300033 Empirical Social Justice Research (International Track) (S) (SoSe 2016)

In contrast to normative disciplines social sciences are treating social justice not as a moral but as a social phenomenon. As such, justice can be subject to empirical inquiry. The aim is to describe existing concepts of justice in a society and to give explanations, why they exist and which consequences they have. The first aim of sociological justice research is to identify the social forces (e.g. structure, cul¬ture, institutions) and mechanisms (e.g. comparison processes) that are affecting the develop¬ment of justice conceptions and evaluations, their variation within and between societies and their stabilities or changes over time. The second aim is to study the consequences of perceived injustice or justice with regard to a social order. Four approaches can be distinguished within empirical justice research:
(1) an institutional approach asking which conceptions of justice are possible to disentangle from the blueprints of societal institutions and their distributional practices,
(2) a discourse-analytical approach analyzing under which condition justice is becoming part of public debates, which notion is assigned and how different public actors are referring to it for realizing their goals,
(2) an attitudinal approach studying individuals’ ideas about justice, which conceptions of justice they endorse and how they evaluate the existing distribution of goods and bads in a society including their own shares,
(3) a behavioral approach which is concerned with concrete behavior asking how people distribute goods and bads in everyday or experimental situations.
In the class the classical and recent contributions within each of these four approaches will be discussed.