Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 891 )

• Contingent Pathways in Eurasian History

  

  Economic historians and historians of Asia have been deeply involved in a debate with long roots: Why did modern economic development occur first and most... Read more

  Posted on 07 October 2012 SOCIETY

• Water and Public Policy Research in Vietnam

  

  We don't get a lot of exposure to social science and policy research from Vietnam, so it was very interesting for me recently to run across two recent books by... Read more

  Posted on 06 October 2012 SOCIETY

• Domain of Agent-based Modeling Methods

  Agent-based modeling is an intriguing new set of tools for computational social science. The techniques permit us to project forward the system-level effects... Read more

  Posted on 02 October 2012 PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY

• Strategic Action Fields

  

  Sometimes a rethinking of ontology and social categories results in an important step forward in social theory. This appears to be the case in some recent... Read more

  Posted on 27 September 2012 SOCIETY

• Actor-centered Sociology and Agent-based Models

  

  Actor-centered sociology (ACS) begins in the intuition that social processes begin in the interactions of socially constructed individuals, and it takes... Read more

  Posted on 25 September 2012 SOCIETY

• China's Rural Transition

  

  Roughly half of China's population is still rural, living in villages and towns and dependent primarily on farming. In 1985 that percentage was about 76%, so... Read more

  Posted on 21 September 2012 SOCIETY

• What Makes Universities Better?

  

  Universities are large, complex organizations that have multiple goals -- educating undergraduates, training graduate students, facilitating and expanding... Read more

  Posted on 17 September 2012 SCHOOLING, SOCIETY

• Social Sciences and the Civil Rights Movement

  

  The American Civil Rights movement was (and is) a complex, extended series of events, actions, and interactions in the United States between roughly 1950 and... Read more

  Posted on 15 September 2012 SOCIETY

• How Jim Crow Worked

  

  Understanding history is partly about understanding some of the dry facts of social sequence and cause and effect in the making of various periods of... Read more

  Posted on 12 September 2012 SOCIETY

• Why Spatial Analysis?

  

  G. William Skinner's contributions to the China field were many (link). A great deal of current research in the China field builds on his regionalization... Read more

  Posted on 10 September 2012 SOCIETY

• Quality of Life in China

  

  One of the important developments in efforts to measure economic progress has been the creation of various measures of quality of life. Read more

  Posted on 05 September 2012 SOCIETY

• Liberal Education

  

  One of the most fundamental and distinctive aspects of the American approach to undergraduate education is the priority given to making sure that students... Read more

  Posted on 03 September 2012 SOCIETY

• The Great Divergence

  It has been ten years since Ken Pomeranz published The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy., a book that forced some rea... Read more

  Posted on 01 September 2012 SOCIETY

• Rural Studies in China

  

  I spent a rewarding afternoon at the Institute for Rural Studies at Central China Normal University in Wuhan this week (link). The Institute is the leading... Read more

  Posted on 28 August 2012 SOCIETY

• Technical Knowledge

  There is a kind of knowledge in an advanced mechanical society that doesn't get much attention from philosophers of science and sociologists of science, but it... Read more

  Posted on 26 August 2012 SOCIETY

• Political Polarization?

  

  Is the American electorate "polarized" with regard to sets of political issues? McCarty, Rosenthal, and Poole accept the common view that we have in fact... Read more

  Posted on 22 August 2012 POLITICS, SOCIETY

• Social Obligations and Markets

  

  The vice presidential pick for the Republican ticket is an extreme voice on the question of whether individuals have obligations to others in society that... Read more

  Posted on 17 August 2012 SOCIETY

• Mobilizing the Masses

  

  One of the books on the Chinese Revolution that I particularly respect is Odoric Wou's 1994 Mobilizing the Masses: Building Revolution in Henan. As noted in... Read more

  Posted on 13 August 2012 SOCIETY

• Civil Rights History

  

  What is involved in assembling the history of a complicated period like the US civil rights movement? This is a difficult question for any complex historical... Read more

  Posted on 10 August 2012 SOCIETY

• Mayer Zald

  

  I am sorry to share the news with readers that Mayer Zald passed away today in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Mayer was a brilliant sociologist, a founding contributor... Read more

  Posted on 08 August 2012 SOCIETY