Face (sociological concept)

About: Face (sociological concept) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5171 publications have been published within this topic receiving 96109 citations. The topic is also known as: Lose face & Face (sociological concept).

The feeling of "face" in Confucian society: from a perspective of psychosocial equilibrium

Abstract: Previous research on the feeling of “face” has long described “face” as a complicated phenomenon in Confucian societies. Indeed, the feeling of face is highly context dependent. One may have very different (having or losing) face perception if the same face event occurs in a different context. To better capture the features of how face is felt, effects on possible responses need to be considered. Therefore, this article adopts a perspective of psychosocial equilibrium to elaborate people’s feeling of face in Taiwan, a Confucian society. The first section illustrates the concept of psychosocial equilibrium and its psychodynamic effects on people’s feeling of face. Then, the second section of this article takes positive social situations (having face events) as backdrop to exhibit how people balance their psychosocial equilibrium with different relationships. Following the positive social situations, the third section of this article then focuses on the negative situations (losing face events) to explain how losing face is felt due to unbalance of psychosocial equilibrium with one’s relation in that specific context.

Negotiating the Meaning of Difference

Abstract: The move from theorizing difference to dealing with difference in an intercultural collaboration creates generative conflicts for educators and students. This article tracks the conflicting discourses, alternative representations, and political consequences the construct “Black English” had for Black and White mentors, teenage writers, and instructors in a Community Literacy Center collaboration. Comparing the accounts offered by resistance, conversation, and negotiation theory, it examines the dilemmadriven process of constructing a new negotiated meaning in the face of conflicting forces, voices, and representations. Dealing with difference in such collaboration means not only interpreting diverse verbal and nonverbal signifying systems based on values, experience, and competing discourses but constructing a new negotiated representation in the face of conflict that offers an (at least provisional) ground for action.

The realism of Realism: the state and the study of International Relations

Abstract: On the face of it, the title of this article must look rather odd, especially to any non-specialist who happens to light upon it. For ‘Realism’ surely connotes enterprises and appraisals of a realistic kind, ones which take full account of the facts and constraints of life. Accordingly, it might well be thought clearly superfluous to assert that such things, already identified as realistic, are indeed so.

Seeing like a system Luhmann for anthropologists

Abstract: In this essay, I discuss how Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory might be useful for anthropologists. After providing a summary of Luhmann’s theory, I address the quandaries anthropologists might face when deploying a theory that presumes systems without selves. I also recount how other anthropologists have made use of Luhmann’s systems theory to analyze auditing, legal pluralism, and biosecurity hazards.

Laws And Explanation In The Social Sciences

Abstract: The first full-length defense of social scientific laws to appear in the last twenty years, this book upholds the prospect of the nomological explanation of human behavior against those who maintain that this approach is impossible, impractical, or irrelevant. By pursuing an analogy with the natural sciences, Mclntyre shows that the barriers to nomological inquiry within the social sciences are not generated by factors unique to social inquiry, but arise from a largely common set of problems that face any scientific endeavor. All of the most widely supported arguments against social scientific laws have failed largely due to adherence to a highly idealized conception of nomologicality (allegedly drawn from the natural sciences themselves) and the limited doctrine of "descriptivism." Basing his arguments upon a more realistic view of scientific theorizing that emphasizes the pivotal role of "redescription" in aiding the search for scientific laws, Mclntyre is optimistic about attaining useful law-like explanations of human behavior.