Showing papers on "Realism published in 2008"

A Realist Approach For Qualitative Research

Abstract: Preface: The Value of Realism for Qualitative Research Acknowledgments About the Author Part I: A Realist Stance for Qualitative Research Chapter 1: What Is Realism, and Why Should Qualitative Researchers Care? Chapter 2: Meaning and Culture Are Real Chapter 3: Causation Is Real Chapter 4: Diversity Is Real Part II: Realism and Qualitative Methods Chapter 5: The Realities of Research Design Chapter 6: Research Relationships and Data Collection Chapter 7: Real and Virtual Relationships in Qualitative Data Analysis (with Barbara Miller) Chapter 8: Understanding, Validity, and Evidence Part III: Applications of Realism in Qualitative Research Chapter 9: Explaining Plains Indian Social Organization Chapter 10: Meaning and Diversity in Inuit Kinship and Culture Conclusion References Author Index Subject Index

World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy

Abstract: List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xiii CHAPTER ONE: Introduction 1 CHAPTER TWO: Realism, Balance-of-Power Theory, and the Counterbalancing Constraint 22 CHAPTER THREE: Realism, Balance-of-Threat Theory, and the "Soft Balancing" Constraint 60 CHAPTER FOUR: Liberalism, Globalization, and Constraints Derived from Economic Interdependence 98 CHAPTER FIVE: Institutionalism and the Constraint of Reputation 148 CHAPTER SIX: Constructivism and the Constraint of Legitimacy 171 CHAPTER SEVEN: A New Agenda 208 Index 219

Complex critical realism: tenets and application in nursing research.

Abstract: To outline the main tenets of critical realism (CR), its use, and future application in nursing. Little work has been done to discuss how CR can be applied to nursing research. The tenets of CR include recognition of reality independent of human perceptions, a generative view of causation in open systems, and a focus on explanations and methodological eclecticism using a postdisciplinary approach. Critical realism is useful for (1) understanding complex outcomes, (2) optimizing interventions, and (3) researching biopsychosocial pathways. Such questions are central to evidence-based practice, chronic disease management, and population health. Critical realism is philosophically strong and potentially useful for nursing research.

Searching for realism, structure and agency in Actor Network Theory.

Abstract: Superficially, Actor Network Theory (ANT) and critical realism (CR) are radically opposed research traditions Written from a realist perspective, this paper asks whether there might be a basis for finding common ground between these two traditions It looks in turn at the questions of realism, structure, and agency, analysing the differences between the two perspectives and seeking to identify what each might learn from the other Overall, the paper argues that there is a great deal that realists can learn from actor network theory; yet ANT remains stunted by its lack of a depth ontology It fails to recognize the significance of mechanisms, and of their dependence on emergence, and thus lacks both dimensions of the depth that is characteristic of critical realism's ontology This prevents ANT from recognizing the role and powers of social structure; but on the other hand, realists would do well to heed ANT's call for us to trace the connections through which structures are constantly made and remade A lack of ontological depth also underpins ANT's practice of treating human and non-human actors symmetrically, yet this remains a valuable provocation to sociologists who neglect non-human entities entirely

How Fiction Works

Abstract: In the tradition of E. M. Forster's "Aspects of the Novel" and Milan Kundera's "The Art of the Novel", "How Fiction Works" is a scintillating and searching study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. In his first full-length book of criticism, one of the most prominent critics of our time takes the machinery of story-telling apart to ask a series of fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we 'know' a fictional character? What constitutes a 'telling' detail? When is a metaphor successful? Is realism realistic? Why do most endings of novels disappoint?Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Beatrix Potter, from the Bible to John Le Carre, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, it incisively sums up two decades of bold, often controversial, and now classic critical work, and will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone interested in what happens on the page.

Realism and International Politics

Abstract: Part 1: Theory 1. Kant, Liberalism, and War 2. Conflict in World Politics 3. Reflections on Theory of International Politics 4. The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory 5. Realist Thought and Neorealist Theory 6. Evaluating Theories 7. Assaying Theories: Reflections on Imre Lakatos Part 2: International Politics 8. The Stability of a Bipolar World 9. Contention and Management in International Relations 10. International Structure, National Force, and the Balance of World Power 11. The Myth of National Interdependence 12. The Emerging Structure of International Politics 13. Structural Realism after the Cold War 14. Globalization and Governance 15. The Continuity of International Politics Part 3: Military Affairs 16. Reason, Will, and Weapons 17. Toward Nuclear Peace 18. Nuclear Myths and Political Realities 19. A Reply (to critics of Sagan and Waltz) Part 4: Policy 20. The Politics of Peace 21. America's European Policy Viewed in Global Perspective 22. Another Gap? 23. America as a Model for the World? A Foreign Policy Perspective

The Realist Tradition in American Public Opinion

Abstract: For more than half a century, realist scholars of international relations have maintained that their world view is inimical to the American public. For a variety of reasons—inchoate attitudes, national history, American exceptionalism—realists assert that the U.S. government pursues realist policies in spite and not because of public opinion. Indeed, most IR scholars share this “anti-realist assumption.” To determine the empirical validity of the anti-realist assumption, this paper re-examines survey and experimental data on the mass public’s attitudes towards foreign policy priorities and world views, the use of force, and foreign economic policy over the past three decades. The results suggest that, far from disliking realism, Americans are at least as comfortable with the logic of realpolitik as they are with liberal internationalism. The persistence of the anti-realist assumption might be due to an ironic fact: American elites are more predisposed towards liberal internationalism than the rest of the American public.

The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War: Neoconservatives Versus Realists

Abstract: The aim of this article is to contribute to our understanding of both the debate over the war in Iraq and its implications for the future of U.S. foreign policy by examining the relationship between neoconservatism and realism. The article begins by establishing the connection between the tenets of neoconservatism and the arguments for war against Iraq. The primary focus is on the neoconservative Bush Doctrine that served as the primary justification for the Iraq War. Next, we turn to the arguments that realists put forth in their attempt to steer America away from the road to war. The realists, however, proved to be unsuccessful in their attempt to prevent war and in the final section we address the central question of the article; why did realism fail in the debate over Iraq?

Justifying Sociological Knowledge: From Realism to Interpretation

Abstract: In the context of calls for “postpositivist” sociology, realism has emerged as a powerful and compelling epistemology for social science. In transferring and transforming scientific realism—a philosophy of natural science—into a justificatory discourse for social science, realism splits into two parts: a strict, highly naturalistic realism and a reflexive, more mediated, and critical realism. Both forms of realism, however, suffer from conceptual ambiguities, omissions, and elisions that make them an inappropriate epistemology for social science. Examination of these problems in detail reveals how a different perspective—centered on the interpretation of meaning—could provide a better justification for social inquiry, and in particular a better understanding of sociological theory and the construction of sociological explanations.

On the Ontological Status of Ideas

Abstract: Four recent turns (realist, processual, holistic and reflexive) in social thought are discussed and related to the four dimensional schema of dialectical realism the author has recently outlined. It is shown how ontology matters, and indeed is not only necessary but inevitable, The nature of the reality of ideas (of different types) is demonstrated and the most prevalent mistakes in the metatheory of ideas and ideation analysed. The significance of categorical realism and the character of those specific types if ideas known as ‘ideologies’ are then discussed. Finally some good and bad dialectical connections of ideas and related phenomena are sketched.

"Half and Half Children": Third-Generation Women Writers and the New Nigerian Novel

Abstract: The paper looks at seven novels by women published since 2000, and asks in what ways they reconfigure realism and the social text of the recent Nigerian past. Their authors are engaged in a lively dialogue with their literary precursors, male and female, using their interpretation of the past. Though realism is their preferred mode, it is a realism that bears the trace of pre-existing non-realist modes of expression and belief. By reclaiming the traditionally negative icon of the abiku child, they effect a retrieval of the feminine repressed, casting the feminine double as shadow or negative to the paradigmatic male protagonist of Nigerian fiction and reinserting it into the postcolonial national narrative. Like one of the protagonists, these novels ask the urgent question: “What was the country I loved? The country I would fight for? Should it have borders?”

Austere Realism: Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal Ontology

Abstract: The authors of Austere Realism describe and defend a provocative ontological-cum-semantic position, asserting that the right ontology is minimal or austere, in that it excludes numerous common-sense posits, and that statements employing such posits are nonetheless true, when truth is understood to be semantic correctness under contextually operative semantic standards. Terence Horgan and Matjaz [hacek over z] Potrc [hacek over c] argue that austere realism emerges naturally from consideration of the deep problems within the naive common-sense approach to truth and ontology. They offer an account of truth that confronts these deep internal problems and is independently plausible: contextual semantics, which asserts that truth is semantically correct affirmability. Under contextual semantics, much ordinary and scientific thought and discourse is true because its truth is indirect correspondence to the world. After offering further arguments for austere realism and addressing objections to it, Horgan and Potrc [hacek over c] consider various alternative austere ontologies. They advance a specific version they call "blobjectivism"--the view that the right ontology includes only one concrete particular, the entire cosmos ("the blobject"), which, although it has enormous local spatiotemporal variability, does not have any proper parts. The arguments in Austere Realism are powerfully made and concisely and lucidly set out. The authors' contentions and their methodological approach--products of a decade-long collaboration--will generate lively debate among scholars in metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy. Terence E. Horgan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. Matjaz [hacek over z] Potrc [hacek over c] is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana.

Scientific realism and the rationality of science

Abstract: Contents: Introduction Scientific realism The God's eye point of view Truth and entity realism Incommensurability and the language of science Induction and natural kinds Methodological pluralism, normative naturalism and the realist aim of science Realism, method and truth Why is it rational to believe scientific theories are true? Bibliography Index.

Constructing Adolescence in Fantastic Realism

Abstract: Series Editor's Forward Preface Introduction Chapter One: Developing through Fantasy: From Stasis to Transformation. Chapter Two: Fantasies of Identity: The Self and Individualism Chapter Three: Fantasies of Empowerment and Agency: Gender and the Burden of Responsibility Chapter Four: Writing Fantastic Spaces: Real, Virtual and Textual Teens Conclusion: New Evolutions: Fears and Pleasures of Young Adult Fantastic Realism Notes Bibliography Index

In the spotlight: A blessing and a curse for immigrant women in the Netherlands

Abstract: Within a short period of time, the Netherlands transformed itself from a relatively tolerant country to a nation that called for cultural assimilation, tough measures and neo-patriotism. The discursive genre of `new realism' played a crucial role in this retreat from multiculturalism, and that had a dual effect for immigrant women. Whereas formerly they were virtually ignored by both the integration and the emancipation policy, since the triumph of new realism they are in the centre of both policy lines and there is now more policy attention for their needs and interests. Yet in the public debate the culture card is drawn frequently and immigrant women are portrayed as either victims or accomplices of their oppressive cultures. Policy makers and practitioners in the field, however, succeeded in avoiding cultural stereotyping by developing cultural-sensitive measures, while naming them in culture-blind terms.

Militarism, Realism, Just War, or Nonviolence? Critical Geopolitics and the Problem of Normativity

Abstract: Despite illuminating multiple modalities by which armed conflict is discursively justified, critical geopolitics can be criticised for providing a weak normative engagement with the social institution and practices of warfare. This has limited the impact of this school of thought outside of geography and critical security studies at a time when the ethics of military intervention have been prominent in public debate. This article explores the moral discourse of critical geopolitics through an examination of Gerard Toal's writings on Iraq and Bosnia. This scholarship is reviewed in the light of Coates's typology of major traditions of moral reflection on war – militarism, realism, just war theory, and pacifism/nonviolence. This analysis interrogates Toal's narratives, in which American military intervention was advocated in the Former Yugoslavia and opposed in Iraq. This suggests that rather than a thoroughgoing commitment to pacifism/nonviolence, or a blanket cynicism about American foreign policy, Toal's...

Reclaiming the critical dimension of realism: Hans J. Morgenthau on the ethics of scholarship

Abstract: This article investigates Morgenthau’s views on the ethics of scholarship and argues that all his works should be read in the light of his central goal: speaking truth to power. Doing so demonstrates that for Morgenthau, a realist theory of international politics includes two dimensions: it is supposed to explain international relations, but it is also, fundamentally, a critical project which questions the existing status quo. While the explanatory dimension of realism is debated at great length, its critical dimension is consistently overlooked by the more recent, self-named ‘critical’ approaches which tend to present the two adjectives ‘realist’ and ‘critical’ as mutually exclusive. This amounts to an insidious high-jacking of the very adjective critical, which in most cases merely signals one does not espouse a realist perspective. This is highly problematic as it obscures the fact that for Morgenthau, the founding father of realism, political science is by definition a subversive and revolutionary force critical of the existing order. Highlighting the critical dimension that lies at the core of the realist project as formulated by Morgenthau therefore challenges the current narrow use of the adjective ‘critical’ in the discipline and leads to reclaim it for the realist tradition.

Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel

Abstract: In lucid narrative prose, Sean Kicummah Teuton studies the stirring literature of “Red Power,” an era of Native American organizing that began in 1969 and expanded into the 1970s. Teuton challenges the claim that Red Power thinking relied on romantic longings for a pure Indigenous past and culture. He shows instead that the movement engaged historical memory and oral tradition to produce more enabling knowledge of American Indian lives and possibilities. Looking to the era’s moments and literature, he develops an alternative, “tribal realist” critical perspective to allow for more nuanced analyses of Native writing. In this approach, “knowledge” is not the unattainable product of disinterested observation. Rather it is the achievement of communally mediated, self-reflexive work openly engaged with the world, and as such it is revisable. For this tribal realist position, Teuton enlarges the concepts of Indigenous identity and tribal experience as intertwined sources of insight into a shared world. While engaging a wide spectrum of Native American writing, Teuton focuses on three of the most canonized and, he contends, most misread novels of the era—N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968), James Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). Through his readings, he demonstrates the utility of tribal realism as an interpretive framework to explain social transformations in Indian Country during the Red Power era and today. Such transformations, Teuton maintains, were forged through a process of political awakening that grew from Indians’ rethought experience with tribal lands and oral traditions, the body and imprisonment, in literature and in life.

Realism, photography, and nineteenth-century fiction

Abstract: Introduction: 'detestable introductions' 1. Missing persons and model bodies: Victorian photographic figures 2. Composing the novel body: re-membering the body and the text in Little Dorrit 3. A model Jew: 'literary photography' and the Jewish body in Daniel Deronda 4. Sexuality in the age of technological reproducibility: Wilde, identity, and photography After-image: surviving the photograph Select bibliography.

How (Not) to Write the History of Pragmatist Philosophy of Science

Abstract: This survey article discusses the pragmatist tradition in twentieth century philosophy of science. Pragmatism, originating with Charles Peirce's writings on the pragmatic maxim in the 1870s, is a background both for scientific realism and, via the views of William James and John Dewey, for the relativist and/or constructivist forms of neopragmatism that have often been seen as challenging the very ideas of scientific rationality and objectivity. The paper shows how the issue of realism arises in pragmatist philosophy of science and how some pragmatists, classical and modern, have attempted to deal with it. Various dimensions of the realism dispute are thus discussed, especially realism as contrasted to instrumentalism and realism as contrasted to relativism/constructivism. It is argued that the pragmatist tradition cannot avoid these tensions but is largely constituted by them.

Human security as power-knowledge: The biopolitics of a definitional debate

Abstract: This article interrogates the parameters of the human security debate as a site of biopolitics in order to gain an understanding of how it has been possible to shape the debate in certain ways and not others The role of cosmological realism in grounding knowledge claims within the debate is explored By privileging objectivist claims to knowledge of human (in)security, it is argued that empiricism and rationalism, as forms of cosmological realism, foster the production of logics which facilitate forms of biopolitical intervention The quest for precision, measurement, causality and policy relevance that define the production of human security knowledge is shown to have important political effects beyond the definitional debate itself in terms of agency, normalcy, and the scope for intervention Therefore, this article demonstrates how the demarcation of human security as a field of knowledge is a process pregnant with relations of power that are important to understanding contemporary political dynamics

The New Legal Realism

Abstract: The last decade has witnessed the birth of the New Legal Realism—an effort to go beyond the old realism by testing competing hypotheses about the role of law and politics in judicial decisions, with reference to large sets and statistical analysis. The New Legal Realists have uncovered a Standard Model of Judicial Behavior, demonstrating significant differences between Republican appointees and Democratic appointees, and showing that such differences can be diminished or heightened by panel composition. The New Legal Realists have also started to find that race, sex, and other demographic characteristics sometimes have effects on judicial judgments. At the same time, many gaps remain. Numerous areas of law remain unstudied; certain characteristics of judges have yet to be investigated; and in some ways, the existing work is theoretically thin. The New Legal Realism has clear jurisprudential implications, bearing as it does on competing accounts of legal reasoning, including Ronald Dworkin’s suggestion that such reasoning is a search for “integrity.” Discussion is devoted to the relationship between the New Legal Realism and some of the perennial normative questions in administrative law. In 1931, Karl Llewellyn attempted to capture the empirical goals of the legal realists by referring to early “efforts to capitalize the wealth of our reported cases to make large-scale quantitative studies of facts and outcome.” Llewellyn emphasized the “hope that these might develop lines of prediction more sure, or at least capable of adding further certainty to the predictions based as hitherto on intensive study of smaller bodies of cases.” But Llewellyn added, with apparent embarrassment: “I know of no published results.” We are in the midst of a flowering of “large-scale quantitative studies of facts and outcome,” with numerous published results. The relevant studies have produced a New Legal Realism—an effort to understand the sources of judicial decisions on the basis of ∗ Assistant Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School. ** Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor, Law School and Department of Political Science, University of Chicago. We are grateful to the Chicago Judges Project, and in particular to Dean Saul Levmore, for relevant support. 1 Karl N. Llewellyn, Some Realism About Realism: Responding to Dean Pound, 44 Harv L Rev 1222, 1243-44 (1931). 2 Id. at 1244. 3 Id.

Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700-2000

Abstract: Introduction 1. Journalism and the rise of fiction, 1700-1875: Daniel Defoe to George Eliot 2. Literary realism and the fictions of the industrialized press, 1850-1915: Mark Twain to Theodore Dreiser 3. Reporters-turned-novelists and the making of contemporary journalistic fiction, 1890-today: Rudyard Kipling to Joan Didion 4. The taint of journalistic literature and the stigma of the ink-stained wretch: Joel Chandler Harris to Dorothy Parker and beyond Epilogue: the future of journalistic fiction and the legacy of the journalist-literary figures Appendix: the major journalist-literary figures: their writings and positions in journalism.

What Lies Ahead: Classical Realism on the Future of International Relations

Abstract: Realism contends that politics is a struggle for power and/or survival, and consequently depicts international politics as a realm of recurrent conflicts among states with very little prospect for change. It is therefore not traditionally regarded as an approach which entertains an idea of progress. E.H Carr famously rejected “pure realism” as an untenable position precisely because it fails to provide “a ground for action,” and advocated finding a delicate balance between realism and utopia, as meaningful political action must include both. While realism certainly entails a degree of pessimism, it is far fetched to claim that realist scholars are radically sceptical about the future of international relations. The article investigates Hans Morgenthau and Raymond Aron, two leading classical realist scholars, and argues that neither advocated a strict version of power politics. On the contrary, they both attempted to find the balance Carr suggested between realist concerns and ideals necessary to spur political action. Both were also very aware of the dangers of nihilism, and upheld hope in the future of humankind, even if this hope remains tempered by pessimism as to whether it will ever realize its destiny.