Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 866 )

• Populism's Base

  

  Steve Bannon may have lost his perch in the White House and Breitbart; but the themes of white supremacy, intolerance, bigotry, and anti-government extremism... Read more

  Posted on 15 January 2018 SOCIETY

• Trust and Organizational Effectiveness

  

  It is fairly well agreed that organizations require a degree of trust among the participants in order for the organization to function at all. But what does thi... Read more

  Posted on 08 January 2018 SOCIETY

• Is History Probabilistic?

  

  Many of our intuitions about causality are driven by a background assumption of determinism: one cause, one effect, always. But it is evident in many realms --... Read more

  Posted on 30 December 2017 SOCIETY

• The Culture of an Organization

  

  It is often held that the behavior of a particular organization is affected by its culture. Two banks may have very similar organizational structures but show... Read more

  Posted on 22 December 2017 SOCIETY

• Is Public Opinion Part of a Complex System?

  

  The worrisome likelihood that Russians and other malevolent actors are tinkering with public opinion in Western Europe and the United States through social medi... Read more

  Posted on 20 December 2017 SOCIETY

• Varieties of Organizational Dysfunction

  

  Several earlier posts have made the point that important technology failures often include organizational faults in their causal background. Read more

  Posted on 13 December 2017 SOCIETY

• Organizational Dysfunction

  

  What is a dysfunction when it comes to the normal workings of an organization? In order to identify dysfunctions we need to have a prior conception of the... Read more

  Posted on 09 December 2017 SOCIETY

• New Perspectives on Chinese Authoritarianism

  

  The question of China's political future is an important one and a difficult one. Will China evolve towards a political system that embodies real legal... Read more

  Posted on 04 December 2017 SOCIETY

• Collapse of Eastern European Communisms

  

  An earlier post commented on Tony Judt's magnificent book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. There I focused on the story he tells of the brutality of... Read more

  Posted on 29 November 2017 SOCIETY

• Corruption and Institutional Design

  

  Robert Klitgaard is an insightful expert on the institutional causes of corruption in various social arrangements. His 1988 book, Controlling Corruption, laid... Read more

  Posted on 28 November 2017 SOCIETY

• China Today

  

  There are a lot of opinions about China today in the United States -- authoritarian, farsighted, effective at economic progress, overly committed to Party... Read more

  Posted on 22 November 2017 SOCIETY

• Europe After World War II

  

  Europe faces major challenges today, from the rise of the extreme right to Brexit to the ongoing threat of ISIS terror. But these challenges pale against those... Read more

  Posted on 11 November 2017 SOCIETY

• A Localist Approach to Chinese Politics

  

  How do the domestic politics of China work, from 1949 to the present?This question covers many issues: Why does the Chinese state act as it does? Why does it... Read more

  Posted on 09 November 2017 SOCIETY

• Ten Years of Understanding Society

  

  This month marks the tenth anniversary of Understanding Society. The blog now includes 1,176 posts on topics in the philosophy of social science, the... Read more

  Posted on 08 November 2017 SOCIETY

• Social Science and Policy

  

  One of the important reasons that we value scientific knowledge is the possibility that it will allow us to intervene in the world to solve problems that we car... Read more

  Posted on 31 October 2017 SOCIETY

• Small Farmers in Indian Agriculture

  

  Agriculture remains the primary source of income for India's population, and the majority of India's farmers subsist on small farms, less than two hectares (fiv... Read more

  Posted on 30 October 2017 SOCIETY

• How to Think About Social Identities

  

  What is involved in having a national or racial or sexual identity? What do we mean when we say that a person has a Canadian or a Haitian identity? Read more

  Posted on 27 October 2017 SOCIETY

• Intergenerational Social Mobility

  

  A crucial part of social cohesion is the prospect of social mobility across generations. A social order in which individuals are stuck in their social position... Read more

  Posted on 23 October 2017 SOCIETY

• Social Consciousness and Critical Realism

  

  Critical realism proposes an approach to the social world that pays particular attention to objective and material features of the social realm -- property... Read more

  Posted on 08 October 2017 SOCIETY

• Community Resilience

  

  We know what is meant by saying that a physical system is resilient: for a given range of shocks, the system has the ability to recover its structural integrity. Read more

  Posted on 05 October 2017 SOCIETY