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- Mjöberg, Jessica, 1977-
(författare)
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Innerlighetens tid : En sociologisk undersökning av intimitet och senmodernitet
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Due to a recent increase in usage of the concept of intimacy within social scientific research, the overarching aim of this work is to investigate its meaning and significance in contemporary social life. The first part of the thesis reviews research on intimacy. Intimacy is perceived as being vaguely defined as a concept, leading to insufficient discussions concerning the significance of intimacy both as a social concept and as a social phenomenon in contemporary western society. In order to become more clearly defined as a social concept to use in future research, intimacy needs to be investigated as a social phenomenon. The second part explores and analyses intimacy as a social phenomenon by way of three partly phenomenological and partly theoretical analyses: the phenomenology of intimacy, the arithmetic of intimacy and the dark sides of intimacy. The three analyses result in a definition of intimacy understood as a kind of sociality, or mode of social being, characterized by an oceanic experience, mutual and complete directedness between the ones being in relation, an experience of mental as well as physical closeness, and an experience of time as “durée”. The third part discusses the proposed definition of intimacy as sociality in relation to contemporary social theory. In relation to an understanding of contemporary western society as late modern or radicalized modern, intimacy as sociality is discussed as a radicalization of a rational sociality, characteristic for modern society. The discussion takes the form of a dialectic critique of modern dualistic theories, proposing a triadic (dialectic) alternative for understanding basic forms of sociality and social relations. The vague notion of intimacy as a concept suited to characterize social life in contemporary western society is supported by this proposition.
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| 2. |
- Lundin, Elin, 1970-
(författare)
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Motstånd och kreativitet : George Herbert Meads bidrag till aktör-strukturdebatten
- 2004
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation is about the agency-structure debate. Different ways of comprehending the relationship between agency and structure constitute a watershed between theoretical approaches in sociology. On one side, we have the Weberian social definition paradigm. On the other, we have the Durkheimian social facts paradigm. My overriding focus is, however, not on theories that explain social reality in terms of either agency or structure. But rather, I focus on sociological theories whose aim is to integrate the two explanations or paradigms. How to integrate agency and structure in a satisfying way has become one of the central problems - perhaps even the most central - in social theory today. The vital question is how to create a theory that explains social reality by proceeding from both the notion of people doing things which affect the social relationships in which they are embedded (agency) and the idea of the social context moulding and forming social activity (structure). In the present dissertation, I examine George Herbert Mead's answer to the question by comparing his social pragmatism with the contemporary contributions to the agency-structure debate made by Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu and Jürgen Habermas. Often Mead has been erroneously associated primarily with a concern with agency, rejecting the importance of social structures. By discussing the revisionist, "social behavioristic" critique of Herbert Blumer's "symbolic interactionistic" interpretation my aim is to come to terms with such bias perspectives of Mead's views. His solution of the problem of agency and structure is based on two central ideas: 1) about the situated character of human action and 2) about the primary sociality of human action. I illustrate how Mead considers corporeal social structures of habitual responses to a certain stimuli as a precondition for experiencing inhibitions of the act or problematic social relations. The inhibited social act transforms our social behavior into social interaction where we get consciously aware of meaning and ourselves. He speaks of this as taking the attitude of the (generalized) other from which he means that self-reflexion arises. Giddens, Bourdieu and Habermas had intentions of exceeding the dualism between agency and structure by focusing on social practices. I argue, by emphasizing the importance Mead ascribed to the inhibited social act, his theory gives us better possibilities than the contemporary theories to solve the vital question.
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