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Narrative Foundations of Knowing: Towards a New Perspective in the Sociology of Knowledge
Abstract
The article deals with the problem that for a long time has been unnoticed in sociology. Knowledge is one of the primary research objects in social science. However, the existing theories, aimed at the exploration of knowledge, provide certain limitations. Sociological models are intended to explain the social aspects. But they fail to answer a fundamental question: 'What is knowledge?' The article introduces a broad analytical scheme for the sociology of knowledge that is narrative in its foundations. This approach focuses on such inner characteristics of knowledge as meaning, coherence, causality, and discourse. Two aspects of narrative construction of sociological knowledge are considered. The first is making a narrative history of science. The second is the embededness of narrative in the process of sociological explanation. The article then discusses the problem of applicability of narrative to the scientific description of large-scale matters such as macro-history and social change. It provides both criticisms and arguments in favour of narrative research of major issues. It concludes that narrative as an analytical scheme has a universal dimension and that it has to be further developed in the framework of a sociological investigation.
... For the reasons stated above, narratives are suggested as a supplement to paradigms as the descriptor of what is taking place in the field and in the public discourse on education. The concept of narrative has taken hold across the social sciences (Fisher 1985;Borisenkova 2009). Furthermore, it has taken on a range of meanings (Czarniazski 2004). ...
Based on the authors' wide reading in the field, this article suggests the notion of the narrative as a fitting and meaningful way of conceptualising and mapping the field of comparative education. Four prominent narratives can be identified in not only the field of comparative education (and the scholarly discourse on education) but also the public discourse on education. These are the narratives of the capability theory, neoliberal economics, the creed of human rights, and the call for social justice. These narratives are contrasted, and guidelines are offered for further research on reconstructing and reflecting on the current state of comparative education and its future trajectory.
... In line with Borisenkova's (2009) interview epistemology, we think that even within a homogeneous marginalized group, there are different modalities of agency which are based upon different biographical temporalities. These temporalities function as a generative mechanism of its members' agentic orientations toward their structural contexts and fuel specific narrative reconstructions within which motivational changes are set in motion. ...
... Our understanding is informed by Raymond Williams' concept of 'the structure of feeling ' (1965;Eldridge and Eldridge 1994), by feminist and sociological approaches to narrative and auto/biography (Stanley 1992;Borisenkova 2009), and as such, by an understanding that writing produced in any given historical period, or representing a particular historical moment, does not stand on its own simply as 'text' to be read and interpreted by the critic. On the contrary, these publications not only contain something within them which represents the 'collective' voice, or the dominant frame of reference for the social circumstances within which the women were situated, but also the very act of writing expresses a moment of engagement with that context, an act of agency which attempts to articulate and move beyond the conditions of the production of the text. ...
During the 1984–1985 British miners' strike and in its immediate aftermath, women activists produced a series of publications involving creative writing, which sought to communicate the strike from their own perspective. The production and sale of publications were a practical activity in support of the strike and in defence of community. We argue that insofar as writing was also a means whereby the women who worked to make sense of themselves in an emergent situation for which there was no precedent, an analysis of such writing offers opportunities for a broader understanding of the strike. Writing enabled the women to affirm their class-based political loyalties while expressing the complexities and contradictions of gender relationships and roles. Writing as a reflexive act contributed to a clarification of those aspects of female lives which they valued, facilitated an expression of their emotional response to their experience of activism and enabled them to articulate a moral-political position within which they worked with ambiguity and contradiction. This article suggests that cultural texts of this type in themselves can only be properly understood in the context of structural and historical relations of power and that the context and conditions of production of writing are particularly pertinent to this process.
What are narratives? I will try to answer this tricky question in the following pages, explaining why I will prefer the term “narrative” over “storytelling” or “account”, and its proper form of the act of narrating (narration). Since the concept of narrative is not a novel idea for the social sciences, I will also outline the history of this object of study over the last few decades, with its ups and downs, up to the phase known as the “narrative turn”. I will employ sociology—my very discipline of reference—as a guiding light but I will neither overlook nor neglect other disciplines that have directly or indirectly studied narratives. I will take particular care to bring two key sociological aspects to the reader’s attention: the quantitative/qualitative querelle and the role of the sociology of knowledge. In the final section, by describing their dimensions and characteristics, I will highlight how narratives—as a cultural product—play a role in reshaping the social world.KeywordsNarrativesSociologyNarrativityAccountsCulture
This chapter discusses narratives and narrativity in terms of five perspectives, which plays an important role in social life and human communication. First, it discusses narratives and stories as concepts and their traditional role in instructional communication. A second perspective relates to the nature of scientific knowledge and curricula as narratives. As a third perspective, a more subject‐matter‐specific focus is taken. Fourth, the narrative nature of learning and knowledge construction are discussed. Fifth, the narrativity of the identity construction in instruction is covered. The challenges for understanding instruction, communication, and education are huge; however, the narrative paradigm helps us to make big leaps also in developing instructional communication, from curricula to face‐to‐face sessions between teachers and students.
The aim of this article is to capture the generic process which shapes the reasons Second Chance Schools’ students set out for enrolling in them and for approaching lifelong learning. We theoretically frame motivations as having relational and temporal emergence and as embedded in their lifeworld experiences which have to be narratively reconstructed in order for the students to take life decisions. Through biographical interviews with adult students attending a Second Chance School in Greece, we identified the role of life-disrupting events in this process and their core dynamic in forming motivational pathways. We argue that life disruptions fuel four different kinds of biographical gestalts, within each of which students develop a peculiar narrative reasoning for their enrollment in Second Chance School. Stigma, emancipation, biographical suffering, and work improvement constitute four distinct biographical gestalts, in which specific life disruptions are tied up with how adult students construct their motivational orientation toward lifelong learning throughout their lives.
Conscientious Sociology is an introductory but essential step towards the recognition of paradigmatic contestations and shifts in the post-1970s Social Sciences. It develops an ideal typology of three major paradigms, i.e. the Foundationalist, the Relativist and the Critical-Conscientious Paradigms by discussing and comparing their principles in four Meta-Theoretical domains: Ontology, Epistemology, Methodology, and Axiology.
Hosseini, in his book, shows how the Conscientious paradigm deals with well known dilemmas which are not effectively resolved by two other paradigms; dilemmas like how to create an objective account of reality whereas the subjectivities of actors and investigators are accommodated or what relationship must be set up between quantitative and qualitative methods. The book also further discusses the principles that Conscientious sociologist are expected to consider when engaging in empirical research. It finally, provides its readers with a unique perspective adopted from a radical Iranian social thinker, Ali Shariati whose ideas are portrayed as an insightful exemplar for Iranian critical sociologists. The book also contributes to the growing debates around the nature and future of critical sociology in the West by adding a Southern perspective.
http://www.amazon.com/Conscientious-Sociology-Paradigmatic-Persian-Edition/dp/1780833180/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1384569160&sr=8-2&keywords=conscientious+sociology
In this 1989 book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism. It confirms Rorty's status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike.
This essay situates the narrative paradigm in regard to major social scientific and humanistic theories, and applies the paradigm in an interpretation and assessment of the conversation between Socrates and Callicles in Plato's Gorgias.
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This essay proposes a theory of human communication based on a conception of persons as homo narrans. It compares and contrasts this view with the traditional rational perspective on symbolic interaction. The viability of the narrative paradigm and its attendant notions of reason and rationality are demonstrated through an extended analysis of key aspects of the current nuclear war controversy and a brief application to The Epic of Gilgamesh. The narrative paradigm synthesizes two strands in rhetorical theory: the argumentative, persuasive theme and the literary, aesthetic theme.
In this paper I explore the questions of why and how sociologists should be interested in narrative. The answer to the first question is straightforward: Narrative texts are packed with sociological information, and a great deal of our empirical evidence is in narrative form. In an attempt to answer the second question, I look at definitions of narrative, distinguishing narrative from non-narrative texts. I highlight the linguistic properties of narrative and illustrate modes of analysis, paying close attention to both the structural properties of the text and its subtle linguistic nuances. I guide the reader through a detailed analysis of a short narrative text. I show how linguistics and sociology interplay at the level of a text.
The nature of narrative explanations is explored as an alternative to the better established variable-centered explanations. Narratives are conceived as di-graphs where the nodes are states of the world and the arcs are actions (causes). Comparative narratives are understood as mappings between di-graphs. Ethnographic and historical explanations, where the number of cases is small and causality complex, may depend upon a narrative depiction.