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Post by Don Quixote on Oct 7, 2014 0:40:45 GMT 5.5
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Post by Lisbeth Salander on Oct 11, 2014 22:55:58 GMT 5.5
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Post by Lisbeth Salander on Oct 13, 2014 20:57:23 GMT 5.5
I find it difficult to grasp the concept of positivism Following is a PPT for the same: Positivism_ppt
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Post by Don Quixote on Oct 13, 2014 23:00:27 GMT 5.5
I find it difficult to grasp the concept of positivism Following is a PPT for the same: Positivism_pptAn extract from my notes, hope it helps!
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Post by Lisbeth Salander on Oct 13, 2014 23:12:16 GMT 5.5
I find it difficult to grasp the concept of positivism Following is a PPT for the same: Positivism_pptAn extract from my notes, hope it helps! Thanks! Your notes are to the point
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Post by Lisbeth Salander on Oct 19, 2014 22:30:49 GMT 5.5
Q. Examine the functional as well as dysfunctional aspects of religion in a pluralistic society taking India and USA as illustrative models. [Long answer, 2004]
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Post by Lisbeth Salander on Oct 22, 2014 12:12:45 GMT 5.5
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Post by Don Quixote on Jan 2, 2015 11:52:28 GMT 5.5
<Very long article, but the gist is simple>Technological UnemploymentIN 1930, when the world was “suffering…from a bad attack of economic pessimism”, John Maynard Keynes wrote a broadly optimistic essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”. It imagined a middle way between revolution and stagnation that would leave the said grandchildren a great deal richer than their grandparents. But the path was not without dangers. One of the worries Keynes admitted was a “new disease”: “technological unemployment…due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” His readers might not have heard of the problem, he suggested—but they were certain to hear a lot more about it in the years to come. For the most part, they did not. Nowadays, the majority of economists confidently wave such worries away. By raising productivity, they argue, any automation which economises on the use of labour will increase incomes. That will generate demand for new products and services, which will in turn create new jobs for displaced workers. Read more at www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-technological-innovation-has-always-delivered-more-long-run-employment-not-less
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Post by Lisbeth Salander on Jan 4, 2015 13:52:08 GMT 5.5
Don QuixoteDid you read about Piketty's refusal of Légion d’Honneur? I was impressed by his "I am refusing this nomination because I do not think it is the government’s role to decide who is honourable." Wondering if it's applicable to India
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Post by Don Quixote on Jan 4, 2015 21:00:04 GMT 5.5
Lisbeth Salander, Not this specific instance, but I am sure there would be others in such group and they are right to some extent of course when awards are politicized.
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Post by Lisbeth Salander on Jan 5, 2015 17:44:02 GMT 5.5
Another article on Work & Economy by bbc newsFrom boom to bust in Australia's mining townsAfter 23 years of growth, including one of the biggest mining booms in the nation's history, tumbling iron ore and coal prices have put a brake on Australia's economy - and mining towns are paying the price.Peter Windle is a casualty of the mining slowdown. The New South Wales mining employee has lost a well-paid job, a company car and an annual bonus that in some years was as high as A$60,000 ($48,800; £31,300). A termination package from the mining company he used to work for has helped soften the blow. But Mr Windle still had to sell his investment property to keep his head above water. Once part of a vast army of workers in what was Australia's booming resources sector, Mr Windle now gets up at 5.30 am five days a week to clean and drive school buses in the small town of Muswellbrook. For decades, the town had ridden the waves of Australia's coal boom. "It's the worst I've seen it in 28 years in the mining industry," says Mr Windle. "Everyone is getting out. Three hundred houses are for sale in my town, three in my street, and rental prices have collapsed on older weatherboard houses from A$1,000 a week to A$200," he says. Mr Windle was the purchase and compliance manager at Glennies Creek Coal Mine. Earlier this year, however, Brazilian company Vale - which owns the underground mine and an open-cut mine at nearby Camberwell - suddenly announced it was sacking 500 workers and mothballing the mines.
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Post by Lisbeth Salander on Feb 6, 2015 19:42:56 GMT 5.5
Suicide in AmericaWhy more Americans are killing themselvesExcerpts from the article, What drives people to self-destruction? Those who suffer from depression are, unsurprisingly, most at risk. The suicide rate also rises when times are hard. During the Depression it jumped to a record 19 per 100,000. It grew after the recent financial crisis too. “Even just uncertainty over employment” makes people worry a lot, notes Yeats Conwell, a psychiatrist at the University of Rochester Medical Centre. The over-75s have historically been most likely to kill themselves, especially if they are lonely or ill. But now it is the middle-aged who are most at risk. In 2012 the suicide rate for Americans aged 45-54 was 20 per 100,000—the highest rate of any age group. For those aged 55-64 it was 18; for the over-65s it was 15. The middle years can be stressful, because that is when people realise that their youthful ambitions will never be fulfilled. Women make nearly four times as many suicide attempts as men, but men succeed four times as often. Men favour bloodier methods: most use a gun, whereas less than a third of women do. Women may be better at asking for help; overall, they are two and a half times more likely than men to take anti-depressants. Whites are nearly three times as likely as African-Americans to kill themselves. Blacks are five times more likely to be murdered with a gun than to kill themselves with one; for whites it is the other way round. Military veterans are especially prone to suicide. Data from 48 states suggest that 30 out of 100,000 veterans kill themselves each year—a rate far higher than among civilians. Many find it hard to overcome the trauma of combat, or to adjust to civilian life. A survey by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, an advocacy group, found that 31% of veterans had considered taking their own lives. Congress is mulling a bill to overhaul how the Department of Veterans Affairs handles the problem.
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Post by Don Quixote on Feb 9, 2015 14:27:44 GMT 5.5
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Post by Don Quixote on Feb 10, 2015 15:46:01 GMT 5.5
On fertility and modern education:The fertility decline to present levels is mostly an economic response to the changing value of children, and to the changing economic relationship of parents and children. The economic transformation is not spontaneous, but the product of cultural transformation through education.... more at qz.com/231313/children-arent-worth-very-much-thats-why-we-no-longer-make-many/One may not agree with all the reasons especially how aggressively sexist the tone becomes through the essay, but the observation on declining economic/cultural value of more children cannot be denied.
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Post by Lisbeth Salander on Feb 10, 2015 19:58:15 GMT 5.5
An enlightening article! Thanks Don Quixote . I agree with the following statements, Education and control of finances by women embrace and amplify the new flow of resources from parents to children, rather than children to parents... Parental control of children’s sexuality and marriage does not last long once children have been transformed into persons...
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Post by Lisbeth Salander on Feb 11, 2015 22:48:29 GMT 5.5
Women and Social MediaGender and Identity on Social Media.pdf (528.22 KB) If anyone ever completely understood Jurgen Habermas's conceptualisation of Öffentlichkeit, amongst them would be contemporary digital social-networking giants such as Facebook and Twitter. Technically a nowhere-land, these social-networking sites are the ideal public spaces and where the formulation, articulation, distribution and negotiation of ideas take place. As Habermas suggests, it is in the public sphere that private individuals constitute themselves in a collective body. This is exactly how people group together on social-media sites through various 'communities' and 'pages,' and as 'followers' as well. Moreover, social-media sites have emerged as important platforms for voicing opinions, both public and private. Twitter, for example – which has become the fastest medium of news broadcast – brings live discussions from newsrooms to mobile-phone screens, empowering consumers of 'news' by making them interactive participants not only in the consumption of news but also in its production.
Over the years, feminist critiques of Habermas's conceptualisation of the 'public sphere' have been published by various theorists including Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Iris Marion Young, Mary Ryan, Carole Patman and Joan Landes. These scholars have alerted us to the physical exclusion of women from the public sphere. Additionally, their responses have flagged a bigger problem: Habermas's own unwillingness to accept the challenge and make a critical examination of the subject of women's exclusion. Portuguese sociologist Filipe Carriera da Silva – in his contribution to what Lisa McLaughlin's calls "the feminist project of revising the Habermasian public sphere” – makes a formulation of how such gendered exclusion is interlinked with the sexual split between public and private.
It is within this context that this Issue Brief looks at digital public spaces to observe the process of identity formation, its occasional bifurcation, and even the obfuscation of the same, in the context of gender-specific issues. The paper limits itself to women-centric concerns, as any discussion on alternate sexual identities is a complex one and merits a separate study. The issues analysed in this paper include: the politics of silencing women; propriety; social media; and health and genderspecific vulnerabilities.
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Post by Don Quixote on Feb 25, 2015 10:08:36 GMT 5.5
More of social anthropology: qr.ae/EbvhFRead other answers for that question as well.
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Post by Lisbeth Salander on Mar 15, 2015 5:45:08 GMT 5.5
Understanding Marx's Base and Superstructure Base and Superstructure are two linked theoretical concepts developed by Karl Marx, one of the founders of sociology. Simply put, base refers to the forces and relations of production—to all the people, relationships between them, the roles that they play, and the materials and resources involved in producing the things needed by society. Superstructure, quite simply and expansively, refers to all other aspects of society. It includes culture, ideology (world views, ideas, values, and beliefs), norms and expectations, identities that people inhabit, social institutions (education, religion, media, family, among others), the political structure, and the state (the political apparatus that governs society). Marx argued that the superstructure grows out of the base, and reflects the interests of the ruling class that controls the base. As such, it justifies how the base operates, and the power of the ruling class. From a sociological standpoint, it’s important to recognize that neither the base nor the superstructure are naturally occurring, nor are they static. They are both social creations (created by people in a society), and both are the accumulation of social processes and interactions between people that are constantly playing out, shifting, and evolving. Extended DefinitionMarx theorized that the superstructure effectively grows out of the base; that it reflects the interests of the ruling class that controls the base (called the “bourgeoisie” in Marx’s time). In The German Ideology, written with Friedrich Engels, Marx offered a critique of Hegel’s theory of how society operates, which was based on principles of Idealism. Hegel asserted that ideology determines social life, that the reality of the world around us is determined by our mind, by our thoughts. Considering recent historical shifts in relations of production, most importantly, the shift from feudalist to capitalist production, Marx was not content with Hegel’s theory. He believed that the shift to a capitalist mode of production had sweeping ramifications for the social structure, culture, institutions, and ideology of society—that it reconfigured the superstructure in drastic ways. He posed instead a “materialist” way of understanding history (“historical materialism”), which is the idea that the material conditions of our existence, what we produce in order to live and how we go about doing so, determines all else in society. Building on this idea, Marx posed a new way of thinking about the relationship between thought and lived reality with his theory of the relationship between base and superstructure. Importantly, Marx argued that this is not a neutral relationship. There is a lot at stake in the way the superstructure emerges out of the base, because as the place where norms, values, beliefs, and ideology reside, the superstructure serves to legitimate the base. The superstructure creates the conditions in which the relations of production seem right, just, or even natural, though in reality they may be deeply unjust, and designed to benefit only the minority ruling class, rather than the majority working class. Marx argued that religious ideology that urged people to obey authority and work hard for salvation in the afterlife was a way in which superstructure justifies the base, because it generates an acceptance of one’s conditions as they are. Following Marx, Antonio Gramsci elaborated on the role of education in training people to obediently serve in their designated roles in the division of labor, depending upon into which class they were born. Marx and Gramsci also wrote about the role of the state—the political apparatus—in protecting the interests of the ruling class. In recent history, state bailouts of collapsing private banks is an example of this. In his early writings Marx is very committed to the principles of historical materialism, and the attendant one-way causal relationship between base and superstructure. However, as his theory evolved and grew more complex over time, Marx reframed the relationship between base and superstructure as dialectical, meaning that each influences what happens in the other. Thus, if something changes in the base, it causes reverberations in the superstructure, and vice versa. Marx believed in the possibility of a revolution among the working class because he thought that once workers realized the extent to which they were exploited and harmed for the benefit of the ruling class, then they would decide to change things, and a significant change in the base, in terms of how goods are produced, by whom, and on what terms, would follow. sociology.about.com/od/Key-Theoretical-Concepts/fl/Base-and-Superstructure.htm
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Post by Lisbeth Salander on Mar 15, 2015 5:51:58 GMT 5.5
Sociology Of Deviance And CrimeThe Study Of Cultural Norms And What Happens When They Are BrokenSociologists who study deviance and crime examine cultural norms, how they change over time, how they are enforced, and what happens to individuals and societies when norms are broken. Deviance and social norms vary among societies, communities, and times, and often sociologists are interested in why these differences exist and how these differences impact the individuals and groups in those areas. Sociologist define deviance as behavior that is recognized as violating expected rules and norms. It is simply more than nonconformity, however; it is behavior that departs significantly from social expectations. In the sociological perspective on deviance, there is subtlety that distinguishes it from our commonsense understanding of the same behavior. Sociologists stress social context, not just individual behavior. That is, deviance is looked at in terms of group processes, definitions, and judgments and not just as unusual individual acts. Sociologists also recognize that not all behaviors are judged similarly by all groups. What is deviant to one group may not be considered deviant to another. Further, sociologists recognize that established rules and norms are socially created, not just morally decided or individually imposed. That is, deviance lies not just in the behavior itself, but in the social responses of groups to behavior by others. The study of deviance can be divided into the study of why people violate laws or norms and the study of how society reacts. This reaction includes the labeling process by which deviance comes to be recognized as such. The societal reaction to deviant behavior suggests that social groups actually create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders. Sociologists often use their understanding of deviance to help explain otherwise ordinary events, such as tattooing or body piercing, eating disorders, or drug and alcohol use. Many of the kinds of questions asked by sociologists who study deviance deal with the social context in which behaviors are committed. For example, are there conditions under which suicide is an acceptable behavior? Would one who commits suicide in the face of a terminal illness be judged differently from a despondent person who jumps from a window?ResourcesAndersen, M.L. and Taylor, H.F. (2009). Sociology: The Essentials. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. sociology.about.com/od/Disciplines/a/Sociology-Of-Deviance-Crime.htm
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