Hello everyone, I am new to the board and I enjoy it. I had been looking for a well rounded site like this one philosophy and social science.
I am currently working on my PHD in Public Administration. I come from a business background and was going to write on economic development in urban inner cities, how ever I have changed my mind and am looking for some ‘new’ feedback on an idea I have for a dissertation topic.
I want to study what I have termed the ‘cultural implosion’ theory. Here is the gist. I believe that cultures are built on certain critical foundations that serve as a philosophical framework for that particular cultural or subculture. An analogy, which is where I derived the term, is skyscraper implosions. In a skyscraper implosion explosives are place on strategic structural points, which when destroyed causes the weight of the building to collapse in on itself.
It is my theory that certain subcultures can be collapsed by strategically creating explosion points on the core elements that sustain the bulk of the culture. That if this is done, rapid subcultural change can occur in in certain environments.
There is more, but that is it in a nutshell.
My research would focus on dramatic cultural shifts in societies or subcultures, defining the original cultural, the events the precipitated its implosion, and then extracting from those examples, patterns that might be able to be artificially reproduced through public policy.
What are you thoughts, opinions, or have you seen any similar concepts?
Sounds a bit too “grand-theory” to me. It seems more likely that cultural shifts are subtle and mundane, rather than marked and grandiose…even when they appear to be so. It’s a case of the skyscraper slowly deteriorating due to mundane forces, with the final blow that takes it down being a rogue gust…rather than a nice show of things with engineered explosions and cheering audiences.
It is a very interesting subject though, but it seems like it would require a very extensive amount of research with a fantastic attention for detail.
I think you’re probably right, but I don’t know that your goal of developing artificial recreations is achievable. The minute impetus for dramatic cultural change is likely to be so small that it would be difficult to tease from the complexity of culture. I think culture is one of the problems that can’t be solved like that: there is such complex feedback at work that the whole system is highly unpredictable.
That said, I think it’s a great idea for a dissertation. As I understand it, whether your idea is right or not does not affect whether you pass. And I’m sure you can find out a lot about cultures that is of use by investigating how they change. And, I don’t know how mathy you want to get, but there is a lot of theory on problems of predictability, and you could somehow define the limits of prediction in culture. Then again, this is the Soft Sciences forum. . .