Conceptual Apparatus (conceptual + apparatus)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


The rise of a ,social development' agenda in New Zealand

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE, Issue 1 2009
Neil Lunt
Since 1999 New Zealand has seen the election of a series of Labour-led governments committed to a social policy framework of social development. This article outlines the background to the emergence of social development, tracing its antecedents in the neo-liberal administrations of the 1990s. The social development framework consists of commitments around economic development, human capital development, family development and politico-administrative redevelopment. Taking the position that reforms must be seen as concrete policy mechanisms and as discursive cues and conceptual apparatus, the article offers a comparison and critique. First, it identifies the continuities and contrasts with the previous neo-liberal framework of minimal social policy; and second, it begins the process of critically interrogating the potential citizenship implications of social development. [source]


Space, Boundaries, and the Problem of Order: A View from Systems Theory

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2007
Jan Helmig
The idea our global polity is chiefly divided by territorially organized nation-states captures contemporary constellations of power and authority only insufficiently. Through a decoupling of power and the state, political spaces no longer match geographical spaces. Instead of simply acknowledging a challenge to the state, there is the need to rethink the changing meaning of space for political processes. The paper identifies three aspects, a reconceptualization of the spatial assumptions that IR needs to address: the production of space, the constitutive role of boundaries, and the problem of order. With this contribution, we argue that one avenue in understanding the production of space and the following questions of order is by converging systems theory and critical geopolitics. While the latter has already developed a conceptual apparatus to analyze the production of space, the former comes with an encompassing theoretical background, which takes "world society" as the starting point of analysis. In this respect, nation states are understood as a form of internal differentiation of a wider system, namely world society. [source]


Rinkeby Swedish and semilingualism in language ideological debates: A Bourdieuean perspective

JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 2 2004
Christopher Stroud
The focus of this paper is on the mechanisms whereby liberal and well-meaning democratic societies propagate a cycle of disposession where immigrants are constructed as least resourced while the powerful retain their power. Specifically discussed is the semiotic management of traditional hierarchies of privilege and access through language ideological discourses pertaining to second language acquisition, multilingualism and heterogeneity. One notion in particular is discussed in this context, namely Rinkeby Swedish, a potential, imagined, pan-immigrant contact variety of Swedish. The discussion is framed within a primarily Bourdieuean conceptual apparatus using concepts of symbolic market, explaining the role of language boundaries and their institutional policing, and detailing the semiotic processes of iconization whereby immigrants are positioned as outside of a symbolically reconstituted community of ,real' Swedish speakers, in strategic attempts to restrict their access to important linguistic and symbolic resources. [source]


Blockheads, roundheads, pointy heads: Intellectual disability and the brain before modern medicine

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Issue 2 2005
C. F. Goodey
Recent work on the conceptual history of intellectual disability has pointed to a discontinuity in the seventeenth century, identifying the concept as essentially modern in a more radical sense than mental illness or physical disability. However, Galenist accounts of intellectual impairment were clearly connected (via anatomy) to neurology, which could be taken as prima facie evidence that Galenism shares with modern medicine one of its basic explanatory approaches to intellectual disability. Close textual examination does not bear out this counter-claim, at least as far as the conceptual apparatus itself is concerned. However, it does reveal a degree of continuity in the medical mind-set as discourses of monstrosity were transposed from the domain of anatomy to that of post-Cartesian psychology. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source]


Critical Dialogues: Habermasian Social Theory and International Relations1

POLITICS, Issue 3 2005
Alexander Anievas
The works of Jürgen Habermas have been a theoretical inspiration for many students of international relations (IR). To date, however, the majority of critical IR approaches drawing from the Habermasian perspective have done so on purely philosophical grounds. This article will thus explore the utility of the social-theoretical aspects of Habermas's work for critical inquiries into world politics. To this end, it will examine four main elements of his work: the theory of communicative action; public sphere; lifeworld/system architecture; and discourse ethics. It will be argued that adopting the Habermasian conceptual apparatus provides a social-theoretical route to explaining the contradictory and often paradoxical nature of international relations in the epoch of ,globalisation'. While various constructivist approaches to IR have recently offered more socially-oriented applications of Habermas's theoretical framework, the majority of these studies have done so from predominately non-critical standpoints. This article will thus seek to explore the utility of Habermas's work in offering a critical social theory of world politics. [source]