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"Sayer, R. Andrew"
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Why things matter to people : social science, values and ethical life
\"Andrew Sayer undertakes a fundamental critique of social science's difficulties in acknowledging that people's relation to the world is one of concern. As sentient beings, capable of flourishing and suffering, and particularly vulnerable to how others treat us, our view of the world is substantially evaluative. Yet modernist ways of thinking encourage the common but extraordinary belief that values are beyond reason, and merely subjective or matters of convention, with little or nothing to do with the kind of beings people are, the quality of their social relations, their material circumstances or well-being. The author shows how social theory and philosophy need to change to reflect the complexity of everyday ethical concerns and the importance people attach to dignity. He argues for a robustly critical social science that explains and evaluates social life from the standpoint of human flourishing\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Why Things Matter to People
Andrew Sayer undertakes a fundamental critique of social science's difficulties in acknowledging that people's relation to the world is one of concern. As sentient beings, capable of flourishing and suffering, and particularly vulnerable to how others treat us, our view of the world is substantially evaluative. Yet modernist ways of thinking encourage the common but extraordinary belief that values are beyond reason, and merely subjective or matters of convention, with little or nothing to do with the kind of beings people are, the quality of their social relations, their material circumstances or well-being. The author shows how social theory and philosophy need to change to reflect the complexity of everyday ethical concerns and the importance people attach to dignity. He argues for a robustly critical social science that explains and evaluates social life from the standpoint of human flourishing.
eBook
Realism and social science
Realism and Social Science offers the reader an authoritative and compelling guide to critical realism and its implications for social theory and for the practice of social science. It offers an alternative both to approaches which are overly confident about the possibility of a successful social science and those which are defeatist about any possibility of progress in understanding the social world. Written by one of the leading social theorists in the field, it demonstrates the virtues of critical realism for theory and empirical research in social science, and provides a critical engagement with leading non-realist approaches.
eBook
Culture and economy after the cultural turn
Traditionally social science treated culture as a peripheral issue, but the last twenty years have witnessed a cultural turn throughout the social sciences. Culture is now at the core of debate. Culture and Economy After the Cultural Turn examines the impact of the cultural turn for the social sciences in relation to the decline of interest in economic aspects of society. It presents a number of responses to the changing relationship between culture and economy, and to the way in which the cultural turn has sought to understand it. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines present differing views oon these matters in relation to issues of political sensibilities and movements, equality and recognition, `cultural manageme.
eBook
Market relations and the competitive process
There has been increasing interest and debate in recent years on the instituted nature of economic processes in general and the related ideas of the market, in particular the competitive process. This debate lies at the interface between two largely independent disciplines, economics and sociology, and reflects an attempt to bring the two fields of discourse more closely together. This book explores this interface in a number of ways, looking at the competitive process and market relations from a number of different perspectives. It includes a wide range of contributors, most of whom are leading writers and thinkers in the field. The book considers the social role of economic institutions in society and examines the various meanings embedded in the word 'markets', as well as developing arguments on the nature of competition as an instituted economic process, rather than as competition being something that disturbs norms or institutions. It goes on to consider the deeper and more involved connection between markets and cognition, explaining how institutions can ease cognitive difficulties, and the effect of culture on markets and competition is also fully studied. This book will be of vital use to students and academics working in the fields of economics, sociology and business studies. It sketches the agenda for future research about markets and the competitive process.
eBook
Merging regional and global aerosol optical depth records from major available satellite products
Satellite instruments provide a vantage point for studying aerosol loading consistently over different regions of the world. However, the typical lifetime of a single satellite platform is on the order of 5–15 years; thus, for climate studies, the use of multiple satellite sensors should be considered. Discrepancies exist between aerosol optical depth (AOD) products due to differences in their information content, spatial and temporal sampling, calibration, cloud masking, and algorithmic assumptions. Users of satellite-based AOD time-series are confronted with the challenge of choosing an appropriate dataset for the intended application. In this study, 16 monthly AOD products obtained from different satellite sensors and with different algorithms were inter-compared and evaluated against Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) monthly AOD. Global and regional analyses indicate that products tend to agree qualitatively on the annual, seasonal and monthly timescales but may be offset in magnitude. Several approaches were then investigated to merge the AOD records from different satellites and create an optimised AOD dataset. With few exceptions, all merging approaches lead to similar results, indicating the robustness and stability of the merged AOD products. We introduce a gridded monthly AOD merged product for the period 1995–2017. We show that the quality of the merged product is as least as good as that of individual products. Optimal agreement of the AOD merged product with AERONET further demonstrates the advantage of merging multiple products. This merged dataset provides a long-term perspective on AOD changes over different regions of the world, and users are encouraged to use this dataset.
Journal Article