Critical theory

About: Critical theory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5372 publications have been published within this topic receiving 164765 citations.

Critical theories, international relations and the anti-globalisation movement: the politics of global resistance

Abstract: This book explores the interface between social movement resistances to neoliberal globalisation and a range of critical theories in the discipline of International Relations (IR). Since the late 1980s, mainstream theories in IR have come under sustained attack from a range of critical perspectives. Indeed, many commentators see the rise of these perspectives as challenging the very constitution of the discipline (see e.g. Hoffman 1987; Lapid 1989; Linklater 1992; George 1994; Smith et al. 1998; for a more sceptical view see Navon 2001). Critical theorists share the notion that, in Robert Cox's famous phrase, '[t]heory is always for someone and for some purpose' (Cox 1986:207): that is, the act of theorising is always political. Given this, critical theorists interrogate the relation between power and knowledge production; they expose and denaturalise power hierarchies and relations of domination more generally; and they seek out immanent possibilities for disruption, resistance and transformative change. In this context, all acknowledge the importance of exploring social struggles and resistances, whether conceptualised as social movements or not, as crucial sites of world politics.

Social Theory in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Abstract: Preface to the Second Edition Introduction 1. A Timeless Order and its Achievement: Structuralism and Genetic Structuralism 2. The Biological Metaphor: Functionalism and Neo-functionalism 3. The Enigma of Everyday Life: Symbolic Interactionism, the Dramaturgical Approach and Ethnomethodology 4. The Invasion of Economic Man: From Rational Choice Theory to the New Institutionalism 5. As Sociology meets History: Giddens's Structuration Theory and Historical Sociology 6. The History of the Present: Foucault's Archaeology and Genealogy 7. The Spread of Reason: Habermas's Critical Theory and Beyond 8. A Brave New World?: Current Trends in Social Theory 9. Conclusion: Social Theory for the Twenty-First Century

Politics that matter: Thinking about power and justice with the new materialists

Abstract: Although wide-ranging in their aspects and concerns, ‘new materialist’ approaches in feminist and political theory share a commitment to trouble binaries central to humanist inquiry, for example sensuous/ideal, natural/artificial, subject/object. In distinction from an ‘old materialism’ rooted in Marxian critiques of idealism and continuing that tradition’s humanist bent, the new materialisms underscore a need to reconceptualize matter: nature, in both its animate and inanimate guises, but also the apparatuses, artifacts and other objects that are produced by and productive of human capacities, and indeed of the world itself. In so doing, these approaches compel a rethinking of the boundary between human and nonhuman. At stake is the claim that such reconceptualizations can clarify our ethical imperatives and political possibilities: a recognition that matter is not the passive receptacle or recipient of human agency, which is in turn neither sovereign nor unified, conditions a post-humanist perspective said to promote generosity, responsibility, and/or receptiveness to difference. From the perspective of an earlier materialism, by contrast, where exploitation and oppression happen to ‘species-beings’ rather than being enacted through such biologistic distinctions, political and ethical critique hinges on a human/nonhuman divide. The curious commodity that is labor power, for example, or the conundrums of commodity fetishism and alienated labor, are demystified – and the capitalist system perpetuating them is exposed as dehumanizing – through analyses that traffic heavily in the binaries now being questioned. In that earlier context, subjects appeared as makers of their own history (although of course not ‘just as they please[d]’ (Marx, 1996, p. 32), objectivity was accorded both to social structures and to historical materialist analyses of them, and the power of ‘things’ was more likely to be linked to their reification than to an inhering vibrancy. Pursuing a thorough investigation of the differences between these interpretive paradigms is well beyond the scope of our essay. But we begin by contrasting them in

From Labor Process Theory to Critical Management Studies

Abstract: Critical management studies scholars occupy a tenuous pos/tlOn in business schools. Their location and intellectual trajectory needs to be understood in the political context of the historical defeat of the Left since its highpoint in 1968. One of the tributaries of critical management studies is labor process theory, which derives from Braverman’s (1974) classic critique of the degradation of labor in capitalist work organization. Whereas Braverman attempted to restore confidence in the potential of the working class to fulfill its Marxist destiny to lead a revolutionary transformation of society, any such confidence in the second coming of communism has long since evaporated from critical management studies. Instead of adhering to Marx’s or Braverman’s historical visions critical management studies scholars have increasingly turned to Foucault or critical theorists such as Adorno or Marcuse, who provide the basis for a deconstruction of Marxian eschatology. This is presented as an intellectual p...