Diss.--Frankfurt am Main Universität, 2005. / Bibliogr. p. 303-313.

Tesi--Roma--Pontificia universitas Gregoriana, 2005. / Bibliogr. p. 253-268.

Texte remanié de: Dissertation Ph. D.--Department of sociology and anthropology--Ramat Gan--Bar Ilan university, 2005. / Bibliogr. p. 87-95.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 221-230).

Uppsatsen handlar om huruvida sociologin fortfarande är relevant när ekonomivetenskapen breddar sitt studiefält till att inte längre vara självklart ekonomisk utan också ställa frågor som traditionellt legat på sociologins bord. Genom en teoretisk analys av statistiska resultat angående användandet av inköpslista i samband med matvaruinköp undersöker uppsatsen huruvida ekonomins klassiska handlingsteori, rational choice, och dess antaganden om homo economicus är tillräckligt för att förklara de resultat som uppkommer. Jürgen Habermas teori om kommunikativt handlande, och Webers handlingsteori används som exempel på utpräglat sociologiska handlingsteorier vars förklaringsförmåga av de uppkomna resultaten jämförs med rational choice theory. Arbetet visar hur ekonomivetenskapen i sin strävan att bredda sitt studiefält behöver ifrågasätta vissa klassiska antaganden, något som under senare årtionden har inträffat, och att sociologin kan ge förklaringar där klassisk ekonomisk teori faller kort.

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The genesis of this research initiative is situated in a very challenging and troubling period in my career as an associate dean in a public post-secondary educational institution - a time during which I led our first significant initiatives into costrecovery program delivery. This mission gave rise to contentious issues about our values as educators and about bureaucratic norms that were being challenged. The issues cried out for discourse and values based decision making about what and how we "ought" to be as an institution. Instead, too often, power differentials and bureaucratic imperatives played the central roles in decision-making processes about this new form of programming. Fundamental questions of goodness and justice were left unresolved and often even un-discussed. The events of my practice form the "object of study" in this research as I seek both an understanding of why the experience was thus and also how it might have been otherwise. Through the work of Jiirgen Habermas I explore the difficult problem of achieving social order, grounded in moral agency, in a world characterized by divergent values and perspectives. I discover hope and potential promise in his conceptually proceduralistic approach to the task of social coordination. Examining my experiences in light of Habermas' notions of social coordination, I find some possible explanations for these events and some concepts that offer hope for new approaches to governance and administration. There remain, however, very real and complicating barriers to the ideal posited by Habermas - barriers located in the complexities of human behaviour and interpersonal relationships. Seeking better ways of understanding those barriers and of responding to their impact, I turn to Hannah Arendt and Susan Bickford whose work provides insight into the personal and interpersonal dimensions of human action in creating just communities. Examining my practice experiences through their conceptualizations yields additional insights about what occurred and why, offers guidance about my own actions, and affords a new appreciation of my own complicity in the events as they transpired. The result is new ways of understanding power, discourse, and moral agency - and therefore of understanding my role in educational leadership.

This thesis explores the question of what it means to be a critical being, and how we can cultivate and enact a critical orientation through the ancient Aristotelian notion of phronesis. I begin by defending the claim that the familiar traditions and methods of rhetoric and hermeneutics have their practical, experiential and critical origins in a fundamental and constitutive human desire to express and understand ourselves and others through the most primary of human capabilities: listening, speaking, interpreting and understanding. This way of describing hermeneutics and rhetoric gives us a sense of their origins in lived experience. It also reminds us that rhetorical expression and hermeneutic understanding are not to be thought of as merely ‘systematized disciplines’, ‘instruments’ or ‘methods’ that we can be indifferent to, but part of our participatory linguistic experience. I argue that once the interpenetrating relation of rhetorical expression and hermeneutic understanding is made apparent, an implicit critical-thinking dimension in experience also becomes visible. This ‘critical dimension’ is not discovered in static theory, procedure or method, but, rather, something that is enacted over time with and among others. It is Aristotle’s concept of phronesis, and his understanding of insight and practical reasoning that best captures the emergence and enactment of critical thinking-being. Phronesis is a mode of practical reasoning that is always in motion, always challenging and interrogating the relation between the particular circumstances we find ourselves in, and the historical traditions, general rules, laws or procedures that form our normative background. I allow this argument for a critical hermeneutics through phronesis to be challenged by Jürgen Habermas’s critical sociological approach. I conclude, firstly, that Habermas’s critical theory relies for its critical thrust on a hermeneutical reflective tradition of immanent critique and insights about communication that can be grasped through phronetic reasoning, tradition and concrete embodied linguistic practices. Secondly, I argue that critical hermeneutics enacted through practical reasoning and phronesis describes a way of thinking-acting-desiring being that is more congruent with our actual experience, and therefore capable of meeting the personal, occupational, moral and political exigencies of a complex and diverse contemporary world.

The purpose of this study is to discuss the use of social media by the Swedish Police for democratic purposes. The idea of citizen empowerment is closely related to the development of new communication technologies such as social media. Yet many studies indicate that governmental institutions rarely make use of the assumed potentials of social media. In this study, the democratic potential of social media is derived from Habermas normative concept of deliberative participation. Operational definitions emphasize discursive equality, interactive reciprocity and external impact. The analytical framework is combined with qualitative text analysis to highlight the conditions of interaction between representatives of the Police and citizens. In conclusion: the democratic potential of social media, from a Habermasian point of view, is to a significant extent neglected at the expense of its strategic advantages. In fact, the promise of interactive reciprocity obscures the passivisation and disempowerment of citizens. However, the study is limited to a specific sphere of influence and does not account for other forms of citizen participation made possible with social media or modern ICT.

Employing the concepts of lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and system as primarily discussed by Edmund Husserl and Jürgen Habermas, this dissertation argues that the lifeworlds of Anglo-Indian and Goan Catholics in the Greater Toronto Area have permitted members of these communities to relatively easily understand, interact with and manoeuvre through Canada’s democratic, individualistic and market-driven system. Suggesting that the Catholic faith serves as a multi-dimensional primary lens for Canadian Goan and Anglo-Indians, this sociological ethnography explores how religion has and continues affect their identity as diasporic post-colonial communities. Modifying key elements of traditional Indian culture to reflect their Catholic beliefs, these migrants consider their faith to be the very backdrop upon which their life experiences render meaningful. Through systematic qualitative case studies, I uncover how these individuals have successfully maintained a sense of security and ethnic pride amidst the myriad cultures and religions found in Canada’s multicultural society. Oscillating between the fuzzy boundaries of the Indian traditional and North American liberal worlds, Anglo-Indians and Goans attribute their achievements to their open-minded Westernized upbringing, their traditional Indian roots and their Catholic-centred principles effectively making them, in their opinions, admirable models of accommodation to Canada’s system.