Social Alienation - Science topic

Thank you all for the useful comments.

My book manuscript is completed and is in production now.

Many thanks everyone. Really appreciate it, and definitely will go through all articles. Regards, Bob

Hallo Rudi, 

Recently I came across the web page of Main Street Center, USA, which subsidizes revitalization programs in the US related to main streets. Looking briefly trough it I  saw that some of them include the studies on commercial profile and try to form adequate strategies. Under the link I attach you can see a map with plenty locations and info about them. Maybe you find it helpful or at least interesting. 

Best, Magdalena.     

Alienation, according to Marx, involves a structural relationship in the mode of production defined by the alienation of the worked from nature, society, the products of labour and, ultimately, from the self.

Loose use and abuse of the term has allowed it to be "psychologized" and turned into a simple descriptor of anything from issues of personal identity, employee morale, moderate mental disease and disorder, depression, negative attitudes towards one's boss (ya think?) and vaguely related issues from Facebook "addiction" to rampant consumerism.

In short, the term has been captured by "bourgeois" sociology and organizational psychology and made into a symptom of individual "angst" when it is, in reality, an essential part of capitalism ("late" and/or "state").

Returning to the source would be a good first step toward reclaiming a meaningful academic understanding and forming the intellectual basis for something called "praxis."

There is another method to use that draws upon notions of alienation. Two general approaches to alienation are available. One proposed by Seeman and the other, from which Seeman perspective draws its inspiration, avered by Marx. Mann has used alienation theory to investigate alienation by university students. I have used the Marxist approach to look at alienation and ICT. I would advocate adopting a participatory action approach to your research for it would encourage the students themselves to be involved in your investigations. I did this for my Phd which looked at ICT professionals, academics and older end-users of ICT. Challenging but productive. I am waiting on the viva for my Phd but of course would be more than happy to let you have access to it.

Jacek's citations are definitely helpful. Simply put, alienation (in Marxian terms) is the psychological condition that arises when individuals, or classes of individuals, are detached from their "species-being." What is natural, in Marx's view, were three things: productivity, creativity, and sociality (all of this by the way can be found in the first part of the German Ideology, which is the clearest statement given by Marx). (1) By productivity, Marx meant humans, unlike animals, had to produce to survive. With the appropriation of the means of production (factories; farms; etc), most humans are detached from the productive process. A worker may make one part of the car, but he or she is separated from the total process, from which the value of the good is produced. An artisan, by contrast, begins making the commodity from start to finish and thus imbues it with her sweat, blood, and labor power - thus, value is truest and most overt.

(2) Creativity refers to humans need to innovate new means of production to obtain the most basic needs. In class-based societies, (a) there are no incentives for workers to innovate as employers claim ownership and profit from innovation and (b) bureaucracies stifle the act of creation. Hence, we are detached from this dimension of humanness.

(3) Sociality: social relationships, in Marx's world, are defined by how people produce - that is, the categories defined by the means of production. In capitalist societies, workers and owners objectify each other, as workers sell their labor on the market, and are sold products based on marketing techniques. This objectification process seeps into relationships between workers and, thus, we become alienated from each other. Everything moral, subjective, sensuous, and communally-oriented becomes hidden beneath the wage-based, commodity-oriented system.

(4) Because our identities are shaped by all of these things, we are naturally alienated from our selves. Marcuse called this malaise one-dimensionality. We objectify ourselves, and lose the subjective side. We are dehumanized by market, political, technological, media, and pop cultural forces that place us into a category, shred the emotional-moral dimension, and leave us with a flat, non-natural sense of being.

And to add some empirical results to the theoretical discussion of Gwendolyn here's a meta analysis of deterrence:

Among the results it might be interesting to note that death penalty doesnt seem to work at all, and deterrence in the form of more severe punishment can be questioned in general. The most positive results on deterrence of severity is in the experimental studies, which of course also should be valued the highest, but even if only those studies are considered the results are barely within the limit for significance according to the authors of the article.

I understand homolgy in the Bourdieusien usage to reflect the structural composition of the social system from which individual habitus is derived-- perhaps in this way mirrored by the individual? The idea of an "intersection of fields" as McEwan suggests, is intuitively interesting and relates to my research in role adoption across multiple fields. Resistors adopt the role of resistor within a defined filed. Why? We know that when one crosses fields there is a tendency to rebel against the former in favor of the latter... Is the resistor rebeling as a means to adopt a new role, i.e., role transformation, or is their a gratuity which results to the resistor by enacting the resistor role? An interesting question would be to ask what their commitment to the adopted role actually is. In other words, channeling Stryker (2007) on commitment, what is the cost involved if they abandon that role?

There is , as you might know a strong TB-HIV co-infection issue around the world. You can find quite a bit of my stigma work on ResearchGate.

perhaps the problem is that we assume that the way that formal education is framed is acceptable. it could be suggested that formal education was developed from the needs of a developing industrialised nation(s) where complaint 'skilled workers' were required. What we sometimes need to do is 'stand back' and question the 'context' of education. In other words ‘What is Education for?’

I suggest Foucault (Surveillance), Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the Banking of Education), Gatto (characterizes as the Hegemonic nature of discourse on education and the education professions), Rosenberg (schools as life enriching) and John Holts (How children fail? And the home schooling movement) work as they challenge the central ‘design’ of modern westernised education.

Also consider democratic schools! They are really interesting and encourage participation from students in an empowering way.

School is often used as a way for society to replicate power and control through a nationally organised curriculum which has ensures that ‘everyone knows their place’ in society. Not much different than Aristotle and Socrates. In the UK we can judge a child’s earning power at 33 years of age when they are around 13 months old! School seems to ensure that this status quo.

It reminds me of the Roman Empire’s way of ensure that the population did not riot

“Give them bread and the circus” (in other words feed society physically and ensure that they are kept amused.

Caroline LH