Outline of a Theory of Practice.
About: This article is published in Contemporary Sociology.The article was published on 1980-03-01. It has received 14683 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Practice theory.
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TL;DR: Statius' Silvae, written late in the reign of Domitian (AD 81-96), are a new kind of poetry that confronts the challenge of imperial majesty or private wealth by new poetic strategies and forms as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Statius' Silvae, written late in the reign of Domitian (AD 81–96), are a new kind of poetry that confronts the challenge of imperial majesty or private wealth by new poetic strategies and forms. As poems of praise, they delight in poetic excess whether they honour the emperor or the poet's friends. Yet extravagant speech is also capacious speech. It functions as a strategy for conveying the wealth and grandeur of villas, statues and precious works of art as well as the complex emotions aroused by the material and political culture of empire. The Silvae are the product of a divided, self-fashioning voice. Statius was born in Naples of non-aristocratic parents. His position as outsider to the culture he celebrates gives him a unique perspective on it. The Silvae are poems of anxiety as well as praise, expressive of the tensions within the later period of Domitian's reign.
127 citations
TL;DR: The universal validity of the personalist view of meaning as owned by the individual speaker and exclusively defined by his intentions is questioned on the basis of an analysis of spontaneous verbal interaction in a politico-judiciary arena in a traditional village in Western Samoa as mentioned in this paper.
127 citations
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TL;DR: A critical look at directed acyclic graph models is taken, and it is suggested that it is in need of more, and more explicit, methodological and philosophical justification than it typically receives.
Abstract: Directed acyclic graph (DAG) models are popular tools for describing causal relationships and for guiding attempts to learn them from data. They appear to supply a means of extracting causal conclusions from probabilistic conditional independence properties inferred from purely observational data. I take a critical look at this enterprise, and suggest that it is in need of more, and more explicit, methodological and philosophical justification than it typically receives. In particular, I argue for the value of a clean separation between formal causal language and intuitive causal assumptions.
126 citations
TL;DR: For two and a half months in the spring of 1989, China's student actors dominated the world stage of modern telecommunications as mentioned in this paper, and their massive demonstrations, the hunger strike during Gorbachev's visit, and the dramatic appearance of the Goddess of Democracy captured the attention of an audience that spanned the globe.
Abstract: For two and a half months in the spring of 1989, China's student actors dominated the world stage of modern telecommunications. Their massive demonstrations, the hunger strike during Gorbachev's visit, and the dramatic appearance of the Goddess of Democracy captured the attention of an audience that spanned the globe. As we write in mid-1990, the movement and its bloody suppression have already produced an enormous body of literature—from eyewitness accounts by journalists (Morrison 1989; Zhaoqiang, Gejing and Siyuan 1989) and special issues of scholarly journals ( Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs Nos. 23, 24; The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 14.4), to pictorial histories (Turnley and Turnley 1989) and documentary collections (Han 1990; Wu 1989), and, most recently, textbook chapters (Spence 1990) and analytical works (Feigon 1990; Nathan 1990)—tracing the development of China's crisis. Despite a flood of material too massive to review in the present context, we still lack a convincing interpretive framework that places the events within the context of China's modern political evolution, and also provides a way to compare China's experience to that of Eastern Europe. Such an interpretation should help us to understand why massive public demonstrations spurred an evolution toward democratic governance in Eastern Europe, but in China led only to the massacre of June 3–4 and the present era of political repression.
126 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the concept of creativity is redefined as the necessary adaption of habitual practices to specific contexts of action, which overcomes the dichotomy presented by Joas.
Abstract: Hans Joas's The Creativity of Action (1996) posits that conceiving of all action as fundamentally creative would overcome problems inherent in rational and normative theories of action and would provide an alternative basis for action-based theories of macrosociological phenomena. Joas conceives of creativity as a response to the frustration of “prereflective aspirations,” which necessitates innovative adjustment to reestablish habitual intentions. This conceptualization creates an unsupportable duality between habitual action and creativity that neglects other possible sources of creative action, including habit itself. Combining strengths from Bourdieu's concept of habitus, creativity can be redefined as the necessary adaption of habitual practices to specific contexts of action. Creative action continually introduces novel possibilities in practical action and provokes a variety of social responses to its products. This revised concept of creativity overcomes the dichotomy presented by Joas identifies ...
126 citations