Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 866 )

• Slime Mold Intelligence

  We often think of intelligent action in terms of a number of ideas: goal-directedness, belief acquisition, planning, prioritization of needs and wants, oversigh... Read more

  Posted on 20 February 2020 SOCIETY

• Methods of Causal Inquiry

  

  This diagram provides a map of an extensive set of methods of causal inquiry in the social sciences. The goal here is to show that the many approaches that... Read more

  Posted on 18 February 2020 SOCIETY

• Generativity and Emergence

  

  Social entities and structures have properties that exercise causal influence over all of us, and over the continuing development of the society in which we... Read more

  Posted on 16 February 2020 SOCIETY

• The Future of Our Democracy

  

  How can the United States recover its culture of civility and mutual respect among citizens after the bitter, unlimited toxicity of the first three years of... Read more

  Posted on 07 February 2020 SOCIETY

• Alain Touraine on Social Movements

  

  Alain Touraine, now in his tenth decade, published Défense de la modernité in 2018 as a statement of his current thinking about the meaning of modernity, and... Read more

  Posted on 04 February 2020 SOCIETY

• Responsible Innovation and the Philosophy of Technology

  

  Several posts here have focused on the philosophy of technology (link, link, link, link). A simple definition of the philosophy of technology might go along... Read more

  Posted on 26 January 2020 SOCIETY

• What Are the Prospects for a Progressive Movement in the US?

  

  It is hard to remember that American politics has experienced times of profound reflection upon and criticism of the premises of modern urban, capitalist,... Read more

  Posted on 18 January 2020 SOCIETY

• Sociology of Trumpism

  

  What does sociology have to offer when it comes to understanding the political phenomenon of Donald Trump as president? It seems that there are a number of... Read more

  Posted on 10 January 2020 SOCIETY

• Academic Social Media

  

  The means through which academics engage in communication and discussion of their ideas have changed significantly in the past decade through the rapid growth o... Read more

  Posted on 09 January 2020 SOCIETY

• The Power of Case Studies in System Safety

  

  Images: Andrew Hopkins titles Images: Other safety sourcesOne of the genuinely interesting aspects of the work of Andrew Hopkins is the extensive case studies h... Read more

  Posted on 02 January 2020 SOCIETY

• Non-action in Times of Catastrophe

  

  Ivan Ermakoff's 2008 book Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications is dense, rigorous, and important. It treats two historical episodes in close... Read more

  Posted on 30 December 2019 SOCIETY

• High-reliability Organizations

  

  Charles Perrow takes a particularly negative view of the possibility of safe management of high-risk technologies in Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk... Read more

  Posted on 28 December 2019 SOCIETY

• Entertainment as a Valuable Thing

  

  Quite a bit of the GDP of the United States goes into a broad category we can call "entertainment" -- television, video streaming services, books and newspapers... Read more

  Posted on 18 December 2019 SOCIETY

• Why Do Regulatory Organizations Fail?

  

  Why is Charles Perrow a pessimist about government regulation?Perrow is a leading researcher in the sociology of organizations, and he is a singular expert on... Read more

  Posted on 07 December 2019 SOCIETY

• The Second Primitive Accumulation

  

  One of the more memorable parts of Capital is Marx's description of the “so-called primitive accumulation of capital” — the historical process where rural peopl... Read more

  Posted on 01 December 2019 SOCIETY

• Organizations as Open Systems

  

  Key to understanding the "ontology of government" is the empirical and theoretical challenge of understanding how organizations work. Read more

  Posted on 23 November 2019 SOCIETY

• Personalized Power at the Local Level

  

  How does government work? We often understand this question as one involving the institutions and actors within the Federal government. Read more

  Posted on 19 November 2019 SOCIETY

• Electronic Health Records and Medical Mistakes

  

  Electronic Health Record systems (EHRs) have been broadly implemented by hospitals and health systems around the country as a way of increasing the accuracy,... Read more

  Posted on 14 November 2019 SOCIETY

• Twelve Years of Understanding Society

  

  Understanding Society has now reached its twelfth anniversary of continuous publication. This represents 1,271 posts, and over 1.3 million words. Read more

  Posted on 06 November 2019 SOCIETY

• O-rings and Production Pressure

  

  Allan McDonald's Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster (2009) has given me a somewhat different understanding of the... Read more

  Posted on 03 November 2019 SOCIETY