In this volume East Asia is used as a unit of political and economic analysis to reveal an approach to modernization that is distinct from the Western model. The volume especially focuses on the interaction between nations of East Asia; the advantages and limits of export-led growth; relations between such processes as state formation, industrial growth, urbanization, and the movement from status- to class-based social hierarchies; and the links between state, market, and civic culture.

Each chapter takes at least one country as its topic. There also is a comparative and regional perspective provided within many of the contributions. All the chapters present fresh insights and analyses with intellectual and historical depth. Modernization in East Asia contains useful theoretical frameworks and empirical data for scholars, practitioners, and students.

First published in 1978, this volume is addressed to the crisis prevailing in the social and cultural sciences. The authors explore the conflict between positivism and romanticism, between hard and soft sociological research methods, and between objectivity and subjectivity - conflicts that were particularly acute in sociology at the time of publication. All of the essays adopt the approach of 'symbolic realism' or 'cognitive aesthetics' to overcome the dualism in conventional sociological theory. This strategy of symbolic realism is a philosophical amalgam forged from findings in existential phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism. It establishes a legitimate basis for the application of aesthetic criteria to truth-seeking in the social sciences. The synthesis emergent from these essays suggests a paradigm with broad implications for all the human studies. Students of culture will find this volume a provocative point of departure for their own investigations.

For too long, argues Richard Harvey Brown, social scientists have felt forced to choose between imitating science's empirical methodology and impersonating a romantic notion of art, the methods of which are seen as primarily a matter of intuition, interpretation, and opinion. Developing the idea of a cognitive aesthetic, Brown shows how both science and art--as well as the human studies that stand between them--depend on metaphoric thinking as their logic of discovery and may be assessed in terms of such aesthetic criteria of adequacy as economy, elegance, originality, scope, congruence, and form. By recognizing this aesthetic common ground between science and art, Brown demonstrates that a fusion can be achieved within the human sciences of these two principal ideals of knowledge--the scientific or positivist one and the artistic or intuitive one. A path, then, is opened for creating a knowledge of ourselves and society which is at once objective and subjective, at once valid scientifically and significantly humane.

Brown makes elegant use of sociological theory and of insights from language philosophy, literary criticism, and rhetoric to articulate a new theory of the human sciences, using the powerful metaphor of society as text.

In this important book, a leading authority in the field of social theory and communication shows how scientific practice is a rhetorical and narrative activity, a story well told. Richard Harvey Brown develops the idea of science as narration, casts various scientific disciplines as literary genres, and argues that expert knowledge of any kind is a form of power. He then explains how a narrative view of science can help integrate science within a democratic civic discourse. Brown shows why social science knowledge is as much a rhetorical enterprise as is the social reality that it describes. He construes laboratory science, physics, ethnography, sociology, philosophy, and astronomy as genres, narratives, and other rhetorical practices, and thereby portrays science as a special kind of narrative discourse that generates theories and shapes their validity and significance. He next focuses on the political dimensions of science, including the politics of psychology in the United States, showing how power and knowledge shape, limit, and infuse each other. Brown argues that this linguistically and socially constructed character of knowledge does not undermine its truth value but rather reaffirms the moral status and political responsibilities of its practitioners. In one important chapter, written with Robert Brulle, he explores the movement for environmental justice in the United States, showing how ordinary people can use science as part of a larger civic narration. Brown concludes by discussing how the rationality of science can be preserved even as it is subsumed within a rational and moral civic discourse.

The United States is in transit from an industrial to a postindustrial society, from a modern to postmodern culture, and from a national to a global economy. In this book Richard Harvey Brown asks how we can distinguish the uniquely American elements of these changes from more global influences. His answer focuses on the ways in which economic imperatives give shape to the shifting experience of being American. Drawing on a wide knowledge of American history and literature, the latest social science, and contemporary social issues, Brown investigates continuity and change in American race relations, politics, religion, conception of selfhood, families, and the arts. He paints a vivid picture of contemporary America, showing how postmodernism is perceived and felt by individuals and focusing attention on the strengths and limitations of American democracy.