Max Weber and Georg Simmel are considered as ideal-typical founders of sociology. Whereas Simmel pleaded for a large conception of sociology, which would include the epistemological and metaphysical issues as well, Max Weber explicitly excluded philosophical questions from the domain of sociology. A philosophical reading of Max Weber’s sociology, which uncovers his philosophy in the margins of ...

This study analyzes how teens represent themselves through their profile photographs on a popular nonymous chat site. Using visual content analysis methods, we analyzed 400 profile photographs, controlling for the self-reported gender and the apparent race of the photographic subject. The analysis finds significant differences in gaze, posture, dress, and distance from the camera according to g...

A pattern found in many marketing systems, “male breadwinning,” is contingent upon overlapping and shared ideologies, which influence the economic organization and thus the type and number of relationships in those systems. Implementing a mixed-methods research methodology, this article continues and extends previous work in macromarketing on the interplay of markets, ideology, socio-economic o...

The history of the colonial world is interpreted differently by western historians and “nativist” historians and ethnologists. The colonialist perspective of history often disregards an entire phase of history before the colonial period, exalting the colonialist enterprise. On the other hand, ethnologists and native historians stress indigenous sources of history, including oral accounts. The p...

In this paper, I present a narratological approach to the BioShock trilogy of games. I look at three narratological levels as they relate to space. At the level of the storyline, a large part of the game revolves around the piecemeal construction of the narrative of the game space – the narrative of the player's avatar is developed alongside the narrative of what happened to the space he is mov...

According to Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding, an audience member, based on their individual ideological perspectives, can read media texts in one of three ways: dominant, negotiated, or resistant. Hall’s theory, however, also implies that the producer will always encode a dominant or hegemonic message. Given semantically messy texts like music videos, however, producers now have t...

The widely shocking attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 was interpreted differently by various institutions worldwide, ranging from America's legitimate motive to begin a 'war on terror' to defend her 'very freedom', to a pretext for Bush administration to pursue G. H. W. Bush's temptation for 'a new world order'. Various institutions, therefore, made use of their...

While aspects of Halliday’s theory have been adopted for the study of ideology in discourse in particular via Critical Discourse Analysis these applications of his ideas have not attempted to bring the full weight of Halliday’s model to the problem of understanding the phenomenon and practical manifestation of ideology. A consideration of Halliday’s model reveals, first of all, that Halliday, l...

In two papers in the mid-seventies, Quine has discussed an ontological debacle, the reduction of ontology to an ontology of pure sets only. This debacle, which weakened Quine’s interest in ontology, is the natural outcome of ontological relativity, or, more precisely, the proxy-function argument. It is explained how Quine unavoidably came to this conclusion. Moreover, it is argued that the resu...