| The sociology component and the comparative perspective
The diversity of situations encountered in Namibia, Indonesia, Ivory
Coast, and Uganda begs the question: how are these cases comparable?
The guiding question is: What is common across the different languages,
cultures, geographical endowments which makes it possible to draw
conclusions of general scientific and practical relevance from these
disparate cases?
The project's answer is that "development" - however defined - involves
a change in the use of resources, a change which is negotiated in
interactions among local people, and between local people and
outsiders. This change can be seen as rooted in an initiative
undertaken by some people in the name of development and to which other
people respond in various ways. The interplay between initiative and
reaction constitutes the "negotiation" which determines the outcome in
the form of change, and this change always involves a change in the way
resources are used or in the nature of the resources.
The research project's approach rests on the fundamental insight that
what people see as a resource as well as how they use that resource
involves institutions - which we see in a very broad sense as organized
human activity. These pre-organized forms or "patterns" predate any
concrete individual action concerning the creation or use of a resource
and is taken into account in any individual action - whether in the
form of adherence to certain rules, in the use of a certain language,
or in the form of accepted forms of behaviour.
The interdisciplinary basis for the project is the view that the
interplay between "pre-organized" forms of action and individual action
applies to all human activity - verbal and non-verbal alike. Language
as a form of human activity in its relation to changes in the accress
to and use of resources taking into consideration the interplay between
"patterns" and individual action - this, then, is the common focus of
research in different countries and for researchers coming from
different disciplines.
For the sociology component this means focusing on existing patterns of power and trust and their effect on
1) the processes of negotiation studied in more detail by the linguists in the project and
2) the actual patterns of resource use resulting from these negotiations [1].
Why power and trust? Both are basic ingredients to all human
interaction and have been the centre of much theoretical reflection and
empirical research - but their potential as a tool for intercultural
comparison seems to have been neglected. It is therefore not amazing
that the attempt to employ such a rather innovative - and hence
untested - comparative perspective has led to a lively
interdisciplinary discussion which developed around how to define and
operationalize these and other core terms [2].
[1] For a more extensive
treatment of the link between the research project, the global
discourse on sustainable development, and sociological theory see a
draft originally written for the project proposal Sociological perspective.pdf
[2]
See the collection of proposed definitions: CoreNotions(english).pdf
|