Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 866 )

• Liberalism and Hate-based Extremism

  

  How should a democratic society handle the increasingly virulent challenges presented by hate groups, anti-government extremists, and organizations that... Read more

  Posted on 17 August 2016 SOCIETY

• Inductive Reasoning and the Philosophy of Science

  

  I've just finished reading Sharon Bertsch McGrayne's book on Bayesian statistics, The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code,... Read more

  Posted on 03 August 2016 SOCIETY

• Ethnography of the Far Right

  

  Can we understand the dynamics of far-right extremism without understanding far-right extremists? Probably not; it seems clear we need to have a much more... Read more

  Posted on 02 August 2016 SOCIETY

• Survey Research on Right-wing Extremism in Europe

  

  European research and policy organizations have devoted a fair amount of attention to the rise of extremist movements and intolerance in European countries in... Read more

  Posted on 29 July 2016 SOCIETY

• Accident Analysis and Systems Thinking

  

  Complex socio-technical systems fail; that is, accidents occur. And it is enormously important for engineers and policy makers to have a better way of thinking... Read more

  Posted on 24 July 2016 SOCIETY

• Ideologies and Organizations as Causes of Political Extremism

  

  In a recent post I addressed the issue of the rise of mass intolerance and hate from the point of view of the public -- the processes through which sizable... Read more

  Posted on 19 July 2016 SOCIETY

• Making Sense of ISA 2016

  

  The International Sociological Association hosted its third major forum in Vienna this month. (ISA forums are organized every four years; previous forums took... Read more

  Posted on 14 July 2016 SOCIETY

• Elias on Figurational Sociology

  

  A premise shared by all actor-centered versions of sociology is that individuals and their actions are the rock-bottom level of the social world. Every other... Read more

  Posted on 10 July 2016 SOCIETY

• Social Psychology of Largescale Hate

  

  Many countries are facing a detestable resurgence of racism and ethnic hostility in the current political environment, catalyzed in complicated ways by the... Read more

  Posted on 06 July 2016 SOCIETY

• Karl Polanyi as a Critical Realist?

  

  In The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique Fred Block and Peggy Somers focus on a phrase that Karl Polanyi uses in The Great... Read more

  Posted on 01 July 2016 SOCIETY

• Complementarity of Thick and Thin Theories of the Actor

  

  There is a range of approaches to the social sciences that fall under the umbrella of "actor-centered" theories (link). The chief fissure among these theories i... Read more

  Posted on 28 June 2016 SOCIETY

• Systems Management and the War on Poverty

  

  One of the important developments in engineering and management thinking since World War II is the value of approaching large problems as systems rather than... Read more

  Posted on 27 June 2016 SOCIETY

• Errors in Organizations

  

  Organizations do things -- process tax returns, deploy armies, send spacecraft to Mars. And in order to do these various things, organizations have people with... Read more

  Posted on 23 June 2016 SOCIETY

• Capitalism 2.0?

  

  Capitalism is one particular configuration of the economic institutions that define production and consumption in a society. It involves private ownership of... Read more

  Posted on 17 June 2016 SOCIETY

• Making Change Happen

  

  There are many large social ills that we would collectively like to change. We would like to see an end to debilitating poverty; we would like to end the... Read more

  Posted on 10 June 2016 SOCIETY

• LBJ's Commitment to Cities

  

  In the United States we have been in the desert for decades when it comes to big, transformative policy reforms aimed at addressing our most serious social... Read more

  Posted on 09 June 2016 SOCIETY

• Bourdieu on Post-modern Biography

  

  Here is a very interesting short piece by Pierre Bourdieu on the topic of biography, "L'Illusion biographique," that is very relevant to the prior post. (Thanks... Read more

  Posted on 30 May 2016 SOCIETY

• Three Conceptions of Biography

  

  A biography is a narrative of a person's life. The biographer wants to tell the story of how the subject made it from childhood to adulthood; how he or she... Read more

  Posted on 23 May 2016 SOCIETY

• Global Inequality

  

  image: scenes from Mumbai, April 2016Inequalities of wealth and income throughout the world have generated a great deal of attention in the past several years,... Read more

  Posted on 19 May 2016 SOCIETY

• The Kerner Commission Report

  

  The Kerner Commission released its report in 1968, following months of intensive study of the series of major race riots and rebellions that had occurred in... Read more

  Posted on 13 May 2016 SOCIETY