Samenvatting Sociologie van de Sociale Wetenschappen (SSW)
HOORCOLLEGE 1 l Inleiding SSW
Casus Oostvaardersplassen: In 1968 veel dieren uitgezet → In 2011 veel meer geworden.
2007 → bijvoeren is verboden (doordat de wilde dieren geen eigendom van de staat zijn) →
veel dieren kwamen om → 2016: van Staatsbosbeheer naar gemeente Flevoland.
‘Scientific arguments against feeding the animals’:
- Het eten dat je geeft wordt weggehaald door de sterkste dieren die het het minste
nodig hebben (‘Fodder taken by strongest animals → target group is not reached’)
- Fighting and stress in the herd
- Early rut: faster population growth
- Digestion: switched off from winter condition
- Hay has too much protein
- Feeding makes the animals aid dependent on humans
The province decides to feed the animals itself → ‘From a scientific point-of-view: feeding
the animals is unwise’ (vanuit wetenschappelijk oogpunt is het bijvoeren van de dieren
onverstandig).
→ Change of policy: reduce number of grazing animals
De status van wetenschappelijke kennis is niet zo absoluut en is misschien zelfs wel aan het
dalen.
‘Post-truth society’:
● Pre-modern society: given truth → waarheid ligt buiten de mens, bepaalde kennis
staat los van de mens.
● Modern society: found truth → waarheid ligt buiten de mens, maar kan gevonden
worden door goed onderzoek te doen.
● Postmodern society: made truth → waarheid is niet (altijd) objectief, maar die
kennis/waarheid creëren we zelf.
● Post-postmodern society: truth as a marketable product → wat gepresenteerd
wordt als de waarheid wordt bepaald door media als Facebook of Google. → kennis
als handelswaar.
→ Maatschappelijke status van beroepen (‘judge, medical doctors, teaching professionals
etc.’): wetenschappers hebben nog een (redelijk) hoge status.
This course: ‘understanding how scientific texts are produced, for what purpose and how
power relations play a role (hence influence the outcome of the research)’
Themes in this course:
● Origin and institutionalisation of disciplines
● Reasons why ratio is not always decisive
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, ● Western, white, male hegemony
● Alternative forms of knowledge
● Alternative means of communication
● Research integrity
● The neo-liberal university
Wat is ‘wetenschap’?
- Begrijpen, objectieve waarheid, verifieerbaar, onderzoek doen, transparant.
Science = ‘the more or less systematic search for knowledge by experts, reacting to earlier
scientific ideas and sharing their insights with others.’
Eller about social science: ‘social science cannot be measured by standard or natural
science.’
→ ‘Agency is the capacity to have subjectivity, will, or desire’ (Eller 2017, 210).
Conclusion
- This course is on the daily practice (between guidelines of SSRM and philosophy of science)
- Scientific practice is an institutionalised practice
- Nexus between science and power relations
- Status of social science seems to be on the decline
- Exact science sets a standard that social sciences are ill equipped to meet.
HOORCOLLEGE 2 l Institutionalisering
Intuïtieve definitie van ‘instituties’:
Instituties zijn vaststaande, ‘frozen’, antwoorden op de huidige, terugkerende en
fundamentele kwesties waar we tegenwoordig mee te maken hebben. (Geert de Vries, after
James Feibleman).
‘Actual cultures are themselves the frozen answers to ontological problems’ (James K.
Feibleman)
Instituties:
Formele instituties zijn een belangrijk gedeelte van onze samenleving (rechtspraak,
onderwijs, parlementaire democratie, vrije pers, gezondheidszorg)
‘More spontaneously grown, repetitive actions (things that have become a concept, e.g. the
soul pair of trouser)’
Instituties: Peter Burger & Thomas Luckmann →
‘The basic contentions of the argument of this book are implicit in its title and subtitle,
namely, that reality is socially constructed and that the sociology of knowledge must analyse
the process in which this occurs’ (Berger & Luckmann 1967 [1966]: 13).
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,Thomas theorema:
Het Thomas-theorema of de Thomas-regel is een fundamenteel begrip uit de sociologie dat
weergeeft dat wanneer mensen situaties als werkelijk definiëren, die situaties werkelijke
gevolgen hebben. De definitie van de situatie is dus van invloed op het handelen → ‘If men
define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (William Isaac Thomas &
Dorothy Swain Thomas, 1928). → heeft een link met het ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ (Merton).
Peter Burger & Thomas Luckmann, 1967, The social construction of reality: A treatise
in the sociology of knowledge, London: Penguin (first published 1966):
- ‘the sociology of knowledge is concerned with the analysis of the social construction
of reality’ (Berger & Luckmann 1967 [1966]: 15).
- ‘the problem is contained in nuce in Pascal’s famous statement that what is truth on
one side of the Pyrenees is error on the other’ (Berger & Luckmann 1967 [1966]: 17).
- ‘The reality of everyday life further presents itself to me as an intersubjective world
that I share with others. […] I know there is an ongoing correspondence between my
meanings and their meanings in this world’ (Berger & Luckmann 1967 [1966]: 37).
→ ‘The central question […] can then be put as follows: How is it possible that
subjective meanings become objective facticities?’ (Berger & Luckmann 1967 [1966]: 30).
- ‘Social order exists only as a product of human activity.’ (Berger & Luckmann 1967
[1966]: 70).
- ‘All human activity is subject to habitualization’ (Berger & Luckmann 1967 [1966]: 70-
71).
- ‘Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of
habitualized actions by types of actors. […] The typification of habitualized
actions that constitute institutions are always shared ones. They are available to all
members of the particular social group in question’ (Berger & Luckmann 1967 [1966]:
72).
- ‘With the acquisition of historicity, these formations also acquire another crucial
quality […] this quality is objectivity. This means that the institutions that have now
been crystallized […] are experienced as existing over and beyond the individuals
who “happen to” embody them at the moment. (Berger & Luckmann 1967 [1966]:
76).
- ‘Only at this point [then, is an] institutional world […] experienced as an objective
reality’ (Berger & Luckmann 1967 [1966]: 77).
-
-
-
-
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The institutions as historical and objective facticities, confront the individual as
undeniable facts. The institutions are there, external to him […] They have coercive
power over him’ (Berger & Luckmann 1967 [1966]: 78).
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,→ ‘The central question […] can then be put as follows: How is it possible that
subjective meanings become objective facticities?’ (Berger & Luckmann 1967 [1966]: 30).
Answer:
● Sanctions
● Symbols (including language)
● Roles
Sanctions:
- ‘[The] socialization into the institutional order requires the establishment of sanctions’
(Berger and Luckmann 1967 [1966]: 80).
Symbol:
- ‘Intersubjective sedimentation can be called truly social only when it is has been
objectivated in a sign system of one kind or another’ (Berger & Luckmann 1967
[1966]: 85).
- ‘Language becomes the depository of a large aggregate of collective sedimentations’
(Berger & Luckmann 1967 [1966]: 87).
- ‘Physical objects and actions may be called upon as mnemotechnic aids’ (Berger &
Luckmann 1967 [1966]: 88).
Roles:
- ‘All institutionalized conduct involves roles. Thus roles share in the controlling
character of institutionalization. […] The roles represent the institutional order’
(Berger & Luckmann 1967 [1966]: 92).
- ‘The institutional order is real only insofar as it is realized in performed roles’ (Berger
& Luckmann 1967 [1966]: 96).
Het boek van Eller, hoofdstuk 1 → ‘Each discipline must enshrine its knowledge –and its
territory or “turf,” if you will– in specific institutional forms and perpetuate those institutions
over generations’ (Eller 2017: 2).
Question: Jack Eller uses in chapter 1 various concepts that refer explicitly or implicitly to
the institutionalisation of social sciences or of specific disciplines in the social sciences.
Which concepts can you discover? → Foucault, Bourdieu, Gramsci, Mannheim, Bernstein,
Knorr-Cetina.
● Karl Mannheim: ‘one’s generation profoundly affects one’s individual knowledge […]
People of the same age, having lived through the same events, have in common
“possible modes of thought, experience, feeling and action”, resulting in what he
called “the stratification of experience” (Eller, 2017).
● Basil Bernstein: ‘the “canon,”, the body of information that “counts as” knowledge,
that has been officially sanctioned for knowing and therefore for teaching’ (Eller
2017)
● Karin Knorr-Cetina → epistemic culture:
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, ○ ‘Those amalgams of arrangements and mechanisms –bonded through
affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence– which, in a given field make
how we know what we know.’ (Eller 2017: 14).
○ ‘Knowledge is not only socially constructed but also socially distributed. […]
One of the most important distinctions in the knowledge distribution,
especially in regard to science, is that between the “expert” and the novice.’
(Eller 2017: 4).
○ ‘Individuals who are recognized for possessing expert knowledge enjoy a
certain prestige and power […]: experts are often paid well for their expertise,
and ordinary people often defer to and obey the recommendations of
experts.’ (Eller 2017: 6).
○ ‘Agnotology is the investigation of the causes and effects of ignorance or
knowledgelessness. Robert Proctor, for one, has insisted that ignorance is
not merely the absence of knowledge, but is a social product as much as
knowledge is’ (Eller 2017: 9)
Karin Knorr Cetina: Een kennisobject is een theoretisch concept geïntroduceerd door Knorr
Cetina om de opkomst van post-sociale relaties in epistemische culturen te beschrijven .
Kennisobjecten verschillen van alledaagse dingen en worden gedefinieerd als zich
ontvouwende structuren die niet identiek zijn aan zichzelf.
Standard techniques of disciplinary institutionalization / Standaardtechnieken van
disciplinaire institutionalisatie (Eller 2017: 27):
- Academic departments and teaching chairs
- Research institutes
- Journals (disciplinary, regional, topic-focused)
Arturo Escobar
● Normalisation of definition (normalisatie van de definitie)
● Statistical targets (statistische doelen)
● Models (modellen)
● Professionalisation (professionalisatie)
● Institutionalisation in organisations (institutionalisatie in
organisaties)
→ Escobar beweert in zijn boek 'Encountering Development’ dat
internationale ontwikkeling een controlemechanisme is geworden dat
vergelijkbaar is met kolonialisme of 'cultureel imperialisme: dat arme
landen weinig middelen hadden om beleefd te weigeren'.
→ Het traceerde de opkomst en ondergang van de ontwikkeling door
Michel Foucault 's discoursanalyse , die ontwikkeling als ontologisch
beschouwt. Dit leidde tot de conclusie dat "ontwikkelingsplanning niet alleen een probleem
was in de mate dat het mislukte, het was een probleem, zelfs als het erin slaagde, omdat het
zo sterk de voorwaarden stelde voor hoe mensen in arme landen zouden kunnen leven".
(Arturo Escobar, 1995, Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third
World, Princeton: Princeton University Press.)
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,De term institutionalisering wordt veel gebruikt in sociale theorieën om te verwijzen naar
het proces iets te plaatsen (bijvoorbeeld een concept, een sociale rol, een bepaalde waarde
of een gedragswijze) binnen een organisatie, sociaal systeem, of de samenleving als
geheel.
HOORCOLLEGE 3 l Sociologie
Institutionalisering (door Berger & Luckmann):
● Thomas theorema
● ‘Social order exists only as a product of human activity and all human activity is
subject to habitualization (gewoontes).’
● ‘Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized
actions by types of actors.’ (Berger & Luckmann, 1967)
● ‘With the acquisition (verwerving, aanwinst) of historicity, these formations also
acquire another crucial quality [...] this quality is objectivity.’
Structure-agency:
‘Men made their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it
under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and
transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on
the brains of the living.’ (Karl Marx, The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852)
Institutionalisering van disciplines in de hoofdstukken van Eller:
- ‘Box with key organizations’
- ‘List of key journals’
- ‘Ancient origins’
- ‘Key thinkers’
- ‘Seminal works’
- ‘Box with research topics’
- ‘Section on idiosyncratic approach to terrorism’
Het begin van de sociologie:
● Ibn Khaldun (14e eeuw)
● Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) → Early example of gender studies: ‘If a test of
civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society
over which the other half has power, from the exercise of the right of the strongest.
Tried by this test, the American civilization appears to be of a lower order than might
have been expected from some other symptoms of its social state.’ (Martineau,
1837)
● William Du Bois (1868-1963) → ‘The Negro problem looked at in one way is but the
old world questions of ignorance, poverty, crime and the dislike of the stranger.’
Ancestors: the first recognized sociologists:
- Saint-Simon (1760-1825)
- Auguste Comte (1798-1857)
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, Three founders of contemporary sociology:
- Karl Marx
- Émile Durkheim
- Max Weber
Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) → ‘Le seul moyen de démontrer que la
sociologie est possible c’est de faire voir qu’elle vit’
‘There is ‘a number of identifiable and consistent social
causes and social types of suicide’ (Eller, 2017: 165)
‘A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not,
capable of exerting over the individual an external
constraint’ (Durkheim, cited by Eller 2017: 165).
Karl Marx (1818-1883):
Relevantie van Marx’ werk vandaag de dag:
● Thomas Piketty → ‘The history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply
political, and it cannot be reduced to purely economic mechanisms’ (Thomas Piketty,
cited by Eller 2017: 90).
○ ‘The rate of return on capital, r, can be significantly higher for long periods of
time than the rate of growth of income and output, g’ (Thomas Piketty, cited
by Eller 2017: 90). → met kapitaal wordt je steeds rijker.
Friedrich Engels, The condition of the working-class in England in 1844 →
Max Weber (1864-1920) →
‘The Protestant ethic and
the spirit of capitalism’ (1904) →
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