Gaining Insight from Incomparability: Exploratory Comparison in Studies of Social Practices.
This paper suggests an experimental approach to comparison. It is argued that comparing should be detached from the question of adequacy in order to regain it as an analytical and explorative tool. This approach is put to work by comparing boxing to computer programming. Drawing on comparisons of sp...
| Published in: | Comparative Sociology Vol. 7; no. 3; pp. 338 - 362 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Brill Academic Publishers
2008
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| Summary: | This paper suggests an experimental approach to comparison. It is argued that comparing should be detached from the question of adequacy in order to regain it as an analytical and explorative tool. This approach is put to work by comparing boxing to computer programming. Drawing on comparisons of sports practices to other social practices by Mead and Bourdieu, the paper deploys sports comparison quite similarly. In a comparative perspective the practice of writing code for software is depicted by using means and modes of description developed from an ethnography of boxing. This serves for illuminating and understanding programming's gestural and embodied logic. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. |
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