I NEED YOUR HELP AND COMMENTS
LIFESTYLE as a main theoretical concept to understand the daily living activity of people.
Dear Questlers...
I have been engaged in a theoretical quest to understand the daily activity of the human being. The ingredients for this quest were:
- dissatisfaction of the more general/macro schemas, say Marxism to "interpret" why and how we do what we do the way we do it. The dissatisfaction is about the lack of the needed concreteness of theses macro schemas of thought when it comes to the daily activities of people.
- dissatisfaction with the one-sidedness of the so-called social sciences and psychology. I still feel that these sciences, in spite of thier achievements, have not grown to the level of providing a "reasonable" theory of the life path of the individual. They tend to focus on this or that aspect of the individual life, or go into very specific issues that are not enough to theorize the whole path.
These dissatisfactions, among other things, led me to think that we are missing the core of the issue. This inability of not capturing the core and overcoming it is my main task.
I, the, started to think in analogies. I took Marxism as an example. The main concept in Marx "THEORY" is the concept of the "MODE OF PRODUCTION". This concept is so vital that it links the concepts in a coherent way.
Led by this analogy, I found, or actually suggesting, that to understand the daily path of actions of the individuals we need to find the core concept at first. This concept, it is suggested, is the "LIFE STYLE".
As you can see, I am taking a very well known word, that is commonly used in the daily conversations, and which has some "MEANING" and "VISUALIZATION" and I am trying to use it in a "SCIENTIFIC WAY", I am trying to give it a very well structure, and trying to identify this structure and how it is related to "OTHER THINGS".
To give you an example, Marx, is using "THE MODE OF PRODUCTION" as the "UNITY OF THE PRODUCTION FORCES AND PRODUCTION RELATIONS". The issue here is not if Marx is right or not, but it is about a compact formulation and a fine relationships among the concepts he used.
In my quest, I am trying to properly identify what is a "Life Style", its aspects, its structure, or architecture, the contradictions, the dynamism, the synchronic and diachronic analysis of it. How it is related to other social facts, how it is set, how a person follows a LIFE STYLE, how stable or fragile is a life style.
As you can see, these questions and many other ones can give rise into a more concrete understanding of life styles, and a better idea than the vague image that may come to mind when we hear or use this word.
I would appreciate if you can give me your feedback of how you think about "LIFESTYLE"... May thanks.
Posted on 28.05.2008
2 comments | 80 views
To innovate is to come up with new things... The problem is that we tend to think of innovators in terms of academia... in people who are well educated, in those who are capable of abstract thinking.
For someone who is starting to learn programming, you normally advise him/her to master the language before doing an actual assignment. Otherwise he/she is surely digging out his/her failure.
I was amazed today with a colleague who hardly knows English, and barely knows programming, and he was assigned a real task that he has to deliver. The task would require knowledge of sophisticated programming (sorry for the jargon, but he neded to know XML and Arrays). He just managed to finish the task using a different logic.
technically wise, what he came up with is very far from being a "good programming", but in terms of "finding a solution" within the given time, a solution that worked, that was great, given the very primitive basis he knows.
A good lesson that I learned: "Try sometimes to deviate from the standard way of doing things" or least: "Let others deviate".
Posted on 26.05.2008
1 comment | 67 views
Well, This is something that I haven't learned today, but it seems that it is today that I keep finding it rewarding: You can research something by start writing about it. Don't wait until you generate all the ideas about it. No! start writing, and you will start discovering the concepts that make that subject, how they are connected, what is important, what is the core, what is peripheral, or how that subject needs to be looked at from a certain point of view or a different angle. So, if you have an idea, just start writing about it, and it will work.
Posted on 24.12.2007
2 comments | 111 views
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