1,721,149 research outputs found
Constitutionalism, sovereignty, and the troubled category of social citizenship
Full text linkIn a recent paper Martin Loughlin laments the fact that during 'the last 20 years or so' a serious misunderstanding of constitutional authority has found its way into a great deal of social, legal, and political thinking. Loughlin contends that this misunderstanding is a reaction to 'the growing range of governmental functions now being exercised through supra- or transnational institutional arrangements'. In a not-unrelated set of papers, Grahame Thompson highlights the way this problematic thinking about constitutionalism has infected discussions about the role of global corporations, especially those that attempt to grant to some global corporations the status 'global corporate citizen'. After setting out a distinctive understanding of 'the social', this paper explores some aspects of these interventions by Loughlin and Thompson. The paper then builds on their insights to develop an argument that the category of social citizenship is unsustainable
Culture and the study of social identity
Full text linkBy declaring the social to be universal and timeless the formalised study of social identity – drawn mostly from sociology, social policy, social psychology, and cultural studies – ignores the fact that as a discrete domain the social has a definite a history. This paper argues, first, that modern social identity depends on the existence of the social as a separate domain of relative peace and freedom which emerged in early modern Europe – the civil-peace social. The paper then goes on to its main argument, that culture – as patterns of enculturation, or the formation of particular personae – can, by providing a distinction between culture and the social, help to clarify the way social identity actually works. In this way, the study of social identity needs to put more stress on the fact that for the civil-peace social to have emerged and to continue to flourish, the culture that produced unrestrained individuals and groups had (and still has) to be overcome in favour of the culture that produced (and continues to produce) more restrained persons as new moral personae
Sociology and international law: some historical connections
Full text linkSociology and international law are closely related. Both fields were formalised as disciplines in the second half of the nineteenth century, though this is not the source of their closeness. Rather, they are closely related because of their joint reliance on the notion of the social. Both made much use of an organic-communitarian understanding of the social and in both a counter-current arose against this direction, around a distinctly politico-legal understanding. In building its organic-communitarian tradition, international law actually borrowed heavily from the sociological discourses of the time, particularly from the work of Durkheim. The borrowings concerning the politico-legal tradition, however, ran the other way, with sociology borrowing from those public law discourses about sovereignty that informed most discourses of international law. The paper sketches the main method involved, sets out each of the two aforementioned rival understandings of the social, discusses international law’s use of the organic-communitarian understanding, and discusses sociology’s borrowing from public law in deploying a politico-legal understanding through the notion of sovereignty
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Problems with the critical posture? Foucault and critical discourse analysis
Full text linkThis paper provides a brief analysis of Michel Foucault’s work on power and governmentality, and mounts the argument that the treatment of these concepts by Foucault is theoretical rather than empirical or historical. Foucault’s approach – a Kantian dialectical approach – allows the social to engulf politics, sovereignty and the state. Ultimately, Foucault follows a Kantian line to a moral critique of society. Given this critical edge to Foucault’s work, it is not surprising that endeavours such as critical discourse analysis use Foucault’s work to ballast their approach. Like Bruno Latour, however, we suspect that the fascination with social and moral critique is exhausted; and we suspect that the commitment to critique masks the understanding of the critic as an historically specific persona, and disallows – on moral grounds – non-teleological descriptive analyses. Rather than critique critique, however – and risk being hoist by our own petard – our purpose here is an exploration of those who adopt the critical person
Competing understandings of the intersection between society and environment in the climate change debate
Full text linkThe failure of the Copenhagen Conference to produce a legally binding agreement marks an impasse. It also poses difficulties for sociology. This paper will not attempt to directly explain why no agreement could be reached in Copenhagen. Rather, it will sketch the sociological difficulties faced by this and other such mechanisms to use politics and law to facilitate the long term stability of the interface between natural environments and modern societies. In particular, the paper will indicate the role of each of science, morality, law, politics, and economy in producing competing understandings of „environment‟ and „society‟, competing understandings which are drawn on by many participants in the climate change debate. Our appreciation of how and why it presents a crisis, how it might have occurred, its consequences, and the fact that it is an environmental problem is a product of a certain type of specifically „environmental‟ thinking. Our project is to undertake a close exposition of how various understandings of the potential threat of climate change are generated
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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