Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 899 )

• 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

• Refinements of Social Functionalism

  

  Robert Merton is one of the most sophisticated exponents of a qualified functionalism in sociology (Social Theory and Social Structure). He finds that earlier... Read more

  Posted on 30 September 2017 SOCIETY

• Sustaining a Philosophy Research Community

  

  The European Network for Philosophy of Social Science (ENPOSS) completed its annual conference in Krakow last week. It was a stimulating and productive... Read more

  Posted on 28 September 2017 SOCIETY

• Experiencing the Holocaust

  

  When we think we know about an historical event -- the French Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Jim Crow years in America -- generally what we know is a... Read more

  Posted on 20 September 2017 SOCIETY

• Worker-owned Enterprises as a Social Solution

  

  image: Mondragon headquarters, Arrasate-Mondragon, SpainConsider some of the most intractable problems we face in contemporary society: rising inequalities... Read more

  Posted on 17 September 2017 SOCIETY

• Responding to Hate

  

  The Southern Poverty Law Center documents that hate groups and hate-based mobilization are on the rise in the United States (link, link). Read more

  Posted on 10 September 2017 SOCIETY

• Erik Olin Wright on Real Utopias

  

  Erik Olin Wright is one of the genuinely important contributors to a progressive sociology in the United States. He was one of the first wave of social... Read more

  Posted on 04 September 2017 SOCIETY

• New Thinking About Causal Mechanisms

  

  Anyone interested in the topic of causal mechanisms will be interested in the appearance of Stuart Glennan and Phyllis Illari's The Routledge Handbook of... Read more

  Posted on 30 August 2017 SOCIETY