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9780761961246 Academic Inspection Copy

Realism and Social Science

  • ISBN-13: 9780761961246
  • Publisher: SAGE PUBLICATIONS
    Imprint: SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
  • By Andrew Sayer
  • Price: AUD $156.00
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 01/02/2000
  • Format: Paperback (234.00mm X 156.00mm) 224 pages Weight: 340g
  • Categories: Social theory [JHBA]
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A guide to critical realism and an assessment of its virtues in comparison with other leading traditions in social science. Andrew Sayer, a social theorist and a founder of "realism" in the social sciences, criticizes reductionism and determinism in "modernist" social science and rejects the postmodern for its overexaggeration of the permeable character of boundaries in social explanation. He provides a guide to the key features of critical realism and criticizes postmodernism, anti-essentialism and constructionism. Finally, the book provides an assessment of the ethical turn in social theory, and its implications.
Andrew Sayer is Professor of Social Theory and Political Economy at Lancaster University.
PART ONE: INTRODUCING CRITICAL REALISM Introduction Key Features of Critical Realism in Practice A Brief Introduction PART TWO: POSTMODERN-REALIST ENCOUNTERS Introduction Realism for Sceptics Postmodernism and the Three `PoMo' Flips Essentialism, Social Constructionism and Beyond PART THREE: Social Science and Space Introduction Space and Social Theory Geohistorical Explanation and Problems of Narrative PART FOUR: CRITICAL REALISM: FROM CRITIQUE TO NORMATIVE THEORY Introduction Critical Realism and the Limits to Critical Social Science Ethics Unbound For a Normative Turn in Social Theory
`Sayer makes a direct contribution to the glaring academic divide between law finding, positivists and relativist post-modernist researchers, providing a middle pathway via critical realism (CR) to scientific explanation. He offers a clear definition of CR and successfully tackles various misunderstandings and critisims of this alternative approach. While this is not cutting edge CR, the arguments contained are well worth repeating to a discipline that is a little hard of hearing.... a number of Sayer's provocative arguments have stayed with me, long after setting his book "to rest" on the shelf, challenging my own research agenda' -Journal of Economic and Social Geography `This is a most welcome addition to the growing literature on critical realism and its implications for social science. For some time now a book has been needed that is inter-disciplinary in its content and lucid in its exposition of critical realism. The author is to be congratulated in aiming to fill this gap' - Tim May, Dept of Sociology, University of Durham
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