Dlittle30
I am a philosopher of social science with a strong interest in China and Southeast Asia. Paying attention to the logical and conceptual issues raised by the social sciences is key to better understanding the modern world. I think philosophers need to interact seriously and extensively with working social scientists and historians if they are going to be able to make a useful contribution.
MY BLOGS
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Understanding Society
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/
Innovative thinking about social agency and structure in a global world
LATEST ARTICLES ( 896 )
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How to Think About Work
Work defines a large portion of life in any society, traditional or modern. How should we think about the social and economic forces that create "work"? Read more
Posted on 21 October 2012 SOCIETY -
The Talent Supply Chain
I had an interesting discussion with a senior executive of Kelly Services that provided some very striking new perspectives on the world of work. Read more
Posted on 19 October 2012 SOCIETY -
Who Was Leon Trotsky?
Leon Trotsky was something of a hero for a part of the anti-Stalinist left from the 1930s through at least the 1970s. Sidney Hook and John Dewey offered... Read more
Posted on 14 October 2012 HISTORY, SOCIETY -
Voter Registration, Mississippi, 1960
One of the most important and hard-fought dimensions of the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s was the issue of voting rights. The Jim Crow South... Read more
Posted on 10 October 2012 HISTORY, POLITICS, SOCIETY -
Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable Call for Papers
FIFTEENTH ANNUAL PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE ROUNDTABLE 22-24 MARCH 2013 University of California-Santa Cruz CALL FOR PAPERS We are organizing the fifteenth... Read more
Posted on 08 October 2012 PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
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
