Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new type of ba, called ‘‘vocation ba’’ and to describe the main aspects of this type of ba as well as its methods. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews the literature in the field of self-transcending knowledge and the concept of ba and shows the main aspects for the design of a new methodology and framework. Additionally it analy...

What does it mean to live for sociology, today? In attempting to answer this question I return to Max Weber’s famous lectures delivered toward the end of his life—one on science as a vocation and the other on politics as a vocation. He presented ‘‘Science as a Vocation’’ in November 1917 toward the end of World War I and the more pessimistic ‘‘Politics as a Vocation’’ in January 1919 after Germ...

The purpose of this paper is to sketch some of the implications, prospective and retrospective, of the primacy of method in the present study of politics and to do it by way of a contrast, which is deliberately heightened, but hopefully not caricatured, between the vocation of the “methodist”1 and the vocation of the theorist. My discussion will be centered around the kinds of activity involved...

Copyright © 2014, Kowsar Corp.; Published by Kowsar Corp. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. During my much needed vacation in northern Iran, at the first leg of the journey, we stayed at a hotel complex ...