Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 899 )

• Kojève on Freedom

  An earlier post highlighted Alexandre Kojève's presentation of Hegel's rich conception of labor, freedom, and human self-creation. Read more

  Posted on 29 September 2019 SOCIETY

• The US Chemical Safety Board

  

  The Federal agency responsible for investigating chemical and petrochemical accidents in the United States is the Chemical Safety Board (link). Read more

  Posted on 03 September 2019 SOCIETY

• Testing the NRC

  

  Serious nuclear accidents are rare but potentially devastating to people, land, and agriculture. (It appears that minor to moderate nuclear accidents are not... Read more

  Posted on 12 August 2019 SOCIETY

• Hegel on Labor and Freedom

  

  Hegel provided a powerful conception of human beings in the world and a rich conception of freedom. Key to that conception is the idea of self-creation through... Read more

  Posted on 11 August 2019 SOCIETY

• The Sociology of Scientific Discipline Formation

  

  There was a time in the philosophy of science when it may have been believed that scientific knowledge develops in a logical, linear way from observation and... Read more

  Posted on 09 August 2019 SOCIETY

• Pervasive Organizational and Regulatory Failures

  

  It is intriguing to observe how pervasive organizational and regulatory failures are in our collective lives. Once you are sensitized to these factors, you see... Read more

  Posted on 01 August 2019 SOCIETY

• Soviet Nuclear Disasters: Kyshtym

  

  The 1986 meltdown of reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was the greatest nuclear disaster the world has yet seen. Read more

  Posted on 27 July 2019 SOCIETY

• Safety and Accident Analysis: Longford

  

  Andrew Hopkins has written a number of fascinating case studies of industrial accidents, usually in the field of petrochemicals. Read more

  Posted on 18 July 2019 SOCIETY

• Thai Politics and Thai Perspectives

  

  One of the benefits of attending international conferences is meeting interesting scholars from different countries and traditions. Read more

  Posted on 17 July 2019 SOCIETY

• How Things Seem and Why

  

  The idea that there is a stark separation between many of our ideas of the social world, on the one hand, and the realities of the social world in which we... Read more

  Posted on 13 July 2019 SOCIETY

• ABM Fundamentalism

  

  I've just had the singular opportunity of participating in the habilitation examination of Gianluca Manzo at the Sorbonne, based on his excellent manuscript on... Read more

  Posted on 09 July 2019 SOCIETY

• Herbert Simon's Theories of Organizations

  

  Image: detail from Family Portrait 2 1965 (Creative Commons license, Richard Rappaport)Herbert Simon made paradigm-changing contributions to the theory of... Read more

  Posted on 20 June 2019 SOCIETY

• Gilbert on Social Facts

  

  I am currently thinking about the topic of "organizational actors", and Margaret Gilbert's arguments about social actors are plainly relevant to this topic. Read more

  Posted on 14 June 2019 SOCIETY

• Asian Conference on the Philosophy of the Social Sciences

  

  photo: Tianjin, ChinaA group of philosophers of social science convened in Tianjin, China, at Nankai University in June to consider some of the ways that the... Read more

  Posted on 09 June 2019 SOCIETY

• Auditing FEMA

  

  Crucial to improving an organization's performance is being able to obtain honest and detailed assessments of its functioning, in normal times and in... Read more

  Posted on 09 June 2019 SOCIETY

• The 737 MAX Disaster as an Organizational Failure

  

  The topic of the organizational causes of technology failure comes up frequently in Understanding Society. The tragic crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in... Read more

  Posted on 25 May 2019 SOCIETY

• A Plan for Philosophy of Social Science Circa 1976

  

  image: Imre LakatosMy Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy was written between 1974 and 1977 and was accepted in 1977. The topic was Marx's theory of science as... Read more

  Posted on 13 May 2019 SOCIETY

• My Program of Research, Circa 1976

  

  image: philosopher at workMy Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy was written between 1974 and 1977 and was accepted in 1977. The topic was Marx's theory of... Read more

  Posted on 11 May 2019 SOCIETY

• Theorizing About Organizations

  

  The fields of organizational studies and organizational sociology originated in the early twentieth century but flourished in the post-war period. This makes a... Read more

  Posted on 01 May 2019 SOCIETY

• Retelling US History

  

  images: Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (from Jill Lepore, These Truths)People who mostly learned American history through their high school education... Read more

  Posted on 18 April 2019 SOCIETY