Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 893 )

• Sources of Technology Failure

  

  A recurring theme in Understanding Society is the topic of technology failure -- air disasters, chemical plant explosions, deep drilling accidents. Read more

  Posted on 12 May 2023 SOCIETY

• Authoritarian Steps in Red State Legislatures

  

  Is it so hard to picture a United States that has succumbed to authoritarianism and the sacrifice of our basic democratic rights? Read more

  Posted on 05 May 2023 SOCIETY

• Analytical Sociology and Contentious Politics

  

  Analytical sociology is, as its proponents say, a meta-theory of how to conduct social research. In their contribution to Gianluca Manzo's Analytical... Read more

  Posted on 30 April 2023 SOCIETY

• Psychology of "comradeship" in Hitler's Armies

  

  What motivates violence, sacrifice, and atrocity among members of the military and other armed units in times of war and occupation? Read more

  Posted on 23 April 2023 SOCIETY

• Psychology of Morality

  

  Morality is a part of everyday life and personal experience. It is also, of course, the subject of a large field of philosophy -- philosophical ethics. What... Read more

  Posted on 21 April 2023 SOCIETY

• Social Science Study of the Holocaust

  

  image: "Mapping the SS Concentration Camps," Geographies of the Holocaust (Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, eds.)The complex realities of... Read more

  Posted on 13 April 2023 SOCIETY

• Origins of American Right-wing Extremism in the 1960s

  

  photo: Pat Buchanan, Newsweek, March 4, 1996The election of Donald Trump in 2016 presented mainstream America with a shocking wakeup: right-wing extremism,... Read more

  Posted on 11 April 2023 SOCIETY

• The Diachronic Social

  

  An earlier post offered what is for me a fairly large change of orientation on fundamental questions of social ontology: a conviction that the concept of... Read more

  Posted on 06 April 2023 SOCIETY

• ChatGPT Makes Stuff up

  

  It is really important for people to understand that ChatGPT is not a valid source of academic content or references. And it is not just useless because it make... Read more

  Posted on 27 March 2023 SOCIETY

• Red-state Authoritarianism

  

  Think about the many fronts in the war on individual rights and freedoms in Florida and other red states:vague but harsh limitations on what teachers can teach... Read more

  Posted on 19 March 2023 SOCIETY

• Corporate Ethics and Corporate Crimes

  

  Several earlier posts focused on corporate responsibility for crimes against humanity during the period of the Holocaust (link, link, link). Read more

  Posted on 09 March 2023 SOCIETY

• W.E.B. Du Bois' Stunning Modernist Data Graphics

  

  Du Bois, Diaspora of Africans to the AmericasW.E.B. Du Bois is well known for his pioneering work in American sociology, and most especially his studies of the... Read more

  Posted on 03 March 2023 SOCIETY

• Isaiah Berlin's Approach to History of Philosophy

  

  Isaiah Berlin's approach to the study of philosophy was strikingly different from that taken by practitioners of the technical disciplines of analytic... Read more

  Posted on 21 February 2023 SOCIETY

• Mechanisms of Extremist Mobilization

  

  The increase in public belief in core claims of far-right extremism in the United States is alarming. Central among those beliefs is the "Great Replacement"... Read more

  Posted on 17 February 2023 SOCIETY

• Decline of Support for Democratic Norms

  

  The signs of authoritarian and extremist assaults on the US constitutional democracy are ominous and increasing. The former president's explicit lawlessness... Read more

  Posted on 16 February 2023 SOCIETY

• New Public Administration 1968-2002

  

  Image: org chart, Housing and Urban Development (9,500 staff)Herbert Simon's important contribution to the study of administrative organizations appeared in... Read more

  Posted on 02 February 2023 SOCIETY

• Ten Paper Topics in Philosophy and History Framed by ChatGPT

  

  An earlier post considered the question of how to assess the quality of ChatGPT as an academic writer. One particular concern shared by professors in... Read more

  Posted on 22 January 2023 SOCIETY

• ChatGPT as an Academic Writer

  

  I've taken the view that the hoopla about ChatGPT is overblown, and that the texts generated by large language models in response to "prompts" are nothing more... Read more

  Posted on 21 January 2023 SOCIETY

• Philosophy of Public Administration?

  

  The Department of Energy building is shown in Washington, Friday, May 1, 2015. House Republicans Friday passed the second of 12 spending bills for the upcoming... Read more

  Posted on 19 January 2023 SOCIETY

• Is Ontological Individualism Still a Viable Social Ontology?

  

  image: a flat social ontology: actors and structuresOver the years I've continued to advocate for the position of ontological individualism -- the idea that... Read more

  Posted on 16 January 2023 SOCIETY