Search results for "ideal type"
showing 10 items of 13 documents
Parliamentary Politics as an Activity
2018
In this book, Kari Palonen undertakes a thought experiment to spell out key principles of the parliamentary ideal type of politics. Max Weber offers him the main intellectual inspiration, Westminster parliament provides the main historical reference and the author’s studies on parliamentary procedure and rhetoric provide the background. Parliamentary acting and thinking offers us the best example of politics as contingent and controversial activity. In parliament, the pro et contra debate on the motions and the dissensus between perspectives of judging as well as playing in time and with time are built into the institution itself. In this sense, parliamentary politics is more than parliamen…
Chances for Parliamentary Politics Today
2018
In the final chapter, the contemporary situation of parliamentary politics is discussed. The chances and limits of the parliamentary ideal type are situated to the current horizons of Western European politics. The main point is to emphasise the priority of dissensus and debate over outcomes as the main advantage of parliamentary-style politics over the narrowly teleological forms of human activities. With different thought experiments we could imagine to parliamentarise procedures and practices. These themes are discussed in terms of Perelmanian conceptual pairs of rhetoric, from a perspective that first presents the obstacle to parliamentarisation and discusses chances for a revaluation i…
Understanding Debate as Politics
2017
The book’s core idea is to present and explain how different actual and virtual debates can be understood and analysed as political actions. We want to provide tools and ways for grasping the complex phenomenon of politics by concentrating on debate, including debates carried out in, or reflected by, documents. The approach proposed allows for a nuanced and detailed understanding of politics, as it does justice to the aims of political actors, taking into account their actions, interests, moves and strategies, and situating them in relation to the different contexts in which their contributions make a difference. The first chapter presents the theoretical and methodological background by an…
Reading Debates Politically
2017
This chapter focuses on the concept of debate, taking the concept of ‘political literacy’ as point of departure. The concept of political literacy means that it is crucial to be willing and competent to judge actions, situations, practices and institutions in terms of political struggle. What kinds of aims can we identify in various utterances, arguments or topoi, and how may we assess their consequences? Based on this idea of political literacy, our leading thesis in this chapter is that parliamentary debate, as it was formed and is practised in the British parliament at Westminster, forms an approximation to the ideal type of debate. The ideal type allows the classification of the structu…
The Anthropologist as Deviant Modernizer: Felipe Landa Jocano’s Journey Through the Cold War, the Social Sciences, Decolonization, and Nation Buildin…
2021
This chapter traces the transnational journey of Philippine anthropologist Felipe Landa Jocano from the 1950s to the 1970s. Jocano was part of a group of Philippine social scientists who earned their post-graduate degrees at the University of Chicago after the Philippines became independent from the US. One of the pre-eminent scholars in the Philippines, Jocano’s professional and intellectual journey unfolded against the backdrop of the Cold War and decolonization. Jocano received funding from US institutions that contributed to the Cold War, and he was committed to structural functionalism and modernization theory. Yet he developed a decolonized approach to modernization that questioned th…
Parliamentarisation as Politicisation
2021
Understanding politics as a contingent and controversial activity, politicisation refers to those activities that create or make visible the political quality in the phenomena in question. Parliamentarisation is a distinct strategy of politicisation. In this chapter, parliament refers to a certain procedural and institutional ideal type of acting politically. The parliamentary way of politicising acting and thinking forms a Gedankenbild, a mental image. It is an ideal type that one-sidedly accentuates and intensifies the political way of thinking. The parliamentary way of proceeding politically transcends the given polity: ‘parliament’ is not primarily a parliament ‘of’ a unit, such as the …
Thinking Parliamentary Politics as an Ideal Type
2018
The chapter discusses in detail Max Weber’s concept of ideal type, as a modus of knowledge that connects the contingent and controversial activities of scholarship and parliamentary politics. Weber regards the constantly changing reality as inexhaustible by any concepts. However, concepts offer competing ideal-typical perspectives on the interpretation of the changing realities. For Weber, the research process is a contingent and open-ended practice in which new perspectives contain chances to provoke conceptual revisions, whereas the absence of new perspectives would lead to stagnation. Understanding realised histories presupposes speculation with ideal types. The procedures and practices …
Paradigms for Political Action. A Draft for a Repertoire
2022
Whether politics is a separate sphere or an aspect of human action is a subject of academic controversy. I focus here on the political aspect of action, which is not exclusive of other aspects. There are no ‘naturally political’ issues nor is there anything completely devoid of a political aspect. I am now taking a step backwards to discuss the seemingly simple ‘political or not’ question, as compared to the ‘political in which sense’ question, which I have discussed elsewhere. In this article, I stay on the ideal–typical level, as I want to discuss alternative ways of marking the criteria for the political aspect, without discussing the views of other scholars in detail. I call the procedu…
Identifying the Ideal Types of Online Shoppers : A Qualitative Analysis of Online Shopping
2020
The tremendous increase in online shopping has created a growing demand to understand online shopping behavior. This study contributes to this understanding by identifying ideal types among online shoppers. An ideal type is an analytical construct used to ascertain similarities and deviations to concrete cases in an individual phenomenon. Theoretically, the study draws from different perspectives to create a multifaceted view of online shoppers. The purpose is not to categorize online shoppers under a specific category but rather to help understand different typically occurring online shopping behaviors. Through thematic analysis of the data from 31 participants, this study presents five id…
Ideal Types of Sport and Wellness Technology Users
2017
A demand exists for the increasing understanding of consumers’ motives and habits related to exercising and the influence of sport and wellness technology on everyday lives. This study aims to shred light to the different types of users of sport and wellness technology by examining the influential aspects of sport and wellness technology and gamification. By thematically analyzing data from 16 indepth interviews, one group interview, and one set of observation, the study highlights the unique characteristics of the sport and wellness technology users by grouping them into ideal types that represents data as extensively as possible. An ideal type is an analytical construct to ascertain devia…