Browsing by Subject "Actor-network theory"
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Item Open Access Cash loans to Ottoman timariots during military campaigns (sixteenth-seventeenth centuries) : a vulnerable fiscal system?(Brill Academic Publishers, 2016) Tekgül, NilScholarship has argued that the Ottoman timar system was an efficient way to provide military forces in a non-monetized economy. As the state granted its sources of revenue to timariots in return for military service, it was financially relieved of the need to pay the expenses of the cavalry. Several documents so far neglected by scholars and evidencing the practice of cash loans to timariots during military campaigns prove otherwise. This paper analyzes the process of the generation of timariots' disposable income in the framework of actor-network theory. It is argued that the granting of loans demonstrated an attempt to regulate the cash flow of the timariot's income during campaigns, which was necessitated by problems of transforming tax revenues into disposable form. In the light of documents evidencing cash loans, it is further argued that cash loans reflect the vulnerability of the Ottoman timar system.Item Open Access Two ontological orientations in Sociology: building social ontologies and blurring the boundaries of the ‘social’(Sage Publications Ltd., 2015) Karakayali, N.The article highlights two contrasting ways in which social theorists have been trying to define the ontological boundaries of sociology since the early days of the discipline. Some (e.g. Durkheim, Weber, and critical realists) have attempted to demarcate social reality as a causally autonomous and qualitatively distinct realm in a segmented/stratified universe. Others (e.g. Tarde, Spencer, Luhmann, sociobiologists, and actor-network theorists) have postulated a more open (or flat) ontological space and blurred such demarcations by either rejecting the causal autonomy of sociological phenomena, or their qualitative distinctiveness, or both. So far, there has been little convergence between these two orientations since according to the former, the opening of the boundaries is likely to give way to reductionist conceptions of society, whereas the latter tends to associate rigid boundaries with essentialism. Through a close examination of these opposing orientations, the article aims to shed light on current ontological dilemmas of sociology. © 2014, © The Author(s) 2014.