The author develops a phenomenological theory of the social structure of immediate experience. At the heart of this study is a theory of habitual sensitivity that originates in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey. The author develops this theory as an alternative to Schutz's theory of taken-for-granted knowledge, which has had a pervasive influence on how phenomenology has been understood and applied within sociology. Each chapter expands on Ostrow's claim that the world is inherently social, by virtue of the sensitivity that immerses us within it before it ever becomes an...

This book provides an understanding of the content and aims of Habermas's critical theory of society -- the theory that analyzes the causes of our cultural lack of direction, polical apathy, and the increasing complexity of modern society. The author offers a foothold on the current debates regarding the credibility and cogency of the theory.

Braaten presents Habermas's defense of his critique of reason in his most recent work concerning the confrontation between postmodernists and neoconservatives, and modernists and liberal theorists. She also explores the possibility of applying...

This book develops a critique of utopianism through a provocative comparison of the works of Karl Marx and F. A. Hayek, thus engaging two vastly different traditions in critical dialogue. By emphasizing the methodological and substantive similarities between Marxian and Hayekian perspectives, it challenges each tradition's most precious assumptions about the other. Through this comparative analysis, the book articulates the crucial distinctions between utopian and radical theorizing.

Sciabarra examines the dialectical method of social inquiry common to both Marxian and Hayekian thought...

This book presents three generations of German, French, and Anglo-American thinking on the Hegelian narrative of desire, recognition, and alienation in life, labor, and language--a narrative that has been subject to extensive commentary in philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and feminist thought. The texts focus on a central topos in Western thought, the story of self-consciousness awakened in nature and in history. John O'Neill argues that current postmodern rejections of the Hegelian-Marxist narrative demand an understanding of the texts included here. Without Hegel and Marx in our...

This anthology documents the resurrection, in the last few decades, of the importance of narrative to the study of individuals and groups. The editors propose that the human sciences are undergoing a paradigm shift away from nomological models and toward a more humanistic language in which narrative plays a complex and controversial role. Narratives, they claim, help to make experience intelligible, to crystallize personal identity, and to constitute and nurture community.

The fifteen articles in this collection, organized into sections dealing with memory, identity, and community, are by...

Order Without Rules establishes the basic terms for a critical discourse between the theory of communicative action and the tradition of practice-based inquiries inspired by Wittgenstein and elaborated within the field of ethnomethodology. It argues that such a discourse not only is possible, but that it is essential if critical theory is to move beyond the crisis caused by the decline of the great rationalist social projects of the past two centuries and the simultaneous rise of an array of post-enlightenment and anti-rationalist movements waiting to take their place.

Since Max Weber...

Well written and richly illustrated with vivid examples from Wittgenstein's woodcutters to witchcraft in Mexico and elsewhere, this book argues that the underlying methodological principle governing interpretive change is explanatory coherence.

Culminating a twenty-year personal and scholarly quest, the authors explore the phenomenon of loving relationships (minus the sexual attraction) between men and women. They articulate these relationships as dialogical love in which partners respond to each other's presence personally rather than categorically as friend or lover. In a society where relationships of dialogical love are neither articulated and named nor recognized as acceptable ways of being, they are usually mistaken as affairs or regarded as "just" friend relationships. Since these relationships are spontaneous, free, and...

Kindness and the Good Society utilizes phenomenology and a wide variety of traditional and non-traditional sources to provide the first comprehensive account of kindness in any genre of philosophy. Remarkably rich in descriptive detail and drawing upon a wide range of examples, including literary sources, current affairs, and traditional philosophical texts, Hamrick's book rescues kindness from the purposeful neglect of deontological and utilitarian ethical theories. Beginning with an account of the personal and social areas of ethical and moral comportment, Hamrick addresses what is not...

This book expands the concept of the nature of science and provides a practical research alternative for those who work with people and organizations.

Using literary criticism, philosophy, and history, as well as recent developments in the cognitive and social sciences, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences shows how to use research information organized by the narrative form--such information as clinical life histories, organizational case studies, biographic material, corporate cultural designs, and literary products. The relationship between the narrative format and classical and...