Foucault in China (1989–2019)

How and why social science theory can contribute to medical education research

The essence of the concept of political ideology, its role in the development of society, and the interpretation of ideology in the teachings of Eastern and Western thinkers are studied. A comparative analysis of the political doctrines of Eastern thinkers such as Abu Nasr Farabi, Amir Timur, Western scholars Destut de Tracy, Mannheim, Gramshi, Gouldner, Voloshinov on political ideology is carried out. In the course of the research, the role of ideology in the management of society, ensuring social stability, and the formation of state and civil relations is analyzed. The main goal of the research is to illuminate the theoretical foundations of the concept of political ideology, to reveal how the issue of ideology was interpreted in the views of Eastern and Western thinkers, and to analyze the influence of these views on modern political processes. The methodological basis of the research is historical-comparative analysis, a systematic approach, the logical-analytical method - a comparative study of the views of Eastern and Western thinkers, an analysis of the role of ideology in the political system as a whole, a logical interpretation of the concept of political ideology and its elements. The research results will serve as additional educational material for students studying political science, philosophy, history, and social sciences. Ideological aspects of the teachings of Eastern thinkers - although there are commonalities between Eastern and Western political thought, their ideological foundations differ significantly. In the East, politics is harmonized with spiritual and moral values, while in the West, emphasis is placed on the political system, law, and civil rights. At the same time, the common goal of both schools is the formation of a just society and ensuring the stability of society. Thus, by identifying the commonalities and differences in the views of Eastern and Western thinkers, it is possible to determine which ideas are of priority importance in modern political processes. It will also be possible to determine the influence of various political ideologies on public consciousness, their role in the formation of management systems, and their contribution to the development of political culture. Key words: idea, ideology, political ideology, western ideology, eastern ideology

In this paper, I want to begin to contemplate the possibility that the concept of culture could one day be thought outside modern Western thought, via a reading of Martin Heidegger's 'Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer'. As we shall see, for Heidegger, the dominant position here is representationalism. And so a large part of what I want to do here is to begin to shake the concept of culture from these dominant representationalist moorings.

Addressing the policy challenges and opportunities of “Big data”

James W. Davis’s Terms of Inquiry: On the Theory and Practice of Political Science (2005) presents a critique of the application of the scientific method to the social sciences. Davis argues that the use of the scientific method obfuscates usable knowledge that might otherwise be gathered by applying methodology more appropriate to the study of social science. Davis, a classically-trained political scientist, became disturbed by the dissociation between disciplinary political science and the practice of politics (p. 2). Additionally, despite the empirical orientation of his training, Davis became dissatisfied with the lack of apparent success in predictive abilities of social science theories, despite these disciplines’ adherence to scientific methodology. These issues propelled the development of this work. His objections do not focus upon the academicians who employ these methods (p. 3); rather, his concerns center upon the appropriateness of the scientific method itself to study social interactions. His assessment rests upon his observations concerning academic political science and international relations (p. ix), though he argues that his conclusions are applicable across social science disciplines (p. 3). Davis examines the assumptions upon which the scientific method rests and illustrates through examples drawn from both the social and natural sciences foundational problems with respect to social science applicability. Overall, Davis succeeds in raising important questions concerning the validity of the use of the scientific method in the social sciences, and his meticulous attention to the problematic pieces of that methodology go far towards this work’s success. However, the book could be more unified to avoid redundancy of ideas and to reduce superfluous examples in some parts, while more fully developing several of the more provocative ideas that inexplicably receive short shrift, and eliminating tangential digressions that add little to his thesis. Additionally, Davis’s general case for neo-interpretivist methodology might collapse under the weight of serious scrutiny.

In 2015, the significant rise in refugees and migrants arriving on European territory from one year to another consolidated the foundation for what is commonly referred to as the 'European Refugee Crisis'. Through a critical analysis of the EU-Turkey Joint Action Plan (EUTJAP) of 2015, among the first and most comprehensive responses to the situation, this chapter questions and reflects upon whose problems the policy addresses, and which problems it disregards in that very same framing. By applying the Boaventura de Sousa Santos' theory of Abyssal Thinking, we argue that Modern Western thinking continues to uphold a system of epistemic racism, which provides the coloniser with the monopoly on defining knowledge and truth, while at the same time working towards silencing and invisibilising countering perspectives. This chapter aims bring forward alternative understandings of the policy by addressing how colonial/racial lines are still imbricated in knowledge and law; how policy is produced from within modern Western thinking; how borders function as a marker of race, and finally; the contradiction of the humanitarian narrative and discourse in the EUTJAP. To actively counter the sociology of absences that is produced by the modern/colonial world order, we must work towards post-abyssal thinking. By theorising from the border with critical border thinking, we can significantly impact this shift in the production of knowledges that can empower and liberate the epistemically oppressed.

The problem ofjustifying democracy arises when a society sees the need for cooperative, collective action. Collective action may be needed to solve coordination problems, public goods problems, Prisoner's Dilemmas, and other structural problems of human interaction or perhaps to realize common ideals of justice in concrete political institutions. Once the need for collective action is established, one must ask how the goals of a cooperative endeavor are to be secured. Cooperation requires that individuals, at least over a specified range of activity, pursue a joint strategy. To assure voluntary compliance in a joint venture, cooperation must be to each person's advantage. However, each person may have an incentive to induce others to cooperate and to defect from the joint strategy in the hope of enjoying the fruits of cooperation without incurring the opportunity costs of compliance. This is the essence of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and considerations of this sort suggest that if collective action is to succeed, policies or strategies formed collectively must be coercively enforceable. Coercion, however, requires justification. Because solving the problem of rational noncompliance requires that collective decisions be coercively enforceable, the rules by which collective decisions are reached require justification. Douglas Rae neatly puts the problem of justification that emerges when political solutions are coercively enforceable as follows: "Once a political community has decided which of its members are to participate directly in the making of collective policy, an important question remains: 'How many of them must agree before a policy is imposed on the community?"" This is essentially the question to which the principle of democratic rule provides an answer: by what process are collective decisions to be made? Answering Rae's question requires a normative framework. We could say that a procedure for making collective decisions is justified if and

This article discusses the contribution of Сarl Menger, a famous Austrian economist and one of the authors of the so-called marginalist revolution in economic theory, to social philosophy. The focus of the research is the transformation of the ideological and methodological foundations of social philosophy at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. The focus is on Menger’s contribution to this transformation. Using discursive and conceptual analysis methods, the author shows that the marginalist revolution brought about the most important transformations not only in economic theory, but also – what seems even more significant – in the ideological and methodological paradigm prevailent in the social sciences at that time. In other words, it impacted social philosophy. If the “old” – pre-marginalist – worldview-methodological paradigm was characterized by methodological holism and the principles of substantiality and equivalent exchange, then the “new” – marginalist – paradigm abandoned the principle of substantiality, and adopted methodological individualism and non-equivalent exchange as its fundamentals. The author states that the “new” ideological and methodological paradigm in the social sciences and humanities or the “new” scientific research program (Lakatos) in social philosophy demonstrated a progressive shift in problems (Lakatos) in the twentieth century, proving its effectiveness and heuristics. However, Russian social philosophy did not adequately reflect the ideological and methodological changes caused by the marginalist revolution, nor did it deaw the appropriate ideological and methodological conclusions. This article aims to address a gap in Russian social philosophy, which is what makes the research conducted in this article both novel and relevant. It examines Сarl Menger’s contribution to the replacing the “old” ideological and methodological paradigm of understanding humans and society with a “new” one. This allows us to discuss Menger’s contribution to the social philosophy in his time. It provides a deep ideological and methodological reflection on the transformations in the paradigmatic foundations of social philosophy and draws appropriate ideological and methodological conclusions.

The main aim of this chapter is to discuss the conceptualization of comparative pedagogies within Continental European and Anglophone traditions, and to discuss the importance of comparative pedagogy within the contemporary comparative educational research as such. The chapter opens with the issue of naming and translation of the key terminology, notably pedagogy, comparative pedagogy, and vzgoja (Erziehung in German and vospitanie in Russian) – a concept which implies the teacher’s intentional guidance of children in their moral, personal, social, aesthetical, physical, and spiritual advancement. The chapter presents a brief history of the development of pedagogy as a distinctive science, and proceeds with the discussion on pedagogy’s identity. Due to multifaceted understanding of pedagogy in Continental Europe, the chapter focuses on the academic tradition in Slovenia and wider area of former Yugoslavia. Further, the role of comparison in different contemporary historical periods of pedagogy’s development is explained. The chapter shows that comparative pedagogy has different meanings in different academic traditions. The main difference between that Continental Europe and the Anglophone world is in the knowledge base they built on (pedagogy vs. other social sciences), and the focus they place on endogenous and exogenous factors influencing the nature of education systems and pedagogical processes. The author finally proposes a new definition of comparative pedagogy; a definition which takes pedagogy as its knowledge base, but is also informed with a long tradition of comparative education research based on other social sciences.

Social sciences are increasingly recognized as useful for reorienting human action toward environmental conservation. Fully realizing the social sciences’ potential requires applying social science methods to conservation challenges and drawing from and building on human action theories from across the social sciences to better understand how and when actions can realize positive social and environmental priorities. We conducted an in‐depth analysis of a bounded, systematically selected set of conservation science peer‐reviewed articles to investigate the prevalence of social science theories of human action in conservation research and whether these theories represent the richness of the social science literature related to human action. We censused papers published in 2023 in Conservation Biology, Conservation Letters, and Biological Conservation and assessed each paper's geographic scope, social science engagement, whether it investigated human action, and weather it explicitly used human action theories and underlying metatheory (i.e., ways of understanding the world and how one gains knowledge of it). Results across 533 papers showed that 32% of papers incorporated social science and that 64% of these social science papers investigated human action. Twenty‐seven percent of these human action papers used explicit human action theories. The theory of planned behavior was the most used explicit theory (17% of action theory papers). The independent self metatheory was the most prevalent; it underlies the theory of planned behavior and focuses on understanding how personal attributes, such as values, shape intentional individual behavior. The prevalence of a few theories and metatheories in these dominant conservation journals may indicate a limited capacity for conservation research to build on previous research, avoid redundant reinvention, and unmask novel applications of social science theory that could reorient human action toward conservation. Human action theory use in conservation might be broadened by changing attitudes on the importance of human action theories for research; incorporating social theory in conservation education; asking reviewers to comment on theory usage and mandating theory reporting; creating spaces for social scientists and theory scholars; providing social scientists and theorists with decision‐making power in organizations; rewarding theory use; recognizing feedback loops among theory use; and replacing colonial and capitalistic approaches to conservation.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman considered herself a social scientist and a feminist theorist. In Gilman’s eyes, doing social science and doing feminist theory were not two separate enterprises, they were one. But modern historians have dismissed her claim to being a social scientist and have resurrected her solely as an important feminist from the past. There are at least two reasons for this dismissal. First, the social evolutionary theory on which Gilman based her claims for social reform was discarded long ago by social scientists because of its neo-Lamarckian reasoning. Secondly, since her feminism was an essential part of Gilman’s scientific argument, her social theory seems to be discounted on this basis alone. In other words, feminism, since it is a form of moral reasoning, has no place in social scientific research. Although historians of science are now engaged in assessing theories in the context of their time, no real consideration has been given to the role of moral reasoning in social scientific research. This is particularly important for those engaged in trying to reconstruct what a feminist social science might be.

Exploration of a new integrative intellectual enterprise: the cognitive social sciences. Research in the cognitive sciences has advanced significantly in recent decades. Computational cognitive modeling has profoundly changed the ways in which we understand cognition. Empirical research has progressed as well, offering new insights into many psychological phenomena. This book investigates the possibility of exploiting the successes of the cognitive sciences to establish a better foundation for the social sciences, including the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science. The result may be a new, powerful, integrative intellectual enterprise: the cognitive social sciences. The book treats a range of topics selected to capture issues that arise across the social sciences, covering computational, empirical, and theoretical approaches. The chapters, by leading scholars in both the cognitive and the social sciences, explore the relationship between cognition and society, including such issues as methodologies of studying cultural differences; the psychological basis of politics (for instance, the role of emotion and the psychology of moral choices); cognitive dimensions of religion; cognitive approaches to economics; meta-theoretical questions on the possibility of the unification of social and cognitive sciences. Combining depth and breadth, the book encourages fruitful interdisciplinary interaction across many fields.

Introduction In this chapter, we draw out some key themes, ideas and concepts from the social sciences, philosophy and other disciplines that have influenced our conceptualisation of solidarity. Our overview contains the most influential works related to solidarity in the English language, and it follows a roughly chronological structure. It does not aim to provide a comprehensive review of scholarship on solidarity in the social sciences and humanities (which can be found elsewhere: Jeffries 2014; Sterno 2005). Instead, it also includes works and debates that do not discuss solidarity explicitly and specifically, but that we found to have an important bearing on how solidarity should be conceptualised. This chapter thus lays the ground for the introduction of our own definition of solidarity, to which Chapter 3 will be devoted. Some Early Sociological Work on Solidarity We have introduced the etymological root of solidarity in the Roman law concept of in solidum in the previous chapter. A similar notion existed in the law of classical Greece, where citizens within an oikos – i.e. a household that often included extended families – were sometimes jointly responsible for debts that any of them had occurred, or could jointly accept paybacks that any of the members of the oikos was entitled to receive (Smith and Sorrell 2014: 222). Solidarity entered the Western political domain in the late eighteenth century, fuelled by French revolutionaries who also used the closely related term fraternite to refer to ‘a feeling of political community and the wish to emphasise what was held in common’ (Sterno 2005: 27; see also Brunkhorst 2005). This feeling of political community was soon extended to larger groups for which the revolutionaries claimed to speak. The idea of mutual assistance among citizens had already played an important role in social contract theories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These sought to provide a political justification for the existence of state power, that is, for political communities in which people had given up their ‘natural’ liberties – e.g. to take anything they saw, to kill their enemies, to settle wherever they liked, etc. – and instituted civil liberties in return. Although the idea of mutual assistance played an important role in social contract theories, thinkers in these traditions were not concerned with the notion of solidarity in an explicit and specific manner.

Over the years the research endeavours in social sciences have been directed towards producing profound discoveries about humankind and the society they live in. Now-a-days qualitative research has been flourishing in many fields of the social sciences. Rapid social change and the resulting diversification of life scenarios are increasingly confronting social researchers with new social contexts and perspectives. There is a specific relevance for qualitative research to the study of social contexts and life situations. This has lead to the development of several social theories and social research methods which have still continued to develop in order to understand the diverse social problems. The challenge for social scientists and researchers worldwide is to continue in the search for a unified consensus on what methodology is to be adopted for research for meeting the emerging diverse needs of humankind and the society. This thought has led to the proliferation of pluralism or multi-method research in which the researcher synthesizes multiple research methodologies in order to study social problems in a holistic way. This concept of pluralism in research has to a greater extend subverted methodological tribalism which had existed till the recent past. This paper focuses on the philosophical assumptions as guidelines to research paradigms have influenced the development of social research theory and social research methods towards pluralism. This paper intends to explore pluralism in qualitative Social Science researches as it may be applied methodologically and philosophically. In this context, the paper heeds a thought on refocusing pluralistic qualitative research in terms of its needs and demands based on the level and depth of the study undertaken. Key Terms: Qualitative research, methodological pluralism, research paradigms, philosophical assumptions

Area and International Studies: Archaeology