book group
Slippery Fish: Book Group.
Information and resources for theorising your research.
This page includes the links to the various pdf and texts that we have collected. There are three sections, the first looks at the big questions of theory in particular what is theory and some of the ways that theory has been put forward over in the past. The second section looks at issues in theory for example debates over causality and methodology. The third covers examples of theory in use.
What is social theory, who are theorists and what types of social theory are there?
- What is theory?
- What is explanation?
- Grand and not so grand theory
- What is interpretivism?
- What is a paradigm?
- What is post modernism?
- What is pragmatism?
- What is social constructionism?
- What is symbolic interactionism?
- What is modelling?
- What is feminist methodology?
- What is decolonising methodology?
- Who is Michael Foucault?
- Who is Jurgen Habermas?
- Who is Pierre Bourdieu?
- Who is Karl Popper?
- What is marxism?
- What is phenomenology?
- What is critical realism?
- Relativism
- What is structuralism / post structuralism?
- Ken Gergen - Relational Being
- Critical and Post-Structural Inquiries
- Max Weber and the spirit of capitalism
- Positivism
- Post-positivism
Issues
- Agency
- Agency and structure
- Causality
- Criticality
- Determinism
- Fuzzy generalisation
- Globalisation
- Before Theory Comes Theorizing
- How to criticise with kindness
- Knowledge and gender / race distortion of the process
- Professional and academic competence
- Reflexivity
- Positionality
- Reflexivity and positionality: implications of frameworks for comparison
- Theoretical and conceptual frameworks
- Truth
- Deduction versus induction
- And working with both deduction and induction
- Interdisciplinarity
Cases showing the use of theory
- A case study of social loss (Grounded Theory)
- A case study of the metered dose inhaler (Actor Network Theory)
- A case study of using technology in Higher Education (Activity Theory)
- A case study of children's meal times (three zone theory)
- A discussion of class identification (marxism and the cash nexus)
- What makes a quality food festival? A factor analysis
- A case of thick description (inductive analysis)
- A case study of big data (analysis by association)
- A case of discursive pedagogy (a Habermasian lens on practice)
- Modelling and a case of child development
- Jean Lave: situated learning and community of practice
- Agency and structure in Southern Italy