Dilemma

About: Dilemma is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 16202 publications have been published within this topic receiving 250251 citations. The topic is also known as: Dilemna.

The Political Psychology of Contemporary Anti-Politics: A Discursive Approach to the End-of-Ideology Era

Abstract: This article advocates a discursive approach for examining political rhetoric. Such an approach is particularly useful for studying contemporary political ideology. The current political climate, especially in Britain, has been described as exemplifying a "Third Way," which is said to have replaced the old ideological division between "left" and "right" by a consensual, non-ideological politics. The discursive approach allows the analyst to look at the continuing dilemmas of an ideology that denies its ideological character. In discursive analyses of interviews with 20 elected local officials in the Midlands of England, the respondents (regardless of party affiliation) tended to give accounts that celebrated the development of consensual, less ideologically divisive politics. These accounts, however, were dilemmatic: As the speakers told of social change, they also stressed their own personal stability, as if they themselves existed outside the previous political climate. They also explicitly distanced themselves from the language of "left" and "right," but in this distancing a further ideological dilemma was detectable. All the local politicians were officially affiliated to a political party. In discursively subtle ways, the speakers used the left/right continuum as they distinguished between the parties, thereby showing the sort of variability that discursive theorists have noted in other contexts. The implications of such findings and of the discursive approach to studying ideology are discussed in relation to the possibilities for developing a critical political psychology.

Situating Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork

Abstract: This chapter contextualizes feminists' dilemmas in fieldwork over time and geographical spaces with a particular focus on research on women in "Third World" countries and among women of color in the West. The most central dilemma for contemporary feminists in fieldwork, from which other contradictions are derived, is power and the unequal hierarchies or levels of control that are often maintained, perpetuated, created, and re-created during and after field research. One of the major challenges of feminist epistemology to mainstream science and social science has been a powerful critique of positivism and its underlying assumptions. Postmodernist theorizing has created opportunities for further innovation in research methods and the post-fieldwork process, particularly representation and writing. A number of feminists argue that postmodernism poses certain obstacles to feminism. The chapter explains the dilemmas of power inherent in the fieldwork and post-fieldwork process that plague the most self-conscious and well-meaning researcher.

Prisoners' Dilemma and Professional Sports Drafts

Abstract: (1979). Prisoners' Dilemma and Professional Sports Drafts. The American Mathematical Monthly: Vol. 86, No. 2, pp. 80-88.

Hardin Revisited: A Critical Look at Perception and the Logic of the Commons

Abstract: With perhaps controversial implications for theory and practice, this paper suggests that the validity of Hardinian theories of the commons are dependent on the implicit rational choice assumption that resource users are aware of resource degradation. Without an awareness of the collective costs of resource use, there can be no dilemma between pursuing individual benefits and avoiding collective ruin. In such situations, the dilemma of the commons cannot be validly said to be the cause of resource depletion, and many traditional policy options to address common resource depletion may not be effective. Two reasons for the lack of awareness about resource degradation are (1) fatalistic beliefs that humans cannot harm a resource base, and (2) the growing complexity and abstraction of modern environmental problems that have obscured the collective costs of resource use from our individual and societal awareness.