Seminar on philosophy of the social sciences [ LFILO2940 ]

The evaluation of the seminar will be based on the presentation of the text at the course, which uses the grid of analysis, and a manuscript of 5 pages containing the essential points of the presentation.

The seminar will consist of two parts : (1) presentation of the grid of analysis and critical discussion of the key texts; (2) presentation by the students of a text chosen in the bibliography of the course. Presentation of the theme and reading of the key texts :

Friday (10:45-12:45) : 30th Septembre, 7,14,21,28 Octobre, 4 Novembre

Critical presentation of a chosen text of the bibliography :

Friday (10:45-16:00) : 11th and 25th Novembre

The pragmatist turn in theory of governance. Implications for action research in human and social sciences.

The introductory part of the course will give an overiew of the theories of social learning on which the main approaches of governance in the human and social sciences rely. In this context, we will study the phenomenological approach in the political sociology of Daniel Cefai (2007) and the experimental and pragmatist approach of Sabel and Dorf (1998). The two key question in this overview are the conditions of transformation of the collective actors' representations and the conditions of institution of process of genesis of new collective actor identities.

The core part will use this overview to conduct a criticism of governance approaches mobilized in specific fields of application. The main axe of criticism will be their capacity to foster social learning in these fields and to generate a true transformation of the collective identities. Our objective therefore is to explore in a rigorous way the parallelism between the learning processes made possible through the intervention in specific empirical fields of research and the critical analysis of the learning processes generated by governance norms and their on-going transformation. The expected result is to generate a process of identity change deployed, firstly, on the level of the research process itself, and, second, on the level of the concerned actors identified within the fields of intervention. In this context, we will focus more specifically on the approaches of action research developed in Organisational learning (Argyris and Schön, 1978) and Transformations de l'éthique (Marc Maesschalck, 2010).

1.                  Theory of governance and collective action : the role of non-state collective actors between political reformism and local experimentation

Dormagen, J.-Y., and D. Mouchart. 2007. Introduction à la sociologie politique. Brussels : De Boeck Université (5'11;209'228).

Fougier,  E. 2004. Altermondialisme : Le nouveau mouvement d'émancipation ? Paris : Lignes de Repères.

Schmidt, M.G. 2000. Theorie der Sozialen Demokratie. In Demokratietheorien. 3. Auflage, ed. M. G. Schmidt, 240'250. Opladen: Leske Verlag + Budrig.

Schmidt, M.G. 2000. Partizipatorische Demokratietheorie. In Demokratietheorien. 3. Auflage, ed. M. G. Schmidt, 251'265.Opladen: Leske Verlag + Budrig.

2.                  The pragmatist turn in theory of governance

Cefai, D. 2007. Pourquoi se mobilise-t-ton? Les theories de l'action collective. Paris : La Découverte. Collection 'Recherches'.

Cefai, D. 2009. Looking (Desperately ?) for Cultural Sociology in France. Culture. Newsletter of the American Sociological Association on the Sociology of Culture, vol. 23 (May 2009).

de Souza Briggs, X. 2008. Democracy as problem solvin:. Civic capacity in communities across the globe. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Baert , P. 2005. Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism. Cambrdige (UK): Polity Press.

Ostrom, V. 1997. The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerabilities of Democracies: A Response to Tocqueville's Challenge.  Ann  Arbor (MI) : University of Michigan Press.

Benford, R.D., and D.A. Snow. 2000. Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment. Annual Review of Sociology 26: 611'639.

Dorf, M.C., and C.F. Sabel. 1998. A constitution of democratic experimentalism. Columbia Law Review 98(2): 267'473.

3.                  Implications for democratic governance : case studies in the field of environmental governance.

Laws, D., and M. Rein. 2003.  Reframing practice. In Delivberative Policy Analysis. Understanding Governance in the Network Society, ed. M.A. Hajer and H. Wagenaar, 172'206. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge Press University.

Thomson, V.E.  2003. Grab Bag Ethics and Policymaking for Leaded Gasoline: A pragmatist's View. In: Moral and Political Reasoning in Environmental Practice, eds. A. Light and A. de-Shalit, 259'279. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

 Agrawal, A. 2005. Conclusion: The analytics of environmentality. In Environmentality. Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects, ed. Agrawal Arun, 201'230. Durham and London : Duke University Press.

Feenberg, A. 2004. (Re)penser la technique. Vers une technologie démocratique. Paris : La Découverte. Collection 'Recherches'.

Sabel, C.F., and J. Zeitlin. 2008. Learning from Difference: The New Architecture of Experimentalist Governance in the European Union. European Law Journal 14(3): 271'327.

Dedeurwaerdere, T. 2009. Social Learning as a Basis for Cooperative Small-Scale Forest Management. Small-scale Forestry 8:193-209.

4.                  Towards a methodology of action research for the governance of the science/collective action interface in human sciences

Argyris, C., and D. A. Schön. 2002. Renverser la relation chercheur/praticien. In Apprentissage organisationnel. Théorie, méthode, pratique, ed. C. Argyris and Schön D.A., 55'80.  Paris/Brussels, De Boeck Université. Collection 'Management'.

Maesschalck, M. 2010. Transformations de l'éthique. De la Phénoménologie radicale au pragmatisme social. Brussels : P.I.E. Peter Lang . Collection 'Anthropologie et philosophie sociale'.

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