Engaging with the world : agency, institutions, historical formations
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Engaging with the world : agency, institutions, historical formations
(Ontological explorations)
Routledge, 2013
- : hbk
Available at 3 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
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  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
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  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographies and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This title reflects the general theme of the 2010 IACR annual conference that was held in Padova, Italy, the aim of which was to provide a fresh view on some cultural and structural changes involving Western societies after the world economic crisis of 2008, from the point of view of Critical Realism.
Global society is often regarded as disrupting identities and blurring boundaries, one which entails giving up ideas of structure and fixity. Globalization supposedly introduces a "liquid" era of fluidity where everything is possible, and anything goes. Nevertheless, its current dynamics are developing into a harder reality: wars, economic crisis, the haunting risk of pandemics, the ever worsening food supply crisis, and the environmental challenge. These social facts call for a dramatic shift in the optimistic cosmopolitan mood and the thought that we can build and rebuild ourselves and our world as we please, at least for the most developed countries. The challenges we face produce new forms of social life and individual experience. They also require us to develop new frameworks to analyze emergent contexts, institutional complexes and morphogenetic fields, and new ways to understand human agency and the meaning of emancipation.
The book broadly falls into three parts:
The first, "Social Ontology and a New Historical Formation", deals with mainly social ontological issues, insofar as they are connected to social scientific and public issues in the emerging society of the XXI century.
The second, "Being human and the adventure of agency", is concerned with the way human beings adapts to the "new world" of "our times", and comes up with innovative models of agency and socialization.
The third, "The constitutionalization of the new world", explores critical realist perspectives, as compared to system-theoretical ones, on the issue of global order and justice.
In all of this, the challenge is to engage with this "new world" in a meaningful way, a task for which a realist mind set is badly needed. Critical realism provides a strong theoretical framework that can meet the challenge, and the book explores its contribution to making sense of, and coming to terms with, this historical formation.
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction: Engaging with the World: Critical Social Science in the Wake of the 'Big Crisis' of 'Our Times' by Andrea M. Maccarini PART I 2. Prolegomenon
- The consequences of the revindication of philosophical ontology for philosophy and social theory by Roy Bhaskar 3. A Morphogenetic-Relational Account of Social Emergence. Processes and Forms by Andrea M. Maccarini 4. Reflexive Social Subjectivities by Riccardo Prandini PART II 5. Realist Engagements in Critical Hermeneutics by Frederic Vandenberghe 6. Re-conceptualizing Socialization as Reflexive Engagement by Margaret S. Archer 7. Engagement as a Social Relation: A Leap into Trans-modernity by Pierpaolo Donati PART III 8. The Human Being Invested in Social Forms: Four Extensions of the Notion of Engagement by Laurent Thevenot 9. The New World Order: What Role for Critical Realism? by Douglas V. Porpora 10. Complex governance and Europe's model of subsidiarity by Helmut Willke
by "Nielsen BookData"