Description
Review essay Knowledge Flows and Chinese Social Theory. Xiaoying Qi. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. (Hbk) 260 pp. £85.
Abstract In a globalizing world, the aim of social science has to be the increase of mutual understanding between peoples and cultures that are thrown together, whether they want it or not, to overcome conflict and to enhance the possibilities of cooperative responses to the global challenges that confront them all. It is the urgency of the need to cooperate under current conditions that makes intensive examination of the impediments to it so important. Ethnocentrism, the inability to view another culture except through the lens of one’s own, is the major impediment that comparative studies seek to remove. A particular aim is to correct the widely acknowledged limitations of dominant social science concepts embedded in the historical experience of the West. Xiaoying Qi provides us with an exemplary study of the way the wealth of Chinese intellectual traditions can be brought into critical engagement with Western paradigms to develop common conceptual resources that will be to the benefit of all peoples.
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Martin Albrow FAcSS, Honorary Vice-President of the British Sociological Association, Founding Editor of International Sociology, Emeritus Professor of University of Wales, former Visiting Professor in the UK, USA, China, and Senior Fellow at LSE, UK, and University of Bonn, Germany. He is internationally known for his pioneering work on social and cultural globalization. His The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity (1996) won the European Amalfi Prize in 1997. Other books include Bureaucracy (1970), Max Weber’s Construction of Social Theory (1990), Do Organizations Have Feelings? (1997), Sociology: The Basics (1999), Global Age Essays on Social and Cultural Change (2014).
Cite this article
Martin Albrow
Chinese social theory in global social science
Journal of China in Comparative Perspective
Vol.1 Issue 1. 2015, p146-155
DOI: http://doi.org/10.24103/JCCP.2015.1.9
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