Cox, Laurence (2011) Building counter culture: the radical praxis of social movement milieux. Into-ebooks (http://into-ebooks.com), Helsinki.
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Abstract
This thesis falls into two parts. The first (chapters one to three) states the problematic of
the research, develops a critique of the dominant “social movements” literature as
unhelpful for understanding the counter culture and argues that the latter can more
effectively be theorised in terms of the implicit theory of social movement found within
agency-oriented Western Marxism and socialist feminism. This latter theory is developed as
an understanding of movement as direction, developing from the local rationalities of
everyday life through articulated but partial campaigns to a “movement project” which
attempts to deploy such local rationalities to restructure the social whole. Within these
terms, it argues for an understanding of counter culture as a movement project from below
within disorganised capitalism. This mode of analysis is seen as that of a historical
sociology geared to the production of open concepts which can be used by participants to
theorise the context of their own choices.
The second part (chapters four to eight) theorises the issues involved in researching social
movements within this perspective, entailing the need to engage with tacit knowledge, to
thematise conflicts and collusion between researcher and participants. The findings
chapters use qualitative interviews from a Dublin movement milieu to develop an analysis,
grounded in participation, of the local rationalities of the counter culture. In this section
the key findings are a rationality of autonomy as self-development, which is shown to
underlie processes of distancing and problems of commitment, and a rationality of
radicalised reflexivity, which resolves the problem of institutionalisation through the
deployment of a wide range of “techniques of the self”. The analysis attempts to locate this
reading within the life-histories of participants but also within the historical development
of the counter culture, examplifying the ability of the concepts developed in this thesis to
engage with the problems facing participants.
Item Type: | Book |
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Keywords: | Building counter culture; radical praxis; social movement; |
Academic Unit: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Sociology |
Item ID: | 2817 |
Depositing User: | Dr. Laurence Cox |
Date Deposited: | 07 Nov 2011 14:37 |
Publisher: | Into-ebooks (http://into-ebooks.com) |
Refereed: | Yes |
URI: | https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/2817 |
Use Licence: | This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here |
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