Social reality

About: Social reality is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4688 publications have been published within this topic receiving 122019 citations.

Discourse and social change

Abstract: Approaches to discourse analysis Michel Foucault and the analysis of discourse a social theory of discourse intertextuality text analysis - constructing social relations and "the self", constructing social reality discourse and social change in contemporary society doing discourse analysis.

The Construction of Social Reality

Abstract: This short treatise looks at how we construct a social reality from our sense impressions; at how, for example, we construct a five-pound note with all that implies in terms of value and social meaning, from the printed piece of paper we see and touch. In "The Construction of Social Reality," eminent philosopher John Searle examines the structure of social reality (or those portions of the world that are facts only by human agreement, such as money, marriage, property, and government), and contrasts it to a brute reality that is independent of human agreement. Searle shows that brute reality provides the indisputable foundation for all social reality, and that social reality, while very real, is maintained by nothing more than custom and habit."

Trust as a Social Reality

Abstract: Although trust is an underdeveloped concept in sociology, promising theoretical formulations are available in the recent work of Luhmann and Barber. This sociological version complements the psychological and attitudinal conceptualizations of experimental and survey researchers. Trust is seen to include both emotional and cognitive dimensions and to function as a deep assumption underwriting social order. Contemporary examples such as lying, family exchange, monetary attitudes, and litigation illustrate the centrality of trust as a sociological reality. In recent years, sociologists have begun to treat trust as a sociological topic (e.g., Conviser; Garfinkel; Haas and Deseran; Henslin; Holzner; Strub and Priest; Weigert,a,b). Indeed, two short and powerful books, Niklas Luhmann's Trust and Pauoer (1979) and Bernard Barber's The Logic and Limits of Trust (1983), have placed trust at the center of sociological theorizing about contemporary society. Nevertheless, we agree with Luhmann's lament that there is a "regrettably sparse literature which has trust as its main theme within sociology" (8). There is a large quantity of research on trust by experimental psychologists and political scientists, which, however, appears theoretically unintegrated and incomplete from the standpoint of a sociology of trust. These researchers typically conceptualize trust as a psychological event within the individual rather than as an intersubjective or systemic social reality. They also tend to use methodological approaches that reduce trust to its cognitive content through psychometric scaling techniques or to its behavioral expressions in laboratory settings. Luhmann and Barber, on the other hand, present trust as an irreducible and multidimiensional so

The sublime object of ideology

Abstract: In this provocative and original work, Slavoj Zizek takes a look at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock's Rear Window, from the operas of Wagner to science fiction, from Alien to the Jewish Joke, the author's acute analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society. Zizek takes issue with analysts of the postmodern condition from Habermas to Sloterdijk, showing that the idea of a 'post-ideological' world ignores the fact that 'even if we do not take things seriously, we are still doing them'. Rejecting postmodernism's unified world of surfaces, he traces a line of thought from Hegel to Althusser and Lacan, in which the human subject is split, divided by a deep antagonism which determines social reality and through which ideology operates. Linking key psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts to social phenomena such as totalitarianism and racism, the book explores the political significance of these fantasies of control. In so doing, The Sublime Object of Ideology represents a powerful contribution to a psychoanalytical theory of ideology, as well as offering persuasive interpretations of a number of contemporary cultural formations.