Suchergebnisse

Argues that the sociology of law should continue its long-standing focus on law & governmentality, but also should expand its analysis to an examination of the interaction of legal & nonlegal forms of governance. The beginning of such an enterprise is provided by the work of Michel Foucault (1977), raising the question of law's role in modern forms of governmental rationality. It is suggested that Foucault's analysis ought to be revised to attend to the plurality of forms of law & governance, & to focus more explicitly on forms of state power. Using this conception, it is contended that the key link between law & modern power is that law plays the organizational & ideological role of providing temporary moments of unification within dispersed fields of social power. This approach to law & governance is favored over others because it facilitates an account that remains sensitive to variations in modes of governance & local power while remaining attentive to the role of the state in the condensation of power relations. 69 References. D. M. Smith

Discusses the historical & current relationship between the social sciences, the scientific method, & postmodern theory. Drawing on the methodology & conclusions of Galileo, modern science has attempted to reduce the distance between science & reality through objective methodology & heightened rationality. It is argued here that the scientific method relies more on the choice of appropriate language & vocabulary than on actual correspondence between methodology & fact. Social scientists have traditionally adopted this skewed approach to life through the scientific method, which blurs rather than reveals reality. The boundaries between explanation & understanding, or nature & humanity, have little meaning in the real world, & it is suggested that the social sciences must be seen as continuous with literature, history, anthropology, politics, etc. Both Thomas Dewey & Michel Foucault advocate rejection of traditional notions of rationality, objectivity, method, & truth. However, it is concluded that Dewey's vocabulary allows more room for hope & solidarity within the social sciences. T. Sevier

Research in Social Science is usually based on survey data where individual research questions relate to observable concepts (variables). However, due to a lack of standards for data citations a reliable identification of the variables used is often difficult. In this paper, we present a work-in-progress study that seeks to provide a solution to the variable detection task based on supervised machine learning algorithms, using a linguistic analysis pipeline to extract a rich feature set, including terminological concepts and similarity metric scores. Further, we present preliminary results on a small dataset that has been specifically designed for this task, yielding modest improvements over the baseline.

This chapter focuses on the family, Pakistan's most fundamental social institution. It is argued that childhood experiences & childrearing techniques have a long-term impact on the perpetuation of social patterns & assessments of power. This results in a complex relationship between the "individual" & "social power." A study of the relationship between the self & society highlights the psychological basis for Pakistan's current crisis of power. This crisis of power is also relevant to the social breakdown that has emerged in recent years in Pakistan. Traditional power relations have been weakened, while the lack of a dominant political leader has led to surging social problems & a general feeling of powerlessness & apathy among the public. 20 References. K. Larsen

This chapter focuses on the family, Pakistan's most fundamental social institution. It is argued that childhood experiences & childrearing techniques have a long-term impact on the perpetuation of social patterns & assessments of power. This results in a complex relationship between the "individual" & "social power." A study of the relationship between the self & society highlights the psychological basis for Pakistan's current crisis of power. This crisis of power is also relevant to the social breakdown that has emerged in recent years in Pakistan. Traditional power relations have been weakened, while the lack of a dominant political leader has led to surging social problems & a general feeling of powerlessness & apathy among the public. 20 References. K. Larsen

Reviews the basic theoretical approaches to the sociology of culture that stem from the original work of Max Weber & Emile Durkheim. It is suggested that recent trends in the sociology of culture have been influenced by Clifford Geertz's (1973) break with the Weberian problematic of defining culture as ideas that motivate individuals. The transformation of cultural studies set off by Geertz's work is summarized in three notions, ie, that: (1) culture is composed of shared public symbols in the form of ideas & texts that are given meaning in particular contexts; (2) culture is a form of social practice, exterior to the individual, located & embodied in institutional practices; & (3) within cultural analysis, attention should always be given to issues of power & inequality. It is argued that from these new perspectives culture is viewed as powerful in three ways: (A) its power does not depend on any particular person believing in it; (B) it does not have to shape the individual's own beliefs & aspirations so much as the individual's knowledge of how others will interpret their actions; & (C) it is structured by institutions that produce systematic patterns for social action. D. M. Smith

Gender inequality in sciences is an ongoing unsolved issue. Many studies have been carried out to tackle the gender specific problems in scientific communication and scientific careers. The EU-Statistics ("She Figures") document the still dominant pattern of lower female presence in higher academic ranks in almost all European Union member states. There are discrepancies between EU science policy and national social policies. The prevailing "publish or perish" attitude, atypical employment as accepted norm and the forced international mobility are factors which hamper the young and female academics' scientific careers. How open for women are the so called "open initiatives"? Women are sceptical towards FLOSS (free/libre open source software), they feel intimidated by the male dominated "chilly" working climate. Only 13 percent of the international Wikipedia writers are female. Only articles on traditionally male topics as soccer are considered as relevant in the German Wikipedia and are allowed to "survive". There is almost no open access publishing in German gender studies. Generally the surveys of attitudes and practices of scholars on open access publishing ignore the gender variable. The only exception is a larger survey of the DFG. In this study women more often than men wish more training in open access publishing techniques.

Closes a collection of essays on the governance of environmental flows amid globalization, reflecting on the fledgling field of environmental flows while also accounting for the broader concern of environmental sociology & political science. The emergence of the environmental flows perspective in light of the sociointellectual context of the development of US & international environmental sociology & political sciences. Key intellectual sources of the environmental flows perspective are discussed, along with how there is continuity in ecological modernization to environmental flows as well as some notable discontinuities. It is concluded that there are two distinct tendencies within environmental social sciences: de-privileging governance & stressing the new character of environmental governance. The potential & shortcomings of the environmental flows perspective are outlined, asserting that global environmental flows indicate how diversified environmental sociology & political science have become. However, while this new research agenda has been advanced, it is contended that issues of power, nation-states, distribution, & identities cannot be dismissed. References. D. Edelman

In this paper, we describe our effort to create a new corpus for the evaluation of detecting and linking so-called survey variables in social science publications (e.g., "Do you believe in Heaven?"). The task is to recognize survey variable mentions in a given text, disambiguate
them, and link them to the corresponding variable within a knowledge base. Since there are generally hundreds of candidates to link to and due to the wide variety of forms they can take, this is a challenging task within NLP. The contribution of our work is the first gold standard corpus for the variable detection and linking task. We describe the annotation guidelines and the annotation process. The produced corpus is multilingual - German and English - and includes manually curated word and phrase alignments. Moreover, it includes text samples that could not be assigned to any variables, denoted as negative examples. Based on the new dataset, we conduct an evaluation of several state-of-the-art text classification and textual similarity methods. The annotated corpus is made available along with an open-source baseline system for variable mention identification and linking.

Closes a collection of essays on the governance of environmental flows amid globalization, reflecting on the fledgling field of environmental flows while also accounting for the broader concern of environmental sociology & political science. The emergence of the environmental flows perspective in light of the sociointellectual context of the development of US & international environmental sociology & political sciences. Key intellectual sources of the environmental flows perspective are discussed, along with how there is continuity in ecological modernization to environmental flows as well as some notable discontinuities. It is concluded that there are two distinct tendencies within environmental social sciences: de-privileging governance & stressing the new character of environmental governance. The potential & shortcomings of the environmental flows perspective are outlined, asserting that global environmental flows indicate how diversified environmental sociology & political science have become. However, while this new research agenda has been advanced, it is contended that issues of power, nation-states, distribution, & identities cannot be dismissed. References. D. Edelman

Explores the contradictory role of the mass media in relation to class power & its reproduction in contemporary societies, drawing on the theories of Stuart Hall (eg, 1986) as an entry into a critique of cultural & media studies. It is argued that Hall & other critical theorists have overemphasized the importance of ideology & the function of the media in the capitalist social order. Here, it is asserted that the media play a direct role in the reproduction of capital & the perpetuation of class struggle, specifically, through control over the system of governance & through the promotion of dominant ideologies. The use of information management, secrecy, & censorship by the corporate structure & capitalist class to maintain their power is described. However, these entities also use strategies beyond & outside the media, including lobbying, private debates, withstanding hostile media coverage, & ignoring public opinion & protest. The ideas of Antonio Gramsci & Karl Marx on class struggle & ideological hegemony are reviewed, & an alternative model of the relationship between media & class power is developed. K. Hyatt Stewart