Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Sarukkai's Copyright page -- Acknowledgements -- Preface -- 1. The Nature of Democracy -- 2. The Concept of Democracy -- The Indian Model of Democracy -- The Chinese Model of Democracy -- The Myth of 'the People' -- 3. Domains of Democracy -- A Democratic Self -- Labour -- Science, Technology and Democracy -- Religion and Democracy -- 4. The Ethical Processes of Democracy -- The Ethical Act of Voting -- Trusteeship -- Creating an Experience of the 'Public' -- 5. Democracy and Truth -- Truth, Politics and Democracy -- 6. Democracy and Freedom -- Freedom of Speech -- Freedom to Dissent -- The Problem with Freedom -- References.

Video is an important new instrument for sociological research, sometimes welcomed as the 'microscope' of social science. It provides access to important and otherwise difficult to examine aspects of human interaction. Moreover, because video captures practice in its lived production as 'another next first time' (Garfinkel 2002), it makes it possible to study practical creativity - the way in which people invent new practices. In this paper, I probe the microscope metaphor through concrete examples from my work with landscape architects and computer scientists in participatory technology research and design projects.

How people refer and how they infer are key empirical questions for the sociology of knowledge. In the present paper, I suggest that in the course of social interaction much referring activity is self-referring, and much inference self-validating. This occurs to the extent that our inductive inferences become permeated with feedback-loops or `bootstraps': I offer a simple general form of representation to assist in thinking about bootstrapped induction. In the second half of the paper I indicate some of the interesting consequences of the existence of bootstrapped induction: I cite the self-fulfilling prophesy as a special case where the induction is destructive, but emphasize the role of bootstrapped induction in constituting stable institutional forms. Finally I raise the question as to how far the bootstraps can be eliminated from patterns of inference: I suggest that this problem might be best attacked by sociologists of natural science.