Showing papers on "Critical theory published in 1992"

Critical frames in educational research: Feminist and post‐structural perspectives

Abstract: (1992). Critical frames in educational research: Feminist and post‐structural perspectives. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 31, Qualitative Issues in Educational Research, pp. 87-99.

Sociology from Women's Experience: A Reaffirmation*

Abstract: The discussion of my work by Pat Hill Collins, Bob Connell, and Charles Lemert is generous and very much appreciated. My difficulty in responding is that each develops a critique from a very different theoretical stance.' Lemert brings to bear his interest in what he describes as the sociological dilemma of the subject-object relation, and the postmodernist critique of modernity and its unitary subject. Pat Hill Collins draws on the tradition of critical theory, strikingly informed by her experience of and commitment to recovering the suppressed feminist thought of black women. Connell works within a Marxist tradition and with specific concerns about the relation of sociology to political practice. Also, each constructs her or his own straw Smith. Lemert reads the project of an inquiry beginning from women's experience as a sociology of women's subjective experience. Collins reads into my project her objective of creating a transformative knowledge. Connell confounds beginning from experience with individualism, and interprets my rather careful (and critical) explications of the conceptual practices of power as an abhorrence of abstractions in general. In response I will clarify how I've understood and worked for a sociology beginning from women's experience. It is not, I insist, a totalizing theory. Rather it is a method of inquiry, always ongoing, opening things up, discovering. In addition, to reemphasize its character as inquiry relevant to the politics and practice of progressive struggle, whether of women or of other oppressed groups, this essay refers to some of the work being done from this approach.

Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity

Abstract: Part 1 Introduction - defining postmodernity: modernity and postmodernity, Bryan S.Turner modernity, postmodernity and the present, Barry Smart. Part 2 Nostalgia and modernity: reading Wall Street - postmodern contradictions in the American social structure, Norman K.Denzin after nostalgia? wilful nostalgia and the phase of globalization, Roland Robertson postmoderism as humanism? urban space and social theory, Scott Las Simmel and the theory of postmodern society, Deena Weinstein and Michael A.Weinstein. Part 2 Critical theory and the modern project: Habermas and the completion of "The Project of Modernity", David Ashley Lyotard and Weber - postmodern rules and neo-Kantian values, Charles Turner towards a reinterpretation of modernity in an age of postmodernity, Adam B.Seligman. Part 3 Politics, women and postmodernity: women between fundamentalism and modernity, Aysegul Baykan women between modernity and postmodernity, Lieteke van Vucht Tijssen citizenship in the semiotic society, Philip Wexler.

Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War

Abstract: On 29 March 1991, shortly after the cessation of hostilities in the Gulf War, Jean Baudrillard published an article entitled "The Gulf War has not taken place", in which he argued that "the true belligerents are those who thrive on the ideology of the truth of this war". It is in response to such excesses of post-modernism that Christopher Norris has written this extended polemical essay. He argues that the extreme cognitive scepticism and relativism of this school of thought is profoundly disabling for critical theory. Reviewing the writings of Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and Baudrillard, as well as the American neo-pragmatist school as represented by Rorty and Fish, he meticulously examines the flaws in their arguments, and makes an impassioned plea for the continuance of the philosopher's role as intellectual critic of real world politics and governments.

Critical communication studies : communication, history, and theory in America

Abstract: The development of communication studies has been a lively process of adoption and integration of theoretical constructs from Pragmatism, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies. Critical Communication Studies describes the intellectual and professional forces that have shaped research interests and formed alliances in the pursuit of particular goals. Hanno Hardt reflects on the need to come to terms with the role of history in academic work and locates the intellectual history within the context of competing social theories. The book provides a substantive foundation for understanding the field and will be a major text in all courses dealing with communication history and theory.

Recent Developments in Critical Management Science

Abstract: For much of its history management science had a quantitative and technical emphasis. More recently, there has been a move towards more subjective approaches such as 'soft OR' and 'soft systems'. Currently, there is interest in 'critical management science' drawing on critical theory, particularly the work of Habermas. This paper reviews developments in critical management science, in particular critiques of traditional and 'soft' management science; Jackson and Keys' system of systems methodology; critical management science methodologies and the problem of power in bringing about change; and the postmodernist critique.

Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism

Abstract: This book provides the first detailed account of Gramsci's work in the context of present-day critical and socio-cultural debate Renate Holub argues that Gramsci was far ahead of his time in offering a theory of art, politics and cultural production which engages these issues at a high level of practical and theoretical concern She takes stock of Gramsci's achievement with particular reference to the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas) and to Brecht's theoretical writings She also discusses Gramsci's writing in relation to thinkers in the phenomenological tradition - especially Merleau-Ponty - an angle which has so far received little attention from Anglo-American commentators She also has some strikingly original points to make about Gramsci's continuing relevance at a time of widespread retreat from Marxist positions among those on the postmodern left "Differential pragmatics" - in Holub's suggestive phrase - is a theory of cultural production and critique derivable from Gramsci's writings with the benefit of other, more recent ideas, like Habermas's theory of communicative action and the insights of feminist criticism This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics; critical theory, political theory, sociology, cultural studies and Italian studies This book should be of interest to students and teachers of critical theory, cultural studies and Italian studies

Critical Theory and the Pragmatist Challenge

Abstract: Habermas's theory breaks with the Continental tradition that has denigrated pragmatism as an Aglo-Saxon philosophy subservient to technocratic capitalism. While Habermas deftly uses pragmatist insights into communicative rationality and democratic ethos, he shows little sensitivity to other facets of pragmatism. This article argues that incorporating the pragmatist perspective on experience and indeterminacy brings a corrective to the emancipatory agenda championed by critical theorists. The pragmatist alternative to the theory of communicative action is presented, with the discussion centering around the following themes: disembodied reason versus embodied reasonableness, determinate being versus indeterminate reality, discursive truth versus pragmatic certainty, rational consensus versus reasonable dissent, transcendental democracy versus democratic transcendence, and rational society versus sane community.

Feudal Europe, 800–1300: communal discourse and conflictual practices

Abstract: The discipline of international relations faces a new debate of fundamental significance. After the realist challenge to the pervasive idealism of the interwar years and the social scientific argument against realism in the late 1950s, it is now the turn of critical theorists to dispute the established paradigms of international politics, having been remarkably successful in several other fields of social inquiry. In essence, critical theorists claim that all social reality is subject to historical change, that a normative discourse of understandings and values entails corresponding practices, and that social theory must include interpretation and dialectical critique. In international relations, this approach particularly critiques the ahistorical, scientific, and materialist conceptions offered by neorealists. Traditional realists, by contrast, find a little more sympathy in the eyes of critical theorists because they join them in their rejection of social science and structural theory. With regard to liberal institutionalism, critical theorists are naturally sympathetic to its communitarian component while castigating its utilitarian strand as the accomplice of neorealism. Overall, the advent of critical theory will thus focus the field of international relations on its “interparadigm debate” with neorealism.

Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society

Abstract: How can we account for the power of ritual? This is the guiding question of "Black Critics and Kings," which examines how Yoruba forms of ritual and knowledge shape politics, history, and resistance against the state. Focusing on "deep" knowledge in Yoruba cosmology as an interpretive space for configuring difference, Andrew Apter analyzes ritual empowerment as an essentially critical practice, one that revises authoritative discourses of space, time, gender, and sovereignty to promote political--and even violent--change. Documenting the development of a Yoruba kingdom from its nineteenth-century genesis to Nigeria's 1983 elections and subsequent military coup, Apter identifies the central role of ritual in reconfiguring power relations both internally and in relation to wider political arenas. What emerges is an ethnography of an interpretive vision that has broadened the horizons of local knowledge to embrace Christianity, colonialism, class formation, and the contemporary Nigerian state. In this capacity, Yoruba "orisa" worship remains a critical site of response to hegemonic interventions. With sustained theoretical argument and empirical rigor, Apter answers critical anthropologists who interrogate the possibility of ethnography. He reveals how an indigenous hermeneutics of power is put into ritual practice--with multiple voices, self-reflexive awareness, and concrete political results. "Black Critics and Kings" eloquently illustrates the ethnographic value of listening to the voice of the other, with implications extending beyond anthropology to engage leading debates in black critical theory."

The discovery of participatory research as a new scientific paradigm: Personal and intellectual accounts

Abstract: The article presents considerations for the placing of participatory research in the practice of sociology. The changing conditions in contemporary society have compelled social scientists to rethink the way social theory has been conceptualized and has been practiced in relation to social change. Modernist social theory, of which sociology is a prime example, has been imbued with the biases of the Enlightenment that privilege the essentialized male rational actor set above the ordinary people. As a consequence it has produced narratives and practices that are not in the interest of the people, especially those who have been dominated and oppressed. In order to live up to the potential of sociology as a vehicle for the improvement of social conditions, it must include the interest and the wisdom of the people in its researching and theorizing activities. It is argued that participatory research provides an opportunity to follow this course in sociology. Participatory research, it is contended, will lead to a paradigm shift in the social sciences because it is based on an expanded conception of knowledge and because it changes the relationship between the researcher and the researched and between theory and practice. Arguments are drawn from the history of science, critical theory, and postmodernist and feminist critiques.

Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism

Abstract: Azade Seyhan provides a concise, elegantly argued introduction to the critical theory of German Romanticism and demonstrates how its approach to the metaphorical and linguistic nature of knowledge is very much alive in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. Her analysis of key thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis explores their views on rhetoric, systematicity, hermeneutics, and cultural interpretation. Seyhan examines German Romanticism as a critical intervention in the debates on representation, which developed in response to the philosophical revolution of German Idealism. Facing a chaotic political and intellectual landscape, the eighteenth-century theorists sought new models of understanding and new objectives for criticism and philosophy. "Representation and Its Discontents" identifies the legacy of this formative moment in modern criticism and suggests its relevance to contemporary discussions of post-structuralism, orientalism, theories of textuality, and the nature of philosophical discourse.

How Far is it from Virginia and Rochester to Frankfurt? Public Choice as Critical Theory

Abstract: Public choice and critical theory constitute two very different and often mutually hostile research traditions. An opportunity for conversation across the two traditions arises inasmuch as public choice has itself demonstrated the incoherence of a politics – in particular, a democratic politics – of unconstrained rational egoism. By deploying an expanded, communicative conception of rationality, critical theory can help move public choice beyond several related impasses. Critical theory benefits from this encounter by gaining content for its currently rather abstract critiques of politics and rationality, and additional insight into the forces conducive to different kinds of rationality. More importantly, political science stands to gain an account of politics more powerful than either tradition can muster by itself.

Theory of Societal Constitutionalism: Foundations of a Non-Marxist Critical Theory.

Abstract: 1. Introduction: societal constitutionalism as critical theory Part I. Conceptual Foundations of Societal Constitutionalism: 2. Social integration and social control: the importance of procedural normative restraints 3. Liberalism and the Weberian dilemma: from restraints on government to restraints on civil society 4. Conceptual foundations of societal constitutionalism: from internal restraints on government to external restraints on drift Part II. Origins of the Analytical Distinctions and Conceptual Foundations: Retracing Steps Taken By Habermas, Fuller, and Parsons: 5. Societal constitutionalism's grounding against relativism: from Weber's legal positivism to Habermas' communication theory 6. Societal constitutionalism's threshold in practice: from Fuller's legal theory to societal constitutionalism 7. Societal constitutionalism's organizational manifestation, I: voluntaristic action as a distinct concept 8. Societal constitutionalism's organizational manifestation, II: from voluntaristic action to collegial formations Part III. Implications of the Analytical Distinctions and Conceptual Foundations: 9. Procedural institutionalization beyond the Western democracies: three bases of voluntaristic restraint 10. External restraints: prospects for reason and 'tradition' 11. Collegial formations as external procedural restraints: prospects for a public realm Notes Bibliography Name index Subject index.

Politics of Curriculum: Origins, Controversies, and Significance of Critical Perspectives

Abstract: In one sense, most educational theorists who have envisioned using the educational process to support social reform could be said to exhibit a "critical perspective." John Dewey (1916), George Counts (1932), and Harold Rugg (1929-1932), as well as recent conservative critics such as Alan Bloom and William J. Bennett, have argued for educational reforms that presumably would foster students' capacity to think in more critical and informed ways about the issues of the day. While progressives, social reconstructionists, and conservatives would understand the social goals and consequences of such critical thinking from quite different ideological points of view, all could be said to advocate "critical perspectives." (Indeed, President Bush, in his January 1991 State of the Union address, used the term empowerment, long a favorite of left-wing theorists in education.) In the field of education, particularly in the field of curriculum, the concept of "critical perspectives" has been appropriated by a group whose intellectual roots can be traced, variously, to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and to Marxist and neo-Marxist theoreticians as varied as Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, and, in education proper, Paulo Freire.

Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition: Self and Society from Freud to Kristeva

Abstract: This text is a benchmark critique of Freudian theory in which a dialogue between the Frankfurt School, the Lacanian tradition and post-Lacanian developments in critical and feminist theory is developed. Considering afresh the relations between self and society, Elliot argues for the importance of imagination and the unconscious in understanding issues about the self and self-identity, ideology and power, sexual difference and gender. The second edition surveys the recent changes that have taken place in psychoanalytic social theory. Traditions of thought covered include critical theory, Lacanian and post-Lacanian theory, post-structuralism and feminism.

Tradition, rationality, and power in introductory nursing textbooks: a critical hermeneutics study.

Abstract: This study investigated the language used to describe, explain, and interpret the concept of nursing process in four introductory nursing textbooks. A critical theory framework was used to reinterpret the ways in which language or linguistic activities construct the social-historical reality of nurses. Themes related to tradition, rationality, and power relationships were explicated. The meanings disclosed from the world of the text provide understandings about how nurses interpret their professional autonomy and how normative structures inform what constitutes authority and responsibility in research, education, and practice.

Postmodernism and Social Theory: The Debate over General Theory

Abstract: Part 1 Toward postmodernism - reconfiguring theory and politics: general social theory, irony, postmodernism, Charles Lemert postmodern social theory as narrative with a moral intent, Steven Seidman on the postmodern barricades - feminism, politics and theory, Linda Nicholson the strange life and hard times of the concept of general theory in sociology - a short history of hope, Stephen Turner. Part 2 Critics of postmodernism - in defense of scientific theory: defending social science against the postmodern doubt, Robert D'Amico the promise of positivism, Jonathan Turner three modes of sociology - scientific, practical, and evaluative, Randall Collins daring modesty - on metatheory, observation and theory growth, David Wagner. Part 3 Between modernism and postmodernism - towards a contextualizing general theory: social science and society as discourse - toward a sociology for civic competence, Richard Brown culture, history, and the problem of spcificity in social theory, Craig Calhoun the tensions of critical theory - is negative dialectics all there is?, Stanley Aronowitz general theory in the postpositivist mode - the "Epistemological Dilemma" and the search for present reason, Jeffrey Alexander.

Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment

Abstract: Part 1 Historical perspectives: metaphysics' forgetfulness of time - on the controversy over Parmenides, frag. 8,5, Michael Theunissen the origins of the theory of the subject, Dieter Henrich inwardness and the culture of modernity, Charles Taylor. Part 2 Theoretical issues: reflections on philosophical method from an analytic point of view, Ernst Tugendhat normatively grounding "critical theory" through recourse to the lifeworld? a transcendental-pragmatic attempt to think with Habermas against Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel what is a pragmatic theory of meaning? - variations on the proposition "We Understand a Speech Act when We Know What Makes It Acceptable", Albrecht Wellmer art and rationality - on the dialectic of symbolic and allegorical form, Peter Burger. Part 3 Postenlightenment challenges: philosophy and social practice - avoiding the ethnocentric predicament, Thomas McCarthy the debate over performative contradiction - Habermas versus the Poststructuralists, Martin Jay Foucault - critique as a philosophical ethos, Richard J. Bernstein the face in the sand - Foucault and the anthropological slumber, Herbert Schnadelbach.

Discourse towards balanced rationality in the high school mathematics classroom : Ideas from Habermas' critical theory

Abstract: This paper aims to contribute to research in mathematics education which is exploring, from social constructivist perspectives, the prospects of reconstructing the microculture of the traditional classroom learning environment. A Habermasian perspective is adopted on the need to make invisible and subject to critical scrutiny the hidden frames of reference which constitute the dominant instrumental ideology of traditional mathematics teaching. Three powerful and congruent frames of reference

Legitimation and the Classification of Archaeological Sites

Abstract: A good deal of archaeology is conducted within the context of historic preservation, which means that many American archaeologists are faced with the issue of determining site significance. In this essay, we turn to critical theory as a way of complementing the positivist basis for determining site significance. Among the critical theorists, Jurgen Habermas offers a way of examining and understanding a connection between knowledge about the past and the interests of contemporary Americans.

On the status of critical theory

Abstract: Critical theory, while remaining in part a scientific social theory, is not just a scientific theory. The nature and distinctiveness of its criticalness is depicted. The logical status of a rationally reconstructed Habermasian critical theory is displayed, defended from some traditional criticisms (including charges of historical idealism), and contrasted with both historical versions of critical theory and purely scientific theories. Whether the critical theory articulated and defended is Habermasian, or a more historicized critical theory, in either case it is argued that it provides a sound basis forideologiekritik against postmodernist scepticism.

Welfare, Ideology and Need: Developing Perspectives on the Welfare State

Abstract: Characterizing welfare ideology conceptions of ideology. Part 1 Welfare State and ideology: social administration and the welfare consensus welfare ideology and the New Right Thatcherism and the welfare consensus. Part 2 Marxist theories of ideology and the Welfare State: ideology, political economy and the Welfare State critical theory and welfare ideology disorganized capitalism and the problems of need and welfare. Part 3 Welfare ideology and discourse: structural Marxism, ideology and the Welfare State welfare, power and ideology - Foucault's account of welfare and ideology problems of human need - the real and ideological bases of welfare policy, ideology and reason.