Postmodernism and the Social Sciences

by Joe Doherty, Elspeth Graham, Mo Malek (Editor)

The social sciences as we know them are developments of the Enlightenment, extensions of the conceptions and methods of Newtonian science. Recently a number of influential social theorists have brought the presuppositions of Enlightenment thinking under critical scrutiny and have called into question the basis of much social scientific thinking. Despite the seriousness of this postmodernist challenge, its nature and dimensions remain unclear especially to those in the modernist mainstream. The essays in this book are designed to call attention to the challenge, and in a manner accessible to those not so familiar with the more theoretical writings on postmodernism. They range widely over the social sciences and ask what the implications of postmodernist thinking are for the modernist disciplines of social anthropology, sociology, geography, social psychology, international relations and economics.
An introductory essay provides a survey of the beginnings of postmodernism in literary theory and in the study of art and architecture and raises questions about the translation of the vocabulary of postmodernism into the social sciences. The following chapters then focus on practices distinctive to particular disciplines and explore the nature and potential of recent developments prompted by postmodernist thinking. The final two essays draw out and examine themes which recur throughout the book and which illustrate the common basis of many discussions of postmodernism. Postmodernism and the Social Sciences brings together a collection of important reflections on questions crucial to the direction of the social sciences in the coming decades.

253 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992