range of careful and original historical case studies, ranging from early capitalism and state formation, to the transformation of communism, to the emergence of contemporary biotechnology and Silicon Vally. -- from back cover.
