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The parallels and differences between current forms of populism and early 20th-century fascism have been the focus for much discussion. This article examines the relevance today of Karl Mannheim's analysis of fascism and of its relationship to democracy in the 1930s. He argued that the threat of fascism arose from the very nature of liberal democratic society, rather than being a product of external forces. He claimed that liberal democracy is transitional, rather than stable in character, and that the new emerging form of governance that was required to replace it shared a key component with fascism: a high level of social and economic planning. At the same time, he insisted that, as a pathological development, fascism served to illustrate the disastrous consequences that a failure to engage realistically with the process of societal development can have for upholding Western civilisational ideals. This article explores Mannheim's arguments against the background of current thinking about populism and 'post-democracy'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of Alfred Schutz was an important early influence on Harold Garfinkel and therefore on the development of ethnomethodology. In this article, I try to clarify what Garfinkel drew from Schutz, as well as what he did not take from him, specifically as regards the task of social inquiry. This is done by focusing in detail on one of Schutz's key articles: 'Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences'. The aim is thereby to illuminate the relationship between Schutz's views on the character of social science and Garfinkel's radical proposal for a re-specified focus of investigation. This is further pursued by examining an important debate about the link between Schutz and ethnomethodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates what are frequently taken to be central commitments of Childhood Studies: the idea that children are worthy of study ‘in their own right’, that childhood is a ‘social construction’, that children are and must be treated as active agents, and that participatory methods are the gold standard. It is argued that while these ideas have been fruitful in some respects, they involve fundamental problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herbert Blumer was a key figure in what came to be identified as the Chicago School of Sociology. He invented the term ‘symbolic interactionism’ as a label for a theoretical approach that derived primarily from the work of John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley. But his most influential work was methodological in character, and he is generally viewed today as a prominent critic of positivism, and of the growing dominance of quantitative method within US sociology. While this picture is broadly accurate, it neglects an important strand in his methodological thinking. He was committed to the goal of a science of social life, while at the same time he was uncertain whether such a science is possible. In his Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant, he identified a serious dilemma facing this project: the problem of how a scientific approach can be made compatible with the distinctive nature of human social life. In the first chapter of his most influential book, Symbolic Interactionism, he advocates a naturalistic approach to case study, and seems to treat this as avoiding the dilemma. However, there is evidence to suggest that, even towards the end of his life, he regarded the problem as still unresolved. In this article, I examine both sides of Blumer’s dilemma, and whether his attitude towards it changed. However, my interest here is not only historiographical. I evaluate Blumer’s arguments and show that his intellectual struggle with this issue remains relevant today, despite the shifts that have taken place in social science methodology and the philosophy of science since his death. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Both conversation analysis (inspired by ethnomethodology) and discourse analysis (of the kind proposed and practised by Potter and Wetherell) are usually treated as self-sufficient approaches to studying the social world, rather than as mere methods that can be combined with others. And there are two areas where their conflict with other approaches is clearest. First, they reject the attribution of substantive and distinctive psychosocial features to particular categories of actor as a means of explaining human behaviour. Second, they reject use of what the people they study say about the world as a source of information that can ever be relied on for analytic purposes. These two negative commitments mark conversation analysis and discourse analysis off from almost all other kinds of social scientific research. In this article, I consider how sound the justifications are for these commitments. I conclude that they are not convincing and that neither approach should be treated as a self-sufficient paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents comments of the author on sociologist Jonathan Potter's response to his article. Potter thinks the author is confused, but the author suggests that even if this is true, it arises at least in part from the character of approaches to research he was discussing and how they present themselves. Potter is right to baulk at the choice between paradigm and method which the author's title seems to offer. There are different ways of interpreting each of these options and this means that simple dichotomy is involved. So the author accepts all what Potter says about the diversity of discourse analysis and that it is not a paradigm in full Kuhnian sense. The focus of the author's article was more specific, it related to whether conversation analysis and discourse analysis can be justified as self-contained approaches to social research and whether claims about their methodological superiority can be sustained. Potter questions the author's attribution to constructionism of the idea that social phenomena do not have the kind of objective reality normally ascribed to them by social actors and most social scientists.

The article challenges the debate that recognition of rhetorical character of research report may not imply anti-realism. It also addresses several difficulties generated when rhetorical character of ethnography is taken. It aims at outlining some main aspects of the responsibility, which is the other side of the authority as claimed by researchers.

B 1.1 b In 2000, a major change in the institutional environment of UK social science occurred when the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) produced its Research Ethics Framework (REF), requiring that all institutions whose members seek funding must operate ethical regulation procedures of a prescribed kind. Point 1.11.2 of the I FRE i states that: 'Where a study design is emergent, the REC [Research Ethics Committee] should agree procedures for I continuing i ethics review (for example through a Project Advisory Group) [...] I as a condition of approval i ' (ESRC 2010:17 emphasis added). B 1.2 b The I FRE i claims to offer "clarification" of some elements of the REF (ESRC 2010:2 and 45), while also being a response to "changing scientific agendas and policy developments" (p2). [Extracted from the article]

The article presents comments of the author to "Practical Scepticism," by sociologist Jonathan Potter. It seems to the author that this phrase carries with it the very equivocation that he claimed characterized Potter's work. In places, what Potter seems to be proposing is the bracketing of assumptions about whether or not the discourse being analysed accurately represents the world or indeed refers to anything beyond itself. Yet in other places Potter clearly wants to go further, in that the study of rhetoric is to replace or redefine philosophy and the social sciences. Phenomenological bracketing is not a form of scepticism, it is a methodological device which is designed to allow explication of the manner in which phenomena are constituted. The equivocation that the author was concerned with in his article is implicit in the concept of practical scepticism. If what is meant by that term is a methodological stance adopted for the pursuit of discourse analysis or discursive psychology, what is involved is not strictly speaking scepticism, it is temporary suspension of ordinary concerns for a particular purpose. Moreover, the usefulness of this stance cannot represent a challenge to philosophical or other social scientific work whose focus is different.

The potential gains and practical problems associated with secondary analysis of qualitative data have received increasing attention in recent years. The discussions display conflicting attitudes, some commentators emphasising the difficulties while others emphasise the benefits. In a few recent contributions the distinctiveness of re-using data has come to be questioned, on the grounds that the problems identified with it of data not fitting the research questions, and of relevant contextual knowledge being absent are by no means limited to secondary analysis. There has also been a more fundamental claim: to the effect that these problems are much less severe once we recognise that all data are constituted and re-constituted within the research process. In this article I examine these arguments, concluding that while they have much to commend them, they do not dissolve the problems of 'fit' and 'context'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]