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The United States is in transit from an industrial to a postindustrial society, from a modern to postmodern culture, and from a national to a global economy. In this book Richard Harvey Brown asks how we can distinguish the uniquely American elements of these changes from more global influences. His answer focuses on the ways in which economic imperatives give shape to the shifting experience of being American.Drawing on a wide knowledge of American history and literature, the latest social science, and contemporary social issues, Brown investigates continuity and change in American race relations, politics, religion, conception of selfhood, families, and the arts. He paints a vivid picture of contemporary America, showing how postmodernism is perceived and felt by individuals and focusing attention on the strengths and limitations of American democracy

In this important book, a leading authority in the field of social theory and communication shows how scientific practice is a rhetorical and narrative activity, a story well told. Richard Harvey Brown develops the idea of science as narration, casts various scientific disciplines as literary genres, and argues that expert knowledge of any kind is a form of power. He then explains how a narrative view of science can help integrate science within a democratic civic discourse.Brown shows why social science knowledge is as much a rhetorical enterprise as is the social reality that it describes. He construes laboratory science, physics, ethnography, sociology, philosophy, and astronomy as genres, narratives, and other rhetorical practices, and thereby portrays science as a special kind of narrative discourse that generates theories and shapes their validity and significance. He next focuses on the political dimensions of science, including the politics of psychology in the United States, showing how power and knowledge shape, limit, and infuse each other. Brown argues that this linguistically and socially constructed character of knowledge does not undermine its truth value but rather reaffirms the moral status and political responsibilities of its practitioners. In one important chapter, written with Robert Brulle, he explores the movement for environmental justice in the United States, showing how ordinary people can use science as part of a larger civic narration. Brown concludes by discussing how the rationality of science can be preserved even as it is subsumed within a rational and moral civic discourse

An influential social thinker, the late Richard Harvey Brown was professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of Toward a Democratic Science: Scientific Narration and Civic Communication, published by Yale University Press.

Taking a cross-cultural approach, the authors consider how the body is constructed in various ways for different purposes, how the electronic media shapes selves and sensualities and contributes to civic discourse, and how global capitalism acts as a force in these processes

Revisión de la teoría sociológica moderna: positivismo y romanticismo en el trabajo de Karl Marx, Max Weber y Emile Durkheim; funcionalismo, interacción simbólica, y etnometodología; y dialéctica y estructura en el trabajo de Jean-Jean-Paul Sartre y Claude Levi-Strauss. El proceso dialéctico se considera como método de construcción de teoría sociológica, ya que considera la subjetividad mientras que mantiene el rigor de la objetividad