Acknowledgements Introduction Part I. Philosophy and Social Science: 1. Interpretation and the sciences of man 2. Neutrality in political science 3. Social theory as practice 4. Understanding and ethnocentricity 5. Rationality 6. Foucault on freedom and truth Part II. Political Philosophy: 7. Atomism 8. What's wrong with negative liberty 9. The diversity of goods 10. Legitimation crisis? 11. The nature and scope of distributive justice 12. Kant's theory of freedom Index.

This essay points to an institutional account of our existential interest in work as a missing piece in welfare analysis. In contrast with social liberals in the post-war era, both liberal economic and egalitarian discourses today espouse a narrowly atomistic account of human nature and the modern economy. Therefore they are unable to take account of the institutional bases of economic development, individual autonomy and social order, and the way these connect. The essay shows that a patterning of distributional outcomes is a reality in both deregulated and densely governed capitalist economies, but that only the latter offers real scope for social and individual choice. The influence of the atomistic account on liberal egalitarian thought however has produced an unambitious, imprecise, and in the case of welfare contractualism, a coercive, account of both individual freedom and social community. What is needed is a more explicit inclusion of a temporal dimension in welfare and economic analysis and a more differentiated framework of pluralist governance.

Philosophy and the Human Sciences

Developmental Freedom and Social Order: Rethinking the Relation between Work and Equality

background

African feminism as decolonising force: a philosophical exploration of the work of Oyeronke Oyewumi

This paper discusses the continuing importance of philosophical questions for social science practice. Particular attention is paid to recent contributions from realist philosophers who challenge the hitherto dominant dispute between positivists and their critics. If philosophical criticism is right, social scientists’ understanding of and hopes for prediction will have to change.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/1050872

What's New in the Philosophy of Social Science?

Knowledge in general, and tacit knowledge in particular, has been hailed as an important factor for successful performance in knowledge-worker teams. Despite claims of the importance of tacit knowledge, few researchers have studied the concept empirically, due in part to the confusion surrounding its conceptualisation. The present study examined the acquisition and sharing o f tacit knowledge and the consequent effect on team performance, through social interaction and the development of a transactive memory system (TMS). TMSs are important for the acquisition and sharing of tacit knowledge, since they enact ‘collective minds’ of teams, and are also a factor in successful team performance. In order to conduct this research, a team-level operational definition of tacit knowledge was forwarded and a direct measure of tacit knowledge for software development teams, called the Team Tacit Knowledge Measure (TTKM ) was developed and validated. To investigate the main premise of this research an empirical survey study was conducted which involved 48 software development teams (n = 181 individuals), from Ireland and the UK. Software developers were chosen as the example of knowledge-worker teams because they work with intangible cognitive processes. It was concluded that tacit knowledge was acquired and shared directly through good quality social interactions and through the development of a TMS. Quality of social interaction was found to be a more important route through which teams can learn and share tacit knowledge, than was transactive memory. However, transactive memory was not a mediator between social interaction and team tacit knowledge, indicating that both provided separate contributions. Team tacit knowledge was found to predict team performance above and beyond transactive memory, though both were significant. Based on these findings recommendations were made for the management of software development teams and for future research directions.

An investigation of the acquisition and sharing of tacit knowledge in software development teams

The purpose of this study is to analyze how change is constructed by local actions and interactions of an organization. Drawing on critical realism and assuming organizational change to be a practical and social performance, a mediating entity - organizational character - is postulated to account for relationship between structure, agency, and action. The empirical study addresses local transformation and organizational character through analyzing events that are related to the development of service business in the context of a large energy company. In the empirical study, the organizational character in context consists of prudence, and of the pursuit of technical excellence and operational efficiency. Prudence is an action disposition in context when encountering new situations. The pursuit of technical excellence was a result of the past construction era. The pursuit of operational efficiency is a typical characteristic in an industry context. Three modes of praxis were identified: the habitual mode of praxis consists of fragmentizing and ensuring, and is aimed at operational efficiency for maintaining the organization; the transformative mode is directed toward the future and consists of envisioning the future and searching for new alternatives; and the contingent mode entails judgments to cope with current problems in the present and is characterized by improvisation. The integration of the relationships identified in the empirical study results in a model of local change. The local changes continuously and recursively construct outcomes of praxis that result in new configurations. In emerging and evolving situations new actions become necessary. Human agents engage in creative and transformative actions that are affected by the organizational character. Organizational character, in the context of this study, overshadows creative and transformative capacities of human agents but does not prevent local changes to the context. With regard to the practical outcomes of the study, a suggestion for the management of organizational change is that attention must be paid to internalized action dispositions in which the organization, human agents, and social consciousness about context and action, are intertwined.

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Philosophy and the Human Sciences

Citations

Developmental Freedom and Social Order: Rethinking the Relation between Work and Equality

African feminism as decolonising force: a philosophical exploration of the work of Oyeronke Oyewumi

What's New in the Philosophy of Social Science?

An investigation of the acquisition and sharing of tacit knowledge in software development teams

Change in organization - emerging situations, character and praxis

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