Sociology
-Saturday, September 13, 2014
Based in England, Mary Douglas developed the explicit tenets of social thought by showing that business organizations operate on metaphors of nature, such as right-handedness, and that the notion of a free market is dependent on the metaphor of an invisible hand. Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky showed that personal assessments of risk, such as risk in eating food with pesticides, are directly related to larger views of the world, specifically the moral validity of large business. Robert Bellah showed that concepts of American civil institutions were directly connected to Christian religious ideas and Jeffrey Alexander showed that debates about civil society are predicated on metaphors of honesty and group membership.