Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 899 )

• George and Bennett on Case Study Methodology

  

  Establishing causal relationships within the fabric of the social world is more challenging than in the biological or physical-chemical domains. Read more

  Posted on 16 December 2014 SOCIETY

• Historicizing Social Action

  

  It is self evident that people are influenced by the historical circumstances in which they are raised and live. People are historicized as actors. The hard... Read more

  Posted on 07 December 2014 SOCIETY

• New Tools for College Success

  

  Today is the second White House College Opportunity Day of Action in Washington DC. President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama have spearheaded this effort t... Read more

  Posted on 04 December 2014 SOCIETY

• Shaping of Inner-city African-American Experience

  

  It is recognized by ethnographers that place and history mean a great deal in the everyday experience that people have in their neighborhoods — villages,... Read more

  Posted on 02 December 2014 SOCIETY

• Geddes on Methods

  

  Earlier posts have examined some recent thinking about social science methods (link, link). Here I will examine another recent contributor to this field, Barbar... Read more

  Posted on 30 November 2014 SOCIETY

• How Professionals Think

  

  photo: Morris Engel, Dock Workers 1947 (link)The topic of how actors arrive at their choices and behavior has come up a number of times here. Read more

  Posted on 23 November 2014 SOCIETY

• 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