社会理论的空间转向

社会理论的空间转向是社会理论的当代进展的一个重要组成部分,它沿着两条路径展开：一方面,吉登斯、布迪厄等社会理论大师在现代性架构下检视空间与社会的交互关系对于研究社会结构与社会过程的重要性;另一方面,后现代社会理论家采用一系列的地理学概念和隐喻来探索日益复杂和分化的社会世界。本文旨在系统地呈现这一转向的基本脉络。     

The utilitarian contract: A generalization of Rawls' theory of justice

In a series of major papers culminating in A Theory of Justice, John Rawls constructs an alternative to utilitarianism by developing a social contract theory of moral and political philosophy. Unfortunately, Rawls formulates the two basic principles upon which the theory rests in such a way as to restrict (unduly) the contract theory's applicability (see Section I). In this paper we present a more general discussion of the theory of justice that avoids the problems of Rawls' formulation and yet retains the important idea of justice as fairness and the contractarian approach (Section II). Later it is argued that this more general theory constitutes a bridge between the pure utilitarian theories and the social contract doctrines (Sections V and VI). The theory's advantages are demonstrated by applying it to a problem discussed by Rawls, intergenerational equity, and comparing the two solutions (Section III). Further comparisons are made and inferences drawn in the concluding three sections.Without implicating them, we would like to thank James M. Buchanan and David Lyons for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

---

     

世纪末忧郁与美国精神气质——帕森斯与古典社会理论的现代转变

帕森斯的《社会行动的结构》体现了一种独特的探究，历史的、经验的和理论的研究在其中融为一体。在学科史的意义上，《结构》标志着“古典”社会理论的“现代”转变。不过，帕森斯是以一种典型的“美国式”方式完成这种转变的。囿于20世纪20、30年代、尤其是“新政”时期的语境，他给予处于世纪之交的一些重要的社会理论一种全新的阐述，把它们从其生身处境的“世纪末”中剥离出来，并暗中赋予其一种积极、乐观的“美国精神气质”，在很大程度上消解了这些理论和经验探讨中原本具有的同“世纪末”的社会、文化背景及其时代问题的复杂关联。悖谬的是，这种“美国化”的阐述在某种意义上恰恰体现了帕森斯试图建构社会（科）学一般理论的宏图，蕴含着某种普遍历史的取向。     

散文理论“文以载道”模式及其在小说理论中的化用

文与道的关系几乎是中国古代文学理论中最重要的问题,“文以载道”成为普遍应用的思维模式。小说理论以散文理论为母体,既借鉴其概念术语,又移植其观念模式。散文理论的文以载道模式也影响到小说理论,并成为小说理论的核心理念。散文理论文以载道模式的着重点是道,而小说理论文以载道的关注重点却是文,将儒家道德伦理观念之“道”泛化为有益于世道人心的思想观念。借助这种模式,“文”假“道”威,提升通俗小说的社会地位。持此论调的小说理论家们对小说独有的审美特点和艺术规律关注不够。     

College women and the occurrence of unwanted sexual advances in public drinking settings

Using existing data from the 1999 Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, this study analyzes the social predictors of unwanted sexual advances experienced by college women and where this type of victimization occurs. Routine activities theory informed the analysis. While attendance and increased alcohol consumption at bars have a significant effect on experiences of unwanted sexual advances, attendance at parties, attendance at drink promotions, and participation in drinking games does not. Furthermore, while less satisfaction with education, having more sexual partners and friends that binge drink, and having more alcohol-related problems increase the likelihood of experiencing unwanted sexual advances, so does drinking less in general, having higher educated parents, and having a higher grade point average. These findings show that the predictors of unwanted sexual advances may differ somewhat from those that predict more serious forms of sexual victimization. Implications for future research and policy are discussed.     

社会建构论：社会问题理论研究的一种新视角

西方建构主义理论对社会问题的研究，提出了一套全新的概念范畴和分析框架，并产生了许多经验研究成果。这种研究在很大程度上异于对社会问题的常识性理解和传统的研究视角。该理论认为社会问题的社会学研究主题不是“有问题的”客观事实或状态，而是这些事实或状态被宣称成为社会问题的活动和过程。经由这些活动和过程，社会问题建构性地存在着。本文通过与传统社会问题理论的比较，着重探讨建构论所进行的社会问题新的理论研究转向及其启发意义。     

科举、商品化与社会平等:清代广西土司社会的“文明化”

本文探讨了清代中央王朝在广西土司地区推行科举以及该地方社会因应这一政策而逐步“文明化”的过程。文章首先描述了广西土司地区依据土地的占有与使用而建构起来的社会结构与身份体系，继而梳理了清初以来中央王朝在该地区推行科举的历史进程，并说明清政府的科举政策如何与地方社会进行互动，进一步导致了土司社会的重构。在此基础上，本文利用地方文书材料，探讨了地方社会群体如何通过商品化手段转变身份，进而追求社会平等与自由的“文明化”过程。     

On the historicity of social ontology

The question I raise is whether the basic features of mind, social categories, and society are unchanging or changing. Some understandings of ontology would seem to suggest that social ontology is a branch of metaphysics. However, as the history of concepts such as metaphysical and ontology indicate, our concepts and knowledge are historical. It is widely held that society is concept- and activity-dependent. I examine critically two strands of social ontology in terms of their answers to this problematic: (1) John Searle’s theory of the construction of social reality and (2) critical realist theory of mind and society as interlaced emergent layers of reality. Apart from emergence in natural systems, there is also emergence beyond nature as consciousness, agency and society cannot be completely explained in terms of biological realities; but how and when did this emergence occur? We need an account of the emergent order of language, reflectively conscious mind, and institutions not only for its own sake, but also because the process whereby new objects and properties emerge may be on-going, path-dependent, diverse, and open-ended. The main argument is that the object of study of social theorists is geo-historically specific, liable to diversity within any given world-historical epoch, and open to further changes and new forms of emergence in the future.     

Connecting with Sara: Facilitating attachment

This paper investigates the value and meaning of the attachment that forms within the therapeutic relationship. It follows the progress of a now 53‐month‐old African American homeless child as she is given the opportunity to form a human attachment through the use of Attachment and Object Relations theories. This paper integrates the work of developmental, attachment, and object relations theorists such as Mahler, Stern, Bowlby, Greenspan, Winnicott, and Fonegy. The child's story is illustrated through the use of documented history as told by the mother to the therapist and through clinical material from the child's therapeutic sessions.

This paper also examines what it means to be a culturally competent and responsible social worker. Research into parenting practices, beliefs, and skills among homeless, African American single women is discussed and integrated into a theory of practice.     

Abstracts

The concept of ‘tacit knowledge’ as the means by which individuals interpret the ‘rules’ of social interaction occupies a central role in all the major contemporary theories of action and social structure. The major reference point for social theorists is Wittgenstein's celebrated discussion of rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations. Focusing on Giddens' incorporation of tacit knowledge and rules into his ‘theory of structuration’, I argue that Wittgenstein's later work is steadfastly set against the ‘latent cognitivism’ inherent in the idea of tacit knowledge and tacit rules. I also argue that the idea of tacit knowledge and tacit rules is either incoherent or explanatorily vacuous. Scholars of the emotions maintain that all anger requires an object of blame. In order to be angry, many writers argue, one must believe than an actor has done serious damage to something that one values. Yet an individual may be angered without blaming another. This kind of emotion, called situational anger, does not entail a corresponding object of blame. Situational anger can be a useful force in public life, enabling citizens to draw attention to the seriousness of social or political problems, without necessarily vilifying political officials. In the first half of this paper I show how H. L. A. Hart's theory of rules can resolve, or at least clarify, a central methodological problem in legal anthropology that was first posed in Llewellyn and Egebel's The Cheyenñe Way In the second half I explore and develop Hart's theory (a) of rules, and apply it to problems of agency and behaviourism in legal anthropology, and (b) of legal development, and apply it to the problem of rule-scepticism in legal anthropology as it is posed in Roberts and Comaroffs Rules and Processes and elsewhere. As human beings, we share many historically developed, language-game interwoven, public forms of life. Due to the joint, dialogically responsive nature of all social life within such forms, we cannot as individuals just act as we please; our forms of life exert a normative influence on what we can say and do. They act as a backdrop against which all our claims to knowledge are judged as acceptable or not. As a result, it is not easy to articulate their inadequacies in a clear and forceful manner. However, within most of our forms of life, we have a first-person right to express how our individual circumstances seem to us. And by the use of special forms of poetic, gestural talk—talk that can originate new language-games—we can offer to make our own ‘inner lives’ public. In this paper, I want to claim that this is just what Wittgenstein is attempting to do in his later philosophy: by use of the self-same methods that anyone might use to express aspects of their own world picture, he is offering us his attempts to make the background ‘landscape’ of our lives more visible to us. These methods are explored below. Proponents of the view that social structures are ontologically distinct from the people in whose actions they are immanent have assumed that structures can stand in causal relations to individual practices. Were causality to be no more than Humean concomitance correlations between structure and practices would be unproblematic. But two prominent advocates of the ontological account of structures, Bhaskar and Giddens, have also espoused a powers theory of causality. According to that theory causation is brought about by the activity of particulars, in the social psychological case, individuals of some sort. Consistence would demand that structure be those individuals. But neither Giddens nor Bhaskar wish to reify structure to the extent that would fit it for a role as a powerful particular. If only human beings can be powerful particulars in these contexts, the only way that structures can be real must be as properties of conversational (symbolic) interactions. Human action is social just in so far as people direct themselves to engage well in joint activities with others.     

Towards a critical realist epistemology?

When critical realists consider epistemology they typically start from “epistemological relativism.” We find this position necessary, but we also find it insufficient because it lacks a critique of the highly unequal social relations among observers themselves—relations that shape the very production of knowledge. While it is indeed the case that all knowledge is fallible, it is also the case that all knowledge is positioned, with a particular standpoint. What is more, the social power relations between standpoints organize the production of truth in ways that produce systematic distortions. In this paper, we propose a critical realist social epistemology. We introduce feminist standpoint theory and postcolonial theory as our suggested interventions into critical realism and we use two case studies of existing work to highlight i) the social production of truth and the real, and ii) what is at stake for radicalizing epistemology in critical realism. In so doing, our paper emphasizes the epistemic complexities that continuously shape ontology, a commitment to subaltern voices or experiences, and a thorough interrogation of the relations between positions of knowledge production.     

Examining Organizational Functioning Through the Lens of Complexity Theory Using System Dynamics Modeling

ABSTRACT

The methodologies associated with complexity theory might serve as an adjunct to some of our more traditional behavioral social science research methods. While the latter has a well-established history in social work, the approaches related to complexity theory are just now gaining a foothold. One such approach is system dynamics modeling. This article will describe the application of system dynamics modeling to a well-known early intervention program. The manner in which it complements traditional research approaches will be discussed, and its unique contribution to understanding the organizational aspects of complexity theory will be highlighted.     

Determinate attitudes and indeterminate norms

The aim of this paper is to offer a version of social normative pragmatism – that is, the approach that takes norms to be the result of shared practices – that comes closer to social reality than its cousins in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. The purpose is presenting a framework that can be useful for social theorists sympathetic to normative concepts. This version introduces the concepts of the adoption of the normative stance, the projective structure of evaluation and a sketch of a theory of normative force in terms of accumulation of normative attitude. In order to motivate this conceptual tools, we present them as allowing us to overcome the traditional skeptical challenge put forward by Kripke.     

The Concept(s) of Trust in Late Modernity,the Relevance of Realist Social Theory

In this paper, we argue that trust is an important aspect of social reality, one that realist social theory has paid little attention to but which clearly resonates with a realist social ontology. Furthermore, the emergence of an interest in trust in specific subject fields such as organization theory indicates the growing significance of issues of trust as market liberalism has developed. As such, the emergence of an interest in trust provides support for Archer's characterisation of late modernity in The Reflexive Imperative (2012) as a period of heterogeneity and greater incongruity. Commenting on this provides an opportunity to discuss the issue of habit in relation to trust and also the importance of the analysis of integration as a means to explain problems of trust. The commentary draws on examples from finance.     

Epistemological problems and the personality and social system in social psychology

If we understand social psychology to be an area where sociology and psychology overlap, or more precisely where we try to explain interaction on the basis of psychological and sociological propositions and concepts, we have singled out a field that should be quite challenging not only in theory and method but in the fundamental questions it raises for both sociology and psychology. Actually, the discipline is not that well integrated and is constituted by such disparate approaches as reinforcement theory, field theory, role theory, small group theory, game theory and psychoanalysis. Many sociologists have abandoned the field altogether. Nor have the proponents of these sub-fields made much effort to consolidate, integrate or reconcile their methodologies. Epistemological questions have been notably absent and only now have arguments from the philosophy of science point of view reemerged to revive the critical and potentially fruitful methodological discussions of earlier theorists (F. Allport; Lewin; Mead; Simmel) and their more recent followers (Homans; Malewski). After considering epistemological problems dealing with the generality of theory and explanation, behavioristic vs. action approaches, operational and model structural implications, we want to argue for a better understanding of social system variables besides those of the personality system and of system theory in general. In our discussion we use examples from the area of sport because it composes a complex system, that is not too difficult to observe at the same time that it shows in relative clarity all of the different levels of an action system. It has, furthermore, many features of an almost experimental design in a natural field. In so far it is a model area to allow due consideration for our demand that social psychology rediscover the method of field studies. This will help to reverse the trend characterized by a general neglect of theory that has resulted from behavioral dogmatism and the expedience of research pragmatism based mostly on two-variable linear models. This is not to say that we disfavor rigorous research design and data analysis - to the contrary. We just want it to be done in the context of broader theoretical concerns and in clear recognition of the pitfalls of operationalism and the merits of action theory.     

Three pseudo-paradoxes in ‘quantum’ decision theory: Apparent effects of observation on probability and utility

In quantum domains, the measurement (or observation) of one of a pair of complementary variables introduces an unavoidable uncertainty in the value of that variable's complement. Such uncertainties are negligible in Newtonian worlds, where observations can be made without appreciably disturbing the observed system. Hence, one would not expect that an observation of a non-quantum probabilistic outcome could affect a probability distribution over subsequently possible states, in a way that would conflict with classical probability calculations. This paper examines three problems in which observations appear to affect the probabilities and expected utilities of subsequent outcomes, in ways which may appear paradoxical. Deeper analysis of these problems reveals that the anomalies arise, not from paradox, but rather from faulty inferences drawn from the observations themselves. Thus the notion of quantum decision theory is disparaged.     

Familiar subjects? Domestic violence and child welfare

Historically, domestic violence and child welfare have been seen as largely separate concerns. Over the last decade domestic violence has finally gained a place on social work agendas, partly as a result of linking domestic violence with child protection issues. Whilst welcoming the extent to which domestic violence is being taken seriously, we raise concerns about the dominant feminist perspectives guiding this project. We argue that current feminist theory is based on fixed and essentialist gender and generational categories which are unhelpful in understanding the complexities of family situations and family processes. Instead we argue for the relevance of relational understandings of gender, power and violence developed from feminist post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theorists. In doing so, we challenge accepted feminist understandings of domestic violence, and question the basis upon which dominant feminist approaches claim an unviolable alliance between the interests of women and children.     

Social protection in Europe: A European trade union perspective

Governments and social partners in the European Union (EU) look for ways and means to adapt welfare systems to new needs, to keep expenditure under control, and to find alternative and supplementary financial resources in order to cope with future financial commitments. The EU is actively involved in the search for solutions to these common problems. It becomes more and more evident that only an active economic, budgetary, taxation and social policy mix can provide a solid base for safeguarding social systems. The author presents the most recent figures relating to actual and future social protection expenditure in the EU, disaggregated according to function and showing significant differences between gross and net figures. Attention is also paid to coverage and replacement rates of social benefits and to the availability of social infrastructures. The article then shows the shifts in implicit tax rates on labour in comparison with the rate on other factors. The conclusion outlines a European trade union view on the future of social protection in Europe and suggests possible issues for social benchmarking.     

科学与指向价值的行动:韦伯《科学作为天职》一百年

本文基于韦伯《科学作为天职》的演讲,将Wissenschaft als Beruf的含义重新置于韦伯科学学说的思考脉络之中。本文认为,该演讲通过“为科学而科学”的“意义”问题指涉每个人如何承担自己的价值立场问题,此问题和韦伯科学学说中行动如何承担价值的主题密切相关。一方面,每个人的价值感受是价值行动的起点,不能通过任何伦理义务将之夷平。另一方面,这样的价值感受若不通过价值理性化,就既不会变成塑造价值的力量,也有碍于行动者明白和掌握为价值而行动的自由是什么。二者之间的紧张使韦伯反对任何有机体学说意义上的文明和共同体,转而从“求真”这一充满人为努力的途径来实现行动者对价值真正的“开明”。在这一途径中,诉诸于观念类型的行动者的“开明”是他将习俗和文明由异己的传统变成自己的根本价值立场的关键。但本文结尾表明,韦伯的这个立场将所有的传统都变成了异己的传统,因此留下了现代社会科学如何面对价值的共同体的根本问题。