The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

We may not be able to make you love reading, but archaeology of knowledge will lead you to love reading starting from now. Book is the window to open the new world. The world that you want is in the better stage and level. World will always guide you to even the prestige stage of the life. You know, this is some of how reading will give you the kindness. In this case, more books you read more knowledge you know, but it can mean also the bore is full.

The archaeology of knowledge

The condition of the working class in England.

(1974). History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 167-170.

History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics

Ideology-An Introduction

Although discourse analysts often conceive of their work as critical, there is little theoretical discussion regarding the possibility of normative critique in the scientific community of discourse...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0957926516630897

Discourse analysis as immanent critique: Possibilities and limits of normative critique in empirical discourse studies:

If we engage in reflection on standards of critique, we are entering the terrain of metaethics, or the question of which ethical standards we should accept. The question is not only, in the sense o...

Suffering as an anchor of critique. The place of critique in critical discourse studies

The term “social exclusion” has been converting into a buzzword in European social sciences in the last decade. But the double use of the notion, as a concept of social politics as well as a sociological concept is producing a blurring of its contents. The aim of this article is to offer an approach which is able to satisfy the theoretic requirements for an analytical sociological concept by making use of the concept of discursive exclusion. Therefore the text develops the notion of discursive exclusion based on the most recent findings about sociological discourse theory and its contributions to the understanding of the construction of social reality. The process of social exclusion has to be understood in the context of its discursive production but also has to go beyond language. The approach will be exemplified by a case study about the exclusion of migrants in Spain.

/pdf/exclusion-discursiva-hacia-un-nuevo-concepto-de-la-exclusion-4nrt6blt5a.pdf

Exclusión discursiva. Hacia un nuevo concepto de la exclusión social

Drug consumption and perception among Latin American immigrants. The aim of this study is to obtain information about drug consumption, leisure activities and knowledge of community services among Spanish-speaking immigrants to prevent drug abuse in this population. Quantitative methodology was used. The field work of this study has two phases: in the first stage (2003), a survey of social perception of drugs was administered to 147 subjects. During the second stage (2004), 610 surveys were administered. Data were analysed by bivariate analysis. Usual consumption of alcohol was 40.1%, usual consumption of tobacco was 31.3%, and usual consumption of cannabis was 3.4% . Drug users considered that the main reason for drug consumption was «to have fun» (p<.03). There is a relationship between leisure time and drug use. Family plays an important role in drug abuse prevention and preventive drug abuse programs must be adapted to this population.

https://www.rafaelaleixandre.es/Archivos/Publicaciones/art_132.pdf

Consumo de drogas y su percepción por parte de inmigrantes latinoamericanos

Excluded and/or marginalized social groups frequently face problems involving representation in the public sphere. Moreover, the very notion of exclusion typically refers to communicatively or discursively produced mechanisms of being considered irrelevant in public processes of communication. Exclusion and marginalization, understood as processes of silencing or invisibilizing social groups, are particularly serious in cases involving social suffering, i.e. socially produced suffering and/or suffering that can be eliminated or alleviated socially. Making silence heard, giving voice to the silenced and bringing the invisibilized back into the public domain are therefore fundamental tasks of solidarity in reaching a higher degree of social integration. The main aim of this article is to reveal how it is possible to disclose and understand the social grammar of the normative claims of silenced and invisibilized social groups. Therefore, grounded in Axel Honneth’s Theory of Recognition, I first devel...

Benno Herzog

Papers

Discourse analysis as immanent critique: Possibilities and limits of normative critique in empirical discourse studies:

Suffering as an anchor of critique. The place of critique in critical discourse studies

Exclusión discursiva. Hacia un nuevo concepto de la exclusión social

Consumo de drogas y su percepción por parte de inmigrantes latinoamericanos

Invisibilization and Silencing as an Ethical and Sociological Challenge