Reification (Marxism)

About: Reification (Marxism) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 508 publications have been published within this topic receiving 10929 citations.

Technology, Reification, and Romanticism@@@Alienation, Praxis and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx@@@Technology and the Human Condition@@@Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-Of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought

Abstract: The truth of the matter is that our deficiency does not lie in the want of well-verified \"facts.\" What we lack is our bearings. The contemporary experience of things technological has repeatedly confounded our vision, our expectations, and our capacity to make intelligent judgments. Categories, arguments, conclusions, and choices that would have been entirely obvious in earlier times are obvious no longer. Patterns of perceptive thinking that were entirely reliable in the past now lead us systematically astray. Many of our standard conceptions of technology reveal a disorientation that borders on dissociation from reality. And as long as we lack the ability to make our situation intelligible, all of the \"data\" in the world will make no difference.;From the Introduction

Mythicizing and Reification in Entrepreneurial Discourse: Ideology‐Critique of Entrepreneurial Studies

Abstract: This article discusses the effects of ideological control in conventional entrepreneurial discourses and praxis. Following postmodernist, deconstructionist and critical theory traditions, the ideas expressed about the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, and its contiguous notions and concepts, are deconstructed to reveal the dysfunctional effects of ideological control both in research and in praxis. It is shown that the concept of entrepreneurship is discriminatory, gender-biased, ethnocentrically determined and ideologically controlled, sustaining not only prevailing societal biases, but serving as a tapestry for un- examined and contradictory assumptions and knowledge about the reality of entrepreneurs.

A social representation is not a quiet thing: exploring the critical potential of social representations theory.

Abstract: Following Moscovici (1972), this paper addresses the questions: What is the aim of research within a social representations perspective? Is it to support or to criticize the social order? Is it to consolidate or transform it? After a brief overview of social representations theory, I argue that while the theory appears to have the conceptual tools to begin this critical task, there are serious criticisms and points of underdevelopment that need addressing. In order for social representations theory to develop into a rigorously critical theory there are three controversial issues that require clarification. These are (a) the relationship between psychological processes and social practices, (b) the reification and legitimization of different knowledge systems, and (c) agency and resistance in the co-construction of self-identity. After discussing each issue in turn, with illustrations from research on racializing representations, I conclude the paper with a discussion of the role of representations in the ideological construction and contestation of reality.

Reading Ads Socially

Abstract: 1. Subjectivity in a Bottle: Commodity Form and Advertising Form, 2. Advertising and the Production of Commodity Signs, 3. The Mortise and the Frame: Reification and Advertising Form, 4. Legitimation Ads: The Story of the Family and how it Saved Capitalism from Itself, 5. Commodity Feminism, 6. This is not an Ad, 7. Levi's 501s and the "Knowing Wink": Commodity Bricolage, 8. The Postmodernism that Failed.

Comment on Hekman's "Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited"

Abstract: I HAVE WRITTEN THIS grudgingly. Susan Hekman's (in this issue) interpretation of my work is so systematically out to lunch that it is difficult to write a response that does not involve a replication of what I have already said, at length and in various versions, elsewhere. But that would interest neither me nor readers. So I have asked myself: Apart from lack of care and thought, what is she doing that leads to her systematic misreading? And what might be systematic about other mistakes such as the chronology of "standpoint theory"'s development (a work published in 1979 is attributed to the decade following, 1983), or that its roots were in Marxism (Where's the women's movement?), or that it is less used and interesting currently (speak for your own discipline, Susan; in sociology it flourishes), or that feminist standpoint theory has become identified with "object-relations" theory (news to me). A major problem is the reification of "feminist standpoint theory." Feminist standpoint theory, as a general class of theory in feminism, was brought into being by Sandra Harding (1986), not to create a new theoretical enclave but to analyze the merits and problems of feminist theoretical work that sought a radical break with existing disciplines through locating knowledge or inquiry in women's standpoint or in women's experience. Those she identified had been working independently of one another and have continued to do so. In a sense, Harding created us. I do not think there was much interchange among us. As standpoint theorists, we became identifiable as a group through Harding's study. And as a construct of Harding's text, we appeared as isolated from the intellectual and political discourses with which our work was in active dialogue. I cannot speak here for Nancy Hartsock, Patricia Hill Collins, or others mentioned in Hekman's article, but, for myself, I am very much aware of being engaged with the debates and innovations of the many feminist experiments in sociology that, like mine, were exploring experience as a method of discovering the social from the standpoint of women's experience. But Hekman goes beyond Harding to constitute us as a common theoretical position, indeed as a foundationalist theory justifying feminist theory as knowledge. A coherence is invented for us: "Despite their significant differences, all of these accounts share the conviction that the feminist standpoint is rooted in a 'reality' that is the opposite of the ab-