Homo economicus rests on the silent premises that human communication today is no different than it was in Adam Smith’s day and therefore human beings relate to each other and to themselves no differently than 225 years ago. In essence, the development of the telegraph followed by the telephone, radio, television, fax, email, and internet […]
Category Archives: Ideas and Papers
Entropic Creation by Helge S. Kragh
Entropic Creation Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology Helge S. Kragh, University of Aarhus, DenmarkSeries : Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945 Entropic Creation is the first English-language book to consider the cultural and religious responses to the second law of thermodynamics, from around 1860 to 1920. According to the second law of thermodynamics, as formulated […]
Social phenomena are not of the same nature as natural phenomena
Culturomics meets random fractal theory: Insights into long-range correlations of social and natural phenomena over the past two centuries Gao, Jianbo Hu, Jing Mao, Xiang Perc, Matjaz Culturomics was recently introduced as the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture. Here we make use of this data by investigating […]
Childhood Constructions of Contemporary Technology: Using Discourse Analysis to Understand the Creation of Occupational Possibilities
Mary Silcock, Clare Hocking & Deborah Payne Ten children aged 10-12 years were audio recorded discussing and demonstrating the types of technology they regularly used at home. A critical discourse analysis of the transcriptions was completed to identify dominant discourses the children deployed. Philosopher Michel Foucault’s theories on the history of existence, power relations, the […]
The Social Genesis of Individual Practice
Whilst Bourdieu’s concept of habitus provides some useful insights into the ‘social’ nature of our identities, it also presents some analytical shortcomings. In this paper I expose some of the theoretical deficiencies present in Bourdieu’s model and argue that these can be resolved by applying some of the insights of the Perfomative Theory of […]