Primitive Classification and Postmodernity

Towards a Sociological Notion of Fiction

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2354007
AutoresKarin Knorr Cetina (autor correspondente)
Ano1994
Volume11
Fascículo3
Páginas1-22
Data de publicação1994-08-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoTheory Culture & Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0263-2764 • E-ISSN: 1460-3616
EditoraSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/026327694011003001
OpenAlexW2121486358
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas33
Referências citadas31

Postmodernist thinking in sociology is easily dismissed as gibberish taken over from French intellectuals and literary critics surveying the world from their Parisian desks or, worse still, from the vantage point of their brief travels to La Californie.It can be seen as an ephemeral fashion taken up by social theorists who are out of ideas, theorists who are finally getting bored with reinterpreting Weber, Durkheim and Marx.)But it can also be seen as a movement sustained by developments within sociology which imply a rupture with Enlightenment thinking, a negation of many of the definitive features which have been associated with the modern.These developments nourish a break with modernist claims by offering empirical documentation for their findings, a feature not entirely irrelevant to a science that wants to make assertions about the social world.In addition, they suggest that postmodernity is something more than a chapter in the sociology of intellectuals and their malaise with the world, as Bauman suggests (1988), or a trend in aestheticism keyed to increased individualism, multiple choices, and 'self-enrichment' or 'self-enlargement' (Rorty, 1986).The perspectives which push sociology from within beyond the grand master themes of modernist thinking and modernist research, differentiation and rationalization, and which lead, as one might say, to pastmodern thinking, are microanalysis and construc tionism.Microanalysis is the detailed description of social episodes through means such as ethnography, discourse analysis or visual methods.It has flourished in ethnomethodology, symbolic inter actionism, social phenomenology, and so on, and has documented in detail the existence of life-worlds which theorists such as Habermas (1983) think we have lost, and the relevance of the body

Aesthetics · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Modernity · Postmodernity · Rationalization (economics · Social science · Sociology · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Management and Organizational Studies · Philosophy · Social and Cultural Dynamics