Engaging with the recent resurgence of interest in methodological and philosophical issues in the human and social sciences, this series provides an outlet for work that demonstrates both the intellectual import of philosophical and methodological debates within the social sciences and their direct relevance to questions of politics, ethics or policy. Philosophy and Method in the Social Sciences welcomes work from sociologists, geographers, philosophers, anthropologists, criminologists and political scientists with broad interest across academic disciplines, that scrutinises contemporary perspectives within the human and social sciences and explores their import for today's social questions.
By Ivan Leudar, Jiří Nekvapil
September 25, 2023
This book brings together two decades of work by the authors on dialogical networks, showing how the concept of the dialogical network developed through series of connected case studies and clarifying the concept through historical analysis. Identifying the key characteristics of dialogical ...
By Yafeng Shan, Jon Williamson
April 24, 2023
This volume contends that Evidential Pluralism—an account of the epistemology of causation, which maintains that in order to establish a causal claim one needs to establish the existence of a correlation and the existence of a mechanism—can be fruitfully applied to the social sciences. Through case...
By Michael Mair
January 09, 2023
The Problem of the State provides a new perspective on what the social and political sciences can contribute to understandings of the state and the ambivalent place it occupies in our collective affairs. Distinguishing two broad conceptual and methodological approaches to addressing the problem of ...
By Kevin McMillan
January 31, 2019
Practices – specific, recurrent types of human action and activity – are perhaps the most fundamental "building blocks" of social reality. This book argues that the detailed empirical study of practices is essential to effective social-scientific inquiry. It develops a philosophical infrastructure ...
By R.J. Anderson, W.W. Sharrock
April 30, 2018
This book examines the nature of work and management, centring on documents as a class of management objects which have been relatively understudied in ethnomethodological research. Treating documents and similar artefacts as ordering devices, the authors describe consociation – the social ...
By Rupert Read, Edited by Simon Summers
September 08, 2016
Engaging with the question of the extent to which the so-called human, economic or social sciences are actually sciences, this book moves away from the search for a criterion or definition that will allow us to sharply distinguish the scientific from the non-scientific. Instead, the book favours ...
Edited
By Olli Lagerspetz, Jan Antfolk, Ylva Gustafsson, Camilla Kronqvist
August 26, 2016
This book highlights the recent re-emergence of Edward Westermarck's work in modern approaches to morality and altruism, examining his importance as one of the founding fathers of anthropology and as a moral relativist, who identified our moral feelings with biologically-evolved retributive ...
By Leonidas Tsilipakos
February 13, 2015
Departing from a concern with certain ’hard’ problems in social theory and focusing instead on the theoretical strategies employed in their solution, especially on how these strategies depend on what the author calls the theoretical attitude towards language, this book considers whether these ...