Michael Jonas is a senior researcher in the Sociology department of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna (Austria). Following a praxeological perspective, he is currently researching social inequality, injustice and unsustainability in world society. Using the enactment of the so-called Fairtrade market in Austria as empirical research field, for instance, he is presently looking at whether this phenomena might be interpreted as part of a moralization of economic markets or as example of an (ongoing) economic colonialisation of morals. In doing so, Jonas seeks to combine a wide range of approaches from various disciplines like sociology, philosophy, economic sciences, political sciences and geography.
Geography and other social sciences like sociology, anthropology on the one hand, and philosophy and other humanities on the other, engage conceptually and empirically with the spatiality of human societies. There is now a range of very different theoretical perspectives that are incommensurable, spanning from phenomenology-oriented endeavors — where the relationality of intentionality-driven space is acknowledged [...]
In this article, I make a plea for a combination of Ted Schatzki’s and Jean Hillier’s approaches. After a short introduction, I identify and discuss central aspects of Schatzki’s social site approach and Hillier’s strategic planning approach. I then argue that Schatzki’s social site approach might be more convincing and usable for practical research in geography if aspects of power, which are central to Hillier’s argumentation, are integrated. Following Lukes’s (2005) so-called radical view of power, various concepts are [...]
