Vorlesungsverzeichnis

Debatten in den Sozialwissenschaften (Seminar)

Inhalt: Das Seminar steht allen Promovierenden der Leuphana offen. Es widmet sich zentralen Debatten der Sozialwissenschaften und diskutiert ihre Relevanz für heutige Forschung. Voraussichtlich werden Schwerpunkte auf den Positivismusstreit, den Historikerstreit und auf die Kontroverse um eine mögliche Politisierung der Sozialwissenschaften unter dem Begriff einer transformativen Wissenschaft gelegt; Anregungen und Änderungen sind aber willkommen. Die Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmer werden mit diesen akademischen Auseinandersetzungen vertraut gemacht und dazu eingeladen, ihre jeweiligen Forschungsprojekte konzeptionell, methodisch und paradigmatisch zu reflektieren. In welcher Tradition stehen ihre je eigenen Forschungsfagen? Wie zeigt sich hier das eigene Wissenschaftsverständnis? Wie lassen sich gesellschaftliche Phänomene erforschen? Wie steht es um die Relevanz des eigenen Projekts – oder sind Nützlichkeitserwägungen gänzlich abzulehnen?

Philosophy of Social Science (PhD) (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Markus Reihlen, Dennis Schoeneborn

Inhalt: This course provides you with insights into how to do more engaging and useful research. So what can philosophy contribute to social science? The answer is straightforward: it helps to construct more interesting research problems by challenging taken-for-granted assumptions. The philosophy of social science raises fundamental questions relevant to the practicing researcher, such as what is the nature of social phenomena? Should we see organizations as accumulations of autonomous individuals, collective actors with goals of their own, or systems embedded into society? What is the appropriate form of investigation? Should we rely on empirical facts, on our reason, on action, or on intuition? Can we investigate society by studying individuals or via their social structures? What values and norms of social actions are appropriate? Should we see the individual's freedom (maximization of individual benefit) or his/her responsibility to the community at large (maximization of collective benefit) as the primary goal of social action? This course blends specific perspectives from the philosophy of social science with controversies in social studies. Our use of the term social studies is broad; it includes all disciplines that study social systems of different kinds and of different levels such as economics, sociology, political science, culturology, social psychology, and the respective socio-technologies such as management. This course will enable students to explain how philosophy could contribute to the improvement and interestingness of social research. More specifically, students will be made familiar with general philosophical controversies in social science such as individualism versus holism, idealism versus materialism, the positivism versus postmodernism debates. Finally, we address the relation between science and praxis and reflect upon the different statuses of science and technology.

The Politics of International Trade: Interests, Institutions, and Power (PhD) (Seminar)

Dozent/in:

Inhalt: This short course provides an overview of key approaches to international political economy, with a focus on the determinants of trade policy. Highlighting the role of interests and institutions on both the domestic and international level, it begins with competing systemic theories, which emphasize power, social purpose, and international institutions. It then turns to the domestic arena and examines the role of interest groups in the formation of coalitions in favor or against free trade as well as social and political institutions, which shape trade policy. Taken as a whole, this course provides students with analytical tools to understand the forces that shape economic globalization, and the backlash against it, in the third decade of the 21st century and beyond.

Uses and Abuses of Culture in Organized Life (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes

Termin:
Einzeltermin | Mo, 07.10.2024, 10:00 - Mi, 09.10.2024, 15:00 | extern | Die Veranstaltung findet in Bristol, UK, statt

Inhalt: The term culture has two enduring meanings – narrowly, as a particular set of valued beliefs and practices, and broadly, as the way of life of a people. The first sense separates some aspects of human life and terms them ‘culture’ – the sort of things found in an art gallery or opera house but not those in a football ground or factory. The second takes a more anthropological perspective, understanding all the ways of life of a people as symbolic, constituted by meaning and interpretation. Such divisions have been important in informing the history of the study of organization and organizing. In the narrow sense, culture can be opposed to structure, as the soft is opposed to the hard, or the informal to the formal. Such a set up anchors ideas about organizational culture, atmosphere and symbolism as analytically distinct from concepts like ‘economy’, with its underpinning of the masculine rational economic actor. Culture is also, in an era of globalization, imagined as a way of understanding the other, a field that cultivates ideas about cross-cultural communication and international management precisely in order to cancel culture as a form of noise that interferes with properly economic transactions. Yet if we adopt a broad sense of culture then all these distinctions are dissolved, since nothing is outside language and symbolism. Social and economic structures cannot be imagined as somehow different from other anthropological practices that human beings engage in. There is no outside to culture, which means that any understanding of the term culture is itself cultural, a word made by the flows and tangles of the present, and hence being shaped by contemporary concerns as much as disciplinary history.

Vorlesungsverzeichnis

Lehrveranstaltungen

Debatten in den Sozialwissenschaften (Seminar)

Philosophy of Social Science (PhD) (Seminar)

The Politics of International Trade: Interests, Institutions, and Power (PhD) (Seminar)

Uses and Abuses of Culture in Organized Life (Seminar)