Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 893 )

• ENPOSS Call for Papers

  

  The European Network for Philosophy of Social Science will hold its next meeting as a joint conference with the North American counterpart, the Philosophy of... Read more

  Posted on 09 November 2014 SOCIETY

• The Luminaries and the Researcher

  

  Social theory is a well-defined field that is centered on a group of core thinkers that we might refer to as "luminaries". These are figures from the... Read more

  Posted on 08 November 2014 SOCIETY

• Seven Years of Understanding Society

  

  This week marks the seventh anniversary of Understanding Society. That's 954 posts, almost a million words, and about a hundred posts in the past twelve months. Read more

  Posted on 05 November 2014 SOCIETY

• Social Knowledge at the Micro Level

  

  People engage in their social worlds on the basis of a dense set of abilities and cognitive frameworks that permit them to make sense of the interactions they... Read more

  Posted on 01 November 2014 SOCIETY

• Granular Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution

  

  It has been observed in earlier posts that there is still a lot we do not understand about China's Cultural Revolution (post, post, post). Why such a sudden... Read more

  Posted on 26 October 2014 SOCIETY

• Social Mechanisms and ABM Methods

  

  One particularly appealing aspect of agent-based models is the role they can play in demonstrating the inner workings of a major class of social mechanisms,... Read more

  Posted on 21 October 2014 SOCIETY

• Modeling Organizational Performance

  

  Organizations do things that we care about. They are generally at least partially designed in order to bring about certain kinds of outcomes, and managers... Read more

  Posted on 15 October 2014 SOCIETY

• 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