Search

This collection of essays aims to revive the sociological debate on the unintended, unanticipated and unexpected consequences of social action, as started by Robert K. Merton in a classic study of 1936. The contributing authors provide insights on both Merton's work and the reception it received in the academia. They also go beyond his original formulations to encompass new theoretical perspectives and empirical interests that have emerged in the intellectual circumstances different from, or opposed to, his functionalist theory. The contributing authors delve into fields as diverse as education, law, politics, financial markets, consumption, risks and accidents, systemic transformation, organizations and institutional work, innovations, and Polish studies.

Volume III of Archerian Studies, which we now deliver to our readers, focuses on the question of culture. Despite the numerous motifs which were introduced to the discourse pertaining to Margaret S. Archer's concept, we see that some repeat here constantly. We hope that this way of depicting considerations inspired by the thought of prominent scholars will not only become an occasion for this scientific literary output to become widespread, but will also open new research perspectives in sociology.

The book contains analyses and interpretations of multidimensional perspectives in philosophical, economical and psychological research on imagination. The authors analyse Russian (N. Bierdiajew) and French philosophy and anthropology (G. Bachelard, G. Durand), German conceptions (I. Kant's, F. Baader's, F. Schiller's or Heideggerian interpretations) of the role of imagination in art, science and sociopolitical domains. Image and imagination play the main role in the contemporary social world. It is investigated by psychology, sociology and political sciences, and many subdisciplines of philosophy have their own traditions in approaches to image and imagination problem. The authors try to integrate the results of these research efforts.

This book refers to the question of cultural normativity. The texts of the book present the diverse profiles of cultural normativity: from philosophical assumptions and indications relating to the sources of axiology and normativity in general to analyses of selected examples of social practices and the reconstruction of declared or presupposed kinds of cultural normativity. The authors evaluate the distinction between normativity and normativeness as a state of norms, they describe the relationships between cultural normativity and ethics. This issue is particularly important with regard to the 20th-century criticism of essentialism, the primacy of the culturalist position in humanities and the importance of the concept of difference in social sciences.

The analysis of social distinction cannot indefinitely remain confined to logics of reasoning that are markedly ethnocentric. Rather than just applying the consecrated schemes of Veblen or Bourdieu, Daloz provides new foundations in this book for understanding 21st Century Dubai, China, Russia and settings of the past.