Speaking Sphere of scientific research
Vocabulary to use
to do/ to conduct research
to make contribution to
to study/ to investigate/ to make studies
to put forward an idea
to suggest a theory/ a hypothesis
to develop/ to modify a theory
to predict/ to forecast/ to foresee
to accumulate knowledge
a new area of research
latest/ recent achievements/ developments
a (an) outstanding/ prominent/ world-known scientist/ researcher
Answer the questions:
What is the sphere of your research?
What particular research are you going to conduct?
What do you study?
Do you have any hypothesis for your research?
What are the latest achievements in your sphere of science?
Can you name some outstanding scientists in your field of research? What contribution have they made?
What further developments can you predict in your sphere of research?
Speak about your sphere of research.
Work in pairs: ask for and give information on your field of science and research.
Grammar notes
Revision of tenses
(на примере правильного глагола to study - изучать)
|
Present |
Past |
Future |
Simple |
study studies (she, he, it) |
studied |
will study |
Progressive |
a is studying are |
w as studying were |
will be studying |
Perfect |
h ave studied has |
had studied |
will have studied |
Perfect Progressive |
h ave been studying has |
had been studying |
will have been studying |
m
Read the sentences from sociological works, underline the verb forms and name the tense they are used in. Translate the sentences into Russian.
Sociology is the youngest of social sciences.
Sociological research provides educators, planners, lawmakers, administrators, developers, business leaders.
Other social sciences include political science, economics and anthropology, including physical anthropology, and cultural or social anthropology.
All sociological research makes use of the scientific method, but the specific techniques of data collection and analysis differ from one sociological study to another.
It was Spencer who invented Darwinism and who gave it such a charge that it lasted for at least a half a century and colored the whole of social drought.
Thus we consistently regard a society as an entity.
Weber's dissertation as well as his post-doctoral work were in legal history.
Sombart, in his discussions of the genesis of capitalism has distinguished between the satisfaction of needs and acquisition as the two great leading principles in economic history.
The classic organization theory generally studies the formal organizations that have the artificial genesis and does not almost touch upon the organizations of the natural (non-intentional) and combined (natural-artificial) origin, including families, tribes, etc.
Every human is born, lives, works and dies in social organizations (family, kinder-garden , school, college, working collective, city, country etc.), that make him obey their laws and the quality of human’s life depends on the humanism of these laws.
Kont, Spencer, Durkheim, Sorokin, Parsons examined society as whole social system and they believed, that their followers will continue the system (holos) approach.
Frank H. Knight's "no specifically human motive is economic" applies not only to social life in general, but even to economic life itself.
The tendency to barter, on which Adam Smith so confidently relied for his picture of primitive man, is not a common tendency of the human being in his economic activities, but a most infrequent one.
Within the nations we are witnessing a development under which the economic system ceases to lay down the law to society and the primacy of society over that system is secured.
The problem of freedom arises on two different levels: the institutional and the moral or religious.
On the institutional level, regulation both extends and restricts freedom; only the balance of the freedoms lost and won is significant.
The very possibility of freedom is in question.
How does man become mature and able to exist as a human being in a complex society?
As Poincare observed a half-century ago, sociologists have long been hierophants of methodology, thus, perhaps, diverting talents and energies from the task of building substantive theory.
The economist, the political scientist, and the psychologist have increasingly come to recognize that what they have systematically taken as given, as data, may be sociologically problematical.
Durkheim remains to this day, along with Max Weber, one of the two prominent sociologists of religion. What the sacred is in Durkheim's thought, charisma is in large degree in Weber's.
Were both men preoccupied by religion and its role in the society?
From this common preoccupation has emerged most of the central propositions of the contemporary sociology of religion.
From these repeated experiences, he little by little arrives at the idea that each of us has a double, another self, which in determined conditions has the power of leaving the organism where it resides and of going roaming at a distance.
Then we have explained nothing of religion until we have found whence this idea comes, to what it corresponds and what can have aroused it in the mind.
Later on, we shall have occasion to fix precisely the meaning which this word expresses; for the time being, it will suffice to say that it is the distinctive character of every sacred being.
However, there are certain Australian tribes which periodically celebrate rites in honour of fabulous ancestors whom tradition places at the beginning of time.
We have seen that Spencer has already contested the reality of this so-called instinct. Since animals clearly distinguish living bodies from dead ones, it seemed to him impossible that man, the heir of the animals, should not have had this same faculty of discernment from the very first.
A science is a discipline which, in whatever manner it is conceived, is always applied to some real data. Physics and chemistry are sciences because physico-chemical phenomena are real, and of a reality which does not depend upon the truths which these sciences show. There is a psychological science because there are really consciousnesses which do not hold their right of existence from the psychologist.
This doctrine rests, in part, upon a certain number of linguistic postulates which have been and still are very much questioned.
But we shall leave aside those questions, the discussion of which requires a special competence as a philologist, and address ourselves directly to the general principles of the system.
That men have an interest in knowing the world which surrounds them, and consequently that their reflection should have been applied to it at an early date, is something that everyone will readily admit.
Things become nothing less than living and thinking beings, minds or personalities like those which the religious imagination has made into the agents of cosmic phenomena.
Every morning the sun mounts in the horizon, every evening it sets; every month the moon goes through the same cycle; the river flows in an uninterrupted manner in its bed; the same seasons periodically bring back the same sensations.
During this time, the American tradition continued to develop with an independence which it has kept up until very recent times.
The works of Spencer and Gillen especially have exercised a considerable influence, not only because they were the oldest, but also because the facts were there presented in a systematic form, which was of a nature to give a direction to later studies, and to stimulate speculation.
Sociology is an extremely variegated discipline. Differences of theoretical outlook and methodology split it into numerous competing traditions and schools of thought.
Much of the substance of Parsons's later writings on power consists of a reaffirmation of this position, and an elaboration of the analogy between power and money.
Money itself has no intrinsic utility; it has “value” only in so far as it is commonly recognized and accepted as a standard form of exchange. It is only in primitive monetary systems, when money is made of precious, metal, that it comes close to being a commodity in its own right.
In the subsequent discussion, my principal interest will be to comment on Parsons's analysis of power as such.
There is a great deal of difference between the sort of interpretation of social and historical change which Parsons presents in Societies, and one which follows a Marxist standpoint.
But it is an accepted fact of political life that those who occupy formal authority positions are sometimes puppets who have their strings pulled from behind the scenes.
UNIT 2