Abstract Legal positivists maintain that the legality of a rule is fundamentally determined by social facts. Yet for much legal history, ordinary officials used terminology in ways seem inconsistent with positivism. Judges regularly cited, analyzed, and predicated their decisions on ‘laws justice,’ which they claimed had universal import. This practice, though well-documented historians, has re...

Representations of quantitative geography, both by practitioners and by others, have tended to associate quantification with empiricism, positivism, and the social and academic status quo. Qualitative geography, by contrast is represented as nonempiricist or postempiricist, sensitive to complexity, contextual, and capable of empowering nonmainstream academic approaches and social groups. Attemp...

In this article we revisit Alvin Gouldner’s The Corning Crisis o,f Wvstern Sociology ( I 970). I n part, this article is an attempt to apply Gouldner’s own lessons about the sociology of knowledge to his own work, situating it with respcct to the dominant epistemological unconscious of late 1960s American sociology as well as thc broader historical context of a still-vibrant Fordist inode of so...

This paper starts out with the discussion of two metaphysical assumptions on which IS research can be based, namely positivism and constructionism. While positivism believes in the existence of an objective and measurable world, constructionism holds that the world is a social construct. Depending on the metaphysical basis, the IS researcher chooses a methodological approach. Traditionally, pos...