Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 866 )

• Emergentism and Generationism

  

  media: lecture by Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky on chaos and reductionSeveral recent posts have focused on the topic of simulations in the social sciences. Read more

  Posted on 12 October 2014 SOCIETY

• Verisimilitude in Models and Simulations

  

  Modeling always requires abstraction and simplification. We need to arrive at a system for representing the components of a system, the laws of action that... Read more

  Posted on 08 October 2014 SOCIETY

• Computational Models for Social Phenomena

  

  There is a very lively body of work emerging in the intersection between computational mathematics and various fields of the social sciences. Read more

  Posted on 02 October 2014 SOCIETY

• A Sense of Injustice in China?

  

  Quite a few years ago Barrington Moore explored in his book Injustice the idea that a sense of justice sometimes plays an important role in history. Read more

  Posted on 23 September 2014 SOCIETY

• Turning Points in History?

  

  We often think that the histories of nations or peoples take turning points. A series of events occur that could have gone either way, things went badly rather... Read more

  Posted on 14 September 2014 SOCIETY

• Varieties of Social Methodology

  

  What are the frameworks that generally come to mind in discussions of methodology in the social sciences? Several families of methodological frameworks are... Read more

  Posted on 10 September 2014 SOCIETY

• Interests, Influence and Knowledge

  

  Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams, and Nicholas Confessore have just published a major story in the New York Times on the topic of foreign influence on major think... Read more

  Posted on 07 September 2014 SOCIETY

• Heuristics for a Mechanisms-based Methodology

  

  Let’s imagine that I’m a young sociologist or political scientist who has gotten interested in the social-mechanisms debates, and I’d like to frame my next... Read more

  Posted on 04 September 2014 SOCIETY

• Margaret Archer on Social Change

  

  In Late Modernity: Trajectories towards Morphogenic Society Margaret Archer and several talented collaborators attempt to lay out a framework of thinking that... Read more

  Posted on 01 September 2014 SOCIETY

• Incarceration Society

  

  Source: The WireIt is becoming increasingly clear that the criminal justice system is an important component of the system of race in the United States today. Read more

  Posted on 30 August 2014 SOCIETY

• Eurasia Project on Population and Family History

  

  The Eurasia Project on Population and Family History represents an innovative and important genre of comparative historical research. Read more

  Posted on 21 August 2014 SOCIETY

• Making Sense of the ASA

  

  The annual meeting of the American Sociological Association is taking place in San Francisco this week, and it is a tsunami of ideas, methodologies, research... Read more

  Posted on 17 August 2014 SOCIETY

• Realism and Methodology

  

  Methodology has to do with the strategies and heuristics through which we attempt to understand a complicated empirical reality (link). Read more

  Posted on 11 August 2014 SOCIETY

• The Status of Women in India

  

  Sociologists are often interested in making sense of processes of change that radiate along the axes of the great tectonics of social life, including class,... Read more

  Posted on 08 August 2014 SOCIETY

• What is Methodology?

  

  As social science researchers, we would all like to have an excellent methodology for carrying out the tasks we confront in our scientific work. But what... Read more

  Posted on 06 August 2014 SOCIETY

• System Safety Engineering

  

  source: Nancy Leveson, Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to SafetyWhy do complex technologies so often fail, and fail in such unexpected ways? Read more

  Posted on 04 August 2014 SOCIETY

• Classifying Mechanisms by Location

  

  If we are going to take social mechanisms seriously, we need to be able to say more about what they are. Earlier posts have opened the possibility of offering... Read more

  Posted on 02 August 2014 SOCIETY

• How Does Bourdieu Meet History?

  

  Pierre Bourdieu's sociology has influenced a broad range of sociologists (and philosophers) since the appearance of Outline of a Theory of Practice in 1972 (wit... Read more

  Posted on 30 July 2014 SOCIETY

• Institutional Logics -- Actors Within Institutions

  

  Why do people behave as they do within various social contexts -- the workplace, the street, the battlefield, the dinner table? Read more

  Posted on 26 July 2014 SOCIETY

• Tyler Cowan on Global Inequality

  

  Tyler Cowan sounds a bit like Voltaire's Pangloss when he argues, as the New York Times headline puts it, that we are living "all in all, [in] a more egalitaria... Read more

  Posted on 20 July 2014 SOCIETY