Andrew Abbott Livres

This work presents analysis of the evolution and development of the social sciences. It reconsiders how knowledge actually changes and advances. Challenging the accepted belief that social sciences are in a perpetual state of progress, this work contends that there is a core set of principles. schovat popis

In The System of Professions Andrew Abbott explores central questions about the role of professions in modern Why should there be occupational groups controlling expert knowledge? Where and why did groups such as law and medicine achieve their power? Will professionalism spread throughout the occupational world? While most inquiries in this field study one profession at a time, Abbott here considers the system of professions as a whole. Through comparative and historical study of the professions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, France, and America, Abbott builds a general theory of how and why professionals evolve.

Tells what every senior researcher knows: that research is not a mechanical, linear process, but a thoughtful and adventurous journey through a nonlinear world. The author breaks library research into seven basic and simultaneous tasks: design, search, scanning/browsing, reading, analyzing, filing, and writing.

Methods of Discovery is organized around strategies for deepening arguments in order to find the best ways to study social phenomena.

For the past twenty years, noted sociologist Andrew Abbott has been developing what he calls a processual ontology for social life. In this view, the social world is constantly changing—making, remaking, and unmaking itself, instant by instant. He argues that even the units of the social world—both individuals and entities—must be explained by these series of events rather than as enduring objects, fixed in time. This radical concept, which lies at the heart of the Chicago School of Sociology, provides a means for the disciplines of history and sociology to interact with and reflect on each other.In Processual Sociology , Abbott first examines the endurance of individuals and social groups through time and then goes on to consider the question of what this means for human nature. He looks at different approaches to the passing of social time and determination, all while examining the goal of social existence, weighing the concepts of individual outcome and social order. Abbott concludes by discussing core difficulties of the practice of social science as a moral activity, arguing that it is inescapably moral and therefore we must develop normative theories more sophisticated than our current naively political normativism. Ranging broadly across disciplines and methodologies, Processual Sociology breaks new ground in its search for conceptual foundations of a rigorously processual account of social life.

Andrew Abbott, einer der wichtigsten Sozialtheoretiker der Gegenwart, unterzieht Texte von Karl Marx und Max Weber einer kritischen Re-Lektüre – mit überraschenden Einsichten. Marx sieht die Gegenwart, so Abbotts Lesart, nur durch Kräfte der Vergangenheit bestimmt. Wollen wir die Gegenwart verstehen, brauchen wir jedoch beides. Vergangenes und Zukünftiges ist im konkreten Handeln miteinander verwoben. Weber hingegen begreife Wissenschaft als vergangenheitsorientiert und Politik als zukunftsbezogen, trenne beides jedoch zu sehr voneinander. Abbott spricht dagegen von »dichten Gegenwarten«, in denen sich Vergangenheiten und Zukunftsentwürfe verknüpfen. Sie können gleichsam historisch erklärt werden (Wissenschaft) und bilden die Basis für schöpferische Gestaltungen (Politik). Die viel gerühmte und ebenso umstrittene Werturteilsfreiheit der Sozialwissenschaften ist in dieser Perspektive ein Mythos.