Content Standard

The students demonstrate an understanding of the emergence of the Social Sciences and the different
disciplines key concepts and approaches in the Social Sciences

Learning Standard
 *Apply the social science ideas and its importance in examining socio-cultural, economic,
and political conditions. a. Psychoanalysis b. Rational Choice c. Institutionalism d.
Feminist Theory e. Hermeneutical Phenomenology f. Human-Environment Systems
(Week 11-12)

Concept
a. Psychoanalysis
How it works?
The psychoanalyst and patient meet three to five times a week. This intensive schedule of one-on-
one sessions helps establish the psychoanalyst's office as a place where the patient can safely free-associate
— that is, talk about whatever comes to mind, whenever it comes to mind — and develop a deep bond with
the analyst. The frequent meetings also encourage the emergence of the patient's full range of personality
traits and behavior patterns, an important step on the path to self-understanding. Use of the couch, a
holdover from Freud's day, is no longer required. Some people find that lying down facilitates free
association and helps them focus their thoughts inward. Others find it more helpful to sit face to face with
the analyst.
Psychoanalysis is a collaborative effort. As the patient free-associates, the analyst listens carefully
and helps her grasp the underlying unconscious sources of her difficulties. To encourage this awareness, the
analyst not only interprets ongoing patterns (interpretations the patient is welcome to amend, reject, or
supplement), but also encourages the patient to re-experience them in the safety of the analytic setting. In
psychoanalytic parlance, this is known as "transference." The patient relives her life's story by transferring to
the analyst feelings and attitudes she originally experienced in her relationships with other people.
For example, a woman consistently arrives 10 or 15 minutes late for her appointments, and the
analyst learns that she also does this with her boss and her husband. By examining the feelings the analyst
arouses as she talks about her reasons for being late — or perhaps realizing her anger with authority figures
— she can begin to become conscious of her motives for wanting to make others wait for her or become
angry at her.
Psychoanalysis is a lengthy process, usually requiring several years — 5.7 years, on average,
according to one survey — to resolve long-standing difficulties, such as self-defeating behavior patterns or
problems forming personal relationships. One reason it can take so many sessions is that, like old habits,
maladaptive life patterns "die hard." There may be many variations to work through. The hope is that over
time, the individual can recover lost emotional connections, give up unhealthy ones, and adapt more
effectively to her current circumstances.
Psychoanalysis may help with such complaints as "I have difficulty finding a suitable partner," "I
never feel excited about my friendships," or "I keep missing deadlines at work and sabotaging my career."
Less intensive psychotherapy may be more appropriate for short-term concerns such as "I'm very sad that
my child is leaving for college," unless these feelings are related to longer-standing behavior patterns.
Distressing symptoms such as phobias, anxieties, and depression also respond to psychoanalysis, sometimes
with the help of a medication.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/Psychoanalysis_Theory_and_treatment

b. Rational Choice
Self-Interest and the Invisible Hand
Adam Smith was one of the first economists to develop the ideas of rational choice theory through
his studies of self-interest and the invisible hand theory. Smith discusses the invisible hand theory in his
book “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” published in 1776.
The invisible hand theory is first built on the actions of self-interest. The invisible hand theory and
later developments in the rational choice theory both refute negative misconceptions that may be associated
with self-interest. Instead, these concepts suggest that rational actors acting with their own self-interests in
mind can actually create benefits for the economy at large.
The invisible hand theory is based on self-interest, rationality, and the rational choice theory. The
invisible hand theory states that individuals driven by self-interest and rationality will make decisions that
lead to positive benefits for the whole economy. Therefore, economists who believe in the invisible hand
theory lobby for less government intervention and more free-market exchange opportunities.
Arguments Against Rational Choice Theory
There are many economists who do not believe in the rational choice theory and are not proponents
of the invisible hand theory. Dissenters have pointed out that individuals do not always make rational utility-
maximizing decisions. Therefore, across the field of behavioral economics economists can study both the
processes and results of rational and irrational decision making.
Nobel laureate Herbert Simon proposed the theory of bounded rationality, which says that people are
not always able to obtain all the information they would need to make the best possible decision. Moreover,
economist Richard Thaler's idea of mental accounting shows how people behave irrationally by placing
greater value on some dollars than others, even though all dollars have the same value. They might drive to
another store to save $10 on a $20 purchase but they would not drive to another store to save $10 on a
$1,000 purchase.
An Example Against Rational Choice Theory
While rational choice theory is logical and easy to understand, it is often contradicted in the real
world. For example, political factions that were in favor of the Brexit vote held on June 24, 2016, used
promotional campaigns that were based on emotion rather than rational analysis. These campaigns led to the
semi-shocking and unexpected result of the vote, when the United Kingdom officially decided to leave the
European Union. The financial markets then responded in kind with shock, wildly increasing short-term
volatility, as measured by the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX).
Further, research conducted by Christopher Simms of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada,
shows that when people are anxious, they fail to make rational decisions. Stressors that produce anxiety have
been shown to actually suppress parts of the brain that aid in rational decision making.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rational-choice-theory.asp

c. Institutionalism
The study of institutions has a long pedigree. It draws insights from previous work in a wide array
of disciplines, including economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. The
reappearance of interest in institutions in the early 1980s followed a familiar pattern: it was a reaction to
dominant strands of thought that neglected institutions, historical context, and process in favour of general
theorizing. Accordingly, institutionalism is frequently characterized by the attention it gives to history. The
institutionalism that emerged in the 1980s is called new institutionalism (NI), but it is less “new” than it is a
restatement of previous scholarship. The following discussion traces the development of institutionalism
from the 19th century to the emergence of NI in the last decades of the 20th century.
European Institutionalism During The 19th Century
A full overview of the institutionalist tradition would go back to Aristotle’s discussion of regime
types (politeia). More recent interest in institutions emerged during the 19th century among the German
historical economists (GHE), also called the institutional economists. Providing a critical response to the
universal theories of the classical economists, these scholars disparaged deductive work, which they
considered to be self-referential mathematical modeling. They argued that economic life is better understood
through empirical work rather than through logical philosophy.
Their key insight was the need for historically and sociologically informed empirical analysis of
reality. The earliest figure from this group was the German economist Wilhelm Roscher. His work insisted
on the importance of context—historical, social, and institutional—for understanding the laws of political
economy, economic behaviour, and the empirical diversity of social life. Early research focused on the
relationship between the social and economic organization of society, stages of development, and
evolutionary processes. Bitter conflicts with their Marxist contemporaries (followers of the theories of Karl
Marx) notwithstanding, some scholars have come to see a close analytical affinity between the two
traditions.
It is customary to divide the GHE into three generations: Early, Younger, and Last. The latter is
noteworthy because it encapsulates some of the work of the German sociologist Max Weber, who was
influenced by early GHE. Weber is perhaps the most influential modern institutionalist. Contemporary
institutional works that posit institutions as an independent and non-epiphenomenal variable are indebted to
Weber’s theorizing a political realm that is autonomous from economics and ideas. In his discussion of
the state and bureaucracy, he proposes a macrosociological theory of institutions.
Institutionalist insights are also present in Weber’s theory of authority. For
Weber, charismatic authority is inherently transient. As charisma exhausts itself and becomes routinized,
traditional or rational-legal forms of authority take its place. With routinization, social relations and
interactions become increasingly regular, predictable, and impersonal. Under modern capitalism, these take
on a rational-legal form and become more extensive and elaborate. Some usages of the
term institutionalization are thus a subset of Weber’s process of routinization.
Early 20th-Century American Institutionalism
Institutionalism appeared in American scholarship during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the
works of the American institutional economists (AIE). The American economist and sociologist Thorstein
Veblen was a pivotal figure who criticized the neoclassical approach for its focus on individuals. He argued
that individuals are shaped by their institutional and sociocultural context. He emphasized habit, instinct,
and emulation as alternatives to utility-calculation models of behaviour. Veblen theorized institutional
persistence and developed several mechanisms of change, including conflict between institutions, exogenous
shocks, and the interplay between routines and the variable and volatile action of agents.
Although Veblen embraced an organicist approach to social science, favouring the
biological metaphor of evolution over the physical metaphor of mechanics deployed by economists, he was
explicitly antifunctionalist. He raised the possibility of social breakdown and described history as an
unfolding process that is cumulative but also crisis-ridden, rather than as a self-balancing smoothly changing
system.
A later figure among the AIE was the American economist John R. Commons, who in the 1920s and
’30s rejected the framework of the classical economists in which providence endows individuals with
freedom to enter into relations of economic exchange and economics is separate from politics. Commons
argued that economics was a series of transactions that were made possible by institutional supports. He
identified three types of transactions: rationing, managerial, and negotiated (associated
with communism, fascism, and capitalism respectively). Institutions have to guarantee liberty
and property before negotiated transactions can occur. He defined institutions as the working rules
of collective action that are laid down and enforced by various organizations including the state. Institutions
produce order by creating expectations toward which individuals can orient their economic behaviour. This
interpretation of institutions is at the heart of rational choice institutionalism (RCI) and the new institutional
economics (NIE).
Mid-20th-Century American Institutionalism
 An anthropological version of economic institutionalism emerged later in the work of Karl Polanyi.
Influenced by the GHE, he argued that economic relations are historically contingent and cannot be
understood outside of their social context. For Polanyi, economics is always embedded in society. Rather
than economic relations producing social integration, Polanyi argued, the social background, and institutions
in particular, integrated the economy. According to this logic, markets are not the product of spontaneous
acts of exchange. Instead, personal-level acts of exchange produce prices only under a system of price-
making markets—a system that cannot arise solely from random acts of exchange. Historically, the market
system is a relatively recent innovation and only one of several, contingent institutional solutions to the
problem of economic integration. Additional forms of integration are reciprocity (e.g., lend-lease) and
redistribution (e.g., the Soviet Union).
Polanyi defined institutions broadly as uniting, stabilizing, and giving structure to the economic
process. Although economic institutions such as price and money are important, Polanyi also stressed the
importance of noneconomic institutions such as religion and government. Haggling over price and
individual choice are understood as a product of institutions; this foreshadows later sociological
institutionalists (SI) who see human behaviour as following a “logic of appropriateness” and institutions as
creating identities. Like his predecessors, Polanyi rejected the idea that contemporary economic science can
universally capture economic relations.
Institutionalism also appeared in political science during the mid-20th century, when American
political science was dominated by the study of democratic progress in the United States. Analysis of other
countries was rare. Nevertheless, theorists such as Carl J. Friedrich focused on institutions in their cross-
national work on constitutionalism. For Friedrich, constitutionalism was characterized by both a concern for
individual autonomy and institutional arrangements—divided government and federalism—to prevent the
concentration of power, especially in the state. Institutions are the rules of politics and the instruments of
their enforcement. However, Friedrich was careful to note that institutions must reflect social and political
reality, and without belief in their legitimacy they are greatly weakened. Friedrich sharply contrasted
modern constitutionalism from nonconstitutional systems such as totalitarianism, and his work on the latter
influenced an entire generation of Sovietologists. Finally, he was also interested in questions of institutional
crafting, although he was agnostic about the existence of a “universal common denominator” for
institutional design. Friedrich’s insights can be seen in both HI and RCI.
Institutionalism appeared in sociology with the emergence of organizational science (OS), which was
a response to the rapid growth in the size of firms starting in the 1860s. The earliest and most influential
figure was Chester Irving Barnard, who in the 1930s argued that an organization is a complex system of
cooperation and highlighted the need to understand the behaviour of the individuals that compose it. He
identified a disconnect between an organization’s conscious system of coordination (formal aspects) and its
unconscious processes (informal aspects). The latter include customs, habits, attitudes, and understandings.
The role of the executive is to create open communication and inducements for individual members.
Barnard stressed the importance of nonmaterial inducements, which facilitated individuals’ carrying
out orders without consciously questioning authority. From this perspective, a manager directs the values of
the organization so that individuals work toward a common purpose. He also argued that organizational
forms vary across organizations because the configuration of individuals is unique to each organization, as is
the appropriate organizational solution.
Institutionalism Revisited
After World War II, institutionalism lost some of its prominence in the social sciences, displaced by
theories focusing on social structures or individual behaviour. In the 1980s, however, research on social
structures led to a revival of interest in institutions and the emergence of new institutionalism (NI). Theorists
of comparative politics suggested that the state was autonomous and called for bringing the state back in as
an explanatory variable. The study of institutions was significantly advanced with research in political
economy on the state-led development of the Asian NIEs, as well as institutional reforms in the developed
countries. Researchers also became increasingly interested in cross-national comparison of institutions, with
a view to understanding the process of democratization. Finally, the global expansion of capitalism
and European Union (EU) integration led to significant research demonstrating the role of institutions as
intermediaries between structures and outcomes.
 Some social scientists explicitly referenced earlier institutional works in their call for bringing
institutions back in. This new body of work that came to be labelled NI sought to investigate among other
things the interaction of society and institutions, the sources of institutional coherence, how historical
processes lead to delayed outcomes, and nonutilitarian models of behaviour.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/institutionalism

d. Feminist Theory
Smith argued that instead of beginning sociological analysis from the abstract point of view of
institutions or systems, women’s lives could be more effectively examined if one began from the
“actualities” of their lived experience in the immediate local settings of everyday/everynight life. She asked,
what are the common features of women’s everyday lives? From this standpoint, Smith observed that
women’s position in modern society is acutely divided by the experience of dual consciousness. Every day
women crossed a tangible dividing line when they went from the “particularizing work in relation to
children, spouse, and household” to the abstract, institutional world of text-mediated work, or in their
dealings with schools, medical systems, or government bureaucracies. In the abstract world of institutional
life, the actualities of local consciousness and lived life are “obliterated” (Smith, 1977). While the standpoint
of women is grounded in bodily, localized, “here and now” relationships between people — due to their
obligations in the domestic sphere — society is organized through “relations of ruling,” which translate the
substance of actual lived experiences into abstract bureaucratic categories. Power and rule in society,
especially the power and rule that constrain and coordinate the lives of women, operate through a
problematic “move into transcendence” that provides accounts of social life as if it were possible to stand
outside of it. Smith argued that the abstract concepts of sociology, at least in the way that sociology was
taught in the 1960s and 1970s, only contributed to the problem.
https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontosociology2ndedition/chapter/chapter-1-an-introduction-to-
sociology/#section1.3.

e. Hermeneutical Phenomenology
Hermeneutic phenomenology is a research method used in qualitative research in the fields of
education and other human sciences, for example nursing science. It is a widely used method example in
Scandinavia, and Van Manen is well known for his hermeneutic phenomenological method. In many studies
the hermeneutic phenomenological method is inarticulate or ambiguous. Researchers generally lack a
common understanding of what this method actually is. One reason for that is that the expression
“hermeneutic phenomenological method” is contradiction in terms. Hermeneutics and phenomenology have
their own distinct history. Hermeneutics and phenomenology as philosophical disciplines have their own
distinct aims and orientations. Hermeneutic is orientated to historical and relative meanings. Phenomenology
in Husserlian sense is orientated to universal and absolute essences. Martin Heidegger connects
hermeneutics and phenomenology in very sophisticated manner as hermeneutical phenomenology and he
provides a very specific definition of his brand of phenomenology. For Heidegger, hermeneutical
phenomenology is the research of the meaning of the Being as a fundamental ontology. However, this kind
of phenomenology is of no use for educational qualitative research.
https://journals.sfu.ca/pie/index.php/pie/article/view/214#:~:text=Hermeneutic%20phenomenology%20is%20a
%20research,sciences%2C%20for%20example%20nursing%20science.&text=Hermeneutic%20is%20orientated%20to
%20historical,to%20universal%20and%20absolute%20essences.

f. Human-Environment Systems
Human-environment systems Systems which combine both human and natural components to show
complex interactions, and feedback between them, are called human-environment systems. The most
internationally accepted framework for studying such systems is the DPSIR model (drivers, pressures, state,
impact, response). This framework for human-environment systems recognises the human activities which
place pressure on the environment and how these pressures modify the current state of the atmosphere,
hydrosphere, lithosphere and biosphere. This leads to impacts on the environment as well as on social and
economic systems. In turn, human society attempts to problem-solve in order to remove, reduce or prevent
the drivers and pressures, restore the state of the environment and mitigate impacts. The diagram below
provides a modified version of this model which can be used to assess the causes and impacts of
environmental change and the strategies implemented to manage them.

https://www.agta.asn.au/GeogSpace/files/Core/Exemplars/Yr10/23.2.3%20Human%20environmental
%20systems.pdf

Independent Learning Activity

Name: ________________________ Date: ______________

Section: _______________________ Score: _____________

I. Instruction: Essay: Answer the following questions concisely.

1. Differentiate classic rational choice theory to contemporary rational choice theory.
2. In psychoanalysis, construct/ draw your own representation of the level of awareness creatively. Briefly
explain on your own words.
3. Differentiate the informal and formal institution based in your understanding and give a short explanation.
4. How did the feminists create an impact in society?
5. What is hermeneutics? How is it defined?
6. How Human-environment interactions shape cultural and natural landscapes?

Rubrics:

CRITERIA DESCRIPTION POINTS POINTS

OBTAINED
Content The student was able to explain the social 10
issues and analyze them using the
assigned social science approaches
Analysis Analysis was clear and concise based on 6
the data presented.
Organizations The paper was well-written with ideas 4
easily conveyed to readers.
Total 20

*Apply the social science ideas and its importance in examining socio-cultural, economic, and political conditions. a. Psychoanalysis b.
Rational Choice c. Institutionalism d. Feminist Theory e. Hermeneutical Phenomenology f. Human-Environment Systems (Week 11-12)