Books about society or linear thinking* against individualism?

Question

are there any books about this specific subject: it's kind of difficult to put into a small sentence but basically it is about "science" (or rather, linear thinking present in science or pseudosciences that claim to study human behaviour) or society being obsessed on trying to label everything, more specifically, the individual / individualism / diversity not particularily of race or sexuality..but of being oneself ...any ideas?

Answer 1

A couple of options include looking at epistemological literature. The non-positivist perspectives I'm familiar with such as feminist, critical and marxist. Books on each of these would support (more likely question) unquestioned validity of linear thinking.  I've found good essays on this in the "Oxford Handbook of Organizational Theory" Tsoukas and Knudsen are the editors. This book deals directly with the philosophical issues connected with "linear" and Wholistic thought.

  The other avenue would be to piece together readings that are critical of individualism and crticial thinking. A once popular book "The Closing of the American Mind" blames individualism  for the simplification of collective knowledge.

  More sophisticated discussion can be found in Hofstede's book "Culture's Consequences" where he describes the advantages ond liabilities of non-linear thinking and ascribes linear thinking to western ideology.  If you use this, look in both the chapters on Individualism/collectivism as well as the one on long term orientation - each of these being dimensions that are correlated with linear and wholistic thinking.

A book that is a good lead to empirical works on the embeddednes of individualism in western, particularly US culture is from the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation from 2003. The main researchers are Markus, Kitayama, Iyengar and Choi who criticize psychology in particular for its shortsightedness in creating universal theory by observing only individualistically oriented subjects in theory building.

This is a shotgun answer for your question, but it is a large topic.