Alan Sanderson
Dr Alan Sanderson was (1) Programme Leader for the Community Studies (Development and Youth Work) Foundation Degree; (2) the Counselling Foundation Degree and (3) the Social Enterprise Third Year Honours Degree at Truro and Penwith College (validation by Plymouth University) from September 2007 until September 2017. Previously, he was an Associate Lecturer in Public Services at the University of Plymouth from 2002 until 2007. Additionally, from September 2009, he delivered a series of lectures to the third year Combined Social Science Students, on the theme of public administration and theoretical understandings of community, at Cornwall College. He also acted as a Dissertation Supervisor for students at both Truro and Penwith College and Cornwall College. Furthermore he was a teaching mentor for several post-graduate students undertaking teaching qualifications.
His academic career benefitted from his wide experience in the effective leadership, management and administration of Private, Public and Voluntary Sector Organisations.
After a successful career in the Financial Services Sector, where he held several managerial posts with large institutions before directing his own business, he re-entered full-time education in 1997 with the intention of exploring the possibility of becoming an academic. He taught at the University of Plymouth from 2002 contributing to the delivery of Social Policy, Community Work and Public Services Programmes.
He completed his doctorate entitled “Managing Community: A Philosophical Analysis of Praxis” in December 2006. This work resulted in several publications, including the co-authorship of two books, The Situational Logic of Social Actions and Reading a Relational Situation both published by Nova Publishers in February 2009.
Alan was an External Examiner for (1) the Adult and Community Foundation Degree and Honours Programme validated by the University of Teeside and delivered at Leeds City College; (2) the Community Work Foundation Degree validated by Hull University and delivered at Grimsby College and (3) the Social Care Practice Foundation Degree validated by Suffolk University and delivered at Great Yarmouth College.
He has acted as a Trustee for the Citizens Advice Bureau, Enable in Cornwall (a Disability Charity), Pentreath ( a Mental Health Charity), Carers Rights (an Advocacy Charity) and Mind. Alan has also served as a Governor of the Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and is, at present, a Library Assistant for the Chained Library in Wells Cathedral, Treasurer of Wells Cathedral Preservation Trust and Membership Secretary of Wells University of the Third Age. He is also a member of Cheddar Vale Lions Club and the Lions Multi-District 105 Environmental Officer and Environmental Co-ordinator for the South West District. Furthermore, Alan is a recipient of a Melvin Jones Fellowship.
Some presentations, about environmental sustainability, prepared for Lions Clubs in the UK can be seen on UTube channel - Alan Sanderson.
His current projects include some revisions to his PhD dissertation together with completion of papers exploring the dynamics of the voluntary sector and environmental sustainability.
Alan also publishes a Blog - Individual Pre-dispositions : Reflections and Perceptions at www.dralansanderson.com
Address: 24 Penleigh Road
Wells
Somerset
BA5 2FA
His academic career benefitted from his wide experience in the effective leadership, management and administration of Private, Public and Voluntary Sector Organisations.
After a successful career in the Financial Services Sector, where he held several managerial posts with large institutions before directing his own business, he re-entered full-time education in 1997 with the intention of exploring the possibility of becoming an academic. He taught at the University of Plymouth from 2002 contributing to the delivery of Social Policy, Community Work and Public Services Programmes.
He completed his doctorate entitled “Managing Community: A Philosophical Analysis of Praxis” in December 2006. This work resulted in several publications, including the co-authorship of two books, The Situational Logic of Social Actions and Reading a Relational Situation both published by Nova Publishers in February 2009.
Alan was an External Examiner for (1) the Adult and Community Foundation Degree and Honours Programme validated by the University of Teeside and delivered at Leeds City College; (2) the Community Work Foundation Degree validated by Hull University and delivered at Grimsby College and (3) the Social Care Practice Foundation Degree validated by Suffolk University and delivered at Great Yarmouth College.
He has acted as a Trustee for the Citizens Advice Bureau, Enable in Cornwall (a Disability Charity), Pentreath ( a Mental Health Charity), Carers Rights (an Advocacy Charity) and Mind. Alan has also served as a Governor of the Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and is, at present, a Library Assistant for the Chained Library in Wells Cathedral, Treasurer of Wells Cathedral Preservation Trust and Membership Secretary of Wells University of the Third Age. He is also a member of Cheddar Vale Lions Club and the Lions Multi-District 105 Environmental Officer and Environmental Co-ordinator for the South West District. Furthermore, Alan is a recipient of a Melvin Jones Fellowship.
Some presentations, about environmental sustainability, prepared for Lions Clubs in the UK can be seen on UTube channel - Alan Sanderson.
His current projects include some revisions to his PhD dissertation together with completion of papers exploring the dynamics of the voluntary sector and environmental sustainability.
Alan also publishes a Blog - Individual Pre-dispositions : Reflections and Perceptions at www.dralansanderson.com
Address: 24 Penleigh Road
Wells
Somerset
BA5 2FA
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Papers by Alan Sanderson
Key Words: Communitarianism, social theory, community.
A necessary beginning to this brief analysis is an outline of Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts (1976, 1984, 1985 and 1990) so that the fundamental underpinning of his assertions concerning the everyday activities of individuals, groups and relations between groups can be appreciated.
In this context, it is proposed that normative ethics or general theories about “what ought to be“ (Taylor, 1975: 175), can be understood in the context of four discrete ethical models. These models result in implicit practical imperatives that reflect in the individual's understanding of their community or communities.
Thus, the social enterprise paradigm embodies the tensions between the agency ontology of the neo-liberal market-driven model of profit orientated business delivery on the one hand, and the structuralist ontology of the regulated market model on the other. In this scenario initiatives so designed create paradoxes that may leave social entrepreneurs struggling to make sense of self-contradictory and incongruous leadership and management situations. This dilemma results in social entrepreneurs, and their staff, striving to design and implement organisational strategies that are enigmatic.
This paper identifies ambiguities and ambivalence that encompass a number of issues. These include contentions over (1) the imperatives of efficiency, effectiveness and economy as against equity; (2) the desired control by community stakeholders over formulation and implementation of business strategies; (3) the just and effective accountability of staff in relation to their remuneration and answerability and (4) the desired culture of social enterprise, which has traditionally promulgated a safe, stable and predictable employee job environment.
If a paradox is to be addressed then organisational creativity must be stimulated. In this nexus, lateral thought becomes critical. The challenge is to stimulate the art of judgement, which can only flourish through the application of the demanding techniques of reflexivity. This requires inspired critical self-evaluation and self-deprecation by those confronting the ambivalence and ambiguities. Therefore, a testing, but rewarding, reflexive procedure is needed to accommodate the necessary non-rational perspectives as well as rationalist approaches to problem solving and decision-making.
The conundrum facing public servants is the likelihood that some community members, in the new age of post-bureaucratic management, would prefer the following alternative conceptualisations of community:
• A hierarchical model of community, under which societal common good has priority over local community interests;
• A network model of community, under which the categorical good of community organisations constitutes what is in the community’s best interests;
• A market model of community, under which the revealed market preferences of individual community members has priority over local community interests;
• An anarchical model of community, under which the community interest is taken to be unknowable.
Thus, public servants aspiring to empower communities, are frustrated by differing perspectives on community engendered by community members contending values, attitudes and beliefs. Therefore, if a community empowerment programme aims to be inclusive then public servants should manage, rather than just facilitate, community initiatives. This approach demands holistic management that aims to achieve unity-in-diversity with community reality modulated by a consensus over the legitimacy of contending perspectives on the social world. Moreover, public servants, when engaging with communities should explore, reflect on and then contextualise their unit of analysis from contending social reality perspectives. Resulting from this process some common ground between contending perspectives might be discernible permitting consensus building to take place even though this may result in the dis-empowerment of existing politico-administrative powers. Therefore, public servants, delivering post-bureaucratic community management find themselves as instigators, utilising a subtle and pre-planned strategy, in an iterative process that encourages communities to play an effective role in the implementation of public policy.
It is proposed that lower income communities embraced sceptical tenets of morality as a bulwark against the perceived insincerity of neo-liberal conservative market orientated outcomes. Thus, they acceded to a physiological strife founded on the fundamental difference between deontological and consequential ethical outcomes. Moreover, new labour’s political elite has exacerbated this ethical scepticism through a strategy of managerialism, producing an ethically ambiguous scenario causing uncertainty for all stakeholders.
In this ambivalent contemporary public arena, where efficiency and effectiveness are as important as notions of equity in the delivery of policies that are underpinned by a regulatory vision of “the public good”, political leadership seems destined to cope with an indeterminacy that requires perpetual transfiguration and optimal opportunism. This inexorably leads to the risk of both overt and direct political authoritarianism at any level of government.
PhD Thesis (2006) by Alan Sanderson
A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF PRAXIS
by
ALAN SANDERSON
Abstract
If communities are to become a viable means of implementing social policy then community practitioners must individually examine their personal praxis. Therefore, in discovering a community’s aims and objectives, a management model is needed that offers every practitioner a reflexive means of understanding peoples’ belief’s, values, and attitudes.
This proposition is critically examined through a philosophical framework that explores individuals’ diverse perspectives on community, derived from their adherence to contending ontological and epistemological propositions about the social world, and its related ethical and motivational dimensions.
Following a philosophical analysis, the taxonomy of social reality perspectives, developed by Dixon (2003) and Dixon and Dogan (2002; 2003a, b, c, d; 2004), is systematically used to explore the contending views on social reality. Thus, methodological configurations are associated with logical categories, (1) naturalist agency, underpinning the self-interested (free-riding) homo economicus; (2) naturalist structuralism, underpinning the obligation driven homo hierarchus; (3) hermeneutic structuralism, underpinning the conversation-saturated homo sociologicus (Archer, 2000: 4); and (4) hermeneutic agency, underpinning homo existentialis.
The disciplines of social psychology, ethics, and political science are employed to explore selected facets of human nature, moral principles, and political ideology chosen, by associates of each set of methodological configurations, in particular relational situations.
Informed by this investigation a sample of community practitioners were questioned about their praxis. This reveals that a substantial majority understand and accept an objective and knowable social world where people are self-interested. Therefore, these practitioners perceive community as a setting where they can influence the decisions of others through discourse and judge its ethical merits by the degree of loyalty and obligation extended to their projects. Thus, it is apparent that community practitioners should evaluate their praxis, through critical self-reflection, if they are to develop suitably robust and durable symbiotic relationships with adherents to each of the four social reality perceptions.
This research leads to a new logic, based on the innovative interpretation of ontological and epistemological configurations offered in the seminal work of Bhaskar (1978 and 1979) and Archer (1989, 1995, 2000 and 2003). Here, an emerging social ontology informs the construction of more specific theories concerning the dynamics of community in identifiable localities. Therefore, it now becomes possible to construct a management model, incorporating contending social realities, the techniques of mediation and the results of changing cognition and cognitive dissonance, that facilitates community practitioner’s critical self-reflection and construction of managerial strategies based on community member’s contending perceptions of social reality.
A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF PRAXIS
by
ALAN SANDERSON
Abstract
If communities are to become a viable means of implementing social policy then community practitioners must individually examine their personal praxis. Therefore, in discovering a community’s aims and objectives, a management model is needed that offers every practitioner a reflexive means of understanding peoples’ belief’s, values, and attitudes.
This proposition is critically examined through a philosophical framework that explores individuals’ diverse perspectives on community, derived from their adherence to contending ontological and epistemological propositions about the social world, and its related ethical and motivational dimensions.
Following a philosophical analysis, the taxonomy of social reality perspectives, developed by Dixon (2003) and Dixon and Dogan (2002; 2003a, b, c, d; 2004), is systematically used to explore the contending views on social reality. Thus, methodological configurations are associated with logical categories, (1) naturalist agency, underpinning the self-interested (free-riding) homo economicus; (2) naturalist structuralism, underpinning the obligation driven homo hierarchus; (3) hermeneutic structuralism, underpinning the conversation-saturated homo sociologicus (Archer, 2000: 4); and (4) hermeneutic agency, underpinning homo existentialis.
The disciplines of social psychology, ethics, and political science are employed to explore selected facets of human nature, moral principles, and political ideology chosen, by associates of each set of methodological configurations, in particular relational situations.
Informed by this investigation a sample of community practitioners were questioned about their praxis. This reveals that a substantial majority understand and accept an objective and knowable social world where people are self-interested. Therefore, these practitioners perceive community as a setting where they can influence the decisions of others through discourse and judge its ethical merits by the degree of loyalty and obligation extended to their projects. Thus, it is apparent that community practitioners should evaluate their praxis, through critical self-reflection, if they are to develop suitably robust and durable symbiotic relationships with adherents to each of the four social reality perceptions.
This research leads to a new logic, based on the innovative interpretation of ontological and epistemological configurations offered in the seminal work of Bhaskar (1978 and 1979) and Archer (1989, 1995, 2000 and 2003). Here, an emerging social ontology informs the construction of more specific theories concerning the dynamics of community in identifiable localities. Therefore, it now becomes possible to construct a management model, incorporating contending social realities, the techniques of mediation and the results of changing cognition and cognitive dissonance, that facilitates community practitioner’s critical self-reflection and construction of managerial strategies based on community member’s contending perceptions of social reality.
A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF PRAXIS
by
ALAN SANDERSON
Abstract
If communities are to become a viable means of implementing social policy then community practitioners must individually examine their personal praxis. Therefore, in discovering a community’s aims and objectives, a management model is needed that offers every practitioner a reflexive means of understanding peoples’ belief’s, values, and attitudes.
This proposition is critically examined through a philosophical framework that explores individuals’ diverse perspectives on community, derived from their adherence to contending ontological and epistemological propositions about the social world, and its related ethical and motivational dimensions.
Following a philosophical analysis, the taxonomy of social reality perspectives, developed by Dixon (2003) and Dixon and Dogan (2002; 2003a, b, c, d; 2004), is systematically used to explore the contending views on social reality. Thus, methodological configurations are associated with logical categories, (1) naturalist agency, underpinning the self-interested (free-riding) homo economicus; (2) naturalist structuralism, underpinning the obligation driven homo hierarchus; (3) hermeneutic structuralism, underpinning the conversation-saturated homo sociologicus (Archer, 2000: 4); and (4) hermeneutic agency, underpinning homo existentialis.
The disciplines of social psychology, ethics, and political science are employed to explore selected facets of human nature, moral principles, and political ideology chosen, by associates of each set of methodological configurations, in particular relational situations.
Informed by this investigation a sample of community practitioners were questioned about their praxis. This reveals that a substantial majority understand and accept an objective and knowable social world where people are self-interested. Therefore, these practitioners perceive community as a setting where they can influence the decisions of others through discourse and judge its ethical merits by the degree of loyalty and obligation extended to their projects. Thus, it is apparent that community practitioners should evaluate their praxis, through critical self-reflection, if they are to develop suitably robust and durable symbiotic relationships with adherents to each of the four social reality perceptions.
This research leads to a new logic, based on the innovative interpretation of ontological and epistemological configurations offered in the seminal work of Bhaskar (1978 and 1979) and Archer (1989, 1995, 2000 and 2003). Here, an emerging social ontology informs the construction of more specific theories concerning the dynamics of community in identifiable localities. Therefore, it now becomes possible to construct a management model, incorporating contending social realities, the techniques of mediation and the results of changing cognition and cognitive dissonance, that facilitates community practitioner’s critical self-reflection and construction of managerial strategies based on community member’s contending perceptions of social reality.
A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF PRAXIS
by
ALAN SANDERSON
Abstract
If communities are to become a viable means of implementing social policy then community practitioners must individually examine their personal praxis. Therefore, in discovering a community’s aims and objectives, a management model is needed that offers every practitioner a reflexive means of understanding peoples’ belief’s, values, and attitudes.
This proposition is critically examined through a philosophical framework that explores individuals’ diverse perspectives on community, derived from their adherence to contending ontological and epistemological propositions about the social world, and its related ethical and motivational dimensions.
Following a philosophical analysis, the taxonomy of social reality perspectives, developed by Dixon (2003) and Dixon and Dogan (2002; 2003a, b, c, d; 2004), is systematically used to explore the contending views on social reality. Thus, methodological configurations are associated with logical categories, (1) naturalist agency, underpinning the self-interested (free-riding) homo economicus; (2) naturalist structuralism, underpinning the obligation driven homo hierarchus; (3) hermeneutic structuralism, underpinning the conversation-saturated homo sociologicus (Archer, 2000: 4); and (4) hermeneutic agency, underpinning homo existentialis.
The disciplines of social psychology, ethics, and political science are employed to explore selected facets of human nature, moral principles, and political ideology chosen, by associates of each set of methodological configurations, in particular relational situations.
Informed by this investigation a sample of community practitioners were questioned about their praxis. This reveals that a substantial majority understand and accept an objective and knowable social world where people are self-interested. Therefore, these practitioners perceive community as a setting where they can influence the decisions of others through discourse and judge its ethical merits by the degree of loyalty and obligation extended to their projects. Thus, it is apparent that community practitioners should evaluate their praxis, through critical self-reflection, if they are to develop suitably robust and durable symbiotic relationships with adherents to each of the four social reality perceptions.
This research leads to a new logic, based on the innovative interpretation of ontological and epistemological configurations offered in the seminal work of Bhaskar (1978 and 1979) and Archer (1989, 1995, 2000 and 2003). Here, an emerging social ontology informs the construction of more specific theories concerning the dynamics of community in identifiable localities. Therefore, it now becomes possible to construct a management model, incorporating contending social realities, the techniques of mediation and the results of changing cognition and cognitive dissonance, that facilitates community practitioner’s critical self-reflection and construction of managerial strategies based on community member’s contending perceptions of social reality.
Key Words: Communitarianism, social theory, community.
A necessary beginning to this brief analysis is an outline of Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts (1976, 1984, 1985 and 1990) so that the fundamental underpinning of his assertions concerning the everyday activities of individuals, groups and relations between groups can be appreciated.
In this context, it is proposed that normative ethics or general theories about “what ought to be“ (Taylor, 1975: 175), can be understood in the context of four discrete ethical models. These models result in implicit practical imperatives that reflect in the individual's understanding of their community or communities.
Thus, the social enterprise paradigm embodies the tensions between the agency ontology of the neo-liberal market-driven model of profit orientated business delivery on the one hand, and the structuralist ontology of the regulated market model on the other. In this scenario initiatives so designed create paradoxes that may leave social entrepreneurs struggling to make sense of self-contradictory and incongruous leadership and management situations. This dilemma results in social entrepreneurs, and their staff, striving to design and implement organisational strategies that are enigmatic.
This paper identifies ambiguities and ambivalence that encompass a number of issues. These include contentions over (1) the imperatives of efficiency, effectiveness and economy as against equity; (2) the desired control by community stakeholders over formulation and implementation of business strategies; (3) the just and effective accountability of staff in relation to their remuneration and answerability and (4) the desired culture of social enterprise, which has traditionally promulgated a safe, stable and predictable employee job environment.
If a paradox is to be addressed then organisational creativity must be stimulated. In this nexus, lateral thought becomes critical. The challenge is to stimulate the art of judgement, which can only flourish through the application of the demanding techniques of reflexivity. This requires inspired critical self-evaluation and self-deprecation by those confronting the ambivalence and ambiguities. Therefore, a testing, but rewarding, reflexive procedure is needed to accommodate the necessary non-rational perspectives as well as rationalist approaches to problem solving and decision-making.
The conundrum facing public servants is the likelihood that some community members, in the new age of post-bureaucratic management, would prefer the following alternative conceptualisations of community:
• A hierarchical model of community, under which societal common good has priority over local community interests;
• A network model of community, under which the categorical good of community organisations constitutes what is in the community’s best interests;
• A market model of community, under which the revealed market preferences of individual community members has priority over local community interests;
• An anarchical model of community, under which the community interest is taken to be unknowable.
Thus, public servants aspiring to empower communities, are frustrated by differing perspectives on community engendered by community members contending values, attitudes and beliefs. Therefore, if a community empowerment programme aims to be inclusive then public servants should manage, rather than just facilitate, community initiatives. This approach demands holistic management that aims to achieve unity-in-diversity with community reality modulated by a consensus over the legitimacy of contending perspectives on the social world. Moreover, public servants, when engaging with communities should explore, reflect on and then contextualise their unit of analysis from contending social reality perspectives. Resulting from this process some common ground between contending perspectives might be discernible permitting consensus building to take place even though this may result in the dis-empowerment of existing politico-administrative powers. Therefore, public servants, delivering post-bureaucratic community management find themselves as instigators, utilising a subtle and pre-planned strategy, in an iterative process that encourages communities to play an effective role in the implementation of public policy.
It is proposed that lower income communities embraced sceptical tenets of morality as a bulwark against the perceived insincerity of neo-liberal conservative market orientated outcomes. Thus, they acceded to a physiological strife founded on the fundamental difference between deontological and consequential ethical outcomes. Moreover, new labour’s political elite has exacerbated this ethical scepticism through a strategy of managerialism, producing an ethically ambiguous scenario causing uncertainty for all stakeholders.
In this ambivalent contemporary public arena, where efficiency and effectiveness are as important as notions of equity in the delivery of policies that are underpinned by a regulatory vision of “the public good”, political leadership seems destined to cope with an indeterminacy that requires perpetual transfiguration and optimal opportunism. This inexorably leads to the risk of both overt and direct political authoritarianism at any level of government.
A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF PRAXIS
by
ALAN SANDERSON
Abstract
If communities are to become a viable means of implementing social policy then community practitioners must individually examine their personal praxis. Therefore, in discovering a community’s aims and objectives, a management model is needed that offers every practitioner a reflexive means of understanding peoples’ belief’s, values, and attitudes.
This proposition is critically examined through a philosophical framework that explores individuals’ diverse perspectives on community, derived from their adherence to contending ontological and epistemological propositions about the social world, and its related ethical and motivational dimensions.
Following a philosophical analysis, the taxonomy of social reality perspectives, developed by Dixon (2003) and Dixon and Dogan (2002; 2003a, b, c, d; 2004), is systematically used to explore the contending views on social reality. Thus, methodological configurations are associated with logical categories, (1) naturalist agency, underpinning the self-interested (free-riding) homo economicus; (2) naturalist structuralism, underpinning the obligation driven homo hierarchus; (3) hermeneutic structuralism, underpinning the conversation-saturated homo sociologicus (Archer, 2000: 4); and (4) hermeneutic agency, underpinning homo existentialis.
The disciplines of social psychology, ethics, and political science are employed to explore selected facets of human nature, moral principles, and political ideology chosen, by associates of each set of methodological configurations, in particular relational situations.
Informed by this investigation a sample of community practitioners were questioned about their praxis. This reveals that a substantial majority understand and accept an objective and knowable social world where people are self-interested. Therefore, these practitioners perceive community as a setting where they can influence the decisions of others through discourse and judge its ethical merits by the degree of loyalty and obligation extended to their projects. Thus, it is apparent that community practitioners should evaluate their praxis, through critical self-reflection, if they are to develop suitably robust and durable symbiotic relationships with adherents to each of the four social reality perceptions.
This research leads to a new logic, based on the innovative interpretation of ontological and epistemological configurations offered in the seminal work of Bhaskar (1978 and 1979) and Archer (1989, 1995, 2000 and 2003). Here, an emerging social ontology informs the construction of more specific theories concerning the dynamics of community in identifiable localities. Therefore, it now becomes possible to construct a management model, incorporating contending social realities, the techniques of mediation and the results of changing cognition and cognitive dissonance, that facilitates community practitioner’s critical self-reflection and construction of managerial strategies based on community member’s contending perceptions of social reality.
A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF PRAXIS
by
ALAN SANDERSON
Abstract
If communities are to become a viable means of implementing social policy then community practitioners must individually examine their personal praxis. Therefore, in discovering a community’s aims and objectives, a management model is needed that offers every practitioner a reflexive means of understanding peoples’ belief’s, values, and attitudes.
This proposition is critically examined through a philosophical framework that explores individuals’ diverse perspectives on community, derived from their adherence to contending ontological and epistemological propositions about the social world, and its related ethical and motivational dimensions.
Following a philosophical analysis, the taxonomy of social reality perspectives, developed by Dixon (2003) and Dixon and Dogan (2002; 2003a, b, c, d; 2004), is systematically used to explore the contending views on social reality. Thus, methodological configurations are associated with logical categories, (1) naturalist agency, underpinning the self-interested (free-riding) homo economicus; (2) naturalist structuralism, underpinning the obligation driven homo hierarchus; (3) hermeneutic structuralism, underpinning the conversation-saturated homo sociologicus (Archer, 2000: 4); and (4) hermeneutic agency, underpinning homo existentialis.
The disciplines of social psychology, ethics, and political science are employed to explore selected facets of human nature, moral principles, and political ideology chosen, by associates of each set of methodological configurations, in particular relational situations.
Informed by this investigation a sample of community practitioners were questioned about their praxis. This reveals that a substantial majority understand and accept an objective and knowable social world where people are self-interested. Therefore, these practitioners perceive community as a setting where they can influence the decisions of others through discourse and judge its ethical merits by the degree of loyalty and obligation extended to their projects. Thus, it is apparent that community practitioners should evaluate their praxis, through critical self-reflection, if they are to develop suitably robust and durable symbiotic relationships with adherents to each of the four social reality perceptions.
This research leads to a new logic, based on the innovative interpretation of ontological and epistemological configurations offered in the seminal work of Bhaskar (1978 and 1979) and Archer (1989, 1995, 2000 and 2003). Here, an emerging social ontology informs the construction of more specific theories concerning the dynamics of community in identifiable localities. Therefore, it now becomes possible to construct a management model, incorporating contending social realities, the techniques of mediation and the results of changing cognition and cognitive dissonance, that facilitates community practitioner’s critical self-reflection and construction of managerial strategies based on community member’s contending perceptions of social reality.
A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF PRAXIS
by
ALAN SANDERSON
Abstract
If communities are to become a viable means of implementing social policy then community practitioners must individually examine their personal praxis. Therefore, in discovering a community’s aims and objectives, a management model is needed that offers every practitioner a reflexive means of understanding peoples’ belief’s, values, and attitudes.
This proposition is critically examined through a philosophical framework that explores individuals’ diverse perspectives on community, derived from their adherence to contending ontological and epistemological propositions about the social world, and its related ethical and motivational dimensions.
Following a philosophical analysis, the taxonomy of social reality perspectives, developed by Dixon (2003) and Dixon and Dogan (2002; 2003a, b, c, d; 2004), is systematically used to explore the contending views on social reality. Thus, methodological configurations are associated with logical categories, (1) naturalist agency, underpinning the self-interested (free-riding) homo economicus; (2) naturalist structuralism, underpinning the obligation driven homo hierarchus; (3) hermeneutic structuralism, underpinning the conversation-saturated homo sociologicus (Archer, 2000: 4); and (4) hermeneutic agency, underpinning homo existentialis.
The disciplines of social psychology, ethics, and political science are employed to explore selected facets of human nature, moral principles, and political ideology chosen, by associates of each set of methodological configurations, in particular relational situations.
Informed by this investigation a sample of community practitioners were questioned about their praxis. This reveals that a substantial majority understand and accept an objective and knowable social world where people are self-interested. Therefore, these practitioners perceive community as a setting where they can influence the decisions of others through discourse and judge its ethical merits by the degree of loyalty and obligation extended to their projects. Thus, it is apparent that community practitioners should evaluate their praxis, through critical self-reflection, if they are to develop suitably robust and durable symbiotic relationships with adherents to each of the four social reality perceptions.
This research leads to a new logic, based on the innovative interpretation of ontological and epistemological configurations offered in the seminal work of Bhaskar (1978 and 1979) and Archer (1989, 1995, 2000 and 2003). Here, an emerging social ontology informs the construction of more specific theories concerning the dynamics of community in identifiable localities. Therefore, it now becomes possible to construct a management model, incorporating contending social realities, the techniques of mediation and the results of changing cognition and cognitive dissonance, that facilitates community practitioner’s critical self-reflection and construction of managerial strategies based on community member’s contending perceptions of social reality.
A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF PRAXIS
by
ALAN SANDERSON
Abstract
If communities are to become a viable means of implementing social policy then community practitioners must individually examine their personal praxis. Therefore, in discovering a community’s aims and objectives, a management model is needed that offers every practitioner a reflexive means of understanding peoples’ belief’s, values, and attitudes.
This proposition is critically examined through a philosophical framework that explores individuals’ diverse perspectives on community, derived from their adherence to contending ontological and epistemological propositions about the social world, and its related ethical and motivational dimensions.
Following a philosophical analysis, the taxonomy of social reality perspectives, developed by Dixon (2003) and Dixon and Dogan (2002; 2003a, b, c, d; 2004), is systematically used to explore the contending views on social reality. Thus, methodological configurations are associated with logical categories, (1) naturalist agency, underpinning the self-interested (free-riding) homo economicus; (2) naturalist structuralism, underpinning the obligation driven homo hierarchus; (3) hermeneutic structuralism, underpinning the conversation-saturated homo sociologicus (Archer, 2000: 4); and (4) hermeneutic agency, underpinning homo existentialis.
The disciplines of social psychology, ethics, and political science are employed to explore selected facets of human nature, moral principles, and political ideology chosen, by associates of each set of methodological configurations, in particular relational situations.
Informed by this investigation a sample of community practitioners were questioned about their praxis. This reveals that a substantial majority understand and accept an objective and knowable social world where people are self-interested. Therefore, these practitioners perceive community as a setting where they can influence the decisions of others through discourse and judge its ethical merits by the degree of loyalty and obligation extended to their projects. Thus, it is apparent that community practitioners should evaluate their praxis, through critical self-reflection, if they are to develop suitably robust and durable symbiotic relationships with adherents to each of the four social reality perceptions.
This research leads to a new logic, based on the innovative interpretation of ontological and epistemological configurations offered in the seminal work of Bhaskar (1978 and 1979) and Archer (1989, 1995, 2000 and 2003). Here, an emerging social ontology informs the construction of more specific theories concerning the dynamics of community in identifiable localities. Therefore, it now becomes possible to construct a management model, incorporating contending social realities, the techniques of mediation and the results of changing cognition and cognitive dissonance, that facilitates community practitioner’s critical self-reflection and construction of managerial strategies based on community member’s contending perceptions of social reality.
A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF PRAXIS
by
ALAN SANDERSON
Abstract
If communities are to become a viable means of implementing social policy then community practitioners must individually examine their personal praxis. Therefore, in discovering a community’s aims and objectives, a management model is needed that offers every practitioner a reflexive means of understanding peoples’ belief’s, values, and attitudes.
This proposition is critically examined through a philosophical framework that explores individuals’ diverse perspectives on community, derived from their adherence to contending ontological and epistemological propositions about the social world, and its related ethical and motivational dimensions.
Following a philosophical analysis, the taxonomy of social reality perspectives, developed by Dixon (2003) and Dixon and Dogan (2002; 2003a, b, c, d; 2004), is systematically used to explore the contending views on social reality. Thus, methodological configurations are associated with logical categories, (1) naturalist agency, underpinning the self-interested (free-riding) homo economicus; (2) naturalist structuralism, underpinning the obligation driven homo hierarchus; (3) hermeneutic structuralism, underpinning the conversation-saturated homo sociologicus (Archer, 2000: 4); and (4) hermeneutic agency, underpinning homo existentialis.
The disciplines of social psychology, ethics, and political science are employed to explore selected facets of human nature, moral principles, and political ideology chosen, by associates of each set of methodological configurations, in particular relational situations.
Informed by this investigation a sample of community practitioners were questioned about their praxis. This reveals that a substantial majority understand and accept an objective and knowable social world where people are self-interested. Therefore, these practitioners perceive community as a setting where they can influence the decisions of others through discourse and judge its ethical merits by the degree of loyalty and obligation extended to their projects. Thus, it is apparent that community practitioners should evaluate their praxis, through critical self-reflection, if they are to develop suitably robust and durable symbiotic relationships with adherents to each of the four social reality perceptions.
This research leads to a new logic, based on the innovative interpretation of ontological and epistemological configurations offered in the seminal work of Bhaskar (1978 and 1979) and Archer (1989, 1995, 2000 and 2003). Here, an emerging social ontology informs the construction of more specific theories concerning the dynamics of community in identifiable localities. Therefore, it now becomes possible to construct a management model, incorporating contending social realities, the techniques of mediation and the results of changing cognition and cognitive dissonance, that facilitates community practitioner’s critical self-reflection and construction of managerial strategies based on community member’s contending perceptions of social reality.
A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF PRAXIS
by
ALAN SANDERSON
Abstract
If communities are to become a viable means of implementing social policy then community practitioners must individually examine their personal praxis. Therefore, in discovering a community’s aims and objectives, a management model is needed that offers every practitioner a reflexive means of understanding peoples’ belief’s, values, and attitudes.
This proposition is critically examined through a philosophical framework that explores individuals’ diverse perspectives on community, derived from their adherence to contending ontological and epistemological propositions about the social world, and its related ethical and motivational dimensions.
Following a philosophical analysis, the taxonomy of social reality perspectives, developed by Dixon (2003) and Dixon and Dogan (2002; 2003a, b, c, d; 2004), is systematically used to explore the contending views on social reality. Thus, methodological configurations are associated with logical categories, (1) naturalist agency, underpinning the self-interested (free-riding) homo economicus; (2) naturalist structuralism, underpinning the obligation driven homo hierarchus; (3) hermeneutic structuralism, underpinning the conversation-saturated homo sociologicus (Archer, 2000: 4); and (4) hermeneutic agency, underpinning homo existentialis.
The disciplines of social psychology, ethics, and political science are employed to explore selected facets of human nature, moral principles, and political ideology chosen, by associates of each set of methodological configurations, in particular relational situations.
Informed by this investigation a sample of community practitioners were questioned about their praxis. This reveals that a substantial majority understand and accept an objective and knowable social world where people are self-interested. Therefore, these practitioners perceive community as a setting where they can influence the decisions of others through discourse and judge its ethical merits by the degree of loyalty and obligation extended to their projects. Thus, it is apparent that community practitioners should evaluate their praxis, through critical self-reflection, if they are to develop suitably robust and durable symbiotic relationships with adherents to each of the four social reality perceptions.
This research leads to a new logic, based on the innovative interpretation of ontological and epistemological configurations offered in the seminal work of Bhaskar (1978 and 1979) and Archer (1989, 1995, 2000 and 2003). Here, an emerging social ontology informs the construction of more specific theories concerning the dynamics of community in identifiable localities. Therefore, it now becomes possible to construct a management model, incorporating contending social realities, the techniques of mediation and the results of changing cognition and cognitive dissonance, that facilitates community practitioner’s critical self-reflection and construction of managerial strategies based on community member’s contending perceptions of social reality.
A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF PRAXIS
by
ALAN SANDERSON
Abstract
If communities are to become a viable means of implementing social policy then community practitioners must individually examine their personal praxis. Therefore, in discovering a community’s aims and objectives, a management model is needed that offers every practitioner a reflexive means of understanding peoples’ belief’s, values, and attitudes.
This proposition is critically examined through a philosophical framework that explores individuals’ diverse perspectives on community, derived from their adherence to contending ontological and epistemological propositions about the social world, and its related ethical and motivational dimensions.
Following a philosophical analysis, the taxonomy of social reality perspectives, developed by Dixon (2003) and Dixon and Dogan (2002; 2003a, b, c, d; 2004), is systematically used to explore the contending views on social reality. Thus, methodological configurations are associated with logical categories, (1) naturalist agency, underpinning the self-interested (free-riding) homo economicus; (2) naturalist structuralism, underpinning the obligation driven homo hierarchus; (3) hermeneutic structuralism, underpinning the conversation-saturated homo sociologicus (Archer, 2000: 4); and (4) hermeneutic agency, underpinning homo existentialis.
The disciplines of social psychology, ethics, and political science are employed to explore selected facets of human nature, moral principles, and political ideology chosen, by associates of each set of methodological configurations, in particular relational situations.
Informed by this investigation a sample of community practitioners were questioned about their praxis. This reveals that a substantial majority understand and accept an objective and knowable social world where people are self-interested. Therefore, these practitioners perceive community as a setting where they can influence the decisions of others through discourse and judge its ethical merits by the degree of loyalty and obligation extended to their projects. Thus, it is apparent that community practitioners should evaluate their praxis, through critical self-reflection, if they are to develop suitably robust and durable symbiotic relationships with adherents to each of the four social reality perceptions.
This research leads to a new logic, based on the innovative interpretation of ontological and epistemological configurations offered in the seminal work of Bhaskar (1978 and 1979) and Archer (1989, 1995, 2000 and 2003). Here, an emerging social ontology informs the construction of more specific theories concerning the dynamics of community in identifiable localities. Therefore, it now becomes possible to construct a management model, incorporating contending social realities, the techniques of mediation and the results of changing cognition and cognitive dissonance, that facilitates community practitioner’s critical self-reflection and construction of managerial strategies based on community member’s contending perceptions of social reality.
A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF PRAXIS
by
ALAN SANDERSON
Abstract
If communities are to become a viable means of implementing social policy then community practitioners must individually examine their personal praxis. Therefore, in discovering a community’s aims and objectives, a management model is needed that offers every practitioner a reflexive means of understanding peoples’ belief’s, values, and attitudes.
This proposition is critically examined through a philosophical framework that explores individuals’ diverse perspectives on community, derived from their adherence to contending ontological and epistemological propositions about the social world, and its related ethical and motivational dimensions.
Following a philosophical analysis, the taxonomy of social reality perspectives, developed by Dixon (2003) and Dixon and Dogan (2002; 2003a, b, c, d; 2004), is systematically used to explore the contending views on social reality. Thus, methodological configurations are associated with logical categories, (1) naturalist agency, underpinning the self-interested (free-riding) homo economicus; (2) naturalist structuralism, underpinning the obligation driven homo hierarchus; (3) hermeneutic structuralism, underpinning the conversation-saturated homo sociologicus (Archer, 2000: 4); and (4) hermeneutic agency, underpinning homo existentialis.
The disciplines of social psychology, ethics, and political science are employed to explore selected facets of human nature, moral principles, and political ideology chosen, by associates of each set of methodological configurations, in particular relational situations.
Informed by this investigation a sample of community practitioners were questioned about their praxis. This reveals that a substantial majority understand and accept an objective and knowable social world where people are self-interested. Therefore, these practitioners perceive community as a setting where they can influence the decisions of others through discourse and judge its ethical merits by the degree of loyalty and obligation extended to their projects. Thus, it is apparent that community practitioners should evaluate their praxis, through critical self-reflection, if they are to develop suitably robust and durable symbiotic relationships with adherents to each of the four social reality perceptions.
This research leads to a new logic, based on the innovative interpretation of ontological and epistemological configurations offered in the seminal work of Bhaskar (1978 and 1979) and Archer (1989, 1995, 2000 and 2003). Here, an emerging social ontology informs the construction of more specific theories concerning the dynamics of community in identifiable localities. Therefore, it now becomes possible to construct a management model, incorporating contending social realities, the techniques of mediation and the results of changing cognition and cognitive dissonance, that facilitates community practitioner’s critical self-reflection and construction of managerial strategies based on community member’s contending perceptions of social reality.
In addressing the implications of this scenario, this paper is divided into four sections. It begins by exploring current research and practice through conceptualising the techniques and methodologies of online tutoring, thus enabling a proposal for a solution to the problem of delivering a third year Honours Programme. Then, this solution is subjected to a critical analysis, informed by the relevant educational literature, which highlights the opportunities and constraints of using online tutoring to deliver Level 3 education in comparison to face-to-face approaches. In the first of the final two section of the paper, the legal, ethical and cultural implications of introducing students to electronic interaction are considered. This precedes section four where some critical reflection over both my own individual praxis for tutoring students, and the likely implications for practitioner development needed to improve the online learning experience, are discussed.
Therefore, this research project implements and evaluates a thorough programme of formative feedback from both lecturer and peers that aims to develop students’ capacity to adopt a critical evaluation of their work and stimulates students’ motivation to improve their existing standards of presentation.
Thus, my chosen methodology incorporates (1) a training process for students; (2) utilises the invaluable resource of employer feedback and (3) evaluates outputs and outcomes. The outputs can be collected as quantitative data whilst outcomes can be explored by psychometric response questionnaires, completed at the beginning and the end of the project. These questionnaires utilise the individual as the unit of analysis and determine consistencies and inconsistencies in attitudes, with the results being the basis of several subsequent semi-structured interviews.
However, the results from the project highlight the complexity of using formative feedback and instead of concluding with the assertion that feedforward can be a positive addition to foundation degree programmes it sounds a note of caution. This concerns the particular interpersonal dynamics that exist amongst a new group of foundation degree students, often drawn from diverse backgrounds with the hallmarks of the non-traditional undergraduates – low attention spans, limited literacy and sometimes more interest in obtaining funding and bursaries than a degree.