Suchergebnisse

It is argued that Leo Strauss's polemic against the social sciences seems effective only because he attacks a straw man of his own creation; neither Max Weber nor the majority of social scientists would find themselves fairly represented in Strauss's reconstruction of his worthy opponent. Neither does Strauss offer a novel alternative to the relativistic solution to the problem of intercultural understanding; he merely invites his disciples to rely on the apparent self-evidence of Western superiority & thus his solution consists in overlooking the problem. Weber's theory of intercultural understanding cannot be heuristically classified with either the essentialist or relativistic positions. His view could be expanded to include a universal theory for studying historically & geo-culturally distant peoples. Pivotal to this theory is the recognition of the value-relevant interests of the historians & anthropologists in the peoples & the problems that they choose to study. The one-sidedness of this understanding cannot be eliminated, but it may be reciprocated by the subjects of the study. The differences in the ideal types of mutually reflecting cultures does not vitiate the scientificity of either but is constitutive thereof. Modified AA

Previous studies of scholarly productivity have neglected the impact of departmental and institutional structure on the outcome. This study examines the relationships between departmental and institutional structure, cooperative scholarship, and individualistic scholarship with productivity in 31 highly ranked sociology departments in the United States. We measure scholarly productivity by the number of peer reviewed articles that were published either jointly or individually by faculty members during 2009–2010. By applying fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, we conclude that a combination of four conditions are associated with higher levels of scholarly productivity. These are: type of institution (public vs. private), proportion of tenured professors, individualistic scholarship, and cooperative scholarship. The results reveal that the conditions (independent variables) combine in different ways (pathways) to be sufficient for the outcome. Further, we conclude that cooperative scholarship and productivity are more complex constructs than suggested by previous literature and that there are multiple pathways by which departments may facilitate scholarly productivity. We address implications and recommendations for future research.

In recent years Abdolkarim Soroush has emerged as one of the leading revisionist thinkers of the Muslim world. Translated into English for the first time, this book features a critical introduction by the editors and an original interview that reveals the intellectual biography of the author. It sets forth Soroush's views on such matters as the inevitablity of change in religion, the necessity of freedom of belief, and the compatibility of Islam with democracy.