Showing papers on "Critical theory published in 2006"

Toward a Political Conception of Corporate Responsibility - Business and Society Seen from a Habermasian Perspective

Abstract: We review two important schools within business and society research, which we label positivist and post-positivist corporate social responsibility (CSR). The former is criticized because of its instrumentalism and normative vacuity, and the latter because of its relativism, foundationalism, and utopianism. We propose a new approach, based on J?rgen Habermas's theory of democracy, and define the new role of the business firm as a political actor in a globalizing society.

Foucault, Sport and Exercise: Power, Knowledge and Transforming the Self

Abstract: Michel Foucault’s work profoundly influences the way we think about society, in particular how we understand social power, the self, and the body. This book gives an innovative and entirely new analysis of is later works making it a one-stop guide for students, exploring how Foucauldian theory can inform our understanding of the body, domination, identity and freedom as experienced through sport and exercise. Divided into three themed parts, this book considers: Foucault’s ideas and key debates Foucault’s theories to explore power relations, the body, identity and the construction of social practices in sport and exercise how individuals make sense of the social forces surrounding them, considering physical activity, fitness and sport practices as expressions of freedom and sites for social change. Accessible and clear, including useful case studies helping to bring the theory to real-life, Foucault, Sport and Exercise considers cultures and experiences in sports, exercise and fitness, coaching and health promotion. In addition to presenting established Foucauldian perspectives and debates, this text also provides innovative discussion of how Foucault’s later work can inform the study and understanding of sport and the physically active body.

European Perspectives on Men and Masculinities: National and Transnational Approaches

Abstract: The social relations of home and work represent some of the most fundamental aspects of gender relations in society, and thus some of the most important elements in the construction of men and masculinities. The separation of home and work is both a very real one and an ideological construction. It is at the root of much liberal social science, as well as figuring, in more or less sophisticated ways, in non-feminist (Habermas, 1984, 1987) and feminist (Fraser, 1989) critical theory. In some ways it refers to the distinction between production and reproduction; but an over-simple division into dual spheres has been shown to be theoretically flawed, historically inaccurate (Bose, 1987; Hearn, 1992) and contrary to the experience of some people and some social categories, for example, women of colour (Collins, 1990).

We can Relate Hip-Hop Culture, Critical Pedagogy, and the Secondary Classroom

Abstract: This article seeks to locate hip-hop in the realm of popular culture in education. Through the use of song lyrics, the author suggests the use of rap music to provide context for the humanities and social sciences in secondary curriculum. Using a theoretical and practical lens, the article argues for the use of hip-hop and other elements of popular culture to be utilized to develop relevant curriculum. Although the article highlights one aspect of hip-hop culture, it seeks to advocate for other creative techniques seeking to provide relevance for high school youth.

Re-Presenting the Good Society

Abstract: Contemporary critical social theories face the question of how to justify the ideas of the good society that guide their critical analyses. Traditionally, these more or less determinate ideas of the good society were held to be independent of their specific sociocultural context and historical epoch. Today, such a concept of context-transcending validity is not easy to defend; the "linguistic turn" of Western philosophy signals the widespread acceptance of the view that ideas of knowledge and validity are always mediated linguistically and that language is conditioned by history and context. In Re-Presenting the Good Society, Maeve Cooke addresses the justificatory dilemma facing critical social theories: how to maintain an idea of context-transcending validity without violating anti-authoritarian impulses. In doing so she not only clarifies the issues and positions taken by other theorists--including Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Judith Butler--but also offers her own original and thought-provoking analysis of context-transcending validity.Because the tension between an anti-authoritarian impulse and a guiding idea of context-transcending validity is today an integral part of critical social theory, Cooke argues that it should be negotiated rather than eliminated. Her proposal for a concept of context-transcending validity has as its central claim that we should conceive of the good society as re-presented in particular constitutively inadequate representations of it. These re-presentations are, Cooke argues provocatively, regulative ideas that have an imaginary, fictive character.

Forging community in race and class: critical race theory and the quest for social justice in education

Abstract: Among the communities of critical race theorists and its detractors in education, there is an apparent rift as to what theoretical construct best contributes to the social justice project in education. Conferences and meetings have served as quasi‐battle grounds for theorists, activists and scholars to go back and forth about what theoretical construct has the greatest bearing on educational praxis. Debate notwithstanding, the following document argues critical race theory (CRT hereafter) as a viable theoretical construct to address issues of social justice in education. In so doing, the following document couches the discussion in three tasks. The first is to identify the contributions of CRT in education. Second, the document argues for a closer read of the theoretical construct and its subsequent application. The concluding task will be an example of how the points of contention and compliance can be located through an example (in this case narrative) of a school with a social justice agenda at its cen...

Reflection in education: a kantian epistemology

Abstract: As even its defenders admit, reflection in education suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity. In this essay, Henk Procee provides a philosophical analysis of the central concepts in this domain. In the current literature, these concepts are usually taken from the pragmatic school of John Dewey and from critical social theory associated with Jurgen Habermas. In contrast, Procee argues that Kant’s philosophy incorporates ideas better suited to understanding reflection in education — particularly through his distinction between understanding ("Verstand") and judgment ("Urteilskraft"), a distinction that supports an epistemology that accepts the special nature of reflection as judgment as opposed to formal learning (which, in Kant’s analysis, is part of understanding). In addition, Procee discusses some consequences for the aims and methods of reflection in education.

Philosophy of new music

Abstract: In 1947 Theodor Adorno, one of the seminal European philosophers of the postwar years, announced his return after exile in the United States to a devastated Europe by writing Philosophy of New Music. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Schoenberg reviled it. Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal to composition itself, rather than as a matter of the reproduction of musical performance. Consisting of two distinct essays, "Schoenberg and Progress" and "Stravinsky and Reaction," this work poses the musical extremes in which Adorno perceived the struggle for the cultural future of Europe: between human emancipation and barbarism, between the compositional techniques and achievements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In this completely new translation-presented along with an extensive introduction by distinguished translator Robert Hullot-Kentor-Philosophy of New Music emerges as an indispensable key to the whole of Adorno's illustrious and influential oeuvre. Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was the leading figure of the Frankfurt school of critical theory. He authored more than twenty volumes, including Negative Dialectics (1982), Philosophy of Modern Music (1980), Kierkegaard (Minnesota, 1989), Dialectic of Enlightenment (1975) with Max Horkheimer, and Aesthetic Theory (Minnesota, 1997).Robert Hullot-Kentor has taught at Harvard and Stanford universities and written widely on Adorno. He has translated various works of Adorno, including Aesthetic Theory.

The Resources of Critique

Abstract: * Introduction * Part I: Four Kinds of Impasse *1. Modernity and its Promises: Habermas and Bidet *1.1 Between sociological suspicion and the rule of law: * Jurgen Habermas *1.2 With and against Marx and Rawls: Jacques Bidet *2. Between Relativism and Universalism: French * Critical Sociology *2.1 Capitalism and its critiques: Boltanski and Chiapello *2.2 The dialectic of universal and particular: Pierre Bourdieu *3. Touching the Void: Badiou and i ek *3.1 The exception is the norm *3.2 Miracles do happen: the ontology of Alain Badiou *3.3 Unreal: Slavoj i ek and the proletariat *4. The Generosity of Being: Antonio Negri *4.1 All is grace *4.2 Negri's Grundrisse: revolutionary subjectivity versus * Marxist 'objectivism' *4.3 The refusal of transcendence * Part II: Three Dimensions of Progress *5. A Critical Realist Ontology *5.1 The story so far *5.2 Dimensions of realism *6. Structure and Contradiction *6.1 Realism about structures *6.2 The primacy of contradiction *6.3 A dialectic of nature? *7. Justice and Universality *7.1 From fact to value *7.2 Equality and well-being *7.3 Why equality matters *8. Conclusion

Rethinking the Critique of Instrumental Reason

Abstract: My paper argues that Jurgen Habermas's transformation of critical social theory seriously weakens the potential of the concept of instrumental reason as a tool of social critique. I defend the central role of the concept of instrumental reason in both i) the critique of social injustice, and ii) the diagnosis of pathologies of meaning stemming from cultural modernization. However, I argue that the root of these problems cannot come into view from within the Habermasian paradigm. Contra Habermas, I argue that the problem of a 'loss of freedom' is better characterized as a process of integration through power; the problem of a 'loss of meaning' must also be reconceived as a problem of moral disintegration. My claim is that a proper understanding of these processes requires an engagement with the understanding of instrumental reason in earlier critical theory as primarily a distortion of the relation of language and experience. This necessitates rethinking the task of critical social theory along the lines of the concept of selbstbesinnung (self-awareness) rather than according to Habermas's Kantianized version of self-reflection.

Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory Between Past and Future

Abstract: In Critique and Disclosure, Nikolas Kompridis argues provocatively for a richer and more time-responsive critical theory. He calls for a shift in the normative and critical emphasis of critical theory from the narrow concern with rules and procedures of Jurgen Habermas's model to a change-enabling disclosure of possibility and the enlargement of meaning. Kompridis contrasts two visions of critical theory's role and purpose in the world: one that restricts itself to the normative clarification of the procedures by which moral and political questions should be settled and an alternative rendering that conceives of itself as a possibility-disclosing practice. At the center of this resituation of critical theory is a normatively reformulated interpretation of Martin Heidegger's idea of "disclosure" or "world disclosure." In this regard Kompridis reconnects critical theory to its normative and conceptual sources in the German philosophical tradition and sets it within a romantic tradition of philosophical critique.Drawing not only on his sustained critical engagement with the thought of Habermas and Heidegger but also on the work of other philosophers including Wittgenstein, Cavell, Gadamer, and Benjamin, Kompridis argues that critical theory must, in light of modernity's time-consciousness, understand itself as fully situated in its time--in an ever-shifting and open-ended horizon of possibilities, to which it must respond by disclosing alternative ways of thinking and acting. His innovative and original argument will serve to move the debate over the future of critical studies forward--beyond simple antinomies to a consideration of, as he puts it, "what critical theory should be if it is to have a future worthy of its past."

Contemporary Sociological Theory

Abstract: This thorough collection of contemporary sociological theory is the definitive guide to current perspectives and approaches in the field. Organized by theme, the volume includes the most representative material available on topics such as symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, structuralism, network theory, critical theory, feminist theory, and the current debates over modernity and postmodernity. The theories of Foucault, Giddens, and Bourdieu also appear in longer sections, enabling students and scholars to examine the work in greater depth. Editorial introductions put these readings into theoretical perspective, making this an authoritative and compact survey of contemporary sociological theory. This book, in conjunction with its complement, Classical Sociological Theory, offers readers a complete overview of sociological theory.

Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)

Abstract: George Landow's widely acclaimed Hypertext was the first book to bring together the worlds of literary theory and computer technology. Landow was one of the first scholars to explore the implications of giving readers instant, easy access to a virtual library of sources as well as unprecedented control of what and how they read. In hypermedia, Landow saw a strikingly literal embodiment of many major points of contemporary literary theory, particularly Derrida's idea of "de-centering" and Barthes's conception of the "readerly" versus "writerly" text. From Intermedia to Microcosm, Storyspace, and the World Wide Web, Landow offers specific information about the kinds of hypertext, different modes of linking, attitudes toward technology, and the proliferation of pornography and gambling on the Internet. For the third edition he includes new material on developing Internet-related technologies, considering in particular their increasingly global reach and the social and political implications of this trend as viewed from a postcolonial perspective. He also discusses blogs, interactive film, and the relation of hypermedia to games. Thoroughly expanded and updated, this pioneering work continues to be the "ur-text" of hypertext studies.

Culture and Cultural Identity in Intercultural Technical Communication

Abstract: Drawing from the critical cultural theory of Arjun Appadurai, this article interrogates the concept of culture underpinning much intercultural technical communication research. Appadurai suggested that intertextual connections between the cultural and the economic, political, demographic, and historical aspects of the globalizing world are essential for understanding cross-cultural communication. The cultural theory offered in this article opens the way for further cultural studies research to be of use in intercultural technical communication theory, research, and pedagogy.

Critical Pedagogy and Classroom Praxis

Abstract: In this paper we argue for the incorporation of critical pedagogy in the teaching of sociology. We first establish the theoretical and emancipatory rationale for critical pedagogy with a review of the neomarxist concept of reproduction. We then examine a specific application of critical pedagogy in the sociology curriculum of Western Oregon University. We give particular attention to a course sequence on community organizing in which students have developed a successful tenants union that serves as a vehicle for both personal and social transformation.

Michel Foucault in the Social Study of ICTs: Critique and Reappraisal

Abstract: Despite the considerable cross-disciplinary influence of Foucault’s work, he is, the article argues, unjustly neglected in the study of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially in the information systems (IS) field. The article argues for the abiding relevance of Foucault’s oeuvre. His thinking on techne and technology is reviewed, and a critique of his relative neglect in the IS discipline is provided. The article then critically evaluates and illustrates how he can and has been used in the study of ICTs in IS, organization, management, and surveillance studies, and, more recently, by those studying network society, technobodies, and cyberspace. The article concludes by pointing to the potential for utilizing Foucault in deconstructing the growing interest in ICT-supported knowledge management and related systems and understanding control in liquid modernity.

Ideology, Curriculum, and the New Sociology of Education: Revisiting the Work of Michael Apple

Abstract: Introduction. Ideology, Curriculum, and the New Sociology of Education: Revisiting the Work of Michael Apple, Greg Dimitriadis, Lois Weis, and Cameron McCarthy Section One: Revisiting the New Sociology of Education 1. Retrieving the Ideological Past: Critical Sociology, Gender Theory and the School Curriculum 2. Social Class, School Knowledge, and the Hidden Curriculum: Re-Theorizing Reproduction 3. Schooling, Power, and the Exile of the Soul Section Two: Contemporary Theoretical Challenges 4. Riding Tensions Critically: Ideology, Power/Knowledge, and Curriculum Making 5. Are We Making Progress?: Ideology and Curriculum in the Age of "No Child Left Behind" 6. Teaching After the Market: From Commodity to Cosmopolitan Section Three: On Spaces of Possibility 7. Contesting Research Rearticulation and "Thick Democracy" as Political Projects of Method 8. [Re]visioning Knowledge, Politics, and Change: Educational Poetics 9. Situating Education: Michael Apple's Scholarship and Political Commitment in the Brazilian Context. Afterword. Critical Education, Politics, and the Real World

Sociological Theory in the Contemporary Era: Text and Readings

Abstract: Chapter 1: Introduction What Is Sociological Theory? Why Read Original Works? Who Are Sociology's Core Theorists? Who are Sociology's Core Contemporary Theorists? How Can We Navigate Sociological Theory? Discussion Questions Chapter 2: Structural Functionalism Talcott C. Parsons (1902-1979): A Biographical Sketch Parson's Intellecutal Influences and Core Ideas Parson's Theoretical Orientation Readings Categories of the Orientation and Organization of Action (1951) Sex Roles in the American Kinship System (1943) Robert K. Merton (1910-2003): A Biographical Sketch Merton's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Merton's Theoretical Orientation Readings Manifest and Latent Functions (1949) Social Structure and Anomie (1967) Discussion Questions Chapter 3: Critical Theory Mark Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse: Biographical Sketches Horkheimer's, Adorno's, and Marcuse's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Horkheimer's, Adorno'a, and Marcuse's Theoretical Orientations Readings Eclipse of Reason (1947) The Culture Industry Reconsidered (1975) One-Dimensional Man (1964) Jurgen Habermas (1929- ): A Biographical Sketch Habermas's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Habermas's Theoretical Orientation Readings Civil Society, Public Opinion, and Communicative Power (1996) The Tasks of a Critical Theory of Society (1987) Patricia Hill Collins (1948- ): A Biographical Sketch Collins's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Collins's Theoretical Orientation Reading Black Feminist Thought (1990) Discussion Questions Chaper 4: Exchange and Rational Choice Theories George C. Homans (1910-1989): A Biographical Sketch Homan's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Homan's Theoretical Orientation Reading Social Behavior as Exchange (1958) Peter M. Blau (1918-2002): A Biographical Sketch Blau's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Blau's Theoretical Orientation Reading Exchange and Power in Social Life (1964) James S. Coleman (1926-1995): A Biographical Sketch Coleman's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Coleman's Theoretical Orientation Reading Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital (1988) Discussion Questions Chapter 5: Symbolic Interactionism and Dramaturgy Herbert Blumer (1900-1987): A Biographical Sketch Blumer's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Blumer's Theoretical Orientation Reading The Methodological Position of Symbolic Interactionism (1969) Erving Goffman (1922-1982): A Biographical Sketch Goffman's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Goffman's Theoretical Orientation Readings The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1959) Asylums (1961) Arlie Russell Hochschild (1940- ): A Biographical Sketch Hochschild's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Hochschild's Theoretical Orientation Readings Working on Feeling (2003) The Managed Heart (1983) Discussion Questions Chapter 6: Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology Alfred Schutz (1899-1959): A Biographical Sketch Schutz's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Schutz's Theoreitcal Orientation Reading The Phenomenology of the Social World (1967) Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann: Biographical Sketches Berger and Luckmann's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Berger and Luckmann's Theoretial Orientation Reading The Social Construction of Reality (1966) Harold Garfinkle (1917- ): A Biographical Sketch Garfinkle's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Garfinkle's Theoretical Orientation Reading Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) Dorothy E. Smith (1926- ): A Biographical Sketch Smith's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Smith's Theoretical Orientation Readings Institutional Ethnography (2005) The Everyday World as Problematic (1987) Discussion Questions Chapter 7: Poststructuralism Defining Poststructuralism Michel Foucault (1926-1984): A Biographical Sketch Foucault's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Foucault's Theoretical Orientation Reading Social Space and the Genesis of Groups (1982) Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002): A Biographical Sketch Bourdieu's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Bourdieu's Theoretical Orientation Readings Discipline and Punish (1975) Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception (1968) Edward Said (1935-2003): A Biographical Sketch Said's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Said's Theoretical Orientation Reading Orientalism (1978) Discussion Questions Chapter 8: Postmodernism Defining Postmodernism Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007): A Biographical Sketch Baudrillard's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Baudrillard's Theoretical Orientation Reading Simulacra and Simulations (1981) Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998): A Biographical Sketch Lyotard's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Lyotard's Theoretical Orientation Reading The Postmodern Condition (1979) Judith Butler (1956- ): A Biographical Sketch Butler's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Butler's Theoretical Orientation Reading Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire (1990) Discussion Questions Chapter 9: The Global Society Defining Globalization Immanuel Wallerstein (1930- ): A Biographical Sketch Wallerstein's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Wallerstein's Theoretical Orientation Reading The Modern World-System as a Capitalist World-Economy: Production, Surplus Value, and Polarization (2004) Leslie Sklair (1940- ): A Biographical Sketch Sklair's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Sklair's Theoretical Orientation Reading Globalization: Capitalism and Its Alternatives (2002) George Ritzer (1940- ): A Biographical Sketch Ritzer's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Ritzer's Theoretical Orientation Reading Rethinking Globalization: Glocalization/Grobalization and Something/Nothing (2003) Anthony Giddens (1938- ): A Biographical Sketch Gidden's Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas Gidden's Theoretical Orientation Reading The Consequences of Modernity (1990) Discussion Questions

Critical Indigenous African Education and Knowledge

Abstract: The issues raised in this paper (presented in June 2001 at UCLA in partial satisfaction of a graduate course requirement) address a preliminary African centered approach to the question of indigenous African education and knowledge in contemporary society, and thus: calls for critical discourse regarding its utility; suggest that indigenous African theoretical and philosophical discussion should consider an Afrocentric focus; discuss how indigenous African education and knowledge and how it should work to resurrect itself from invisibility in the history of education; there is a need for a critical corrective theory in African education; acknowledge that education and knowledge existed in Africa before Islamic or Western schooling; the story of indigenous and modern African education and knowledge should not remain dormant in untrue assumptions; provides examples of the usefulness of indigenous knowledge via Nigeria (Opata 1998); suggest that there is a need for new lines of communication between schooling and indigenous education; examines via Semali (1999) the distinctions between indigenous African knowledge and other forms of knowledge and the obstacles to its implementation; review the question of African writing history; wherein misconception prevails that Africa was not familiar with literature and art before contact with the Western world; list the many scripts in Africa as examples of a literary tradition; acknowledge that in the arena of science and technology historically and presently, Africa is generally unrecognized or extremely discounted; there is a myth that an indigenous scientific or technological community did not exist in traditional African society which illustrates the complexity of the modern struggle for African science concerning articulation, cultural ethos and scientific principles; there is a need for a full investigation of the history of African science and science education; Africa and African education need a critical examination of its mission, goals and objectives that moves beyond the questions of select donor agencies and narrow national issues; African education needs a critical theory to extract the best of indigenous African thought and practice; and in conclusion, this work outlines some ideas for developing a critical African education theory, and a progressive Pan African agenda via the directional insight of the philosophy of the African Renaissance movement and the African Union.

History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism

Abstract: As is well known, the period since the early 1970s has been one of massive historical structural transformations of the global order, frequently referred to as the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism (or, better, from Fordism to post-Fordism to neoliberal global capitalism). This transformation of social, economic, and cultural life, which has entailed the undermining of the state-centric order of the mid – twentieth century, has been as fundamental as the earlier transition from nineteenth-century liberal capitalism to the stateinterventionist, bureaucratic forms of the twentieth century. These processes have entailed far-reaching changes in not only Western capitalist countries but communist countries as well, and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and European communism in addition to fundamental transformations in China. Consequently, they have been interpreted as marking the end of Marxism and of the theoretical relevance of Marx’s critical theory. And yet these processes of historical transformation have also reasserted the central importance of historical dynamics and large-scale structural changes. This problematic, which is at the heart of Marx’s critical theory, is precisely that which eludes the grasp of the major theories of the immediate post-Fordist era — those of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jurgen Habermas. Recent transformations have revealed those theories to have been retrospective, focused critically on the Fordist era, but no longer adequate to the contemporary post-Fordist world. Emphasizing the problematic of historical dynamics and transformations

Reconstructing Dewey: The Philosophy of Critical Pragmatism

Abstract: The historical relationship between pragmatism and critical theory is one in which the antifoundational and practice-oriented dimensions of pragmatism appear to exist in tension, if not outright conflict, with the emancipatory commitments of the neo-Marxist legacy of critical theory. While Deweyan pragmatism is most often understood in its deliberative, experimental, open-ended, and contextual dimensions, little attention has been paid to the critical dimensions of Dewey's thought. In what follows, I take the initial steps in recovering the critical features of Dewey's pragmatism by developing my analysis along two lines. First, I sketch the general contours of the relationship between pragmatism and critical theory in order to account for and unpack the long-standing hostility of critical theorists toward pragmatism. Second, I argue that these hostilities are unwarranted, and that they have been passed to us in the form of a persistent inability to appreciate the critical features of Dewey's pragmatism. Through an investigation of the philosophical underpinnings of Dewey's pragmatism, I hope to show that Dewey's democratic commitments to the transformatory potential of lived experience, to a reconstructed conception of individualism, and to the cultivation of reflective social intelligence might be viewed as the basis of a critical theory worthy of greater attention and appreciation. Moreover, I hope that this effort will open avenues of inquiry into what might be called a model of “critical pragmatism.”

Power and Action in Critical Theory Across Disciplines: Implications for Critical Community Psychology

Abstract: Although critical scholarship and community psychology share similar aspirations, the links between them remain unexplored and under-theorized. In this article we explore the implications of critical scholarship in various specialties for the field of community psychology. To understand the contributions of critical scholarship to a theory of power and action for social change, we conducted a systematic analysis of a ten-year period of publications in seven journals associated with the critical scholarship tradition. We created precise criteria for the concepts of power and action and applied them to the publications. Results indicate an interesting paradox at play. Whereas community psychology is more action oriented than critical scholarship, its actions fall short of challenging institutionalized power structures and the status quo; and whereas critical scholarship is more challenging of the status quo than community psychology in theory, it has failed to produce viable actions that challenge the status quo. We discuss the implications of this state of affairs for the development of a more critical community psychology.