Social Research articles from June 1995

Social Research archives from June 1995

Metaphor, morality, and politics, or, why conservatives have left liberals in the dust.
June 22, 1995... We may not always know it, but we think in metaphor.(1) A large proportion of our most commonplace thoughts make use of an extensive, but unconscious, system of metaphorical concepts, that is, concepts from a typically concrete realm of thought...

Metaphors economists live by.
June 22, 1995... When economists look at, say, childcare, they think of markets. "Childcare"--which to other people looks like a piece of social control or a set of buildings or a problem for new parents--looks to economists like a certificate on the New York...

The organism metaphor in sociology.
June 22, 1995... IDEAS from biology have entered social science along three routes. In the eighteenth century (and again today in sociobiology) biological studies aided an effort to identify the instinctive dispositions of human actors, an effort pursued by...

Naming and knowing: giving forms to things unknown.
June 22, 1995... Unless we believe that we can create a distinct name for every conceivable object, thought, feeling, and action--and persuade everyone else to use the same set of names--we might as well concede from the start that we are necessarily creatures of...

The theatrics and mechanics of action: the theater and the machine as political metaphors.
June 22, 1995... Introduction The evolution of sociology, political science, economics, psychology, and other modern social sciences was contingent on the possibility of amoral discourse on human behavior. While this process can be traced to a...

Space, fields, boundaries: the rise of spatial metaphors in contemporary sociological theory.
June 22, 1995... SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY has been profoundly affected by the use of metaphors borrowed from a wide range of other disciplines, ranging from the natural sciences (for example, biology, genetics, physics, cybernetics) to the other social sciences...

Metaphoric connections: holistic science in the shadow of the Third Reich.
June 22, 1995... When I was living in Germany and first becoming interested in German holistic science of the interwar years--a science that professed to do justice to the "wholeness" of living organisms and to eschew mechanistic, reductionistic caricatures--I...

All economies are "embedded": the career of a concept, and beyond.
June 22, 1995... Introduction This account of the career of the concept of embeddedness in economic sociology has two interrelated purposes. The first is to make a contribution to the sociology of social science by presenting a history of this concept...