Archives par étiquette : critique / critics

Special Issue “Critique & Social Change” Historical Social Research

Thomas Kern, Thomas Laux & Insa Pruisken (eds.)

Historical Social Research, 42(3).

Critique and Social Change: Historical, Cultural, and Institutional Perspectives. How does critique change society? What are the conditions for critique to emerge? These questions are the core of recent socio-logical debates. This HSR Special Issue seeks to contribute to the sociology of critique by empirically studying the historical, cultural, and institutional conditions of critique and social change. For this purpose, critique is approached in two ways: as an outcome of social change, on the one hand, and as a cause or condition for social change, on the other hand. The contributions include a broad range of empirical case studies that examine the articulation of critique and its consequences from different perspectives. They deal with topical debates on organ donation, the justification of social inequality, neoliberalism, new public management, various protest movements (Occupy Wall Street, the democratic movement in South Korea, the environmental movement in Italy, the commune movement in the United States), the transformation of institutional logics in the field of academic science, the role of public media debates during the banking crisis of 2008 and the influence of intellectuals on the critique of clientelism in Ireland.

Link to the review

Justifying and Criticizing the Capitalist Market Economy: A Typology of Legitimation Criteria.

Frank Nullmeier & Dominika Biegoń (2017)

In: Schneider, Steffen/Schmidtke, Henning/Haunss, Sebastian/Gronau, Jennifer (eds.)(2017) Capitalism and Its Legitimacy in Times of Crisis. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 37-60.

Abstract. Based on a review and extension of extant classifications, Chapter 2 by Frank Nullmeier and Dominika Biegoń develops a typology of arguments for justifying and criticizing the capitalist market economy in economic and social science writing. Nullmeier and Biegoń show that four groups of legitimation criteria – ‘classical’ criteria going back to Adam Smith and Karl Marx as well as justice-, democracy- and culture-centred arguments and normative ideas – may be distinguished both in procapitalist and in anticapitalist thought and discourse. Their typology of criteria underpins the empirical analyses of the volume.

Link to the book

Interrogating the social. A critical sociology for the 21st Century

Fuyuki Kurasawa (ed.)(2017)

London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Abstract. This book brings together a collection of work from emerging and established scholars who have put forth a vision of what critical sociology is and what it could be in the early decades of the 21st century. Pushing beyond the theoretical outlines of sociological critique, the authors demonstrate how critical sociology is practiced through conceptual innovation and empirical analyses interweaving the themes of society, power, and culture. Interrogating the Social reinvents the project of critical sociology in two ways: by reflecting upon society as an object of inquiry; and by questioning the existing social order’s self-evident character and exclusionary effects. In doing so, it answers three related questions: How should social relations and interactions be re-thought today? What new institutional and discursive configurations of power are emerging? How do we make sense of contemporary cultural performances and movements?

This edited collection is suited to a wide and diverse audience across the disciplines of sociology, political science, social and political theory, and cultural studies.

Link to the book