Contingency (Social Systems Theory)

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The impact that management theory and how the basic functions and practice of management as well as the role of the manager and approaches to management have contributed to the practice of emergency management. Current views of management theory stress the changing nature of the external environment and the need to understand and address these external forces for change.  The contribution and role of systems theory and contingency theory to the emergency management process are stressed.

A textual journey through Dante s Comedy must begin from its beginnings. For this reason I chose the utmost classical approach of the lectura to examine the first three cantos as a textual whole in three movements, as they develop the exposition of the Third Way in Thomas demonstration of the existence of God (Summa Theologiae I, II, 3). Dante s Comedy is a unitary text distinguished by a strong hysteron proteron narrative pattern, where the Author embeds in his main character a manifold profile: pilgrim, reporter and narrator. The narrator has grown in experience through the journey from a complete loss of orientation to a gradual regain of the natural order of things, i.e. from a complete mental submission to contingency or disorder misleading to suicide to a natural order of things wanted by God. The Third Way of Thomas demonstration leads from a crypto-atheism, i.e. God does not exist, to the demonstration that a necessary being has to be. I analyzed Thomas Third Way and then applied this perspective to the first three cantos of Dante s Comedy. At the end I noticed that the Comedy as a whole is necessarily contingent, so that a further analysis of the threefold feature of Dante was crucial for the comprehension of the whole. His experience as a man and above all as a man of culture required also awareness of his contemporary culture and of the main influences he may have perceived and left a print in his conscience. Therefore I chose to investigate contingency as a state of the mind, as the medieval philo-theologicians did too: they understood contingency not only as the interaction of matter and form, but as a condition of the soul between earthly disorder and celestial natural order.

This paper critically reviews the current status of the concept of distance in human geography in order to argue that recent experimentally-driven work in construal-level theory offers ample opportunities for recasting distance as a key geographical trope. After analysing the four entangled dimensions of distance revealed by construal-level theory (spatial distance; temporal distance; social distance; and hypothetical distance), the paper articulates this research program from experimental psychology with geographical work on non-representational theory, geographical imaginations/imaginative geographies, learning as a geographical process, TimeSpace theorizing, and ontogenetic understandings of space. It is argued that the subjective understanding of distance afforded by construal-level theory can rescue distance from its entrenched association with positivistic geography and spatial analysis. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.07.018

A thorough review of trust models is carried out in this paper to reveal the key capabilities of existing trust models and compare how they differ among disciplines. Trust decisions are risky due to uncertainties and the loss of control. On the other hand, not trusting might mean giving up some potential benefits. Advances in electronic transactions, mutliagent systems, and decision support systems create a necessity to develop trust and reputation models. The development of such models will allow for trust reasoning and decisions to be made in situations with high risk and uncertainty. In recent years, several attempts have been made to model reputation and trust. However, perceiving trust differently and the lack of having a unified trust definition are among the main causes of the proliferation of many trust models across different disciplines.

Scholars have seen a contradiction in Polybius’ view of history because, on the one hand, he talks of cycles and recurrent  actions, but on the other is aware of the unpredictable aspects of history (as seen, e.g., with tychê). The present paper seeks to show that there is no contradiction in Polybius’ thought, since alongside the belief that the future can be deduced by drawing logical (κατὰ λόγον) conclusions from the past, there is
another strand in Polybius which recognises and indeed highlights the importance of contingency in history, and the fact that many events occur contrary to human reckoning (παρὰ λόγον). Although Polybius does not discuss the latter explicitly, he  nonetheless underscores it by the use of counterfactual thinking and of narratives that emphasise accidental occurrences. Both approaches serve, although in different ways, the paideutic
purposes of Polybius’ work.

[This has just been published in the Journal of Political Power at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2158379X.2015.1099210?journalCode=rpow21 ]

In a critique of Michel Foucault’s understanding of power relations, Andrew Sayer outlined an alternative that was both more conceptually rigorous and offered a clearer analytical framework with which to approach the analysis of power.  Part of Sayer’s development was to distinguish not only between the holding and the operating of power(s), but also the three contingencies that always exist alongside power(s).  The paper argues that Sayer’s critique of Foucault, while a welcome theoretical clarification, partially mistakes Foucault’s project (which was to analyse power ‘as is’, not power ‘in the abstract’) and also misses some of Foucault’s own clarifications to his understanding of power.  The paper develops Sayer’s position by integrating important elements of Foucault’s approach – namely his concept of ‘dispositif’ – that illustrate Foucault’s more nuanced understanding of power.  This is developed by arguing that there is, in fact, a fourth level of contingency that Sayer does not articulate.  The paper uses De-facing Power, an early work of Clarissa Hayward, to illustrate how a combined ‘Foucaultian/Sayerian’ model of power and contingency can give extra explanatory and analytical strength.  The outcome of the article’s argument is that contingency ceases to be a ‘problem’ in social scientific research; instead it becomes the raison d’être for social scientific explanation.

Keywords: Andrew Sayer; contingency; critical realism; dispositif; Michel Foucault; power

This intervention contributes to recent work in urban geography that integrates the conceptual frameworks of assemblages and actor-network theory by highlighting two additional directions that require a more rigorous and detailed theorization. The first direction concerns the relationship between contingency and necessity in urban assemblages and actor-networks and this paper delineates four specific propositions as a starting point for further reflection. The second direction suggests that urban assemblages and actor-networks require a more explicit vocabulary for thinking about competition and cooperation within and between cities. To this end, the paper introduces a new concept – delayed asymmetric counterforces – that can foster a better understanding of competition-induced urban change and destabilization. The novel concept is developed in conjunction with a typology of delays in competitive urban dynamics, which helps illuminate how delayed asymmetric counterforces are both a cause and an effect of the complexity inherent in the urban realm.

Resumo: Descreverei nesse artigo como Rorty lê Proust, tomando Em busca do tempo perdido como um substituto para a Alegoria da Caverna de Platão. O protagonista de Proust precisa abandonar a busca pela Verdade e seu encanto por palavras-sagradas, assumindo a contingência e aprendendo a rir de si mesmo. Por fim, pretendo mostrar como Rorty constrói um paralelo entre a narrativa de Proust e o caminho de crítica de metafísica que parte de Hegel, passa por Nietzsche, Heidegger e chega a Derrida.
Palavras-chave: Proust; Rorty; contingência; ironia; Verdade.

Abstract: This paper describe as Rorty reads Proust, taking In Search of Lost Time as a substitute for the Allegory of the Cave of Plato. The protagonist of Proust need abandon the search for Truth and the enchantment of sacred words, assuming the contingency and learning to laugh at himself. Finally, I intend to show how Rorty constructs a parallel between the narratives of Proust and the way of metaphysics criticism that part of Hegel's and goes through Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida.
Keywords: Proust, Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Truth

"Abstract: This essay examines the emancipatory possibilities
of interculturalism. The aim is to evaluate whether the philosophical discourse of interculturalism, which is still parasitic on the
vocabulary of modernity, can achieve its emancipatory role in
a postmodern world by trying to empower difference through
consensus. Further, this essay aims to propose a way out of
modernist dialecticism and towards a truly postmodern theory
of interculturalism.

Key Words: Interculturalism, Postmodernism, Modernism, Consensus, Contingency"

This book is the first French introduction to the sociology of Niklas Luhmann, whose work remains largely untranslated. It firstly endeavours to show the various sources and influences of this very iconoclastic writer. These include Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition, Parsons’s sociology, Spencer Brown’s theory of logic, Saussure’s linguistics, Bateson’s communication theory, Husserl’s phenomenology and Derrida’s deconstruction theory. They all meld into a theoretical project that can be summed up as an attempt to strip the world as it is of its obviousness. Luhmann endeavours to reveal the place of contingency and disorder in social mechanisms.
I also reconstruct Luhmann’s extremely consistent theory of society, which describes modern society as a system, made up not of human beings but of communication. In other words, the social system does not bind human beings together, it does not constrain them, it does not subsume them, it is not the sum of them — rather, it expels them. It is also differentiated into functional subsystems, self-contained via specialised codes: the political, economic, religious, artistic, legal systems, etc. Lacking any centre, this (always-already global) modern society constantly observes itself, in the vain attempt to try to derive a knowledge of itself, but it is incapable (a characteristic which also applies to its political subsystem) of giving itself any kind of direction. As for human beings — who are placed at the periphery of the system and are as unfathomable to themselves individually as to one another — both their attribute of rationality and their status of subject are reduced to mere fictions.
The final section of the book attends to the political and normative implications of Luhmann’s model, although he claims that thinking in value terms is pointless. I show, in particular through an analysis of his controversy with Jürgen Habermas, or of his defense of ecology, that he considers ontological categories as endowed with a force of exclusion, if not a totalitarian pretension, and views his own work as an attempt to empty out these categories.

El análisis de la problemática del control telefónico en la Secretaría de Educación Pública se ha realizado en su totalidad.  Anteriormente, dentro de la institución, ningún área conformante de la misma o alguna persona en particular se interesó por un órgano administrativo tan pequeño pero que guarda en sí una gran importancia para todo el personal de la dependencia.  El desarrollo del estudio tuvo lugar en la ciudad de México, sede de la dependencia a tratar, y tiene su límites a las áreas centrales de ésta.  Comprende el periodo de enero a agosto de 1988 ya que fue en este tiempo cuando se llevó a cabo dicho programa en la institución.  El decreto de racionalización publicado el 4 de enero de 1988 surge como consecuencia de los fuertes problemas económicos vividos en la ciudad de México,, ocasionados por el desmedido crecimiento del índice inflacionario; el colapso de la bolsa de valores; la devaluación del peso frente al dólar;  en fin, era necesario frenar el gasto público a través de diferentes mecanismos de control, como lo fueron el programa de aliento y crecimiento (PAC) y el pacto de solidaridad económica (PSE), pero al interior de las Secretarías de Estado, esto significaba un trabajo minucioso y bien estructurado ya que ayudaría a fortalecer la economía de estas dependencias.

This article focuses on cosmopolitanism utilising the theoretical concepts of collective learning and triple contingency. Starting from the link between cosmopolitanism and collective learning in the context of the process of globalization, it extrapolates the perspective thus opened up and draws out its empirically by no means insignificant theoretical implications. The core of the paper consists of a differentiation of the general concept of learning into a number of distinct types of social learning by placing it in the context of different intersubjective experiential frameworks and, particularly, by bringing the concept of triple contingency to bear on it. This approach makes possible the critical explosion, as it were, of the theory of globalization from the inside out by identifying the learning processes at its core that are responsible for the creation of a diversity of competing cosmopolitan models or models of world openness and associated attempts to realise them. At the same time, the analysis of this culture of contradictions and corresponding practices which give rise to complex collective learning processes allows a penetrating yet reasoned critique of different types of contemporary cosmopolitanism.

The Nintendo DS has been, given its huge popularity, relatively understudied. This article is a small step toward correcting that and, in doing so, contributes to game studies in general. Using Goffman's and Benjamin's theories of play and Innis's analysis of media, this article explores the nature of play on a handheld videogame system as an illuminating case of the tension between time-based storage media and space-based transmission media. Storage, transmission, space, and time are intertwined and made complicit in the ways in which the Nintendo DS is used and played. By engaging with non-diegetic aspects of the video game experience, such as saving and pausing, we can begin to address the materiality of handheld video gaming systems as objects with which we play with and rework time and space. In turn, mobile play itself is highly contingent and spatial-temporal practices take on special significance in this light.

The brief of this chapter is to provide an assessment of the prospects for the realization of a cosmopolitan modernity, with due consideration for contemporary conditions. It undertakes this task from the perspective of critical theory which is represented in the form of a new kind of cognitive sociology. It proceeds on the basis of a theoretical conception that avoids fixing on either the idealistic philosophical concept of cosmopolitanism or on the positivist social scientific concepts of a cosmopolitan condition and banal cosmopolitanism. Instead, it gives centre stage to the concept of cosmopolitization understood as a process which leads to the formation of cosmopolitan structures on different levels – from the micro to the macro and meta levels. Rather than a purely objective movement transpiring above the heads and behind the backs of the actors involved, however, cosmopolitization is crucially also a process of societal learning through which the objective events are intersubjectively confronted, processed, made sense of and acted upon. This approach allows the understanding of cosmopolitanism in terms of three distinct formats: (i) the leading counterfactual  idea of cosmopolitanism forming part of the context-transcendent or meta-level cognitive order of modernity presupposed by all those involved; (ii) the variety of different actor-based micro-level cosmopolitan models of world openness constructed immanently in contemporary social contexts under the incursive generative and recursive regulative force of the counterfactual idea and its selective combination with other cognitive order principles such as sovereignty, freedom, equality, solidarity, legality, legitimacy, efficiency, truth, rightness, authenticity and so forth; and (iii) between the micro and meta levels, finally, the immanently relevant, publicly recognized cultural model of cosmopolitanism that emerges from the constructive practices and discourses of the plurality of actors and the discursive interrelation of their respective cosmopolitan models directed and guided by the publicly mediated selective embodiment of cognitive order principles. Taking into account the current global geopolitical situation and the typical mechanisms operating at national levels, the assessment finds that the positive side is outweighed by the negative one. The counterfactual idea of cosmopolitanism is currently acknowledged as forming part of the cognitive order of society and, complementarily, a vigorous construction of actor models of world openness is in evidence. Yet the emergence of a publicly recognized cultural model of cosmopolitanism necessary for the institutionalization of a societal cosmopolitan order is not just lacking, but rather blocked by both powerful socio-structural interferences and reified cultural models. It is possible that a cosmopolitan modernity could emerge in the medium term, but it would require concerted struggle and, at best, would be realizable in no more than a quarter of the world population. A positive development in the longer term would undoubtedly require much more radical action and change.

"This book develops a sociologically informed theory of constitutionalism in the global realm, addressing both national and transnational forms of constitutional ordering. The book begins with the argument that current approaches to constitutionalism remain tied to a state-based conception of constitutions, and overlooks underlying structural transformations that trigger the emergence of constitutional forms of ordering. Poul F. Kjaer aims to address this shortcoming by offering a sociological and historically informed analysis of the evolution of constitutionalism in the face of globalisation. The analysis contextualises on-going constitutional developments through the use of a long-term historical perspective, which is capable of highlighting the impact of deeper structural transformations unfolding within society.
The book looks at the ways in which national and transnational legal forms have evolved alongside one another. It demonstrates that the formation of global constitutions has not resulted in a corresponding decrease in the power of nation states, but instead, legal and political aspects of both the nation state and the transnational have been reconfigured and intensified in a mutually supportive manner.
In combining insights from a range of fields, this interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to students and scholars of constitutional law, sociology, global governance studies, and legal, social and political theory.

List of Content
1. Introduction: The Metamorphosis of Constitutionalism
Part 1: Structural Transformations
2. The Implosion of the Euro-Centric World
3. The Multiplicity of Normative Orders in World Society
Part 2: Re-configurations of Law and the Political
4. The Law within and in-between Normative Orders
5. The Political within and in-between Normative Orders
Part 3: Constitutional Stabilisation
6. The Breakdown of Constitutional Ordering through Globalisation-induced Crises
7.The Transmutation of Constitutional Ordering
8.Re-calibrating the Constitutional Concept
9. Conclusion

Reviews and Review essays:
- Aldo Mascareño: Revista de Ciencia Política, 36, 2, 587 – 592, 2016.
- Gregory Shaffer: ‘Law, Constitutionalism and World Society: Kjaer, Kratochwil,
and global (dis)order’, International Journal of Constitutional Law, 13, 4, 1063–1077, 2015.
-    Alfons Bora: Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie, 35, 1, 152-156, 2015.
- Grahame Thompson: ‘Socializing the Constitution?’, Economy and Society, 44, 3, 480 – 93, 2015.

In a critique of Michel Foucault’s understanding of power relations, Andrew Sayer outlined an alternative that was both more conceptually rigorous and offered a clearer analytical framework with which to approach the analysis of power. Part of Sayer’s development was to distinguish not only between the holding and the operating of power(s), but also the three contingencies that always exist alongside power(s). The paper argues that Sayer’s critique of Foucault, while a welcome theoretical clarification, partially mistakes Foucault’s project (which was to analyse power ‘as is’, not power ‘in the abstract’) and also misses some of Foucault’s own clarifications to his understanding of power. The paper develops Sayer’s position by integrating important elements of Foucault’s approach – namely his concept of ‘dispositif’ – that illustrate Foucault’s more nuanced understanding of power. This is developed by arguing that there is, in fact, a fourth level of contingency that Sayer does not articulate. The paper uses De-facing Power, an early work of Clarissa Hayward, to illustrate how a combined ‘Foucaultian/Sayerian’ model of power and contingency can give extra explanatory and analytical strength. The outcome of the article’s argument is that contingency ceases to be a ‘problem’ in social scientific research; instead it becomes the raison d’être for social scientific explanation.

Descreverei nesse artigo como Rorty le Proust, tomando Em busca do tempo perdido como um substituto para a Alegoria da Caverna de Platao. O protagonista de Proust precisa abandonar a busca pela Verdade e seu encanto por palavras-sagradas, assumindo a contingencia e aprendendo a rir de si mesmo. Por fim, pretendo mostrar como Rorty constroi um paralelo entre a narrativa de Proust e o caminho de critica de metafisica que parte de Hegel, passa por Nietzsche, Heidegger e chega a Derrida.

The aim of the paper is an extension of the idealizational theory of science in order to explicate intuitions of historians and philosophers of history about unpredictability and contingency of history. The author identifies two types of essential structures: the first kind dominated by the main factor and the second kind which is dominated by a class of secondary factors. In an essential structure dominated by the main factor, the power of influence it exerts is greater than the sum of the power of influence of secondary factors. In an essential structure dominated by secondary factors, their total influence is greater than the influence exerted by the main factor, although the power of the latter influence is greater than the power of influence of each secondary factor taken separately. In the latter kind of essential structure the so-called cascade effect can occur which means that at certain moment the power of influence of secondary factors can be greater than influence of main factor. In the further part of this paper, the author examines consequences of cascade effect for construction of scientific theory and historical narrative

12/15/2015: “Ludus est necessarius (…): Spiel und Kontingenz bei den Dominikanern des 13. Jahrhunderts,” DFG-Graduiertenkolleg 1919: “Vorsorge, Voraussicht, Vorhersage. Kontingenzbewältigung durch Zukunftshandeln”, University Duisburg-Essen.

9/17/2016: “Gegner Zeit: Spiel als Zukunftsbewältigung am Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts,” Colloquium “Spielerleben, Lebensspiele. Zur Symbolik von Spielhandeln und Spielwelten,” Schweizer Gesellschaft für Symbolforschung (Swiss Society for Research on Symbols).

Critical theory was always characterised by a particular attempt to develop a general theory of society on the basis of an integrative approach characterised by a combination of philosophy and sociology and of normative and descriptive approaches. In Frankfurt, the original epicentre of this particular school of thought, this has however come to an end. Contemporary Frankfurt theorists essentially have abandoned the sociological and descriptive dimension and re-casted what is left of the Frankfurt School into a subdivision of Anglo-American analytical political philosophy. As apparent from the book under review and his entire oeuvre, Hauke Brunkhorst, the last of the Mohicans of real Frankfurt style critical theory, have always resented this development. He has therefore found himself in internal exile at the University of Flensburg, the intellectual equivalent of Siberia in the German academic context, for the last decades. The exceptionally brilliance of the book under review thereby confirms the old insight, which has been illustrated again and again throughout history, that the best books tend to be written in exile. Written by authors who did not correspond with the prevailing Zeitgeist but who nonetheless choose to stick to their guns.
The book literally begins by the dawn of man and ends with an analysis of the pressing problems and challenges characterizing contemporary society. As such the book also reads as a history of the world in its entirety at the same time as the its main focus is on four revolutionary processes: The Papal Revolution of the 11th and 12th centuries, the Protestant revolution of the 16th century; The Atlantic Revolution of the late 18th century and the Euro-Asian (in particular but not only the Chinese and Russian revolutions) of the early 20th century. Finally, as a fifth wave, the global transformations which came about through decolonisation and the transitions from authoritarianism and totalitarianism to democracy and human rights in the latter half of the 20th century are analysed. Full review available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2015.00710.x/abstract

The paper presents an extension of L. Nowak's idealization theory of science in order to explicate intuitions about unpredictability and contingency of history shared by professional historians and methodologists of history. In the first part of the paper, a critical analysis of some explications (G. Reisch, M. Shermer) of such intuitions, based on the conceptual apparatus of the chaos theory, is presented. In the second part of the paper, an original model of cascade process is elaborated that conceptualizes the contingency of history. This model is subsequently compared with M. Shermer's chaotic model of historical sequences. In third part of this paper, an application of the model of cascade process is shown in the construction of a scientific theory, historical narrative and in historical research.

""In his chapter “Iconspicuous Revolutions of 1989: Culture and Contingency in the Making of Political Icons,” Dominik Bartmański revisits the European icons of the euphoric year of 1989 and asks what constitutes a powerful iconic fact. Specifically, he explains why the fall of the Berlin Wall emerged as the icon of 1989 and has retained this symbolic status ever since.

The answer is not obvious. 1989 was full of epochal events and important figures busy making history. Especially the earlier, politically unprecedented changes in Hungary and Poland had opened up a revolutionary space in which such events like the fall of the wall became possible at all. And yet they have not attained the same lasting influence on the international collective imagination. To reconstruct this phenomenon is to tell a story about how the iconic can trump the political. By demonstrating what counts in public perception as “revolutionary,” “political signal,” and “beginning” and “end” of a social process, Bartmański shows the role that iconicity plays in constituting these key categories and thus in structuring our ability to notice, understand, and remember events. By "public perception" Bartmanski does not mean only the "lay audiences" but also the producers of the journalistic facts themselves. Indeed, all social groups are deeply enmeshed in and responsive to the background codings and symbolic imperatives of a given culture.  It is precisely the various aspects of iconic power that makes events amenable to wide appropriation and socially "resonant". It is their iconicity that turns them into “objective,” temporal markers of history.

Of course, the key question is: what constitutes "iconic power"? Is it purely arbitrary signification structure or something different? What accounts for the fact that some symbolic representations and performances stick and others don't?

To answer these questions the present paper offers an analytical framework that identifies several constituent elements of iconic power. It distinguishes (1) "iconic capital," i.e. the historical accretion of symbolic resources associated with a given entity, (2) "cultural congruity," i.e. the fit between a given entity's character and the genre of cultural performance it is supposed to represent, and (3) "remembrance patterns," i.e. commemorative practices.

Each element is a bundle of material forms and affordances ("surface") and discursive content ("depth"). Only when all the elements coalesce in a felicitous way can an iconic effect emerge. Bartmanski observes that although open-ended and contingent, this iconic process is not arbitrary but instead rooted in the specific meanings structures that make certain social outcomes more plausible than others. 

Performing the cultural reconstruction of 1989 along those lines provides a "thick" elaboration of two observations that function as epigrams for the present paper.

The first is theoretical and was made by Roland Barthes in his essay "Rhetoric of the Image": "In every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs."

The second was made by an anthropologist Daphne Berdahl who insisted that "among other things, the revolutions of 1989 were about visibility - making visible 'the people'."

Just like other chapters in this book, the present sociological interpretation of political symbols inevitably takes us beyond the surface of news pictures to the surfaces and depths of events, to singular bodies and powerful crowds, sights and sites, built structures, and symbolically constructed narratives. It is the new prism of iconicity through which the effects of shocking and euphoric events that seem deceptively simple and well known can be explained in full. """

The theme of the conference invited reflection, with reference to both society and sociology, on where we are and where we are going in the twenty-first century. This paper thus suggests in outline a theory of location(s) appropriate to current societal conditions and accompanies it with some epistemological-methodological thoughts concerning sociology. Since there can be little doubt that the contemporary state of the art demands that the theme of location(s) be theoretically treated in accordance with the logics and dynamics of the process of the constitution and organisation of society, the argument proceeds in terms of a diagnostically informed and normatively oriented approach that focuses on the nascent global society characterised by a range of ambivalent potentials and its forms of creation and organisation. If functional globalisation prevails, it could take the form of a sharply asymmetrical market and risk society, but if communicative globalisation proves capable of limiting functional developments, then there is the prospect of a risk-avoiding, democratic, cosmopolitan society organised by communication through the public sphere. Close attention is paid to different types of the public sphere, the relations of resonance activated within it, and actual and potential learning processes thus made possible, some of which favour a functionally organised and others a communicatively organised society. The point of the argument is twofold: that in the nascent societal context different locations are best identified in terms of resonance; and that the most appropriate form for a contemporary approach that is aligned with communicative globalisation, critical public resonance in a fully-fledged public sphere and societal or triple contingency learning, would be a pragmatic cognitive sociology.

This article argues that Oakeshott's theory of freedom possesses a greater degree of coherence than is often perceived. Freedom in Oakeshott's philosophy may be defined as `recognized contingency', combining the notions of a genuine choice of action and of an agent's awareness of having such a choice. Oakeshott employs his notion of freedom in two different contexts. One is the context in which freedom is understood as a concept distinguishing what is conceived as `human' from what is conceived as `non-human'. The other context is that of membership in societies, which under certain circumstances can be characterized either by the presence or the lack of freedom. The article argues that, while at first glance Oakeshott's ideas look counter-intuitive, at a deeper level this understanding of freedom is akin to that prevalent in the consciousness of modern liberal societies.

This paper examines the causes of the riots in an attempt to explain how a small, local conflict in Zangon Kataf town exploded into a massive social dislocation. It argues that the cause of the conflict was not ethnicity, or religion, in itself, but rather the fact that several different kinds of social divisions (religion, ethnicity, economic, social and political traditions, language, dress, etc.) coincided and therefore became mutually reinforcing. This study also argues that the existence of different ethnic and religious groups in the same environment does not necessarily lead to conflict, but that incompatible social and political values and traditions make it difficult for those groups to arrive at mutually acceptable mechanisms for resolving disagreements. Finally this paper argues for the importance of history and contingency in understanding social processes in the real world. The actions of various individuals, famous and powerful or anonymous and seemingly insignificant, impacted the process of social change in this instance and sent history cascading down the path it actually took, rather than another, less violent and divisive, path.