Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 866 )

• History of Sociology

  

  Sociology is a discipline with a short history and a very dense and complex tree of topics and methods. So writing its history — even limited to the past centur... Read more

  Posted on 20 April 2015 SOCIETY

• A Short Course in Critical Causality

  For anyone interested in getting a deep exposure to current thinking about causation within the critical realist tradition, Ruth Groff's 2008 collection... Read more

  Posted on 19 April 2015 SOCIETY

• Frédéric Vandenberghe's Social Theory

  

  Frédéric Vandenberghe is an important contributor to the philosophy of critical realism. His interesting book A Philosophical History of German Sociology... Read more

  Posted on 14 April 2015 SOCIETY

• Debates About Field Experiments in the Social Sciences

  

  Questions about the empirical validation of hypotheses about social causation have been of interest in the past several weeks here. Read more

  Posted on 05 April 2015 SOCIETY

• Realism and Empirical Reasoning

  

  How should a realist think about confirmation of hypotheses and theories about real social structures and properties?Here is what the Ur-realist Roy Bhaskar... Read more

  Posted on 02 April 2015 SOCIETY

• Mechanisms, Experiments, and Policies

  

  The social mechanisms approach to the social sciences aligns well with two key intellectual practices, experiments and policies. Read more

  Posted on 24 March 2015 SOCIETY

• Ethics as Culture

  

  Gabriel Abend has recently published The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics, a remarkable book on what seems initially to be a... Read more

  Posted on 17 March 2015 SOCIETY

• Improving Skilled Performance

  

  What can ordinary experience tell us about how skilled practitioners can be brought to a high level of competence and performance? Read more

  Posted on 15 March 2015 SOCIETY

• Coleman's House-of-cards Theory of Structures

  

  image: Henri Bonaventure Monnier, Crowded Restaurant 1860image: James Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory, p. 245James Coleman offers a skeptical position on... Read more

  Posted on 08 March 2015 SOCIETY

• Structures, Diagrams, Rules, and Flows

  

  When we refer to the structure of some complex entity, we often intend to capture one of the following ideas:the parts and their arrangementsthe parts and... Read more

  Posted on 06 March 2015 SOCIETY

• Globalization and the Planetary Knowledge Business

  

  It is a commonplace that modern social and economic systems are intensely knowledge-based, and that the centers of knowledge production are no longer exclusivel... Read more

  Posted on 03 March 2015 SOCIETY

• Three Concepts of Social Structure

  

  There is an important ambiguity in the idea of social structure that needs to be addressed. The word is sometimes used to refer to functioning entities or... Read more

  Posted on 28 February 2015 SOCIETY

• Sellars and Bhaskar

  

  Robert Brandom has just published a highly interesting book about the coherence of the philosophical thought of Wilfrid Sellars, From Empiricism to Expressivism... Read more

  Posted on 26 February 2015 SOCIETY

• Social Structures as Entities

  

  Image: first organizational chart (link)One mark of modernity is the fact that we swim in a sea of structures -- states, markets, militaries, employment systems... Read more

  Posted on 21 February 2015 SOCIETY

• Fissioning Community

  

  What is a community, and what forces exist to either preserve the strands of community or to erode those strands?To start, a community is a population within a... Read more

  Posted on 15 February 2015 SOCIETY

• Expectations and Performance

  

  There is a growing accumulation of evidence suggesting that individuals' performance in a wide range of activities is powerfully and insidiously affected by... Read more

  Posted on 09 February 2015 SOCIETY

• Self-selection and "liberal" Professions

  Neil Gross stirred up a quite a storm a few years ago when he released a body of research findings on the political complexion of university professors. Read more

  Posted on 03 February 2015 SOCIETY

• Social Science History Association Call for Proposals

  

  SOCIAL SCIENCE HISTORY ASSOCIATION CALL FOR PAPERSMacrohistorical Dynamics Network40th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History AssociationBaltimore MD 12-1... Read more

  Posted on 29 January 2015 SOCIETY

• The Mode of Production as Society's Structure

  

  Figure: Althusser's conception of the CMP (RP Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory) Sociologists study social structure and the effects tha... Read more

  Posted on 26 January 2015 SOCIETY

• Was the Civil Rights Movement a Revolution?

  

  photo: African-American newsman attacked by mob in Little Rock, 1957 (link)I think of the results of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s in the... Read more

  Posted on 20 January 2015 SOCIETY