Abstract
In social life rationality must be—and generally is—finely tuned to deal with differences in order to make the best of them so that we can achieve individual and collective goals. Some people prefer to speak French, some English; a few people are pianists, but there are many more who like to listen to piano music; some individuals are very good at fixing cars, and enjoy doing it for a living, whereas others have trouble finding the oil reservoir. We map our activities in terms of such differences. In economic realms, in contrast, we have identity of interests—the pursuit of our own particular well-being. The complementarity of social interests helps to limit exploitation and cheating (free-riding) in economic life. But not entirely. This is the analytical problem I pursue in this book.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.
See Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986.
Some of these examples are from Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword, and Book. London: Collins Harvil, 1988, p. 175.
This is emphasizing a distinction that is generally not made in sociology. For example, Peter M. Blau posits that people seek to adjust conditions and means to achieve ends in social relations and in economic spheres. See his Exchange and Power in Social Life. New York: John Wiley, 1964.
See Harold I. Brown, Rationality. London: Routledge, 1988.
For various statements on periodization and discontinuities in history, see Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978; Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things before the Last. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969; Fernand Braudel, On History. Trans. Sarah Matthews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975; Marshall D. Sahlins and Elman R. Service (eds.), Evolution and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988.
W.B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding. 2nd ed. New York: Schocken, 1968.
Henry Bretton, The Power of Money. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980, p. 161.
Arguably, architecture critic Charles Jencks was the first to use the concept postmodern; see his discussion of the failure of modernist codes in “The Architectural Sign,” pp. 233–242 in Geoffrey Broadbent, Richard Bunt, and Charles Jencks (eds.), Signs, Symbols, and Architecture. Chichester: John Wiley, 1980. In this piece he draws on arguments from his Modern Movements in Architecture. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973.
Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone, The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America. New York: Basic Books, 1988.
For a general discussion, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1989, pp. 327–335.
See Edith Kurzweil, The Age of Structuralism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968 [1964]
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966 [1959].
Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975 [1973], p. 36.
Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans, and Foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Ibid., p. x.
Jean Baudrillard, “Fatal Strategies,” pp. 185–206 in Selected Writings. Ed. and Introduction by Mark Poster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 193.
I quote David Bloor here. He argues for a “strong programme” of objectivity in sociology that includes values. See his Knowledge and Social Imagery. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism. Ed. and Introduction by Tony Pinkney. London: Verso, 1989, p. 175.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1993 Plenum Press, New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
(1993). Reflexivity and Social Science. In: Social Contracts and Economic Markets. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-28187-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-28187-2_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-306-44391-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-585-28187-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive