The Nature of Social Reality: Issues in Social Ontology

ISBN-13: 9780367188931 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 266 str.

Tony Lawson

Opis

The social sciences often fail to examine in any systematic way the nature of their subject matter. Demonstrating that this is a central explanation of the widely acknowledged failings of the social sciences, not least of modern economics, this book sets about rectifying matters.

Spis treści

Preface and acknowledgements.  Part 1: Setting the context.  1. Why social ontology?.  Part 2: A general conception.  2. Ontology and the study of social reality: emergence, organisation, community, power, social relations, corporations, artefacts and money.  Part 3: Topics in scientific ontology.  3. The nature of the firm and peculiarities of the corporation.  4. The modern corporation: the site of a mechanism (of global social change) that is out-of-control?.  5. A theory of money.  6. The positioning and credit theories of money compared.  Part 4: The nature and dynamics of processes of emergence, reproduction and transformation.  7. Emergence, morphogenesis, causal reduction and downward causation.  8. Collective practices and norms.  Part 5: Consequences for projects of human emancipation.  9. Possibilities for emancipatory social change.  Index

O autorze

Tony Lawson is Professor of Economics and Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is also a co-Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics and co-Founder of the Cambridge Realist Workshop and the Cambridge Social Ontology Group.