What is meant by 'social reality’? (3)

The constitution of the ‘social reality’

virtually all social entities are 'plastic’ - their properties change significantly over time, as a result of the purposive and unintentional behavior of the socially constructed individuals who make up a society

organizations, labor unions, universities, churches, and social identities all show a substantial degree of flexibility and fluidity over time, and this fact leads to a substantial degree of heterogeneity among groups of similar social organizations and institutions

the properties of a social entity or practice can change over time

they are not rigid, fixed, timeless; they are not bound into consistent and unchanging categories of entities

such as 'bureaucratic state', 'Islamic society', or 'leftist labor organization’

‘molecules of water preserve their physical characteristics no matter what. But in contrast to natural substances such as gold or water, social things can change their properties indefinitely.' (Little 2007)

Foundational paradigms

material forces should always be part of the understanding or explaining frameworks

better to explain social facts with material forces than with ideational forces

reduce ideational explanations to material explanations or underpin ideational explanations with material factors

Examples

realism

claims that material power rather than ideational forces determine outcomes in international politics and states foremost seek material power (Niebuhr [1932] 1960; Carr 1939; Morgenthau 1948)

historical materialism

claims that it is material productive forces that underpin superstructure, which is mostly ideational (Marx 1859, preface)

‘What counts as knowledge’? (3)

stems from an Old English ending -laec which denoted realisation, ‘making real’

from an old Saxon verb lacan, meaning to move about, bring into the world, make happen, and hence (from its meaning of ‘move about’) to play - akin to the English dialect to lake meaning to play, which in turn yielded our more common word lark = a practical joke (‘for a lark’)

as well as the Danish lege = to play games (the Danish toy brand name Lego comes from that word)

Working definition of knowledge

“Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information. It originates and is applied in the minds of knowers. In organizations, it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in organizational routines, processes, practices, and norms” (Davenport and Prusak 2000)

*etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what words meant and

how they sounded, say, 600 or 2,000 years ago https://www.etymonline.com/

Social ontology (3)

Social ontology - questions about the nature of the social world

one set of questions pertains to the constituents, or building blocks, of social things in general

for instance, some theories argue that social entities are built out of the

psychological states of individual people

while others argue that they are built out of actions

and yet others that they are built out of practices

still other theories deny a distinction between the social and the non-social