Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 893 )

• 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

• Entropic Social Mechanisms

  

  Many of the examples of mechanisms that we turn to in the social sciences are purposive, agental, and designed. But there is a fundamental feature of the natura... Read more

  Posted on 17 July 2014 SOCIETY

• Kathleen Tierney on Disaster and Resilience

  

  The fact of large-scale technology failure has come up fairly often in Understanding Society (link, link, link). There are a couple of reasons for this. Read more

  Posted on 11 July 2014 SOCIETY

• Mechanisms Thinking in International Relations Theory

  

  source: Alex Cooley, "America and Empire" (link)One of the most fundamental ideas underlying the philosophy of social science expressed here and elsewhere is th... Read more

  Posted on 07 July 2014 SOCIETY

• What Drives Organizational Performance?

  

  We have a pretty good idea of the characteristics that support very high individual performance in a variety of fields, from jazz to track to physics to... Read more

  Posted on 04 July 2014 SOCIETY

• Getting Inside People's Frames

  

  It seems clear that human beings bring specific frameworks of thought, ideas, emotions, and valuations to their social lives, and these frameworks affect both... Read more

  Posted on 01 July 2014 SOCIETY

• Saskia Sassen on Austerity and Social Exclusion

  The previous post summarized some of Kathleen Thelen's thinking about the prospects for a more egalitarian capitalism in our future. Read more

  Posted on 29 June 2014 SOCIETY

• Thelen on the Prospects for Egalitarian Capitalism

  

  source: Kathleen Thelen, Varieties of Liberalization (kl 3310)There is a version of economic historical thinking that we might label as "capitalist triumphalism... Read more

  Posted on 28 June 2014 SOCIETY

• Differences in Leadership Qualities Across Professions

  

  My university work involves quite a bit of interaction with leaders in different sectors of society — non-profits, elected officials, community organizations,... Read more

  Posted on 26 June 2014 SOCIETY

• A Catalogue of Social Mechanisms

  

  In an earlier post I made an effort at providing the beginnings of an inventory of social mechanisms from several areas of social research. Read more

  Posted on 21 June 2014 SOCIETY

• Craver on Mechanisms Methodology

  

  Carl Craver and Lindley Darden provide in In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences an extensive treatment of what a mechanisms-based... Read more

  Posted on 19 June 2014 SOCIETY

• Ontology and Methodology

  Part of the dispute between analytical sociology and critical realists comes down to a complicated interplay between ontology and methodology. Read more

  Posted on 12 June 2014 SOCIETY

• Public Attitudes Towards Market Fundamentalism

  

  Several recent posts have raised the question, what would be needed to move US public policy towards a more equitable treatment of the bottom 75% of American... Read more

  Posted on 08 June 2014 SOCIETY

• Polanyi's Substantive Theory of a Decent Society

  Karl Polanyi is underrated as a theorist of capitalist modernity. Margaret Somers and Fred Block's latest book, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl... Read more

  Posted on 05 June 2014 SOCIETY