Public affairs units were closely examined during the 1980s at least partly because of their rapid deployment in major American firms in the 1970s. Academic research focused on: describing the nature of such boundary spanning units, understanding their selection of activities and explaining their efifort to improve corporate performance. The most intenally influential PA units were found to deal with specific problems whose issues were actively being debated in the public policy process.

The 1980s, it is often claimed, was the decade when experimentation finally became a philosophical topic. This was the responsibility, the claim continues, of one particular movement within philosophy of science, called “new experimentalism.” The aim of this article is to complicate this historical narrative. We argue that in the 1980s, the study of experimentation was carried out not by one movement with one particular aim but rather in a diverse and open-ended way by people with different aims (...) and backgrounds. We then argue that from the late 1990s onward, this diversity disappeared and made room for disciplinary divisions—questions concerning experimentation became philosophical, others sociological, and so on. The reason for this, we claim, was that science and technology studies, philosophy of technology, and philosophy of science took over aspects of the 1980s study of experimentation. In this way, we argue, these elements became institutionalized, whereas others were forgotten. The importance of this process of institutionalization is illustrated by means of a discussion of other, similar approaches to the philosophy of experimentation that have not been able to ensure continuity because they did not find an institutional home. (shrink)

Even before the reality TV show The Biggest Loser became popular in the 2000s, similar weight loss formats already existed in the 1970s and 1980s – and not only in West Germany (FRG), but also in state socialist East Germany (GDR). In 1977, the popular West German show Practice Health Magazine ( Gesundheitsmagazin Praxis ) organised a six-month weight loss programme; 10 years later, in 1987, the East German show Man, Stay Healthy! ( Mensch, bleib gesund! ) followed suit. (...) This article analyses both programmes and their ways of addressing fatness from a comparative perspective, while also considering transnational contexts and long-term developments. By asking how the programmes governed individuals classified as ‘overweight’ and how these individuals governed themselves, the article argues that both programmes were rooted in liberal governmentality. Nevertheless, significant differences emerge, raising the question of whether the GDR show articulated a distinct state socialist governmentality, while its FRG counterpart tended to manifest a neo-liberal mode of governing. (shrink)

Since 1980s, the Frankfurt School's critique of Culture Industry has provided powerful ammunitions for Chinese intellectuals to reject rising consumer popular culture. In recent years, Chinese academics began to study the Frankfurt School's critique of capitalist modernity from more theoretical perspectives, attempting to set Chinese problems of modernity and its legitimacy against the Frankfurt School's theorization. However, Chinese intellectuals’ diverse responses to the Frankfurt School have largely remained at the level of academic inquiries rather than seriously engaging in practically (...) seeking alternatives. This study will consider issues of critique of and alternatives to capitalist modernity that modern Marxists or post-Marxists, be they Frankfurt School philosophers, the Chinese Marxists or the latter-day Chinese “new left,” all wish to seek out. (shrink)

This paper examines the influence of American cultural models on Romanian poetry during the late communist period. Using a postcolonial framework, it highlights how and why Romanian poets in the 1980s navigated the symbolic presence of the United States, adopting Westernized perspectives through “self-colonization” strategies (Kiossev in Cultural aspects of the modernization process, 1995), integrating foreign cultural models to construct hybrid poetic identities. The concept of “in-between peripherality” (Tötösy de Zepetnek in The Comparatist 23:89–110, 1999) further clarifies how peripheral (...) cultures negotiate their identities by integrating foreign cultural models and transforming them into “intentional communication” (Hebdige in Subculture. The meaning of style, 2002) and manifestos. Thus, Romanian poetry of the era becomes a site of cross-cultural engagement, constructing “cosmoscapes” that reflect the interplay of local and global imaginaries. By examining the works of poets like Traian T. Coşovei, Romulus Bucur, Alexandru Muşina and Mircea Cărtărescu, the study reveals how American cultural influences were adapted to fit local socio-political contexts. (shrink)

In this chapter, one considers finance at its very foundations, namely, at the place where assumptions are being made about the ways to measure the two key ingredients of finance: risk and return. It is well known that returns for a large class of assets display a number of stylized facts that cannot be squared with the traditional views of 1960s financial economics (normality and continuity assumptions, i.e. Brownian representation of market dynamics). Despite the empirical counterevidence, normality and continuity assumptions (...) were part and parcel of financial theory and practice, embedded in all financial practices and beliefs. Our aim is to build on this puzzle for extracting some clues revealing the use of one research strategy in academic community, model tinkering defined as a particular research habit. We choose to focus on one specific moment of the scientific controversies in academic finance: the ‘leptokurtic crisis’ opened by Mandelbrot in 1962. The profoundness of the crisis came from the angle of the Mandelbrot’s attack: not only he emphasized an empirical inadequacy of the Brownian representation, but also he argued for an inadequate grounding of this representation. We give some insights in this crisis and display the model tinkering strategies of the financial academic community in the 1970s and the 1980s. (shrink)

In Japan during the 1980s, there was an interesting debate about how to teach the area of a parallelogram effectively to primary school children. Yutaka Saeki criticized the standard method, which relies on a cut-and-paste procedure. He argued that the standard method inevitably failed to convince children because it does not provide any cogent reason for them to accept that the formula ‘base x height’ is indeed true. Saeki proposed his own method using a bundle of paper. This method, (...) however convincing at first glance, was totally dismissed by Akira Nakagaki based on his orthodox scientific methodology. There emerged a lively debate between the two. By means of a reconstruction of this debate, this paper will show how the materiality of a thing can scaffold the process of gaining understanding of the concept of geometrical space. Although Saeki and Nakagaki were both unaware of the fact, the debate between them shows clearly that the convincing points of Saeki’s method rely on its material basis. The materiality of a thing can serve as a common basis, in which acquaintance in the context of everyday life is transgressed to the mathematical context. With this transgressive structure entailed in the materiality of a thing, children can be led to understand the spatial logic of the parallelogram, while they themselves make their own reasoning and judgement based on the context of their everyday lives. (shrink)

Henry Tam explains that although communitarian ideas had by early twentieth century contributed to social, scientific and political development, progress was threatened by different forms of depersonalisation. He describes the origins and significance of three counter-moves developed to embed persons as interdependent beings in pursuit of common wellbeing. The first of these involves thinkers who took aim at doctrines that stripped authenticity and respect out of human interactions (Buber, Mounier, Macmurray, Arendt). The second comprises those who argued for better participatory (...) opportunities through improved economic regulation, social parity, shared security, and guarantees of dignified treatment (Tawney, Polanyi, Pateman, Arizmendiarrieta, G.D.H. Cole, Martin Luther King, Michael Young). The third includes critics of attempts to invoke the atomistic self as a foundation for justice (MacIntyre, Sandel, Walzer, and Taylor). (shrink)

This article examines a controversy over a nuclear-energy gallery at the Science Museum, London, in the early 1980s. It uses this case to explore the wider politicization of museums at this time, and thus the politicization of the display of science and technology. It argues that cultural changes in train since the 1960s, coupled with a museological turn towards ‘social history’ as the proper vehicle for exhibiting science and technology, led to the museum becoming newly subject to widespread critical (...) scrutiny. That scrutiny had contradictory effects. On the one hand, it reinforced the image of the museum as a bastion of official culture and knowledge. On the other, it undermined this image, by exposing the ideological nature of the museum’s authority. This double movement laid the groundwork for the crisis of confidence that culminated in the ‘New Museology’ of the later part of the decade. Attending to this controversy thus suggests a need to revise prevailing scholarship on the ‘politics of display’, which often takes for granted an overly straightforward connection between museums and power. (shrink)

In the 1980s, when the American art market flourished, critics were heavily concerned with theory. In T_he Aesthete in the City_ David Carrier offers a personal view on the artistic activity of that decade. He begins with a theoretical perspective on the relationship between two very different forms of artwriting: art criticism and art history writing. Carrier surveys the developments within theory during the 1980s, focusing on constructive critical analysis of the then fashionable work of Jean Baudrillard, Walter (...) Benjamin, T. J. Clark, and Jacques Derrida. He provides detailed accounts of a number of painters, among them Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, and Sean Scully, whose development he followed closely. Carrier argues that the greatest American artistic tradition,Expressionism, provides the basis for an ongoing tradition of abstract painting, a rich system whose potential has not yet been exhausted. Carrier's earlier work was concerned with a philosophical study of the methods of art criticism. This book turns to the theory and practice of art criticism, concentrating on a concrete discussion of individual theorists and artists. (shrink)

In the early 1980s the “welfare state crisis” was a point of reference common to many European countries with advanced public social policy arrangements. In most of them the scope of expansion of social expenditure had already been reigned in after the first oil price shock in the mid-1970s. But it was the impact of the second oil price crisis, with low or negative economic growth rates and another steep rise in unemployment in the early 1980s which provided (...) considerable ammunition for critics of the welfare state in many European countries and which triggered off the crisis debate. The latter was particularly pronounced in countries with centre-right and neo-liberal governments at the time and probably most outspoken in the UK. From the start of her first period in office Margaret Thatcher was explicit about her ambition to “roll back the frontiers of the state” and to give much more room for individual and private forms of social protection. In her first election manifesto in 1979 the welfare state was singled out as part of the problem rather than part of the solution to economic and social difficulties which Britain faced at the time. In short, it seems entirely appropriate to take the early 1980s as a starting point and to focus on the UK as the country in which there was arguably more pressure on traditional social policy structures than anywhere else in Europe. (shrink)

In the mid-1980s, German social democracy was revived like a Phoenix from the ashes. In the individual federal states, it proved its governing capability which had been lost in the final years of the Schmidt Administration: The Social Democrats not only controlled the city-states of Bremen and Hamburg widi an absolute majority, but were able to win die 1985 elections so overwhelmingly, both in the largest state of North Rhine-Westphalia and also in Saarland, that they were not forced to (...) form any coalitions. But where die Social Democrats needed a partnership, as in Hesse, diey showed diat they would wager a red-green coalition. In special political areas, the Opposition made dramatic changes, above all in peace and security policy. (shrink)

In the 1980s, teenagers came to dominate the last bastions of public spaces on the sprawling suburban landscape: the shopping mall and the arcade. Teenagers’ presence and the sense of their domination of those spaces from media and popular culture initiated new regimes of regulation with distinct consequences. Through tactics designed to combat the disruptive presence of teens, including use of closed-circuit video monitoring, professionalization of private security staffs, and strict municipal oversight, mall owners, concerned parents, and local political (...) leaders created systems of insistent and pervasive policing of mall space. That surveillance not only undermined the very nature of the space as public but also nearly eliminated teens from shopping centers while facilitating their reintegration into the supposed safety of the home. (shrink)

The term 'Asian values' became popular in the political discourse in the 1980s and 1990s. The most vocal proponents of Asian values are Singapore s Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia's Mahathir and their deputies and government officials, as well as post-Tiananmen Chinese leaders. Most notable of all these three strands of the Asian values debate is the 'Singapore School', which 'comprises leaders who have articulated a defence of the Singapore regime, either in their personal or official capacities'. This article (...) discusses the origins and philosophical underpinnings of 'Asian values' in the Singapore context and its relationship to civics education. First, it provides the historical context for the interest in Confucianism and Asian Values. It then looks at the role and use of Confucianism and Asian Values in Asia, before discussing the case of Singapore and Asian values. I explore the interconnections between changes in history, civics and social studies curricula, and the politics of the 'Asian Values' discourse in Singapore which underpins these curricula. At the heart of the issue was the states attempt to forge and articulate a Singaporean identity, and the role of citizenship/moral education in attaining this elusive nation building goal. (shrink)

Agnes Heller continued her commitment to socialist theory, seeking a democratic alternative to the actually existing socialist system in Soviet-type societies in the early 1980s. Heller conceptualized socialism as a long-term social experiment based on social imagination and the radicalization of democracy, which contrasted with the Soviet socialist project on the one hand, and went beyond Western parliamentary systems on the other hand. My aim in this paper is to examine the 1982 pamphlet, Why We Should Maintain the Socialist (...) Objective, and present it as a crucial step that Heller takes to depart from Marxism and explore her post-Marxist socialist theory. This paper will examine the social imagination, radicalization of democracy, and other key ideas elaborated in the pamphlet, linking these ideas to her subsequent book, Dictatorship Over Needs, and her essay ‘The Great Republic’. (shrink)

After 1944, for a long while, Bulgarian Symbolism was branded as “decadent” and there was little research on it by Bulgarian scholars. It was not until the late 1960s, and during the 1970s and 1980s, that a significant and intense increase in attention to the movement itself emerged, redefining the map of Bulgarian literary history. Studies not only posed the question of Symbolist poetics as an object of the then-current scholarly debate, which compensated for the lack of such debate (...) in the decades before, but also indirectly turned this into one of the critical cores of the polemic unfolding in Bulgaria after the 1960s about “national originality” in literature. The debate on Symbolism, which is the focus of this paper, shows the breakthroughs, hesitations, and paradoxes that accompanied the establishing of the place of national culture in intercultural dialogue. The problem is that national was often identified as social (in its late socialist interpretations), and, in this way, an inevitable but very dangerous identification with state ideology appeared. On the other hand, the understanding of the Symbolists’ desire to turn poetic language into a universal literary code presupposed for the researcher the integration of national culture into world culture through the prism of the synchronicity of literary communication, which was unrestricted by objective chronology. Studying Bulgarian Symbolism led to more comparative research, as well as the number of poems translated, thus modifying the understanding of the boundaries and context of national literature in the 1970s and 1980s. (shrink)

In the context of 1960s research on biological membranes, scientists stumbled upon a curiously coloured material substance, which became called the “purple membrane.” Interactions with the material as well as chemical analyses led to the conclusion that the microbial membrane contained a photoactive molecule similar to rhodopsin, the light receptor of animals’ retinae. Until 1975, the find led to the formation of novel objects in science, and subsequently to the development of a field in the molecular life sciences that comprised (...) biophysics, bioenergetics as well as membrane and structural biology. Furthermore, the purple membrane and bacteriorhodopsin, as the photoactive membrane transport protein was baptized, inspired attempts at hybrid bio-optical engineering throughout the 1980s. A central motif of the research field was the identification of a functional biological structure, such as a membrane, with a reactive material substance that could be easily prepared and manipulated. Building on this premise, early purple membrane research will be taken as a case in point to understand the appearance and transformation of objects in science through work with material substances. Here, the role played by a perceptible material and its spontaneous change of colour, or reactivity, casts a different light on objects and experimental practices in the late twentieth century molecular life sciences. With respect to the impact of chemical working and thinking, the purple membrane and rhodopsins represent an influential domain straddling the life and chemical sciences as well as bio- and material technologies, which has received only little historical and philosophical attention. Re-drawing the boundary between the living and the non-enlivened, these researches explain and model organismic activity through the reactivity of macromolecular structures, and thus palpable material substances. (shrink)

이 글은 1970년대 중반 정립된 ‘삼민’이 1980년대 중반을 거치면서 이념적으로 급진화하는 과정을 ‘5.18 애도하기’와 ‘후사건적 주체’라는 관점에서 다루고 있다. 1980년대 학생운동은 ‘5.18 사건’의 트라우마에 전이된 ‘트라우마적 존재’이자 그날의 진실을 감추는 국가에 대항해 싸우는 ‘애도 수행적 주체’였다. 따라서 그들은 ‘5.18’를 단순한 국가 폭력의 희생자로만 여기지 않고, ‘무장봉기’와 ‘절대공동체’의 주체로 상징화하고, 스스로 전사가 되었다.하지만 이들의 ‘애도’는 ‘5.18’에 멈추지 않았다. 그들은 코리언이 근현대 역사에서 겪어온 탈식민, 탈분단의 투쟁 속에서 일어난 역사적 트라우마를 소급해 기억하고자 했다. 그리고 미련 기억하기를 통해서 과거 그들의 실패에도 불구하고 이를 (...) 끝까지 밀어붙이는 ‘후사건적 주체’가 되었다. 1980년대 중반 이후 이루어진 운동권의 이념적 급진성과 투쟁의 헌신성은 바로 이것에 기초하고 있었다.그러나 그들이 실현한 것은 대통령 직선제라는 최소한의 제한적인 절차적 민주주의였을 뿐이다. 따라서 이들의 이념과 현실 사이에는 엄청난 간극이 존재했고, 더욱 관념화되었다. 그럼에도 1980년대는 예술과 지식, 여성과 환경 등의 영역에서 다양한 운동과 양식들을 생산한 시대로, 그들의 급진적 이념들은 아직도 극복하지 못한 다양한 사회 구조적 모순과 실천 방안에 관한 비전을 우리에게 보여주고 있다. (shrink)

This paper uses van Leeuwen’s (2008. Discourse and practice: New tools from critical discourse analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press) Authority Legitimation framework to examine government posters published in the 1950s–1980s in Hong Kong, which serve as a means of shaping public opinion and legitimate social action. Martin and White’s (2005. The language of evaluation: Appraisal in english. London: Palgrave Macmillan) Appraisal framework is also applied to provide the study with relevant analytical tools by which to construct evaluatively coherent authorial (...) reading positions propagated by the government in the posters as well as aligning viewers with these desired positions. The government posters being studied are concerned with various aspects of social practices in the domain of public health communication. This paper argues that the representations of these social practices are realized as texts – both visual and verbal – in the posters, as part of a broader recontextualization process where legitimate ways of doing things as stipulated in the government guidelines are recontextualized in these posters and conveyed to members of the public. The aim is two-fold: (1) to provide a systematic analysis of how visual and verbal resources construe evaluation in the government posters and the consequent legitimation discourse as viewers are being persuaded to align with legitimate social practices; (2) to highlight various forms of legitimation, namely, role model authority legitimation, impersonal authority legitimation, and conformity authority legitimation, that are realized in these posters through visual-verbal articulation. (shrink)

In spite of their centrality in modern democracies, the role of political parties in science and technology has been poorly investigated. By focusing on the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), the Italian Communist Party, between the 1960s and the 1980s, this essay argues that, in spite of its hierarchical structure, the PCI became a place where senior scientists, young nontenured scientists, politicians and policymakers, technicians, and workers freely debated. The essay argues for the centrality of science and technology in the (...) party’s political reflection. Indeed, it interprets Enrico Berlinguer’s proposal of austerity policy and sustainable development in light of the party’s collective reflection on the nonneutrality of science, the decolonization process, and the assumption that the contrast between the North and the South of the world was paralleling if not replacing that between the East and the West. (shrink)

In a manner consistent with other Eastern European countries, Romania officially promoted the principles of egalitarianism and the right to education. In practice, however, those policies had unexpected consequences, particularly for women seeking to enter higher education in the 1980s. This study explores how state reforms, demographic pressures, gender norms and structural changes intersected to influence women’s educational path during this period. Following the 1978 Education Act, first-year study places limitations to traditionally female-dominated subjects and the push for polytechnisation (...) redirected many women towards technical subjects and male-dominated specialisations. Faced with intense competition and shrinking opportunities in ‘pink-collar’ fields such as teaching and healthcare, women adapted – often with remarkable determination – and, by the mid-1980s, they began to outnumber men in university enrolment. Using the concepts of the ‘triple burden’ and the emerging ‘quadruple burden’, this paper demonstrates how socialist reforms both reinforced gendered obstacles and opened new avenues for advancement. In late socialist Romania, women navigated a complex mix of progress and pressure, finding ways to thrive in a system that was never designed with them in mind. (shrink)

This study analyses the patenting activities of university science and engineering professors in Canada between 1920 and 1975. Unlike most studies on commercial activities in academia, which typically focus on the post-1980 period and on university practices, we focus on the pre-1980 period and on the individual decisions of professors to patent their inventions. Based on quantitative patent data, we show that patenting, and thus professors’ interest in the possible commercial value of their scientific discoveries made in university laboratories, was (...) relatively common on an individual and informal basis well before the 1980s and the advent of what is now called “academic capitalism”. This contradicts the belief that before that period, universities were a kind of ivory towers in which professors isolated themselves from external influences and engaged only in pure and disinterested research. (shrink)

The article reconstructs a brief period of intensive debates on the legitimacy and justification of torture in the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. It is shown that the emergence of the discourse on the morality of torture was influenced by the following factors. Firstly, the formulation of the “dirty hands” dilemma, which in the analytical tradition became a crucial tool for analyzing the relationship between ends and means. Secondly, the establishment of a theoretical and applied field of philosophical research (...) known as the just war theory. Although it should be acknowledged that the transfer of heuristics from the just war theory as a means of argumentation in favor of torture proved to be a philosophical deadlock, it allowed for the exploration of possibilities and limitations of new theoretical developments in the field of moral philosophy, which is always a necessary stage for the reiteration of debates. (shrink)

This article compares cultural production about 1980s working-class industrial England with that of contemporary, middle-class rural Ireland in order to identify aesthetic through lines in the portrayal of social reproductive violence across both early- and later-stage neoliberalism. It argues that, despite their differences in setting and demographic, novels by Pat Barker and Mike McCormack use peripheral political experience to show the bodies of women bearing the brunt of late capitalism's horrors. Barker's Union Street (1982) serves as an early warning (...) of the neoliberal consensus-to-come, bringing to life the geographic peripheralisation that would accompany deindustrialisation. It portrays the conflicted dynamic between childhood and capital, also anticipating the ways in which care work would increasingly be externalised onto women in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. This overlaps with the 1987 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too's portrayal of childhood sexual vulnerability, as well as Letter to Brezhnev (1985) and its rendering of capitalism's consumption of women. Instead of the realism for which these films are known, Union Street uses gothic modes and the motif of vomiting in ‘irrealist’ fashion. So too, Mike McCormack's Mayo-set 2016 novel Solar Bones employs spectrality, as well as ideas of contamination, to evoke the damage wrought by a now-entrenched neoliberalism as it imperils the middle classes. The novel's recognition of female social reproductive labour is more oblique, but women are again shown to be at the coalface of neoliberal violence, their very bodies marshalled to detect and, crucially, resist gendered precarity. In this, I draw parallel with the Dundalk-set film Kissing Candice (2017), which uses gothic tropes to show rural dispossession writ large through the body of a teenage girl. (shrink)

Daga (the Bulgarian word for “rainbow”) was a Bulgarian comic magazine launched in 1979 and regularly published until 1992. Its remarkably westernized aesthetic greatly impacted an entire generation of readers. Included in its variety of stories (history, sci-fi, literary classics) is an action-packed account of Spartacus’ exploits. For ten consecutive issues (1979–1983), the story spanned the hero’s life from a more fanciful narrative of his early years in Thrace to the better-documented events in Italy and his death. The paper explores (...) the plotline, characterization, and visual aspects of “Spartak” to reveal the eponymous hero’s significance for young Bulgarian readers in the 1980s. Drawing on the cultural and historical context, I argue that Spartacus was well suited to serve as a role model and a national hero by embodying the proletarian anti-imperialist struggle and also, notably, because of his supposed place of birth near the river Strimon in modern-day Bulgaria. I also look at examples of contemporary comics, including a new graphic novel based on Daga’s story published in 2020, and consider the transmutations of the hero to suit the post-communist (and anti-communist) ideological agenda, characterized by a departure from the proletarian image of Spartacus in favor of more conservative, aristocratic features. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyzed the discussion on the principle of universalizability which took place in moral philosophy in 1970–1980s. In short, I see two main problems that attracted more attention than others. The first problem is an opposition of universalizability and generalization. M.G. Singer argued for generalization argument, and R.M. Hare defended universalizability thesis. Hare tried to refute Singer’s position, using methods of ordinary language philosophy, and claimed that in ethics generalization is useless and misleading. I have examined (...) Singer’s defense and concluded that he was right and Hare was mistaken. Consequently, generalization argument is better in clarification of the relationship between universality and morality than Hare’s doctrine of universalizability, and hence the universality of moral principles is not incompatible with the existence of exclusions. The second problem is the substantiation of the application of categorical imperative in the theory of relevant act descriptions and accurate understanding of the difference between maxims and non-maxims. In Generalization in Ethics, Singer drew attention to this theme and philosophers have proposed some suggestions to solve this problem. I describe ideas of H.J. Paton, H. Potter, O. O’Neill and M. Timmons. Paton coined the teleological-law theory. According to Potter, the best criterion for the relevant act descriptions is causal one. O’N eill suggested the inconsistency-of-intention theory. Timmons defended the causal-law theory. My claim is that the teleological-law theory and the causal-law theory fail to solve the relevant act descriptions problem and the causal criterion and the inconsistency-of-intention theory have their limits. From this, I conclude that these approaches cannot be the basis for clarifying the connection between universality and morality, in contrast to Singer’s approach, which, therefore, is better than others to clarify the nature of universality in morality. (shrink)

The present article provides an overview of the key subjects of scholarly research in the areas of epistemology and the philosophy of science and technology conducted in Russia between the 1980s and the present. These disciplines are shown to be deeply rooted in Soviet philosophy and still developed by contemporary Russian philosophers, with both the historical experience of the Russian philosophical thought and foreign conceptions and schools, classical as well as modern, drawn upon. The corollary is that epistemology and (...) the philosophy of science have been the most widely studied philosophical disciplines in Russia over the last couple of decades and retain this status to date. (shrink)

This article maps the entangled (re-)birth of pathological gambling as a medical issue in 1980s West Germany, exploring how self-help group members and ‘psy’ scientists negotiated expertise on excessive gambling behaviour. Taking into account transnational contacts and transfers, it argues that self-help groups played a crucial role in the construction of pathological gambling as an illness. First, the article shows how it was gamblers who – supported by transnational connections and media coverage – were a driving force in the (...) pathologisation of their own behaviour by establishing ‘experiential expertise’ through self-help groups. Second, it demonstrates how professionals reinforced their authority of interpretation over the topic of excessive gambling against the backdrop of the already existing self-help movement by either rejecting or embracing the illness concept prevalent among Gamblers Anonymous. Finally, the article shows how, on the one hand, self-help groups relied on psy-knowledge and its producers, and how, on the other hand, the groups as well as the notion and practice of experiential expertise were integrated into professional therapies, thereby creating a fusion of experiential and scientific expertise into a larger therapeutic health system. (shrink)

The subject of this issue is Zhao Fusan (b. 1926), a Shanghaiborn Christian pastor and intellectual who has lived in exile since the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. As a scholar of world religions and vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Zhao in the mid-1980s authored a sympathetic Marxian interpretation of the role of religion (translated in this issue) that has had a lasting impact in the PRC. In exile, Zhao's major projects (sampled in this issue) (...) have included Chinese editions of important works on early Christianity and the intellectual and cultural history of Europe. (shrink)

This article challenges the assumption underlying most education reforms that constructivism is politically neutral and intrinsically democratic. It makes this argument by examining the curriculum reform in Spain during the 1980s and 1990s in light of the neoliberal politics that the country was experiencing at that time. This study employs the poststructuralist analytical lens of governmentality developed by Foucauldian scholars. Accordingly, it claims that, the psychological version of constructivism adopted by the official curriculum reform failed to deliver promises for (...) democracy because it was crafted within the same neoliberal political rationality that redefined the terms of government in the late 1980s, a redefinition that decontextualized the learner from his/her social context and adopted the logic of the market. (shrink)

This article shows how funding research on Alzheimer's disease became a priority for the British Medical Research Council in the late 1970s and 1980s, thanks to work that isolated new pathological and biochemical markers, and showed that the disease affected a significant proportion of the elderly population. In contrast to histories that focus on the emergence of new and competing theories of disease causation in this period, I argue that concerns over the use of different assessment methods ensured the (...) MRC's immediate priority was standardising the ways in which researchers identified and recorded symptoms of Alzheimer's disease in potential research subjects. I detail how the rationale behind the development of standard assessment guidelines was less about arriving at a firm diagnosis and more about facilitating research by generating data that could be easily compared across the disciplines and sites that constitute modern biomedicine. Drawing on criticism of specific tests in the MRC's guidelines, which some psychiatrists argued were "middle class biased", I also show that debates over standardisation did not simply reflect concerns specific to the fields or areas of research that the MRC sought to govern. Questions about the validity of standard assessment guidelines for Alzheimer's disease embodied broader concerns about education and social class, which ensured that distinguishing normal from pathological in old age remained a contested and historically contingent process. (shrink)

Osteoporosis, a disease of bone loss associated with aging and estrogen loss, can be crippling but is ‘silent’ prior to bone fracture. Despite its disastrous health effects, high prevalence, and enormous associated health care costs, osteoporosis lacked a universally accepted definition until 1992. In the 1980s, the development of more accurate medical imaging technologies to measure bone density spurred the medical community’s need and demand for a common definition. The medical community tried, and failed, to resolve these differing definitions (...) several times at consensus conferences and through published articles. These experts finally accepted a standard definition at an international consensus conference convened by the World Health Organization in 1992. The construction of osteoporosis as a disease of quantifiable risk diagnosed by medical imaging machines reflects contemporary trends in medicine, including the quantification of disease, the risk factor model, medical disciplinary boundaries, and global standardization of medical knowledge. (shrink)

Although there are many historical and philosophical analyses of evolutionary developmental biology (EvoDevo), its development in the 1980s, when many individual or collective attempts to synthesize evolution and development were made, has not been examined in detail. This article focuses on some interdisciplinary studies during the 1980s and argues that they had important characteristics that previous historical and philosophical work has not recognized. First, we clarify how each set of studies from the 1980s integrated the results or (...) approaches from different biological fields, such as paleontology, developmental genetics, comparative morphology, experimental embryology, theoretical developmental biology, and population genetics. Second, after close examination we show that the interdisciplinary studies during the 1980s adopted different and conflicting views of genes, such as developmental-genetic, epigenetic, or population-genetic ones. We conclude that EvoDevo in the 1980s was a motley aggregation of various kinds of local integration. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analysis by comparing these early EvoDevo studies with those of the Modern Synthesis and with the present state of EvoDevo. (shrink)

Microbial diversity has become a leitmotiv of contemporary microbiology, as epitomized in the concept of the microbiome, with significant consequences for the classification of microbes. In this paper, I contrast microbiology’s current diversity ideal with its influential predecessor in the twentieth century, that of purity, as epitomized in Robert Koch’s bacteriological culture methods. Purity and diversity, the two polar opposites with regard to making sense of the microbial world, have been operationalized in microbiological practice by tools such as the “clean” (...) Petri dish versus the “dirty” Winogradsky column, the latter a container that mimics, in the laboratory, the natural environment that teems with diverse microbial life. By tracing the impact of the practices and concepts of purity and diversity on microbial classification through a history of techniques, tools, and manuals, I show the shifts in these concepts over the last century. Juxtaposing the dominant purity ideal with the more restricted, but continuously articulated, diversity ideal in microbial ecology not only provides a fresh perspective on microbial classification that goes beyond its intellectual history, but also contextualizes the present focus on diversity. By covering the period of a century, this paper outlines a revised longue durée historiography that takes its inspiration from artifacts, such as Petri dish and the Winogradsky column, and thereby simple, but influential technologies that often remain invisible. This enables the problem of historical continuity in modern science to be addressed and the accelerationist narratives of its development to be countered. (shrink)

The Animal Breeding Research Organisation in Edinburgh (ABRO, founded in 1945) was a direct ancestor of the Roslin Institute, celebrated for the cloning of Dolly the sheep. After a period of sustained growth as an institute of the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), ABRO was to lose most of its funding in 1981. This decision has been absorbed into the narrative of the Thatcherite attack on science, but in this article I show that the choice to restructure ABRO pre-dated major government (...) cuts to agricultural research, and stemmed from the ARC's wish to prioritize biotechnology in its portfolio. ABRO's management embraced this wish and campaigned against the cuts based on a promise of biotechnological innovation, shifting its focus from farm animal genetics to the production of recombinant pharmaceuticals in sheep milk. By tracing interaction between government policies, research council agendas and local strategies, I show how novel research programmes such as genetic modification could act as a lifeline for struggling institutions. (shrink)

In 1985, after nearly a decade of inconclusive professional response to public concern about misconduct in research, Congress passed legislation requiring action. Subsequent to this legislation, federal agencies and research universities adopted policies for responding to allegations of misconduct in research. Conferences, sessions at professional meetings, and special publications were organized. New educational initiatives were begun, many in response to a 1989 National Institutes of Health/ Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration requirement to include ethics instruction in training grants. (...) Notwithstanding a few key unresolved issues, such as the lack of a uniform federal definition of misconduct in research, the years since 1985 have witnessed a marked change in the professional response to misconduct in research. This paper evaluates the change since 1985 from the perspective of three key goals: 1) confronting misconduct, 2) promoting integrity and 3) ensuring integrity. While significant progress has been made in achieving the first two goals, the third remains largely unaddressed. The latter is due to the fact that researchers have not been interested in studying the integrity of their own profession. It is therefore suggested that studies are needed of routine or normal research practices and their impact on integrity for use in making decisions about research conduct policy. (shrink)

Even though agriculture was not the central thrust of planning in Mao-era China (1949–1976), starting in the 1950s, the party-state progressively nationalized land, reorganized social relations in the countryside, and instituted a universal system of wages that fundamentally reshaped rural China. Quantifying and measuring agricultural labor, in particular, developed into an increasingly important task as the state became not just the sole purveyor but also the sole provider of people’s incomes. At the heart of this measurement was the system of (...) work points. The Work Point System quantified every aspect of rural life by classifying every activity within the rural economy in terms of the number of points needed to perform it. Putatively, every activity was thus reduced to a single number (usually between 1 and 10 for men; and 1 and 9 for women), accounted for on a daily basis. As a result, people’s relationship to numbers and quantification changed in new and fundamental ways. In this paper, I explore the history of the Work Point System, tracing its rationale and how it came to influence rural life and rural imaginations. (shrink)

The article continues to study the topic of the uprising of the image of the Kyiv philosophical school as a prominent leading Ukrainian participant in the world philosophical process of the Cold War period in the scientific and socio-political thought of the Western block, especially in the USA, Canada and Western Germany, in the second half of the twentieth century. The history of the formation of this image by scholars of the democratic world, mainly from the Ukrainian diaspora, can be (...) conditionally divided into the following stages: 1. Scientific international interaction between the USSR and the Western bloc during the transition of the USSR from Khrushchew's "thaw" to neo-Stalinist "stagnation" (early 1960s – early 1970s); 2. Intensification of the ideological confrontation between the USSR and the Western bloc countries during transition of the USSR from said "stagnation" to Gorbachev's "perestroika" (early1970s – second half of the 1980s). In contrast to the first separate critical assessments by diaspora philosophers P. Fedenko, D. Soloviy and their colleagues of philosophy in the Ukrainian SSR in the 1950s and early 1960s, primarily articles of T. Shevcenko by the director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR D. Ostryanin (1952 – 1962), the image of the Kyiv philosophical school in the 1970s and 1980s was significantly emphasized abroad. The political aspect of this image, dominant in which became, primarily due to its popularization by the Canadian philosopher T. Zakydalsky, the figure of a prisoner of conscience V. Lisovyi, was supplemented in the same and subsequent decades by the scientific aspect. In the memoirs of the Soviet prisoner of conscience and political immigrant L. Plyushch and in the publications of scientists from the US M. H. Teeter and B. Vitvitsky the image of the said school was generally drawn on the basis of their study of the history of the mentioned institute and the directions of its work in the 1940s – 1970s. At the same time, philosophers of the Ukrainian diaspora K. Mytrovych, W. Oleksiuk, W. Shayan and some their colleagues critically assessed the Ukrainian historical and philosophical achievements of this institute in the 1950s and 1980s. (shrink)

This paper aims to advance the concept of medical pluralism in reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa by exploring the multiplicity of antenatal practices in Villa Maria Mission Hospital in Uganda. Through analyzing various archival sources and oral history interviews, the paper zooms in on women’s experiences with providing and utilizing different antenatal care practices, and how and why different practices co-existed and changed over time. The paper examines the particular form that medicalization of antenatal care took in Villa Maria Hospital, (...) other healthcare providers that local women could opt for, and tensions and cooperations between hospital staff and “traditional birth attendants” from the villages. This paper thus argues that acceptance and resistance to different practices and medicines available in the hospital and local communities influenced the way medical pluralism operated in this particular context but also pays attention to broader socioeconomic, cultural, colonial, and environmental factors that shaped its development. (shrink)

The subject of this study are the architectural and urban planning projects of the scientific town of Pushchino of the USSR Academy of Sciences, developed in the second half of the 20th century. It focuses on high-rise accents planned in the master plans from the 1950s to the 1980s, which, though never realized, played a crucial organizing role in the city's developmental compositions over the years. These "paper" projects significantly influenced the actual architectural ensemble of the city. Specific changes (...) in the creative concepts are correlated with personnel shifts within the team that developed the projects for Pushchino. The dynamics and direction of architectural searches are considered within the broad context of the history of Soviet architecture and are compared with global processes and the positions of architectural theorists and philosophers. The research employs a formal and comparative analysis method, structured historically to segment the creative process into periods that reflect both the subject of the research and the broader historical and architectural context of the era. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the comprehensive analysis of numerous urban planning and architectural projects, gathered through extensive research in state and personal archives. This allowed for the first time to consider the work of architects on the planning projects of Pushchino as a dynamic process, revealing changes that occurred at each of its stages. Through the analysis of the development of “paper” dominants, wandering from project to project, changes in the global urban planning concepts of the city were traced. Consequently, the article provides insights into the development of urban planning in Pushchino, viewed through the lens of high-rise accents. It also paves the way for further research into other aspects of the process, contributing to a more comprehensive and profound understanding of urban architectural development. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s Punitive Society lectures make clear that, for him, punishment presents a critical problem. On the one hand, Foucault struggles to develop a conceptual vocabulary adequate to punishment, and particularly to the prison-form as a penal development. On the other hand, the Punitive Society lectures clearly indicate the stakes of punishment. How, Foucault asks, might punishment focalize relations of power? How might it serve as a field of struggle? What does a punitive technology of power look like, if it (...) exists? Indeed, across numerous works from the 1970s and 1980s, Foucault traces the varying place of penalties within penal and punitive tactics, showing how punishment reciprocates historical relations of power and problems of power. Yet it remains necessary to develop Foucault’s account of punishment, which is never formalized. In this paper, I develop punishment as a polyvalent technology. Foucauldian punishment may be an analytic, a technology, and—in the allegorical “punitive city” from Discipline and Punish—a diagram of power. I argue that Foucauldian punitive power seizes the body in the name of an authority or a reified power to subordinate individuals to that authority, and with an objective to correct the individual’s relation to a multiplicity. It operates “above,” at the level of, and in “fragments” of embodied individuals. Further, with Foucault’s account of the “punitive city,” we find a theoretical model in whichpunishment becomes the ordering force of the social, and therein a diagram of punitive power exerted in extensive form across the social field. (shrink)

Interview of Vsevolod Khoma with Professor Tamara Yashchuk within the framework of the research program “Ukrainian Philosophy of the 60s–80s of the 20th Century” of the Student Society of Oral History of Philosophy.

This study examines resourceful creativity in fuel choices and kiln upgrades in porcelain manufacturing in postwar China (1950s–80s). Defined as frugal strategies of material substitution, equipment appropriation, and skilled labor deployment, resourceful creativity enabled factories to control costs while improving output and quality. Focusing on Jingdezhen’s state-owned factories, the research traces two major energy transitions: from wood to coal (1950s–60s) and from coal to heavy oil (1970s–80s). The study foregrounds bottom-up resourcefulness within broader East Asian contexts. Kiln builders and operators (...) in Jingdezhen drew on historical handicraft practices, Japanese models, and European experience. The shift from wood to coal, prompted by scarcity, generated strategies such as collectivized wood supply and the creation of “kiln wood stations.” Factory workers and technicians reconstructed kilns, revised blueprints, and applied lineage-based craft knowledge. International exchanges further spurred adaptation: gas-fueled tunnel kilns imported from Czechoslovakia were “digested” and modified to burn coal, reflecting constraints in local infrastructure. The later transition to heavy oil, shaped by the expansion of China’s petroleum industry and the pursuit of higher product quality, likewise demanded hybrid fuel strategies to mitigate shortages and costs. By highlighting hands-on experience and grassroots ingenuity, this study underscores the active role of workers and technicians in shaping technological development and negotiating top-down directives. Resourceful practices of tinkering, emulation, and improvement reveal the entanglement of technological change with socialist political structuring in industrial development. (shrink)

This article examines the emergence of video home systems (VHS) in socialist Romania within the broader context of state-controlled cinema industry and through the conceptual lens of “paracinema.” Rather than viewing video as a disruption in film consumption, the study explores films as both cultural products and commodities. The analysis addresses the social construc­tion of paracinema repertoires in a broader context and uses discourse analysis to explore ruptures and continuities in the polarised framing of films. The results show an intersection (...) of socialist cinema cultures and VHS repertoires, revealing a continuity in moral debates around popular film genres. The discus­sion also reveals how the circulation of videotapes in the black market and the emergence of alternative VHS film repertoires exposed the tensions between state policies and public demand, ultimately reshaping the social construction of cinema cultures under socialism. (shrink)

Cet essai se penche sur l’apparition récente des années 1980 comme cadre d’une grande partie des séries de la « nouvelle télévision ». Je soutiens que cette référence vise à exploiter et à présenter les années 1980 comme une sorte de milieu mythologique pour notre présente compréhension de soi. Comprendre ce point sur les années 1980 et la mythologie nous permet de situer certaines idées ontologiques et philosophiques concernant la nouvelle télévision. Dans ce qui suit, je développe cette approche sur (...) deux fronts : d’abord, avec une discussion plus générale des spécificités philosophiques du média que constitue la nouvelle télévision, et, ensuite avec un examen plus spécifique de la série Black Monday (Showtime, 2019-). (shrink)