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At the heart of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis is a revolt against fetishism: the appeal to abstract categories, treating concepts as if they referred to things 'out there' in the world, independent of social relations). It is commonplace to note that studies of international relations routinely fetishise a system of 'sovereign' states, abstracted from history and the social relations, practices and ideologies that sustain state power. What Bieler and Morton emphasise is that even 'Left' analyses routinely make fetishistic appeal to concepts – 'the state', 'the market', 'security', 'production', 'finance', 'knowledge' – which are treated as things-in-themselves, devoid of human beings in their concrete social relations.1 Despite some scholars' careless applications of the label 'Marxist' to such work, Bieler and Morton's critique is very much in line with Marx's own critique of a tradition of classical political economy so beholden to the modern obsession with uniformity and universality that it forcibly read history through the categories of bourgeois ideology (abstract individuals interacting in 'the market' and so on) that were made to look like 'general preconditions of all production'.2 For the authors of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis, these concerns take on particular urgency at a juncture marked by global economic 'crisis', the developmental 'catch-up' of emerging economies and inter-state rivalry shaped by the dynamics of global political economy.3 The last thing we need is more fetishism, more mindless repetition of abstract categories like 'states', 'markets', 'security' and so on. All this does is naturalise the existing order and insulate it from critique. Instead, Bieler and Morton insist, we must confront the historical contingency of capitalism and 'be on guard against the use of fetishised concepts, categories or raw facts'.4 This is, in other words, a 'necessarily historical materialist moment'.5

In media and communication studies, a number of social science and humanistic perspectives converge. As a multidisciplinary field, however, it tends to borrow methods from diverse disciplines and theoretical schools quite eclectically, without taking into consideration the fact that they may be based on various basic implicit assumptions. Underlying the methods, there are quite different suppositions about the nature of reality, and about the nature of knowledge and how to gain knowledge. We rarely make that explicit when using specific methods or combinations of methods. The aim of this article is to discuss qualitative research and focus on ontological assumptions behind our methodological arguments and choices. Generalization, often seen as the Achilles heel of qualitative research, is also discussed and its relation to ontological positions clarified. Qualitative audience research is used to substantiate the discussion, but the problems discussed are of a more general nature and valid for qualitative research in general.

In den Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften vereinen sich eine Reihe sozial- und geisteswissenschaftlicher Ansätze. Das multidisziplinäre Feld neigt dazu, sich Methoden aus verschiedenen Disziplinen und theoretischen Schulen in eklektischer Weise auszuborgen, ohne zu berücksichtigen, dass diese auf unterschiedlichen impliziten Voraussetzungen beruhen können. Was die zugrundliegenden Methoden angeht, so gibt es durchaus unterschiedliche Annahmen über das Wesen der Realität, die Natur des Wissens und wie Wissen erworben werden kann. Dies wird selten beim Einsatz spezieller Methoden oder Methodenkombintionen deutlich gemacht. Ziel des Beitrags ist eine Diskussion qualitativer Forschung und dabei konzentriert er sich auf ontologische Grundannahmen hinter den methodischen Behauptungen und der Auswahl von Methoden. Behandelt wird auch die Frage der Verallgemeinerung, die oft als Achillesferse qualititativer Forschung gesehen wird, im Verhältnis zu den verdeutlichten theoretischen Positionen. Die Diskussion wird mit Beispielen aus der qualitativen Rezipientenforschung untermauert; die diskutierten Probleme sind aber mehr genereller Natur und gelten für qualitative Forschung im allgemeinen. (UNübers.) (UN)

International audience ; How are sociotechnical imaginaries and ontological assumptions about sound related to affect and conflict spaces? What do sociotechnical imaginaries tell us about social and individual control of sonic environments? Why is it important to think about ontological assumptions of sound when recovering aural experiences of the past in archives? The three books under consideration in this review article address these questions in different ways. They explore the use of media devices to produce affect and social relations, the role of categories of music and noise in the control of urban spaces, and the politics of archival sounds and silence.

Martijn W. Hesselink (European University Institute - Department of Law (LAW)) has posted Knowing EU Law on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This paper discusses how epistemic and ontological commitments shape different understandings of European law and why it matters....

International audience How are sociotechnical imaginaries and ontological assumptions about sound related to affect and conflict spaces? What do sociotechnical imaginaries tell us about social and individual control of sonic environments? Why is it important to think about ontological assumptions of sound when recovering aural experiences of the past in archives? The three books under consideration in this review article address these questions in different ways. They explore the use of media devices to produce affect and social relations, the role of categories of music and noise in the control of urban spaces, and the politics of archival sounds and silence.

How are sociotechnical imaginaries and ontological assumptions about sound related to affect and conflict spaces? What do sociotechnical imaginaries tell us about social and individual control of sonic environments? Why is it important to think about ontological assumptions of sound when recovering aural experiences of the past in archives? The three books under consideration in this review article address these questions in different ways. They explore the use of media devices to produce affect and social relations, the role of categories of music and noise in the control of urban spaces, and the politics of archival sounds and silence.

This article offers a reflexive and phenomenological response to some of the challenges of the recent ontological turn. It argues, first, that a focus on embodiment is crucial in understanding the formation of ontological assumptions, and, second, that researchers have an ethical responsibility to practice an 'ontological reflexivity' that goes beyond the conceptual reflexivity of much recent ontological work. It conceives the anthropological domain as a place of 'intra-actment' and maintains that to avoid ontological closure, researchers must contextualize their ontological assumptions by reflexively sensitizing themselves to how these assumptions are shaped by both embodied experience and the contexts in which they are articulated and performed. This article seeks to enact this through an auto-ethnographic exploration of the author's own embodied experience as it relates to demonic manifestations and the divine.

In order to improve the conceptual apparatus of epistemology, it is important not only to accumulate variations in thought experiments, to use them for clarifying the key points of reference theory and the degree of ontological assumptions made together with the language usage, but also to question the appeal of explanatory properties of empirical methods for the development of knowledge about the mental states of the "other Self". This article is divided into two parts: the first one is a theoretical substantiation of the change in the focus of understanding religious experience problem; the second one centres around an example that demonstrates the need to address thought experiments at the stage of identification of human experiences, called religious, since only these experiences grant the opportunity to "expand our own reflexive understanding of the features of our own conceptual scheme" (Stroson, 2009: 97)

Recently there has been a rise in the application of concepts and methods from biological evolutionary theory to human cultures and societies where the aim is to explain these by describing them as population-level phenomena reducible to individual-level processes. I argue against this type of view by using Mesoudi's Cultural Evolution as a case study. I claim that Mesoudi's ontological assumptions about cultures and societies are dubious and his methodological assumptions inadequate when it comes to addressing cultural and social phenomena. A consequence is that this approach to studying culture is, at the very least, incomplete and of limited application.

David Cameron's leadership of the Conservatives took as its starting point the assumption that the party needed to modernise, requiring a move towards the political 'centre ground'. This shift presented the party leadership with a series of challenges, including brand detoxification, party management, and policy renewal. Modernisation also implied ideological change, to distance the Conservatives from the legacy of Thatcherism and realign conservatism with the values of a wider section of the electorate. In this respect, Cameronite modernisation can be judged a failure. This article suggests that ontological contradictions inherent in central elements of Cameron's conservatism, specifically the 'Big Society' and the 'social justice agenda', fatally undermined its ideological coherence. It argues that this is an important and hitherto overlooked part of the explanation for the shortcomings of Conservative Party modernisation as a political project. Although this is only one part in a wider explanation for the failure of Conservative modernisation, this case study demonstrates that ontological assumptions matter in political practice.

Critical Sociology has previously published examinations of the ontological assumptions Marx incorporated into his epistemological approach. These principles must be understood if intelligibility is to be made of his overall outlook. However, one such previous work failed to recognize the centrality of labor in Marx's ontological-epistemological assumptions. This omission should be rectified. The dimensions of this assumption involve the importance of labor for the species, the importance of labor for human history, and the importance of labor for individuals. A secondary focus attempts to demonstrate the implication of each of these for the conditions of life under capitalism.