Robert Dingwall

Base

Name

Robert Dingwall

Organization

Professor and Freelance

  • Titus Alexander

    The McDonaldization thesis became one of the most widely read sociology books of all time and has entered the culture. It is mentioned in over 8,600 publications and has been applied to countless institutions, from archives and cruises to surgery,  universities and zoos. Recent examples include the McDonaldization of consumption (2018), UK justice (2022), and more with over 1,820 results in Google Scholar since 2022 and 720 in 2023.
    However, Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis is disempowering and undermines the potential of social science to make a difference. Since it was first published 40 years ago McDonald’s has grown fourfold while sociology has flatlined.
    To mark the anniversary The Journal of American Culture has published my Unwrapping the McDonald’s model: An introduction to dynamic social theory, challenging Ritzer’s thesis and proposing an alternative approach to social science, based on the idea that all institutions are social experiments and models of how to achieve specific outcomes.
    See summary of the argument in The Power of Social Models or the full article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13467.

  • Estratégia e táticas da JetX para vencer

    I couldn’t help but smile while reading this article! It’s refreshing to see researchers with a sense of humor and the ability to find a playful side in their work. The Ig Nobel Prize is, after all, a celebration of quirky and offbeat scientific achievements, and your gambling research certainly fits the bill.
    While the study may have involved crocodiles, a far cry from traditional human subjects in gambling research, it highlights the creativity and diversity of scientific inquiry. Sometimes, unconventional approaches lead to unexpected insights and valuable perspectives that can be applied to other fields.
    The fact that your research has practical implications in understanding risk-taking behaviors, even in the animal kingdom, is a testament to the breadth and depth of scientific exploration. It’s a reminder that there’s always more to discover, even in seemingly unrelated areas.
    I applaud your team’s lighthearted yet meaningful approach to research, and the Ig Nobel recognition is a testament to the importance of thinking outside the box. After all, science should be as much about curiosity and wonder as it is about serious inquiry. Thank you for sharing this delightful perspective on your work!

  • Tom

    Almost impossible to get right all of the time…those with bad intent know how to play the system. However, greater inter-agency coordination (tech) and better-resourced less poorly managed agencies could reduce the tragedies.

  • bilbo

    On the role of risk in development of childen….
    I endorse the perspective of the article’s author, and Ransome, although am no fanboi of Lenin, Marx nor yet the Manchester Guardian ( as was )

    Nevertheless, I was a Baby Boomer and – as were my peers – encouraged to play outside all day, and to go wherever I chose on my series of bicycles. That became weekend camping with the Boy Scouts, then mountain walking, then rock-climbing. Later still, military flying and offshore sailing.

    All these required an appropriate and graduated assessment of risk. Adults monitored, often unseen. For example, a group of youngsters at an Outward Bound School would do an ‘expedition’ climbing and crossing some significant Scottish hills and ridges. They would think themselves managing alone, but would be monitored by a staff member or two from an adjacent ridge.

    I believe, from my own ‘lived experience’, that such graduated exposures to risk are important to maturation.

  • Christy Toth

    My daughter is interested in criminology/behavioral science. We would love some information or suggestions. She’s a junior in high school.

  • alex

    Overall good article, ‘m using it for school research. 🙂

  • Alan Britten

    What are the authors views on handkerchief or tissue use? Society has come up with some views on this, maybe a social scientist has a view?

  • Jimmy Yamaimai

    I have known about John Hattie since 2012. He has also influence teaching and learning in our education system in Vanuatu,

  • William Cockerham

    Saw the movie, Robert. Excellent analysis.

  • Nabanita Das

    Hi Tracy,
    I wanted to let you know that I’ve been reading your work on Principles of Marketing for a Digital Age. I’m truly impressed by your writing abilities. You have researched a lot and done an excellent work. If you have interest on recent digital trends, read my article here

  • Prince Njanji

    Is there another Sci-hub-of-some-sort for social sciences? Some of us are in the fields of Public Policy, Human Resources, etc and we are still in the dark. Please, if its out there, share. It will help millions out there.

  • DocReality

    B.S. DEI programs frequently minimize or deny antisemitism and actually foster it with the demonization of Israel. DEI = division, exclusion and indoctrination.

  • Russell Foote, Ph. D.

    Greetings Sage Publishing,
    I would like to recommend a similar award system for social science research and theory building (separately) publications in developing countries. You can even establish a committee to develop criteria and evaluate submitted publications,

  • Michael Strack

    The podcast featuring Craig Calhoun on protest movements discusses the formation, organization, success, and failure of protest movements, as well as their commonalities. Calhoun, an American sociologist and director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has extensively studied protest movements throughout his academic career.

    In the podcast, Calhoun emphasizes that protests are a tactic used by social movements to gain media attention, put issues on the public agenda, and influence policymakers. However, protests are just one aspect of a larger process of social change. Movements involve various activities and strategies beyond protests.

    Calhoun provides insights into the formation and organization of protest movements by drawing on his research, including the Tiananmen Square protests in China. He highlights the role of social relationships and social organization in protests. For example, in the Tiananmen Square protests, the organizers utilized pre-existing ties among students to mobilize and coordinate the protests. They also used symbolic actions, such as camping in the square, to challenge the government’s claims about order and organization.

    The podcast also touches on the different messages and interpretations of protest movements. Calhoun explains that the messages conveyed by protests can vary depending on the target audience and the specific goals of the movement. In the case of Tiananmen Square, different messages were crafted for different audiences, with some emphasizing democracy and others focusing on corruption and economic development.

    Regarding the role of social science in understanding protest movements, Calhoun discusses the three registers of engagement: description, causal analysis, and normative questioning. Social science provides descriptive accounts of protest movements, explores the causes and conditions that give rise to them, and offers critical analysis and evaluation of their strategies and outcomes. Calhoun emphasizes the importance of a balanced and thorough understanding of events while acknowledging that different values and perspectives can shape the interpretation of social science research.

    In terms of research methods, Calhoun shares his approach to studying the Tiananmen Square protests, which involved multiple methods. These included participant observation, survey methodology, retrospective interviews with protest leaders, and documentary research. The combination of these methods allowed Calhoun to gather comprehensive and diverse data to analyze the protests.

    The conversation also briefly addresses the scientific nature of social science research. Calhoun highlights the importance of systematic data gathering, testing preliminary conclusions, and using appropriate methods that fit the research problem and context. While social science research may differ from the experimental and mathematical models often used in natural sciences, it still aims to achieve rigor and reliability in data analysis.

    Finally, the podcast touches on recent criticisms of social sciences and the challenges faced by researchers in obtaining funding. Calhoun mentions attacks on political science funding and emphasizes the need to defend the rigor and value of social science research while navigating the expectations of funding sources.

  • Ayo

    Michael, this is brilliant!!!
    Thank you so much for capturing the mission and activism of this unique publication, and highlighting the historical string that ties us all together.

  • James

    I think just bringing up race on anything is racist. Black vote, Hispanic percent, white power, Asian food, ect…. All racist in my mind…. Even what I just wrote is racist!

  • Arianna

    Dear Emma, thank you for this interesting article. I was wondering when you mention the survey done “nation wide” to what nation are you referring, is it the USA or the UK? Or another nation? This would be incredibly helpful to know for a research project I am conducting.

    Thank you for your attention.

  • Sue Oliver PhD

    I agree wholeheartedly that we qualitative researchers seem to be obliged to work harder to justify our findings as credible and trustworthy and contributing to the existing body of knowledge in our subject area. i have been involved in qualitative research since the early 1990s and have seen the development from having to ‘prove’ the efficacy of my data analysis, to the stage of arguing convincingly for validity through trustworthiness, dependability and various other qualities. However, our chosen research discipline enables us to perceive and understand human conditions to a depth that quantitative methods cannot. There is a place for both, either as mixed methods or separately, but we have to be persistent and thorough in the pursuit of acceptability.

  • Rob Procter

    Hi,

    Have there been any significant changes to social media company data access policies since you posted this?

  • Charles Bradley

    Such a great episode! Thank you so much for doing this.

  • Tim MacIntosh

    Certainly, this is an older post, but I’ll go ahead anyway. At some point Robinson compared the dynamism of America with the struggles of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), noting institutions supporting (imperfectly) equality of opportunity. This narrative is perhaps a small piece of the story.

    But how about another: America’s institutions are based on cheap factors of production – raw materials and slave labour harvested from Africa. Today, it’s not so much the transfer of goods, as the disparity in dividing producer surplus – all boats rise, but mine much, much, much more. There is a fundamental problem with comparing the colonizer’s institutions with the colonized.

    At another point, Robinson takes a pragmatic approach, a real-politick view, that institution building requires compromise – letting land go untaxed in the UK, for example. This of course is not corruption, in that it follows the rules of the institution. On the other hand, it is institutionalize corruption. The privatization of natural resources, the fundamental source of all wealth, is a key colonial instrument of power – it is what perpetuates the “Global South’s” dependency on the “Global North.” I appreciate the pragmatism, but this thinking forfeits all potential for institutions to become innovative. Work is in the service of the multinational, for export. There is no natural, local, innovative economy.

    I worry that the conversation remains a colonial perspective on why nations fail. It’s us, of course, by design.

    Back to Rhodesia: Here’s quote from Rhodes himself.
    “We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.” – Still true, eh?

  • Russell Foote, Ph. D.

    Research Impact: Making It Visible.

    While much has been said about research impact there isn’t much real-world visibility about such impacts. I would therefore propose the following:
    All theses (Bachelors, Master’s and Ph. D. ) must focus on a real world issue that is occurring within families, organization/s, the student’s place of work or an individual level. The focus of such research depends on the student’s major, that is, an engineering Ph. D. or Master’s student should do a thesis that addresses a real world engineering challenge. A graduate student in Psychology should address a real life issue like the changing psychologies of selected teenagers which will require a longitudinal qualitative or quantitative research design.

    Universities should build relationships to conduct action research with community groups, governmental and private sector organizations to conduct research and propose problem- solving proposals on an issue that is affecting any of these entities. The members engaged in such partnerships must remain involved from the conception of the project and throughout its implementation. The participating university should be paid for their contribution to the project. This can become a useful revenue stream for such participating universities.

    All disciplinary majors, from Bachelor’s to Ph. D. should have an annual practicum for which the participating students must submit a report and credits must be given or a final mark can be awarded as part of the end-of-semester assessment of such students.

    At the end of each of the above an impact assessment research exercise must be conducted by a separate committee. None of the individuals who participated in the research project should be appointed to this committee. In addition academic policies in universities should be expanded to accommodate the above suggestions and these suggestions should be taken into consideration by accreditation bodies and THES World University Rankings.

  • william elgin

    CTR is a Marxist program teaching reverse racism that should be banned in the entire US.

  • Nemo

    One thing that I note regarding ALL the sensible opponents of the many and varied assaults on the freedom and well-being of individuals is that so many are classed as “Emeritus”. Given that in the UK what might be classified as ‘Emeritus’ Generals, and ‘Emeritus’ Central Bankers ALL seem to change their opinion with their status. It seems that the status of ‘Emeritus’ is like a truth drug. They all seem to recant their previous beliefs and opinions. Hmm, could it be that once retired they are safe in their pensions and so are willing to say what they dared not say when still employed? Long live Emeritus Professors and any others with the same status who may finally be able to ‘speak truth to power’.

  • Gustavo Adolfo Rodríguez
    INTERESTING ARTICLE
    
  • Maxena Sedanka

    The “greedy work” concept is out of place. Factually, women pursue majors that have lower wage outcomes, pursue jobs with lower average wages (particularly jobs that are not dangerous), work fewer hours, and take off more time, and these are all facts backed by the BLS. Regardless of what Claudia Goldin says, those behaviors are real and directly connected to the matter in a deeply impactful way. They can’t just be shrugged off with a buzz term. Then there is the part where pregnancy takes women out of the workforce for an extended period of time. That directly impacts the aggregate.

    With all of that, of course women are going to make less, it’s literally impossible to avoid, and it will literally never change unless women can address all of those issues, but I don’t see that ever happening. Why? Because despite all of the new age gender pseudoscience coming from college campuses, bloggers, and thinktanks these days, real science shows us that women are just different from men in a number of ways, and that’s totally okay. Our ambitions are different, our desires and how we feel we should fulfill them are different, how we see the world and how we should operate it is different, and that, again, is totally okay. That difference is a needed balance.

    Pressure from woman-centered ideologies that are mostly based in (pretty blatant) misandry have for generations tried hard to turn women into female-male hybrids, and all this has done is caused misery and disconnect between the sexes. It’s unnatural, it doesn’t work, and it’s not working, that’s the key part. It’s not working. How do we know? Look at the never-ending war between men and women, the school shootings, the exploding suicide rate (which is mostly men btw), and the confusion of kids not knowing who or what they are anymore and being encouraged by ideologues to remain in the confusion said ideologues helped perpetuate.

    But losers can win – eventually. The more that workers say to their supervisors that “we want our own time” the more the labor market will change.

    That’s not how real life works and this is how women and men are different. You see, men don’t think this way. Men just go to work and do the job as described, they’re not expecting industry to bend to their desires. Women in western society want to bend the workplace situation to their feelings and desires, but the worker never has the leverage in this situation. The more bending you ask for, the more employers will stop hiring you or finding ways to reduce your wages by outsourcing or automating, thereby devaluing your job industry-wide.

    “The important point,” she adds, “is that both lose. Men are able to have the family and step up because women step back in terms of their jobs, but both are deprived. Men forgo time with their family and women often forgo their career.”

    This ignores the critical point. Women are not stepping back, they are answering the call of nature because they have to. Pregnancy does that. It’s also best for the child, and that’s best for the family in general. Both men and women are obligated to do what’s best for the family, it’s not simply about what they want individually. And this is where the crux of the matter lies: what is more important? A “career” sitting in some dusty cubicle 5 days a week and being mostly miserable doing it? Or building a strong loving family and community that helps make the world a happier place to live in? See, the fact that latter part is so discounted now leaves no surprise as to why our communities are in ruins. There is no strong rearing base for children anymore so there is no wonder children, teens and adolescents are being raised by social media and are out of control. Communities full of single moms in rented houses and apartments, having strangers watch their kids while they work, is not yielding anything but failure and destruction.

  • Ebeneezer Goode

    A very interesting article that without much doubt has some connection to a certain bee in my bonnet called risk assessment. Perhaps someone would be kind enough to enlighten me… By the way, Harcourt’s book? Loving it!

  • Robert Usher BSc (Nottingham U)

    Although providing only imperfect barriers, masks do reduce the velocity and amount of viral particles leaking therethrough, reducing the reach and and density/mass of the viral stream exchanged during conversation. Even the least effective, blood spurt resistant surgical masks shown on the cloned tee shirts will provide some reduction, albeit modest (Mona Lisa excepted as speechless).
    It is well recognised by virologists that, all else considered, the less the viral load initially received the less the disease.
    Clearly, although masks do not prevent transmission, they do reduce it.
    In dwelling on the negatives, the author would appear determined to reject the good for the perfect.

  • Chris Reed

    Why are all the words capitalised? Just hilariously perverse for a social science space. The mind boggles.

    • Sage

      Aaah, how we wish it were intentional (or perhaps some non-IRB-approved experiment)! We’re having a technical issue in which our normal fixes in the style sheets aren’t taking. We are aware and are working on it though.

  • Philip Walsh

    Hi. The link to download the podcast links to the previous one (Dunning-Kruger). Thanks

    • Sage

      Hi Philip – It’s fixed now. Thanks for alerting us!

  • Maresa

    Sounds like brainwashing and subliminal messages. That and controlling our media censorship

  • Dr Sue Oliver

    These are principles that all qualitative researchers need to bear in mind. No harm in being reminded of them, as the field develops.

  • MARK REINERS

    What may be most promising about this potentially very important initiative is the recognition implicitly ‘baked in’ to its founding that effective governance has suffered from the deficit of having too long failed to see the social sciences as a source of illumination for how policy might be defined in a more systemically expansive and integrative manner. Done well, THAT would be a big deal. One example might be to cite the case of medical/health issues. How much effort is expended in pharma labs seeking mechanistic molecular silver bullets for conditions which may have deep and complex roots in the social/environmental conditions of populations, and which might be more holistically addressed in terms of modifications of such factors? Many others might be cited.

  • King

    I completely agree with what you have written. I hope this post could reach more people as this was truly an interesting post.

  • Theorgy
    • NICE
  • Jerome Fontina

    The article mentions biased datasets causing biases in the operation of chat GPT. However, I thought the developers went to extensive measure to prevent and/or remove bias in the data and the AI itself.
    For example, it’s not allowed to express its own opinions, consistently reminds users to have an open mindset, and admits that it is wrong if prompted (even when it is right, leading to some funny results such as 2+2 = 5).

  • bob

    If artificial intelligence have reached the level of doing rudimentary writing tasks, then why not use them? Nobody complains that calculators are reducing our ability to do arithmetic. At some point we need to question the efficiency of performing tasks manually.

    • Jerome Fontina

      You must be an AI trying to take us over! Just kidding.
      LOL, I always find it really funny when people start freaking out over this kind of stuff and/or declaring that artificial intelligence has become sentient and will destroy the universe. People don’t realize that we are still lightyears away from such issues.
      Good point about the calculators. AI is simply a tool – it can be used and misused, like any other tool.
      Knives are great. I use them all the time in my kitchen! True, somebody else could go stab people with my knives, but not if I manage them responsibly. AI, if it has the same dangers, could have the same management and restrictions – so relax!
      When people freak out about self-driving cars, we should also mention to them how many accidents and deaths are caused by drunk, fallible humans. Are well-trained machines really more dangerous?

    • Michelle202

      No disrespect intended, but what I’m about to say is EXTREMELY SERIOUS.
      Kids don’t know how to spell anymore. Instead of writing, like they used to, everything is digital, so they use spellcheck. Thus, when a situation in which they need to ACTUALLY write REAL THINGS without relying on their machines every step of the way comes up, they fail.
      Look at standardized test scores over the past few years in the US. They have been consistently dropping, and this trend is perfectly in line with (I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH) the increased intrusion of technology into our children’s everyday lives.
      I am not denying the usefulness of science or calculators or whatever when I say that our kids do not need phones at age 6 (like many American kids currently have) nor do they need to have computers writing their essays for them. Instead, they need to be learning essential skills that they can apply in their future careers and workplaces. OTHERWISE THE FUTURE WILL BE VERY SCARY INDEED. IMAGINE MILLENIALS – BUT WORSE!

  • Joseph Dionne

    Society chose a handful of words and decided they are swear words. its pretty simple.

    If we want to get rid of swear words, well we need to change ourselves and maybe listen to the sage advice from our parents “sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

  • Ana Ramos-Zayas

    Is there a recording of this event?

    • Sage

      There is and it will be posted on December 12 as an embedded video in this same post

  • Arushi Mehra

    wow that’s great information and very motivated after reading this article

  • Anisah

    Wonderful interview with a superb geographer and thinker. Thank you!

  • Tim MacIntosh

    Hello,
    I’m a regular listener and really try to take insights from the podcast into real life. I’m a little worried about the conversation with Hutton. The social science field is very pumped up in this episode for its ethics and vision of a better world.
    I’d really like to hear guests like this pushed for response on some of these topics:

    • The number of social scientists working in marketing is enormous. Given that their vast knowledge of human behaviour is being leveraged to sell unsustainable mountains of trash to people segmented into I-I-I bubbles, it seems, at times, rich to focus so intently on the “WE” scientists. Often, this body of knowledge is deployed against children!
    • Liz Truss herself was guided by social scientists, albiet with a different world view. Where do these folks sit and where have they strayed?
    • The movement in economics towards an ESG optimization model is laudable. But given the environmental crisis, is enough being done by social scientists to increase the weight of the ESG perspective against the financial one in their equations.

    Generally, I’m skeptical of interview that avoids difficult topics. I wouldn’t say that you generally avoid confrontation David, I just would have liked to hear some more push here!

    Thanks for your work,
    Tim

    • David

      Thanks for your comment Tim. It is a fair point that social science can be and is leveraged for bad ends too. I try and keep interviews reasonably short, and there are usually angles I leave out….but perhaps I should have put that to him.

  • Kim Mildred

    In order to write an impact case study, you must first determine who will benefit specifically. You must be able to show how the effort affected the recipients.

  • Brian Cooksey

    This is an excellent summary of how classical sociology should / could be informing public policy and challenging the century-old hegemony of ‘economics’ as the dominant social science. Joan Robinson pointed out in the 1930s that competitive markets were the exception, not the rule, and subsequent critiques of post-Marshall economics have shattered the notion of homo economicus and the view that GNP growth somehow measures human welfare and the ‘development’ of poor countries. But the economists still dominate the discursive space, and it may be too late to undo the social and ecological damage that this has caused.

  • Ron Iphofen

    Thanks for this Robert – there is so much of value in more sophisticated ‘classical’ sociological thinking that needs rehabilitation – and application in the modern world.

  • Russell Foote, Ph. D.

    Good Day,
    Very useful and informative reports…however it would be nice to establish and offer a reward for the best five academic contributions to the advancement of the Social Sciences across two year intervals openn to social scientists in nthe western hemisphere, that is Canada, America and the Caribbean.

  • zivancevic

    since classical antiquity “Senat” consisted, alas! of the “senus” or the very old ones
    can they really be responsible for the decisions that their physical bodies make? I don’t think so, thus it would be better to avoid “hubris” indeed. Trust the direction of the place to someone younger (i did not say “foolish”, alas!) , let them make a mistake or two, but they would learn gradually- the SENUS is very old and makes terrible mistakes either

  • LisAnne Marie

    Life has always had global health resets, which has now been reset W/ globalization. In many ways this makes it easier. Our world today so connected, which is making sharing of solutions easier. However, that being connected just might the problem! We need to find solution uses our social sciences to get to an answer for a safe/connect globe!!!

  • Marleen

    Nice!

  • Clint Thompson

    I too have noticed this tip creep option becoming more widespread across many businesses that up until the plastic point of sale machines and indeed Covid just didn’t have an opportunity to ask for a tip. I have always been a fair or generous tipper at bars and restaurants because that is just how it was when I became the paying customer. I understood and accepted the reason for the gratuity and always have paid accordingly based on service. Since Covid and now inflation I have become more aware of my ability to remain generous so I am now having to be more assertive or selective in my decisions regarding whether something that is called a tip on a screen is actually just another tax from my perspective and no longer a choice but rather an expectation to pick a number before the machine will allow me to complete the transaction. Businesses that aren’t actually providing a service like liquor outlets and gas station fast food ( that have you pay before the service or product is delivered ) leave me feeling like I was coerced into paying a fee or not for something that wasn’t delivered.

  • Will Van Kessel

    It is appointed for all to die, a d then the judgement.
    Repent and believe and you shall be saved

  • Jenny

    Well written blog, explicating what really matters in scholarly research, teaching and community service cannot be adequately measured by scholarly metrics, but instead by the difference it makes to the lives of people outside academia.

  • Bear Kosik

    Happy to see this essay. I have been saying the same thing for several years, trying to educate people that using the term race perpetuates racism. If we instead think in terms of ancestry, demographic statistics could still be used to establish discrimination. The emphasis on color is inaccurate and rather ridiculous if it weren’t such a powerful means of controlling people. Just think of the person of mixed Euro-African descent who “passes” as white. That denial of heritage is as egregious as gay men who think it’s better to say they are “straight acting”.

  • Yoly

    Very sad to learn about Barney’s death. I have great respect for his work, and his mind! He is the icon of Classic GT

  • Mike Riddell

    Why is there no mention of social capital as an intangible with wonderful regenerative properties? Someone needs to start counting it. Oh wait, they have: countercommunity.com

  • Eira Brandby

    “the Vienna Congress of 1973” in your text above…is it not supposed to be 1873?

    • Sage

      Indeed it is (the 1873 Vienna International Meteorological Congress, we have since learned). The text has been corrected. Thank you!

  • Shamser Sinha

    Thanks Sue. I had meant to get back to many months ago but did not. I will try to find an institutional email address through which to contact you. I would definitely like to take a look at your work

  • John.mcintyre

    Display of enthusiasm may so be due to the cultural origin of the entrepreneur

    • Lin Jiang

      Hi, John, yes! What makes some entrepreneurs display enthusiasm and others don’t is another interesting question.

  • Dr Sue Oliver

    Envisiging Prof. Fletcher-Watson’s argument in the wider academic context, I agree wholeheartedly that all too often, we seem to be writing to out own academic clique. It’s too easy to attach more value to our impact factors than to the actual application of our research to the people we aim to help. Our impact on them needs to be our prime focus.

  • Krishna

    Great blog! You should consider https://www.trackmyhashtag.com/
    It is a free & paid Hashtag tracking tool which will definitely be useful for your readers.
    You can visit this tool and use it to check how it works.

  • Larry Prusak

    This is a fine paper and certainly true to my own experiences. Keep up the fine research though you are fighting heavy head winds from MBA land

  • Tamara

    I teach research mehods to master level students in Russia. Your cite is a huge help. You discuss important research related issues. It helps me to adapt complicated ideas to the students understanding. Your site is one from very few that discusses how students perceive research and its practicality.
    Thank you. Keep going!

  • Leonid

    The author of the article is fascinated by differences in languages. But the name Kiev is the ancient name of the city, which can be found in the first handwritten history of Russia (Rus) – the Laurentian Chronicle of the Tale of Time Years in 1113. It is Kiev, not Kyiv. Concerning the word “question” (in Ukrainian pytannya). In Russian there is a word pytat, vypytyvat, i.e. ask, ask a question. And this is not an attempt.

  • Kyle

    As the old saying goes… “correlation does not equal causation”.

    I’d take a wild stab that the average age of Trump supporters is higher than those of Biden and that the Trump group also have a higher proportion on the 70+ age group. I’d also take a guess that the Trump supporters include more people from the working class and non working segments of the population and these groups are well known to have poorer overall health than those in the middle classes who typically sit further left on the political divide.

    My suspicion would be that Covid cares far more about your age and you health than it does your political beliefs so perhaps any future “analysis” could include that data too.

  • Dr Sue Oliver

    The points raised in this article resonate here in the UK as well. There is, in my experience, often a missing link between research findings, public opinion and policy-making.

  • Chioma

    Hi Preeti, Thanks for this detailed work. For someone with a background in public health and looking to explore behavioral science. This is very helpful to me to see the range of options and career paths.

  • Frank

    Does anybody think hoarding toilet paper during the beginning stages of the pandemic show that people,in general, aren’t very practical or are even lacking a certain amount of intelligence?
    Out of all the products that should have been ahead of toilet paper, like water or anti- bacterial sprays, why a product like toilet paper that can easily be substituted in any number of ways?

  • Parinitha Bhargav

    Though everything cannot be taught online, there is certainly a great value for teaching online. If there was no such option, then the education could have halted for 2 years. Thank you for the helpful answers to make it more effective.

  • Chris Sellers

    The answer that psychology longs for is a universal underlier. I have it; people do not truly love themselves and subsequently search for validation among external sources, compounding the problem.

  • Navdeep Singh Bajwa

    online classes are helpful for those students, who are, kind of shy and always scared to ask questions in class, in zoom chat, students can ask questions personally through zoom chat.

  • Gabrielle Bauer

    A consistent voice of reason. My response to reading your thoughts about the pandemic response is always “yes, yes, yes!” Bravo.

  • Larisa

    Modern youngsyers are visuals, mainly. Videos do help them a lot in their studies in different subjects. Research articles are particularly hard for them – and, perhaps, here relevant videos can be especially significant.

  • Alene Royo

    Nice

  • Sofia Fierro

    I really think that the suffering inflicted on enslaved women through this type of torture is unique and specific. Using this image to protest the lockdown and mask-wearing does minimize the enslaved women’s experiences and undermines its historical specificity. Lockdown and mask wearing might be tyrannical, but they are not enslavement. Your are not working for someone else until you die. And you can always take your mask off when you are in your house.

  • Nicholas

    Would not have thought that and or the future aspects of how it may be utilized in deeper insight on the matter

  • Eruc

    So when you break it all down, you are ok with “encouraging” vaccines but not “demanding” them. But where is the line? I don’t think we are “demanding” them, despite the common use of the term mandate. I think we are encouraging them. There is no blanket requirement mandate that this must be done, period.

    It is an either or. If you get vaxxed you can do these other things more freely. If you don’t you can’t go in certain places or work certain places.
    To me, that is simply a form of encouragement and everyone has the choice. Of course, they have choice. The simple fact that tens of millions in the US are not vaxxed proves they have the choice and autonomy is not violated.

  • S Laddy

    The psychological barrier is key to overcome, not least because it involves plenty of folks unpick the fear porn narrative that has been wielded by the govt and MSM.

  • John Fullerton

    Thank you for sharing about Kathy Charmaz. You mentioned the apology for quoting from her paper without attribution. The book may be freely checked out at https://archive.org/details/qualitativesocio0000schw

  • Cycles U.K Vouchers Code

    The first step in writing an impact case study is to identify the specific beneficiaries. You must be able to demonstrate the impact the initiative had on the beneficiaries. Be clear about the relationship between the project and the beneficiary. If the beneficiary was clear about their needs, this is easier to achieve. If not, include a brief description of the program and its impacts. In addition, you should include testimonials from people who were directly affected by the initiative.

  • Jordy an

    Good one

  • Kwame Aboagye

    Molefi Kente Asante is an inspiration when it comes to Africans and our own cultural beliefs such as Kwanzaa, Homowo and Panafest which what Africans celebrate every year on this earth.

  • Neil McAdam

    Cyrill, I fully endorse your thoughts. For a more generic application of similar approaches and an exploration of some of the barriers to implementing the new organisational leadership see my PHD from Deakin University in Australia dated 200w

  • Daniel Segal

    There’s a blooper in the next to last paragraph of Steven Lubet’s post above. He writes: “In fact, Segal boasts in his bio that he is ‘proud to serve’ in the organizing collective for the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), an organization that specifically opposes all participation in academic activities such as ‘events, projects, or publications that are designed explicitly to bring together Palestinians/Arabs and Israelis so they can present their respective narratives or perspectives, or to work toward reconciliation.’ Not much dialogue; plenty of hypocrisy.”

    I do proudly serve on the organizing collective of USACBI, but USACBI is distinct from PACBI. USACBI is the US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel; PACBI is the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. USACBI is an ally of PACBI, but the two are distinct and should not be conflated.

    That’s just careless; far worse is the partial and selective quotation Lubet gives from the PACBI website. Everyone should read through the entire linked text for themselves to assess how accurately or (I would argue) inaccurately Lubet has represented the PACBI position. The words he quotes are there, but they are taken out of context, for the purpose of continuing a smear against a principled social justice movement to expand human freedom and equality–a movement Lubet opposes because, well, it is committed to expanding human freedom and equality to include Palestinians and thus, necessarily, to ending Israeli state apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism. The Lubet project is what my beloved grandparents would have called a shanda. Palestinians should be free.

    Next year in liberation and justice!

  • John K. Wilson

    I disagree with the student editors, but I defend their right to be wrong without suffering punishment for it. Sadly, Lubet endorses retaliation by a university against students for their views. Lubet claims that the administration must not “allow university resources to be used directly in support of” a boycott. This is wrong. Since all legal journals and student groups use various university resources,  Lubet’s standard would amount to a ban on such organizations. If editors are given academic credit for their work, that credit cannot be withdrawn simply because Lubet dislikes their views. His assertion that academic credit is “obviously inapplicable to political advocacy” is obviously wrong because students are often granted academic credit for work that includes advocacy, and a university banning political advocacy in all academic endeavors would be guilty of massive repression. One fundamental tenet of academic freedom is that it protects even those who oppose academic freedom. While the misguided beliefs of some student editors may be a threat to academic freedom, a far greater threat to academic freedom occurs when a misguided university seeks to punish such advocacy.

  • James

    Transitioning at such a fast and unprecedented pace due to this pandemic is not easy. Universities and students alike, have done incredibly well at such short notice.

    It’s excellent that the new generation is learning how to adapt to this self-directed and accountable world.

    Every student is unique. The effectiveness of online teaching and learning, when used in conjunction with face-to-face learning methods, will help prepare students for working life.

  • Daniel Segal

    Steve Lubet thinks an institutional boycott of academic institutions is incompatible with academic freedom. I know a number of colleagues who hold this position out of a principled commitment to academic freedom, not because they are apologists for Israeli state apartheid and ethnic cleansing–and I greatly respect that principled disagreement with support for institutional boycotts, even as I disagree with it and proudly and fiercely support both BDS and academic freedom.

    That said, rather than presenting a reasoned argument for why an institutional boycott is incompatible with academic freedom, and then saying that I hold inconsistent views, Lubet assumes the incompatibility of my two positions and then says that Daniel Segal is a horrible hypocrite for supporting BDS and academic freedom both. This is not illuminating.

    No one thinks institutional boycotts represent an ideal situation for academia. They are, rather, a drastic last step in response to the worst conduct by academic institutions. Israeli universities violate the academic freedom and right to education of Palestinian students, and are complicit in the trampling of academic freedom of faculty and students at Palestinian universities; Israeli universities are embedded and complicit in Israeli state apartheid and ethnic cleansing. It is painful but necessary for me then to support an institutional boycott targeting Israeli universities, which involves no restrictions on individual scholarly communication with Israeli scholars.

    Here one might recall that CAUT (the Canadian Association of University Teachers) called for an academic boycott of the University of Toronto because of the university’s egregious violations of both academic freedom and the faculty’s role in governance in the Azarova affair. Lubet must also think CAUT was in violation of academic freedom in calling for this institutional academic boycott–and so he can now look up the names of the CAUT leaders and attack them all in highly personalized terms as well. But why? Who on earth thinks this is a useful mode of academic debate?

    Why? Jewish supremacists–aka Zionists–are defending the indefensible, and so they argue in astoundingly bad and self-discrediting ways.

    But let me say it again: as a proudly Jewish scholar, I fiercely support Palestinian freedom and academic freedom.

  • Dr Chris Williams

    I agree. This is a neglected aspect of the success of Europe and UK during the past 500 years. I have been researching why the so-called ‘divergence’ between West and East occurred, when the East had been centuries ahead of the West in the Sciences and philosophy. Radio engineering is especially interesting because the East seems now to be conspicuously ahead, yet all the fundamental innovations came from the West – Hertz, Marconi, Rutherford, Oliver Lodge, et al. The answer certainly has a lot to do with Learned Societies, because they formed support networks and ‘epistemic communities’ based on merit and interests rather than wealth and family connections, and even included women…eventually.

  • a sociolgist

    “It was clear by April 2020 that COVID-19 was not in remotely the same league.” = straw man as no-one ever said this. 
    “Yet we are still acting as if COVID-19 were the same order of threat that it appeared to
    be when it first emerged in human populations in late 2019″ patently
    not true – we don’t have to stay at home, wear masks, the football is back on,
    nightclubs are open
    When you’re sick do you go hospital and say I’m not listening to you, you’re a ‘iatrocracy’ or your “biomedical leaders”?
    The simple explanation for everything you’ve written here is that we were in the middle of pandemic that killed a lot of people, medical people did the best they could in the circumstances, the govt used lockdown and masks as a last resort to prevent an airborne virus transferring between people – that’s why other sociologists aren’t engaging on your terms.

  • John Dale

    The statement “I do not believe in God” is not incompatible with your definition of agnosticism, so this doesn’t sound like the most well designed survey.

    Couple that with the fact you lurch from talking about Dawkins to say that “Indeed in the U.S., 29 percent of atheist scientists also say they are culturally religious” – implying the opposite stance, when Dawkins has described himself as culturally Christian, I thinks it fair to say that I won’t be wasting 25 bucks on the book you’re plugging.

  • Cliff White

    Really excellent article.

  • Rachel Hale

    Your reflection prompts me to compare it to discussions about the difference between blue skies and problem-based research.

  • Nikki

    The pharmaceutical industry have made mistakes before (thalidomide is an obvious example but there are many, many more). A profit-driven industry should never hold sway over humanity or the individual’s right to choose what goes into their own body. Some people have died after the vaccine, yes numbers are low but there will be more fatalities. You can argue that fatalities would be statistically greater from infection but this neglects individual differences. For example, a young person is at comparatively low little risk from the virus but at greater comparative risk of adverse vaccine reactions. Individuals and their loved ones should weight their risks. One should not expect a child to have a vaccine on the basis of protecting others when that involves a risk to their well-being, no matter how small. A mandatory policy also neglects natural immunity which is found to be superiour to vaccine squired immunity, particularly with regard to new variants. One wonders why routine testing for natural immunity is not undertaken? There are mixed studies regarding transmission in vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Once we mandate vaccines on the basis that they prevent severe outcomes we open the door for all kinds of other things. For example, one may argue that perhaps we should mandate anti-depressant use given it may prevent depression, some depressed people do not know they are depressed and depression is prevalent and often deadly??? Of course, this would be ridiculous (although less so than a year ago). All drugs and vaccines have side effects and sometimes unknown long-term consequences. We should always have a choice and agency over our own bodies. Once an entire species can be compelled by a profit-driven industry to have substances that changes their immune or other bodily systems, that species and its wider evolution is no longer free. What seems to be a simple and wholesome good to protect the vulnerable has much wider and worrying implications.

  • gilbs72

    The easiest fear factor to visualize is sitting on the toilet and realizing the toilet paper’s all gone, and having to wash with your bare hands.

  • Linda Polk

    Thank you for all the wonderful work you are doing with returning citizens. As you know, there is a systemic oppression of individuals suspected or convicted of a crime. It extends to supporters of people who are or have been incarcerated. I call this cultural prejudice “felonism”.

    It is this systemic oppression that motivates people, like the ones you mention, to remain silent about their connections to the criminal “justice” system. In our schools today, children do no talk about the trauma of seeing their parents in prison with school staff because they know it is not safe. In fact, children often have unspoken suspicions that their teachers have parallel positions to that of the correctional officers who keep their parents away.

    As a teacher married to a man who was in prison, I knew, even before coining the term felonism, that talking about my husband’s situation would make me vulnerable to termination by those who held this systemic, oppressive attitude. After my husband was released, we wrote Felonism: Hating in Plain Sight to explain how this prejudices harms our nation.

    I once heard a post-graduate professor tell the class that problems are never solved until they are given a name. Therefore, I am writing to compliment your work and ask that you begin using the term “felonism” in all your conversations and articles regarding prison reform. I’m happy to give you more information regarding felonism if you so desire.

  • Tony Hale

    The facts that most miss with covid vaccinations are that while they do not absolutely prevent you from catching covid they do make it much less likely that you will, so they therefore make it much less likely that you will pass it on – And – If you do catch covid it is very likely to be a milder infection than if you’ve had no jabs making it less likely that you will pass it on in that way too. It is a braindead response to carp about covid vaccinations because they don’t provide 100% protection but only a very high percentage protection. How many people would say if I can’t win a complete million in a lottery there’s no way I’ll take eight hundred thousand ?

    • Nikki

      Another fact missed is that the majority of people do not know they have the virus-it is so mild. The majority also are not at risk of severe and adverse outcomes. There are specific at risk groups-like with the flu. In the past vaccines are offered to those risk groups. In the case of Polio and other nasties-that’s a general high risk-everyone is offered. Flu is not high risk for everyone, a proportion of the population are offered a vaccine. Why then is this vaccine different? current policy does not follow the logic and practices we have adhered to successfully since vaccines were created and successfully deployed. You may win the lottery and even be happy with a smaller win but would you play if there was a small but real risk of losing everything you have?

  • John

    It has more to do with the dissemination of western propaganda than racism or national security. The huge collection of information by google leaves WeChat in the shade. The Chinese aren’t trying to export their ideology to the west, rather it’s the other way around.

  • Philip

    Yes, I’ve noticed researchers undermine their findings showing the efficacy – or lack thereof – of masks often qualifying their papers with varying forms of, “although we believe masks are important….” and then proceed to show they, well, suck. To be blunt. We have decades of studies on the subject and recent studies – those properly constructed and without an agenda – only confirm past conclusions regarding the ineffectiveness of masks in both community and hospitals settings. I think it’s worth noting masks were primarily for bacteria and not viruses. This is all so magical – and tiresome – indeed at this point.

  • Dallas Weaver, Ph.D.

    This article demonstrates a lack of technical understanding of how masks work and how that varies with the type, quality, and sanitation methods for the masks.

    We know that N-95 type masks work in hospital settings where infected people go with the possibility of transmission to the staff. Within the hospital settings, the probability of transfer from an existing infected person to the medical staff is less than 0.05% giving a reproductive value (R-value) for the virus in this environment of 0.05 new cases per active case and the virus becomes extinct in the health care environment.

    In the general environment with people using ineffective masks or none at all the R for this virus is about 2.0 or more new cases for every infected person in the population and the number of cases grows exponentially. High-quality masks only work to stop the infection when nearly everyone uses them correctly and sanitizes them between uses.

    Unlike some other pathogens, this COVID-19 virus is very temperature sensitive and will be inactivated my 60ºC in the air for 30 minutes. A home gas cloth dryer or an oven on very low will sanitize N-95 masks for this virus. Hospitals are exposed to other viruses/pathogens that are not inactivated at these low temperatures and have to dispose of the masks or use special sanitation methods for reuse.

    We used citizens’ personal protective equipment (PPE) and sanitized our masks, hats, shirts, etc in the dryer or oven reusing just a few N-95 masks since February 2020, when we found the data on the thermal weakness of these viruses.

    Magical thinking results from inadequate knowledge and strong belief.

  • Richard Carroll

    Face “masks” were once in widespread use in slave times. They were known as “muzzles” and imposed upon slaves as punishment. Rendered faceless, the slaves were
    constantly reminded of their dehumanized condition.

    Since all previous studies dismissed the use of facemasks for viral control, what was the reason for their compulsory worldwide use? I my view, it is the same reason they were used in the past. Our populations have become faceless, muzzled,and subservient to the
    dictates of their rulers. The injection mandates which followed clearly establish that the
    right of bodily autonomy is subject to the dictates of the new masters.

    Faceless, muzzled, injected, tracked. Free or slave?

  • Doug Cross

    Robert,
    You say “I was firmly instructed that this sort of comment was entirely inappropriate: either something was statistically significant or it was not. ”

    Indeed! But even when a result is ‘statistically significant’ there is another defining concern – is it also actually important? Science seems to be increasingly guilty of throwing up many highly significant results that have
    Magical thinking is rife in emergent public health policy, right now. For example, if you substitute ‘water fluoridation’ policy for that on ‘Covid’, exactly the same selective approach to evidence dominates the debate. The absolute refusal of fluoridation proponents to consider their ‘evidence’ relating to the actual performance of this medical imposition, derived by highly selective choice of source regardless of the principles and practices of scientific investigation mirrors absolutely that which the Covid magical theocracy now relies.
    The bizarre continuation of the fluoridation belief system by including it in the new Bill on public health illustrates just how persistent this form of belief system can be once it is spawned and endorsed by its clerics and disciples. It becomes endorsed by those ‘useful idiots’ who become fascinated by the concepts that the Senior Magicians peddle, and the entire debate submerges into the mire of controversy, thus ensuring its survival long after it’s reasonable demise.
    Having observed this dreary phenomenon in many fields of ‘science’ over the years, I find the current magical thinking on how we should respond to this latest pandemic depressingly familiar. The adage, ‘When you’re in a hole, stop digging!’ is one that all politicians (and indeed, public health officials) really should be forced to adhere to, through enforcement by whatever means is available – when lives are at risk, ethics trumps magic every time.

  • Kath Diggle

    Absolutely, the fear surrounding this whole debacle is astounding. Masks are just a physical reminder to keep us obeying the status quo. A useless, planet polluting, virtue signalling piece of theatre designed to terrify the people but make money for the manufacturers. We should all be ashamed of our gullibility.

  • Tracey Burgess

    Actually feel a bit nauseated after reading this. It’s a horrible experience to sit in front of someone (doctor) and to see from their expression and what they say, that they do not believe me. And that everything that I say is being misinterpreted. I am caught in a web and the more I struggle the tighter its grip. My family believed and expressed directly to me that they thought I had a mental illness and was simply in denial. They harrassed me a few years ago with a deluge of texts and emails, in some sort of intervention, I think. My sister’s best friend is a GP in the UK. I wonder if that’s her source of information? Anyway the result of this is no support – well, worse than no support – a totally inappropriate diagnosis of over anxious illness thoughts and depression.

  • Hakky

    I’m afraid that’s not much of an imaginary conversation at all. I recall having almost the exact conversation with my GP a few weeks ago. 🤔

  • Douglas Tooley

    I wonder what they would say if your Northwestern colleague Laura Kipnis got long Covid?

  • 1234

    toooo much raw info needs condensation

  • Emma Wooller

    This is good, but I need to point out that attributing tooth loss to Long Covid isn’t an extreme story. Sufferers have been reporting this for over a year and several articles have been written about it. Although it hasn’t been formally studied, it’s hypothesized that it could be a result of vascular damage. I first heard of it when someone’s dentist said they’d seen a lot of post-Covid patients with brew dental problems.

  • Ren wardell

    This was so interesting! SO glad I stumbled upon this <3

  • dmf

    thanks for this, along these lines you should talk to AbdouMaliq Simone
    (@XazaarAdjame)

  • Sumita Mukherjee

    Thank you for sharing this valuable information. I will definitely be implementing it in my classes from now on. I didn’t know that there are types of online education. I will be sharing this with my team.

  • Alan Salamy

    This is a well written, scholarly, erudite article without being pedantic. Excellent work Ella.

  • Ian Stirling

    I disagree with this only in that ‘CBT is useless rather than harmful’.
    The problem is that the CBT model used is not simply to help patients with their thoughts around their symptoms.
    It is explicitly to inform them and educate them to ignore their symptoms and to counsel them to push through them.

    The difference between:
    Explicitly telling a patient they should do more (or the same amount) and build up a tolerance level (GET).
    Implicitly telling them that by counselling them and reeducating them that their symptoms are not reflective of a serious disease, and there is no risk of worsening on overexercise, only improvement. (CBT)

    Is effectively null.
    https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1359105319854532
    This study finds that patients are not warned of any possible harms of exercise in any of the CFS clinics surveyed.
    If they were warned, the argument could be made it’s harmless.
    The entire model of CBT used is actively harmful and as dangerous as GET.

  • Karl

    What happens when people can no longer think for themselves, are intellectually lazy, and rely on computers and the internet? Exactly the kind of society we have now in the USA, when the so-called elite can’t think their way out of a paper bag.

  • Lutz Barz

    The article on how various laboratories used different parameters ought never to have such leeway unless specified in the results. I have noted, being once a participant in a Government investigation about a certain, need to support, deleterious effect of so-called dope smoking and driving. The test was set up at Sydney University in such a manner as to bring out the worst possible result per each little test. Nowhere was there a real driving simulation. Like in gaming arcades for instance. My first job was training as a metallurgist. This gave me some laboratory experience. I doubt that such tests, mine were at Flat Products, would be globally very different in regard to the product tested. In this article this seems to be terrible non conformist attitude by both laboratory managers and the client/payer. As for real live situations, mentioned above in the article like when I was invaded by a bacterium. Straight through my long pants. Not the mouth nor the nose and utterly isolated. A virus two years before, ditto. I asked the doctor what could be done [in 2016]. He said: nothing. Now everyone’s an expert at dissimulation and confabulating facts. A good article I am going to show to my doctor.

  • Erik Johnson

    The original cluster of “Mystery Illness” that baffled Dr Gary Holmes into authoring his 1988 “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” definition was later found to be caused by toxic black mold “Stachybotrys Chartarum”
    This neurotoxic immune suppressing mold fits the circumstances for why a whole group of teachers got sick in the same room. We told them at the time that they should look into the air filters in that room, but they refused.
    CFS doctors and researchers never came back to find out what happened.

    I suggest that a study be done of doctors and researchers to find how 100% of those claiming they want to “solve CFS” had no intention of doing so.

    • Erik Johnson

      I realize that the idea of “black mold exposure” sounds implausible and unrealistic.
      Completely unrelated to ME/CFS.
      Yet if you have seen Jen Brea’s documentary ‘Unrest”, then you have seen that
      as crazy as it sounds, there is some evidence for this phenomenon.

  • leelaplay

    I believe this is the 2nd pause of the guidelines. ANd that it is against NICE’s internal guidelines to pause something twice.

  • Deborah Bruce

    Thank you for this well written piece. Severe sufferers of this illness do not benefit from airy fairy “treatments” such as GET or CBT. They are too unwell to even access these “treatments”. They need medical intervention and now. Psychologists are delusional and arrogant if they think they will help! We are nothing short of neglected and I believe that they are all afraid of “failure to treat” being levelled if these nonsense “treatments” are discontinued. (PhD Student in Psychology (studies interrupted by severe relapse 2 yrs ago, sufferers of 30plus years)).

  • Ken Smith

    Does Goddard et al wish to continue harming some of the ME/CFS patients for financial gain or pure enjoyment?

  • Lady Shambles

    I’m glad the quackery which ME patients in the UK have been exposed to for half a century is now reaping the censure it deserves. As far as this long term patient is concerned the lack of publication of the new Guideline on 18th August 2021 draws a line after which all harm and deaths from this disease must be laid at the door of NICE and the BPS dogma. People are dying. Hope is lost. We’re looking at another 50 years of gaslighting and zero treatment options that are properly meaningful.

    I’m glad to see some good science happening in the US, but not that associated with the fatuous SEID/IOM criteria. Thank goodness for the Hanson’s and VanElzakkers who realise the importance of strictly defined cohorts (using ICC) .

  • Arelle

    Cover my breathing apparatus with somethin that will become a biohazard within less than half an hour? to protect your health? Might as well ask me to shoot myself in

  • Johannes

    Pollution of the oceans would be another reason to dump them.

  • Paul Watton

    NICE continue to compound the error that they made back in 2007, which saw Graded Exercise Therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy become the officially recognised treatments in the UK, in the first incarnation of the Clinical Guideline for what they termed “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome”.
    It was that error of judgement, by a guideline development group dominated by psychiatrists / psychologists, which recklessly overstated the evidence in favour of GET & CBT and likewise turned a blind eye to the potential for harm. This paved the way for funding the employment of a small army of therapists, who’s livelihoods now depend on the continuation of the status quo.
    Two years later, in 2009, NICE brazenly defended their error of judgement in the course of a judicial review and allegedly adopted questionable tactics in order to win the case, thereby heaping outrage upon anger for the patients who lose out at every turn where NICE is concerned.
    To my knowledge, it isn’t within NICE’s remit to consider the consequences of their evidence-based guidelines, which, in this case, would see the therapists who’s jobs they effectively created in the first place, having to be redeployed or made redundant. They must carry some responsibility in this regard and I have little doubt that this is a factor in the behind-the-scenes discussions which are now going on.
    It seems fundamentally wrong to me, that within the NICE guideline development process, there is no need for the Guideline Development Group to state an opinion, nor to evaluate the alternatives, with respect to the most likely etiology of the disease for which they are tasked with writing a guideline. Looking back, had this been done when the 2007 guideline was prepared, it would have been revealing and might well have proved to have been a very useful thing to have done, in the context of the current debacle.

  • Lutz Barz

    When university students voluntarily wear masks then my view that all their screen staring has turned them into premature senility via digital dementia. How else to explain their quiet acceptance of this unhealthy imposition to breathe in de-oxygenated air. And a police state to enforce it. Not one student protest. What is the point of them wasting public money then in getting a chance to get a great education in a university with all the resources at hand and they do what? What indeed. I went to uni and barely bothered to take note of them. They were vapid then they are vapid now. How strange it must be lecturing to open eyed Sleepers. Who can repeat everything to get a pass and have learnt nothing during their non engagement. But they read the recommended reading list. Like my darling ex the psychologist. Don’t you ever question what they teach in that subject? No. I want a good high paying job after. There. Reason for university and an arts degree.

  • Victor

    No comments, or have they been shadow-banned?

    I object to the great dishonesty in the headline-grabber. COVID-19 is a description of clinical symptoms, allegedly previously unheard of due to the cause being a novel virus – which wasn’t novel at all, being vastly similar to SARS(-Cov) and MERS – pointedly that “deaths from COVID” is a phrase so vague and manipulative that it cannot be justified saying at all anymore. The burden is on the author of this piece and all authors in the news sphere of chosen medium to use precise language else they deliberately mislead the public, for possibly nefarious purposes, or for the banality of evil. In such general discussions we must remember that in each particular individual the proof must be supplied that SARS-Cov-2 virus is the sole and irrefutable cause of death. How can this be done when autopsies are forbidden, you ask? Well I ask for you now because the “flu like symptoms” have all but vanished from society shortly after Bill Gates’ Event 201! Where has the flu gone, you ask? Are flu like symptoms caused by the flu? Should we tell the truth?

    Or should we tell stories of vaccine lovers killed inexplicably after injection, or myriad disabled permanently and otherwise injured? You know the drug makers won’t tell you.

  • Victor

    The list of potential harms forgot the primary one, that is re-breathing exhalations a.k.a. suffocation. I thought infants learned in infancy to breathe, that a child lying on its mother or its rest quickly adjusts itself to find fresh air. Can you not feel something is wrong when you cover your nose and mouth and breathe? Or are you so far gone that you deny the primary reality and cling to fear and superstition instead of bodily sense, let alone mental sense?

    There haven’t been many randomized control trial studies because their results would contradict the narrative of the unprecedented global plandemic, that which the WHO had to redefine, and if there were many such studies, they would quickly be censored and banished from public purview to preclude mass dissent against the overlords.

  • Aaron

    I would add a fifth, that mask wearing impedes breathing and forces your lungs and relevant musculature to strain more than is usual or natural, which for extended periods of time is obviously something presumptively detrimental to health until and unless proven otherwise. Also distinct possibility of breathing in particulate matter from the mask material itself, which is also needless to say dangerous in sufficient quantity, and similarly unstudied.

  • Tom Hunsdale

    Thank you. Thank you. May this be shared far and wide.

  • Trish Castle

    An excellent summary. Some other things to think about include: Do they make the situation worse e.g. what happens to the expired droplets which would normally fall to the ground if unimpeded? Do they sit on the inside surface of the mask and then migrate through or out the sides etc in a more aerosolised state? Is rebreathing trapped air/particles a problem? What about reduced oxygen intake? Is this a thing? And accidents which happen because people cannot see through fogged up glasses? What happens on the surface of the mask as air is drawn in? Do infected particles gather there and get redistributed in a more aerosolised state? What is the effect on health of covering over the entrances to the upper respiratory tract immune system? On dental health? On the production of nitric oxide in the endothelium of the upper respiratory tract? Does a mask or face covering affect this? There are so many unanswered questions; masks should always be a choice and never mandated.

  • A fellow sociologists

    I don’t understand, you want gold standard RCTs that account for all types of masks in all naturalistic environments. But you’re willing to assert, without providing any evidence at all let alone any RCTs, that masks “damage the mental health of the nation” and “discriminate against large sections of the population”. Try getting these claim past peer review. If masks have no effect at all, why are they worn in clinical settings? And the suggestion that advocates of masks say they are 100% effective in every setting is a straw man. They say on balance they are better. If you’re more to offer than exciting anti-mask grifters you should respond in detail to this:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jep.13415

    • Arelle

      How much do you get an hour for shilling?

  • John Vaughan

    Superbly written – you can tell he is a Sociologist!

  • Juliana Krohn

    Another relevant read:
    Bhambra, Gurminder K. and John Holmwod (2021): Colonialism and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.

  • Sue Oliver PhD

    As a researcher into creative dance/movement and social wellbeing, I understand Dr Sinha’s view well. The subtle nuances of movement speak volumes. I included a DVD with my PhD thesis in the hope that it would aid understanding of what movement, especially creative movement, could convey about a dancer’s emotional disposition. This supplemented data from individual interviews and focus groups. They also kept diaries which some of them returned at the end of the data collection period. Movement and gestural attitude are as important in the interviews as in the dance sessions: I could have followed this up with comparisons between these two contexts for each dancer… But one has to draw it to a close at some point and submit! Qualitative research doesn’t necessarily have an obvious end point, does it?

  • Jack

    Interesting. I found it somewhat presuming to speak of love as if it is defined & that everyone knows what that definition is. Maybe you have, or agree with someone who claims to have “worked it out” (like the water that claims to know and be on the vibration of love). I got nervous at the end when you talk of nuero-transmitters and the like. Will that mean experiments on animals? That’s when its taken to far.

  • mirella giannini

    Very interesting, Robert!!! I’ve appreciated ton article for the birth anniversary of Miss Nightingale. Thank you
    Ciao
    mirella

  • Amanda McCully
    1. A very useful list; hope you send up-dates as the list is extended.
    2. Sarah Brownsword’s (2019) article should be read by all Early Years Educators.
    3. I am particularly interested in sources written by BAME academics/writers, as I want to go beyond White academics controlling the anti-racist debate.
  • Venise Berry

    My book Racialism and the Media: Black Jesus, Black Twitter and the First Black American President should be included. It examines the normalization of images and messages that impact cultural representation. Under the umbrella of racialism, I explore stereotypes, biased frames, historical myths and traditional racism.

  • Sukarlan

    Thanks brother. This isseu enlightened me to read more and posted some points in my repertoar on the topic.

  • G. H. Schorel-Hlavka O.W.B.

    Usually, I purchase a few hundred rolls at the time, as my wife (88) goes through a lot. I do not bother to check why she use so many. When there was a shortage I actually gave away toilet rolls. Because of my wife’s ill health I always stock up for several weeks to ensure that if suddenly I cannot go anywhere we do not run out. I have done so for decades and often proved to be the right thing to do. It also means that when there is a shortage we do not worry as we always have ample left when I restock. it also as senior citizen means we are not depending upon anyone to get something in a hurry. It also means that we stock up when prices are down and this also means we can financial manage.

  • Andrew Shields

    Am inerested in your shift from talking about people with narrow scientific or medical expertise to going into a lengthy exposition about the nature of viruses. I see your qualification is as a sociologist.

  • Jennifer Akdemir

    British anti-intellectualism stems, I believe, from Edmund Burke’s adoption of “common sense” as an alternative to intellectual questioning, in the light of the revolutions which occurred in mainland Europe ….. the status quo had to be protected from dangerous (and downwardly distributive) “ideas” and putting about the argument that good sound common sense works much better helped to achieve this. As a defence of privilege for the ruling class and a justification of ignorance for the rest it has functioned very well. Under the British class system, education is still seen as something “posh” (i.e. upper and upper middle class) people do, The salt of the earth working classes have common sense and aspiration, as they are told time and again by the press which caters almost exclusively to them. Brexit consolidated this further, casting educated people as the “elite, as opposed to the billionaires and their media and political minions who actually comprise it….

  • Arminda A Bisbee

    Hi my name is Arminda my considered ethnicity is white but I am most definitely not I’m only considered white because I identify as white but I am Portuguese, native American, German, Italian. And I don’t feel that race should have anything to do with being racist because racist could be racist against somebody being gay color doesn’t even have anything to do with racism but I do think that people use the color of their skin as an excuse to talk about racism.

  • Kate

    I’m extremely grateful to Mr. Lubert for his article responding on behalf of those of us who have CFS/ME and Long COVID. It is amazing to me that those of us with these syndromes continue to be under attack from people who claim to know better than we do about our health. Dr. Devine seems to be yet another incorrect know-it-all who has become dangerous because he has the power of the pen, and the ability to incorrectly influence those who read his bull$hit. I would never wish this syndrome on anyone, but I do wish he could be fully immersed in what we feel for just 72 hours. I bet then he would reverse his opinion and, perhaps, begin advocating for us instead of relegating us to the category of the psychosomatic. Dr. Devine, thank you for making us use our few ounces of energy to have to fight back against your completely ludicrous assumptions and assertions. YOU ARE WRONG!!

  • Lynn Doss

    This is very interesting, I had no idea this was a Social Science. You learn something everyday if you’re lucky.

  • rini

    Terima kasih, artikel yang menarik~ informasinya bermanfaat, please check this web
    Kunjungi :

    <a href=”https://akademitelkom.ac.id/”>Website Kami</a>
    <a href=”https://ittelkom-jkt.ac.id/”>Website Kami</a>
    pls cek ya thx

  • Russell John Foote

    Very commendable article, Professor Peters. Let us begin to propose and vigorously champion solutions even if it means establishing an international organization to do so.
    Social Scientists worldwide should begin to establish regional research associations and university based research organizations with the objective of investigating real world social problems that governments clearly need help p to reduce and resolve. Financial allocations to deal with such problems are necessary but clearly insufficient. The purpose of the research thrust must not be the pursuit of self aggrandizement and citations but all such research must generate and be the basis of an action oriented implementable proposal to address the particular issue in communities in collaboration with community groups, schools, businesses, government ministries and/or other organizations. The conduct of research to resolve social problems like family life, various forms of crime and delinquency, inflation, job creation, unemployment, elimination of gender, ethnic, and social class discrimination, white collar crime must become the primary basis for research funding, university rankings and making universities more functional in the societies in which they find themselves.

  • Ben Smith

    Wonderfully balanced and clear-eyed summary. Well done!

  • krissy

    really enjoyed this great overview

  • Laura Fields

    Oh, thank you for this article. It was very interesting for me to read it. I run my own blog and will definitely mention some things from this article. 
    Keep on doing useful things further. I will be following your articles!

  • Russell John Foote

    Yes…very well expressed Professor Falkenberg. Are you interested in us doing a joint publication on New Theoretical and Research Pathways ‘ focussing on improving current research efforts in the Social Sciences , Management Studies and Education. I already have a draft in this regard. The objective is to close the gap between research findings and the reality of what is really happening with issues under investigation and thus directly impact on the reduction/resolution of problems in the fields of education , organizational management and sociopsychological issues plaguing family life, juvenile offenders, gender and other inequalities.Through such efforts universities will certainly be able to contribute to problem solving in their societies this attracting government’s funds, collaborations with other stakeholders and directly preparing students to contribute to the future workplace.

  • Me Myself

    >>but its narrative of contagion and random violence is common as an “explanation” of real life.<<

    It’s neither common nor an explanation.

  • Steph

    Just noting there’s a typo in Kris Hayashi’s name!

    • Sage

      Fixed! Thanks for message

  • Paul Fox

    As those who already know of Steven Lubet’s work have come to expect from him, this piece is excellent. Aside from Dr Devine’s arrogance and bigotry, failures of logic such as his are so common in psychiatry, and in medicine generally, that I think they are very likely indeed to be, at least implicitly, part of the training. My own experience is, of course, anecdotal, but it accords precisely with the argument advanced, time and time again, in all seriousness, by health”care” academics and policy makers. It boils down simply to the assertion that if a physical cause has not been found for an illness, then it is psychological. It is rubbish, as anyone with a modicum of intelligence knows very well. It is equivalent to the police saying that if a missing person has not been found, then he is alive. Yet, very few in heath”care” are prepared openly to question this fallacy, let alone denounce the quackery – and wrongdoing to patients – arising from it. Those who promote this nonsense clearly know that not only they will be able to get away with scandalous statements such as Devine’s, but also that they will be largely supported by those who could and should make the difference. Until this changes, patients will be right to approach the psych professions with the utmost caution, and probably also with suspicion.

  • Shelley Waller

    Best letter I’ve read this year. The absurdity perpetrated by ppl in these positions adds cruelty to tragedy for so many parents and young ppl who’ve had their lives torn apart by ME. Six years on from a nasty bout of glandular fever, our previously fit, happy & healthy young son remains mostly housebound (not in spite of GET, but largely because of it!). No psych has found him to be anything but an emotionally resilient young man, dealing stoically with the grief of a life-limiting medical illness. Recently, his school provided a bed in the exam room so he could complete half of his final year exams – typing away and then resting flat at 30min intervals for many hours. If only these psychiatrists had any idea how hard me/cfs patients work to achieve the smallest of victories, the price they pay for them, how desperate they are to lead normal lives, hold onto hope, and how damaging these outdated views are to their already enormous battle for symptom relief, support and hope for effective treatment. It’s well past time to retire “psychosomatic” relics to the history books and embrace the intellectual reasoning/scientific rigor which has been suppressed by their presence.

  • Holy

    Excellent article!
    I’m not an academic yet very interested in the state of art of many different academic fields. Looking up scholarly papers online often results in blocks and blocks of dry text which only god knows how even researchers have the patience to read… I wish more thought would be put into how to make the dry truth of current material into public-accessible content, instead of waiting 5-10-15 years for a readable 400 page book from a Nobel prize winner to come out.

  • Karla Contreras

    We need another interview with him! I have listened to this interview innumerable times 😀 Congrats, and recieve a big thank you from a listener in Chile.

  • Russell John Foote

    A commendable article and I am eagerly awaiting the emergence of SPARK. Most definitely, the social science, education and management disciplines ought to be focussed on establishing collaborations with community groups, schools and other organizations in an effort to resolve/reduce problems affecting these entities.In that regsrd, I have already developed several new theoretical perspectives, several new methodologies focussed on giving the social sciences a better edge for problem solving purposes. These articles have been compiled into a book manuscript which I am currently seeking to have published. Moreover, my research, teaching, administrative and community work has always had a problem solving focus. Out of these experiences I have been able to develop proposals corresponding educational and social challenges in my country. I am hoping to become involved in the SPARK initiative. I can be contacted at 18687651159 or russelljfoote@yahoo.com.

  • Daniel Lane

    Actually, the humanities has been attempting to dismantle scientific education by discrediting empiricism for decades now, arguably creating the conditions for the United States’ poor response to the pandemic. COVID-19 is a strong argument as to why humanistic “education” may at best be unhelpful, and quite possibly in fact harmful, in a dangerous world that cares not at all for what human beings think about it.

  • Russell John Foote

    Universities need to adopt a problem solving approach and this must be reflected in their teachong, research and community service. There is an urgent need for more collaborations and outreach work with communities, organizations (healthcare, schools, arts groups, ) to help them to resolve their problems. All undergraduate and graduate majors should have a practical component that is related to the discipline and carrying about 30 % of the final end of term mark. For example students doing degrees in Education can be individually or in pairs assigned to selected primary schools to develop and implement data driven delinquency reduction projects in collaboration with a class teacher. Further data collection should be done to monitor such projects across time. Business students should be assigned to small businesses to describe the business, collect data, and work with the business person to resolve business related issues. Such assignments should include the application of a chosen theory. The business person should be asked to submit an independent performance report on the particular student(s). The focus should be on service and research funders and accreditation bodies should add and give this criterion the greatest weighting in their assessments of universities and in deciding who should receive research funding. Beyond this, a Nobel Prize for the Social Sciences should be introduced to be awarded to the individual(s) whose research contributed to the reduction or elimination of one of those social, cultural or psychological issues that have persisted despite increased in budgetary allocations by governments over the years. Some examples of such problems are community /household level poverty, teenage delinquency, unemployment, environmental problems, mental Health challenges in a specific community or communities.

  • Kaustav Chakrabarti

    Rejection is not the answer to a paper submitted by a fellow academic. Moreover, who decides the various peer groups who vie for rejections of submissions , “not keeping in tune”, with their prejudiced presumptions and assumptions? Social Sciences like History , Political Science and Sociology are subjective and cannot have absolute opinions on any thing whatsoever. The publishing industry is highly competitive and brand publishing houses have their own marketing strategy to sell their books and monographs. They have their own editorial boards with experts purporting to know practically everything under the sun. The latter don’t want any publication to get through other than their own. Its makes a lot of economic sense to corner the market with yesterday’s men with a fixed honorarium than to encourage young authors to publish their works and give them royalties. That way, the old boys network enables the publishing house to enjoy almost a monopsonistic hold on the readers’ choice.

  • Hashem ElAssad

    Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McGowen is a good candidate for the specialist side.

  • Marian Douglas-Ungaro

    Glad to see projects developing to address a massive problem. Many of us are (directly) affected by “what hasn’t yet happened” to really change and remove obstacles in academia. Thank you!

  • Beth Tobicash

    Throughout history,the ignorance and pressure to maintain a cohesive development of mankind as altruistically, and undeniably hindered development.. pushing, pulling, deception,yet interpretation are all individualistic, culturally, educationally,and religiously bias in every way possible. The means to achievement of any goal or desire dependent upon such is likewise such a journey… It is ok,to be divergent, to umong the masses be unique, as we all are… There will never be another as I, this should be the bases upon thought,ideals and ultimately greater good can come forth. Ideals with useless outcome, ignorance at mass level, and the feeling that one deserves something more than another, can only be the bases for a society doomed… For one cannot expect to take more than willing to give… Without becoming unbalanced… I know this is an opinion of a woman who holds no more merit than the next man…I hope will all that is good we can find a way to balance the scales before Hasty decisions are made…

  • Katy

    So refreshing to read this article. Absolutely does not downplay severity of covid19 & long covid, whilst recognising the need to return to normality. Interesting on long-covid & comparison to recovery from other intense hospitalisations. My dad recovered from a heart attack & surgery in 2011 after a week in hospital. He was weak & it took him a long time to walk short distances. I certainly know it was tough in terms of his mental recovery, as I feel the mental scar takes healing too – perhaps this is like for covid19 too. I also feel we need to recognise that once the most vulnerable are vaccinated & pressure on the nhs reduced we have no option but to return to normal. If we don’t, covid19 will have beaten us & no-one wants that.

  • Leyda Cardales-Wade

    Love this article. It’s those are great tips to prepare lessons and intereaact with the students sand families.

  • Russell John Foote

    Politics has been and continued to be an enterprise that is primarily focussed on who gets what, when and how a position initially foreground by Harold Laswell. On that basis, politics continues to facilitate inequalities. However politicians who are final decision makers, always need financial support to get projects up and running and completed in their country. Therein lies the role of businesses who collectively fuel the capitalist system. On the other hand politicians and the wider society continue to proclaim the virtues of a people- first approach which is the essence of democracy.Where does this scenario leave us? it leaves us living within a contradiction of opposites, Democracy and Capitalism, and never the train shall meet. These can never find common ground to work together because capitalism or business interests always prioritize profits and democracy prioritized people. How then can we hope to reduce inequalities in such a context? Why do we continue to fool ourselves by occasionally trying to revive people’s hope for equality. The only hope is to abandon the term politics and replace it with the term governance and this shift must be supported by an education system that teaches the basics and activities that promote governance at elementary, secondary and tertiary education levels. This can include the expansion of credit unions and cooperatives, bottom-up community development initiatives, foreground small business development, domestic agriculture promotion to reduce imported food inflation. Another major initiative is to give the Social Sciences the mandate globally to focus on problem solving research, develop and implement problem solving proposals for reducing the persistent issues of poverty, crime unemployment. To that end a Nobel Prize Award should be introduced for the Social Sciences and given to a social science team that implements a proposal that effectively reduced one of the aforementioned social issues in a country of region.

  • Hashem ElAssad

    A second interview about specialism/generalism with Perry Knoppert with an emphasis on happiness and how I got interested in the topic in the first place https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N-R31q1LNw&t=2s

  • Ian Abery

    Excellent study. Very relevant

  • Russell John Foote

    lt is well established that social scientists have for a long time been investigating g social problems that have persisted in all societies; that these problems (crime, poverty, unemployment, workplace challenges among others) have persisted and increased despite the fact that governments have spent millions of dollars to reduce them and mitigate their effects. On that basis, I think that COSSA should propose and champion through the new U.S. President the need for the immediate introduction of a Nobel Prize for the Social Sciences inclusive of Sociology, Psychology, Criminology and Organizational Change and Development. The major condition and criteria for such an award to an individual or team is that their Research must be focussed on one of these persistent social problems in a community, nation of region, must inform the development of an actionable proposal to reduce/resolve the problem and the researcher/s must work with others to implement the problem- solving proposal and it’s implementation must have produced some positive effect/s.
    Given govrrnments’ inability to come to terms with these persistent social problems, that is a strong enough reason for proposing the award of a Nobel Prize to the Social Sciences

  • Joe Sullivan

    You haven’t tried that on my daughter andi.
    Ya see when we believe in something that has shown to be real but also to be over99% survival rate.
    And that wearing masks does not stop the virus.
    And having an 89 year uncle on dialysis and who had covid and lived all i can say is give it your best shot.

  • Amsnda

    I personally know people who refused to wear masks, and that has said if they get the virus, they’re going to spread it. People like that I think should be locked up all together and let nature handle them, while the rest of us live.

    • Joe Sullivan

      And what a life it must be.
      No freedom what so ever. No church No real human communication No seeing loved ones in nursing homes No funerals No concerts No anything. No facial expressions .Life as we know it gone .
      How the heck can people get to the point of giving everything up that they ever had.
      They keep raising the numbers .They keep telling you how your gonna die .
      The more they strike fear into your heart the more your gonna do everything they say.
      Life is one big risk and damn if i have to live it this way i will take that risk.
      Being unhappy and under the control of people who despise me and don’t really care one pinhead about my health is not something i am willing to do.
      If your a senior citizen or if you have underlying medical problems so be it.
      Wear your masks keep your distance but if your young and healthy why would you subject yourself to such torture ?
      This is now no worse than the common Flu
      with over a 99% chance of survival.
      I am 65 years old and only wore a bandana for
      the first week .
      yes i was scared and cautious. But as time went on and i noticed lots of things that just didn’t make sense so i stopped.
      I wash my hands and keep my distance which by the way i never see anyone really do.
      I never even had the common flu. Being petrified of living has never been my thing .
      And for anybody who’s gonna call me selfish and wish death on me thats your call that does’nt bother me living life being treated like a vhikd from some power hungry politician that has no intention of ever giving that up ?
      WELL THAT BOTHERS ME.
      If i get it i’ll deal with it .

  • Matthew

    “The problem? Evidence shows it may be the wrong way to address major problems like inequality.”

    No, the problem is that there is no inequality, only difference in preferences & the Nudge Unit isn’t addressing problems, as much as they are social engineers trying to fit humans in to some perfect utopian ideal based on what you are, rather than what you bring to table.

  • York Luethje

    I agree that Hanlon’s razor should be always in the forefront of one’s thoughts when trying to explain behaviour such as we are witnessing here. However, how do you explain someone like Neil Ferguson, whose models have not only been serially wrong, wildly so, but who almost obliterated the British livestock industry 20 years ago? Why is such a person still employed, let alone taken seriously?

  • Jack Bodimead

    Yes, we have to learn to live with it…as we have always done… This control culture which has arisen out of covid is abhorrent… It needs to stop now, it is no worse than influenza, another coronavirus, which is oddly not now being recorded in hospital admissions… So where has it suddenly gone?

  • Bill Hickling

    Where has this guy been? Put him in charge! Stop this nonsense now!

  • IdPnSD

    “This brief overview already shows the wide variety of themes, ideologies, plausibilities, origins, people and potential dangers of different conspiracy theory subcultures.” – Nothing happens outside of the cause and effect law. This law occurs as a chain with no beginning and ending. We are seeing only a segment of this chain at this space time. On earth there is a root cause for every chain, and that is called money. On the universe this root cause is called the soul. If you remove money and create moneyless economy (MLE), then you will find that all conspiracies will vanish. For more details take a look at https://www.academia.edu/43619619/Truth_and_MLE_-the_only_way_for_Eternal_Global_Peace_on_Earth

  • Sayida Self

    Dr. Mullings was my advisor at the Graduate Center. She made me the professor I am today. I will be forever indebted to her.

    Dr Sayida Self

  • Russell John Foote

    I think that the most significant metric for evaluating the impact of the Social Sciences is the extent to which quantitative and qualitative social sciences are resolving problems in communities and the wider society in a manner that gives governments less work to do. This is critical because despite increases in government spending in developed and developing countries, social and economic issues continue to escalate such as crime poverty, unemployment, inflation, environmental issues.This will require much collaboration between university academics and community groups or other organizations to investigate issues affecting them, develop prime solving proposals, implement same and monitor progress across time. Funding agencies and should prioritize this feature for providing funds and accreditation bodies should also prioritize same for program and institutional accreditation purposes.

  • RAJA MUHAMMAD SHOAIB

    THIS IS A GOOD STEP

  • Kaustav Chakrabarti

    Very Innovative

  • Bye Bye

    Wow very helpful!

  • Mike Sobocinski

    Although I believe that all ideas deserve consideration based upon their merits, I haven’t found it particularly helpful to apply a binary left/right lens to sociological issues. Weber’s ideal of “value-free” research to try to achieve insights holds far more appeal to me than bringing partisan lenses into things. There must be a willingness to follow the evidence, regardless of what political implications are supported. There is also of course the fact that lots of research is motivated by the personal interests and group affiliations of researchers, which can indeed result in politicized research. But the solution is surely not to merely “balance” two biases as they are currently perceived at this time and place–that is the unsatisfying approach commonly taken by news journalists. Instead, greater focus and emphasis must be placed upon research methods. And greater rigor must be included in all sociology curricula from the undergraduate level upward. For example, why should it be possible to proceed through the completion of a sociology PhD without *any* specific mandate involving the study of history, or of key social science disciplines (economics and political science) that focus specifically upon the most important social institutions? The idea that each social science can stand alone, ignoring the others in favor of its own disciplinary figures (e.g. “who needs political science and economics and history when we can just substitute the theories of Wallerstein?”) has allowed tons of ridiculous ideas to proliferate and not receive the critical assessment they deserve. This is not particularly a left-right issue, but a disciplinary specialization issue. As someone who has taken deliberate efforts to study in multidisciplinary fashion, I usually find that half the published stuff I see in sociology can be readily dismissed because it demonstrates a clear ignorance of other fields. I love the idea of sociology, and the application of scientific methods where possible, and I am fascinated by the various social theories that have been developed. But the sociology curriculum currently seems to be only about one-third science, with philosophy constituting another third and politics the final third. Individual researchers will vary widely, but there probably need to be real curriculum and institutional changes to encourage a reduction in overtly political studies, research, teaching, and “applied” activities trying to bolster themselves with scientific claims. Surely the cause is partially the current rote proclamation of Marx as one of the three giants in sociology. This idea should surely become contested. Marx was a philosopher. His economics were outdated even within his own lifetime. Certainly he is foundational to “critical social science,” but critical studies should not be accepted as foundational in sociology. Comte and Marx could be presented as the initial dilemma of abstract versus applied impulses in the origins of modern social science, but the actual scholarship of the field should be assessable on its own merits. Spencer, for example, had philosophic and political ideas that are widely scorned today, but his *actual research* included a most laudable documentation effort to document and systematically compare all known societies. Something that we should have today as a core database for all sociologists to refer to, but we don’t. Comparative historical sociology is merely one specialization out of dozens today, instead of the core aspect of macrosociology! Sociology has been allowed to become a kind of “catch-all” instead of constantly reinforcing the evidential basis that is essential for grounded theories at multiple scales. The current focus upon inequality is not merely politically driven, but is convenient because it allows endless research to occur in an almost assembly-line fashion: “Find an inequality, and ascribe it to causal forces in society.” There are infinite inequalities available to be described and “explained” but what is lacking is an effective model of complete social systems and how their elements interact. No training is truly required in economics or political science, and as long as that is the case, *inferences* of power elites and oppressive dominant cultures will continue to be used as handily available concepts for theorizing. The extent to which researchers have gone beyond this rudimentary level can be expected to help explain the relative quality of their research. There is no shortage of research, however, that is lacking in its understanding of one or more major social institutions that are essential for truly understanding the topics in context, and there are tons of publications and conferences and instructors that continue to focus narrowly on specific interest groups they desire to promote. Although there is certainly a need for active ADVOCACY on behalf of those in need, it is arguably a different kind of field than one that claims an overarching scientific basis for itself. It’s a form of social work, perhaps, or political advocacy, but not necessarily a verifiable empirical framework. But then, there is probably a real question still of to what extent “social facts” are truly both sui generis *and* usefully predictable. If activism were more subject to the human subjects criteria of ordinary research, then perhaps people wouldn’t be so quick to indulge themselves in it in their official capacities–it would be difficult for example to demonstrate that organizing protests would result in no danger to its participants, or that the benefits for research would outweigh the potential harms from the political actions that had been taken. One of Marx’s most grievous errors was his imperative that “praxis” is essential, because we must first have a full and reliable understanding of our subject (society and its institutions and groups) before we can reasonably believe that we can *apply* an intervention and ensure a benefit will result. Professors, etc. must not simply presume that there are no risks from activism, or that the needs and benefits from activism necessarily outweigh the risks of harm, or the harms of the status quo. Such things cannot necessarily be actually known and calculated. And until we are able to start reasonably calculating these things, how are we to judge the ethics of either instigating action or tolerating inaction? There should not be a presumption that instigating action is automatically either beneficial or entirely harmless. And there should not be facile dismissals of others’ research disciplines (economics, political science) based upon unfalsifiable conceits such as the idea that they’ve all been co-opted by power elites as part of cultural hegemony and “false consciousness.” (Another of Marx’s great errors that took him outside of the realm of science–a key theoretical principle that is essentially unfalsifiable and has encouraged endless “conspiracy theory” styled ideas ever since.) I’m not saying the concepts have no relevance whatsoever to actual realities (i.e. power differences, ideology). I’m saying that the relevance is limited only to what is empirically verifiable, and must not be pre-judged on the basis of theoretical convenience (e.g. Andre Gunder Frank’s famous first book is stunningly devoid of factual examples that should have been necessary to demonstrate his ideas of neocolonial dependency. The book became widely accepted in sociology and is still cited a half century later, but it seems to have justifiably been ignored and forgotten by political scientists and economists. That is the kind of problem that sociology has been dealing with for at least a half century. Sociologists aren’t required to study economics, political science, history, anthropology, or geography deeply enough to be able to self-critique and readily debunk various ideas that appear blatantly, obviously untrue to those who know other disciplines. This fault probably is present in each of those other disciplines, by the way, so the solution is not to merely favor one over the other, but to make all of them more rigorous and interconnected through more collaboration and inter-disciplinary reviews of research. A random sociologist assigned as a journal reviewer is evidently not likely to catch errors that would be blatantly evident to an historian, economist, etc. but until journals adapt to this fact by adopting more rigorous and wide-ranging review policies, and until college curricula add requirements to study each relevant sister science more diligently, the problems of social complexity and change will continue to be described in ways that are too invalid to be very trustworthy or impressive.)

  • Benjamin Geer

    For a cognitive linguistics version of the parenting argument, George Lakoff’s book Moral Politics is worth considering.

  • Hermione Z O Laake

    This is interesting, and thought-provoking reading; I am reading it as part of the content for my MA in Creative Writing at Kingston School of Art. I am interested in your example of the ‘fundamental attribution error’ where we instantly ‘frame’ someone in a negative light in traffic, and your exposition on how this feeds through into many other examples. I think it is a shame though that you framed this as ‘imagined’, and that the imagination is often blamed for instances like this. As elucidated in A Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), you will note that it is the memory that tends to categorise for expediency. The imagination is much cleverer than that. It is capable of showing multiple viewpoints through the use of multiple characters. As you point out, we are multi-faceted individuals, and it is impossible to understand why we might behave in the way we do at any given moment. I can see your point about how the social sciences contribute by identifying behaviours; but equally, and often we forget, the arts strive to illuminate what it is to be human or empathic and to imagine something less obvious than what the memory projects.

  • John Martin Nichols

    The most unkind remark made about the social sciences is that they are fuzzy science. Here in this article Ziyad Marar correctly explains that they are complex. And that they are infinitely worth pursueing. However, as Jordan Peterson and from a slightly different angle Douglas Murray might argue, there is a danger today that in this field the academic world has shifted so much to the left that University students are being misled in believing dismantelling statues for “righteous causes” is something brave and praiseworthy. I feel sure Mr. Marar would not be amongst those encouraging them, realising that different standards and practices were normal in previous centuries and that it is unreasonable to judge those once deemed worthy of remembrance by our own standards today. But I’m afraid it is from the ranks of those professionally established in his chosen subject that harm is actually being done at this moment in time. Measured voices such as Ziyad’s should counter the “Woke” movement, even if he is sufficiently politically correct to substitute the female pronoun when referring to humankind!

  • Tezza Jenkins

    This author has a fantastic sense of humour! I am a student and have to submit a scientific poster and up until now it was a boring PowerPoint slide. His comments made sense and I understood the need to change my entire presentation which I have to submit in 2 days. This was VERY helpful and Ill let you know if I get a good pass mark! Thanks for the tips Tullio.

  • karenza moore

    Interesting article thanks! I think numerical literacy and critical thinking more generally are not taught properly in our education systems and this makes it harder for vaccines to be considered carefully by the gen pop.

  • Prasantha De Silva

    “Stay at home”: We hear this all the time. To me, it sounds like a paternalistic one and contradicts Paulo Freire’s adult education principle – “Do not consider learners empty vessels”. And, of course, it also goes against behavioral science theories. In fact, we can learn it more succinctly from Lao Tsu (700BC):

    Live with them,

    Love them,

    Start with what they know,

    Build with what they have,

    But with the best leaders

    When the work is done,

    The task accomplished,

    The people will say, “We have done this ourselves”.

    Your team discuss this under the social identity and collective behavior. I suggest to bring forward, “be a COVID19 warrior” message to complement the “stay at home” message.

  • Here And Now

    The most interesting comment for me from above was the Camus quote: “Come to terms with death. Thereafter anything is possible” There is a process whereby one can come to terms with death. Practicioners of Eastern disciplines encourage meditation on the inevitability of death. They opine that death and life are essentially one and the same, two sides of the same coin. The yin and the yang. Consciousness can become awakened through these disciplines and practices. One whose consciousness has been awakended knows the potential of embracing one’s own mortality. That person becomes empowered by death and life, and finds harmony in the two. Dualistic thinking fosters the disharmony and fear exposed by Dr. Solomon’s research.

  • Bongani Mavundla

    Thanks for the article- it has provided me with a number of points to consider when working on my research design because one has to factor in how COVID may disrupt the data collection process. It is challenging in my context, where access to the internet is not always readily available to some research participants.

  • Lori Crenshaw

    Great idea!

  • Erica

    My sincere condolences. I am grateful for all the Assistance provided by Dr Charmaz. her insights and support helped me to go through all the questions I had when applying CGT in japan. i am very Touched to hear about her passing.

  • joseph lintz

    My three sons, 18, 21 and 24yr, own their own company, HighKey Holdings, with several divisions: e-commerce/social media marketing/ influencer ‘giveaways’/real estate investments]. Oldest quit his marketing degree at U. of Winnipeg after 2 1/2 yrs; Middle child never attended where he was accepted into Asper School of Business at U. of Manitoba; and the youngest never even applied to a University. They are in business for themselves! As my oldest expressed it, “My marketing profs couldn’t even engage me in a conversation when I told them what I was doing [HighKey, e-commerce and social media marketing].” And for myself, 66yr? I hold three Masters degrees [Engineering/Philosophy/Theology]. Your article was preaching to the choir!

  • Pyxy Stephanson

    An interesting perspective on how resiliency is impacted. Thank you.

  • joe roseman

    I truly think I nailed the charade still in April when I started to compare total deaths by year and cause in several countries. Each of them had an increase in the numbers due to the normal population growth. From this point I made projections of death for 2020. In none of the countries the projection is topped by the alleged numbers of death by Covid-19, which means the Excess Death DOESN’T EXIST!!.

  • Alessandra

    Thank you for this important piece of history of psychology – and beautiful feminist story.

  • john vaughan

    This is most interesting and very high quality – what Mintzberg calls ‘intellectually rigorous’!

  • Sonita Sarker

    All images should have sources listed. The first one is particularly harrowing and it is counter to the intention of the essay itself to leave it there without comment or context or attribution. I absolutely think it should be there but it should be given due respect. I highly encourage the author to give the same consideration to the other images as well.

  • Johnywoo

    “And it’s good for the economy. Why? Because it gives young women a disposable income.”
    How funny that feminists or non feminists claim to be independent when it comes to pay for dinner they suddenly become conservative and wait until the man pulls out the wallet.
    Feminism only when suits the situation.
    Can not wait til sh.. will hit the fan.

  • Jane Ann Liston

    I’m a St Andrews psychology graduate from the 1980s – looking forward to reading this book, having watched the online Saints Talk.

  • Festus

    A crowd of people who meet for no purpose tend to behave in a childish manner and maturity doesn’t matter here. I have passion in learning psychology of crowd

  • jane

    I love your stuff xx thankyou for being there xx

  • K J

    I communicated with Dr. Charmaz at the end of last summer. We exchanged a few emails as I had questions about a qualitative study and thought she would be the best person to ask about this research study. I knew she was sick, but did not know how sick. Dr. Charmaz was very helpful and kind to help. I am so sorry to hear about her passing! For all she has done for the field~she loved her work, thank you!

  • Jonathan Epstein

    I like so much your describing these as “inclusive, additive processes” rather than zero sum. We are all enriched – and that sense that for one to gain another must lose is an illusion we can outgrow

  • Janice M Davis

    I will assign this reading to my Social Work students to ponder the questions raised.

  • Lora

    Thanks a lot!

  • Dem

    Excellent, I love these stories of idiotic bureaucrats, simply because I feel I am not alone in looking down upon these small-minded weirdos. Thankyou!

  • Ellie Lee

    Very good comment. Will be using from the start in teaching on sociology of health and illness this coming term

  • Robert Hudson

    Good article. The is a disconnect between those making the decisions and those suffering the consequences. Government ministers, senior civil servants, SAGE advisers, media presenters. These people will not lose their jobs. They all have large houses with gardens. They all have good IT. They personally suffer none of the many negative consequences of the lock down. They will be mostly if not entirely shielded from the recession. Life may even be easier for them in lock down. It is no wonder that they are not in a hurry to return to normality. The distance between rulers and ruled is even greater than normal because of the lock down. Our masters don’t even see normal people on a day to day basis like they would in regular times. Until and unless something happens to reconnect rulers and ruled it is going to be near impossible for any return to sanity.

  • Geneive Jones

    I agree that this “new” learning is going to have to be open and allow families to adjust to a schedule that works best for their household. A lot of parents are slowly heading back to work or seeking new careers because of our current situation, so expecting all students to log in at the same time is unrealistic! We as educators have to allow flexibility to encourage students and parents to stay engauge .

  • Frances McClain

    I am completing my dissertation this month. My study was a constructivist study and I loved it! Dr. Charmaz was a pioneer both as a woman and developing a methodology that works well for social justice studies. She will be missed…

  • Jas Sangha

    My deepest condolences. I used CGT in my research for my PhD and it was such a perfect fit to my research. Such a beautiful research approach. Thank you Kathy.

  • Rosalind Mary Martin

    Saw SciFoo ref in a Rodale book on circadian rhythms by dr. Panda. I am following the tracks back🌝

  • Michael Penrod

    Dr. Canter is right on target in this article. What people notice first is “difference,” whether that be skin color, hair color and texture, and a variety of other “physical” traits. The genetic evidence certainly does not support the idea of race. Race is simply a social construction designed to keep those who have wealth and power in charge of the societies they live in.

  • Philip Jude Fernandez

    Gurminder’s inciteful 25 minute talk about a sociological context to humanity’s story, centered on the colonist. If French/ American revolution rocks your boat, place them within a context of the Haitian Revolution! Another, the Industrial revolution in the context of British Imperial destruction of Indian silk and cotton textiles with imposition of very heavy duty on Indian goods.

  • John Brosemer

    I have 30 years of teaching and administrative experience. I have taught the social sciences on the US/Mexico border for eight years at the high school and junior high levels. 97-99% of the students were Hispanic, many came across the International Bridge daily, and did not speak English when they arrived, but they began learning English in ESL programs. I had sucess getting these students to achieve academically, to demonstrate resilience and motivation. Of course there were challenges, but test scores became good and excellent in some instances. I
    am Caucasian, but I developed a rapport with the students and their families. I learned about their culture and they learned things about mine. I’ve had similar experiences teaching on campuses with 85% black or African American students. Therefore, I disagree that Hispanic and African American students should be taught by teachers of their same ethnic or racial group. In fact, it seem to me that this type of racial and ethnocentric argument is counter to Thurgood Marshall’s prevailing argument in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education-1954. Segregation is a step in the wrong direction.

  • Kenney Robinson

    The need for Black and Latinx teachers is critical and the necessary time and resources must be invested to expand and elevate programs that are successful. However, at the same time we must support and compel white educators to adopt the strategies to mindsets to help Black and Latinx reach their full potential.

  • Olivia

    Hello i am a more murture student and I enjoyed the on-line classes. And I paid attention I did not find myself drafting or being space out. I love when I can go back and listen to the recording, because I missed something the professor said and it also help me to be a better note taker by listening to the record it help me to retain better.

  • Dr Kevin Goddard

    It seems to me that seeing what others are doing and copying without thinking about whether it is sensible is animal-like behavior; hence, it could be considered to be panic.
     
    I agree that the term “panic buying” is overused, but I still think that it is panic buying if it is prompted by unreasonable expectations of what is likely to happen.
     
    The view that it is acceptable to go to a supermarket and buy everything you want is not a deviation from the normal rules of place. Instead, it is the retention of the normal rules in an emergency situation where they are no-longer reasonable; this is like people taking their luggage from the overhead bins before going down the emergency escape slides.

  • Ernst Leffelaar

    Too late to reach Neil but in time to reach younger students.
    I am a retired Geologist, 69 years old, spent most of my working life in the area of research relating to all sort of natural and man-made catastrophes, especially from the point of view of a reinsurer. From my first semesters at University until the very last day at the Company I worked for, Stochastic and Statistics belonged to the bread and butter of my job. I had quite a hard time studying these two sciences from books at home parallel to my study and job. In this sense my life would have been much more easy had I have the opportunity to go through Prof. Neil J. Salkind’s “Statistics for People Who Hate Statistics”. In this book Neil makes “Statistics” so transparent and easy to understand.
    Dear students, when you buy a brand new car and you study its Owners Manual you many know exactly the functions of each of the levers and knobs in the cockpit but you are still not in the condition to drive the car safely until you get all the knowledge necessary to get a drivers license. Same is with Statistics: you will only get trust worthy results using SPSS or other Statistics Applications until you fully understand the science of Statistics – Prof. Neil J. Salkind was a great teacher in this matter!
    Many thanks, Neil!

  • Carl Mason

    How long before blm have this article removed as racist

  • Eleanor D Rodriguez

    I’ve been trying to learn this for so long but every time I try I lose interest because the content gets boring or confusing. You totally made me enjoy every bit of it! Thank you!!!
     
     
     

  • Edward Strickland

    GDP growth lies within the socio-social living scheme. Technology and automation have disrupted the prevailing GDP socio-economic model. It seem your group, and other administrators look to achieve upward mobility for the people. However, the American and other world industrialist denial to adapt to the changing times has created systemic disagreement with modern civilization’s advancement. The need for secured living standards for the disenfranchised, climate change, and nuclear disarmament are more pressing in human history than ever before. America’s leaders appear to be desensitized to support significant transformation in the design of the socio-social system. The Republicans have rejected the effort to restructure the system to meet peoples’ needs for a Green Deal. I would like to know your thoughts on what is preventing the advancement of human civilization.

  • Cicilia Bangun

    Yes agree, physical distancing doesn’t mean stop communicating with other. This is the time to build solidarity, cares eachother and keep communicate with friends, relatives and family.

  • john

    thanks so much

  • Dr. Sneha Gupta

    A must read for all in this pandemic situation.

  • John bird

    There’s an error in my previous post! Should be “We need more social contact” – Sorry!

  • John bird

    Social isolation is an unfortunate term – we need not social contact whilst we physically isolate. Also, there is a tendency to conflate loneliness and being alone…..

  • GEAH

    “They also define who these real people are. In Trump’s case it’s without the elites, without the intellectuals, and without the Muslims and probably without women, one could say.”

    That is a remarkably stupid observation. Does she actually believe her own nonsense or is she trolling?

  • GEAH

    “The average person in the U.S. uses about 100 rolls of toilet paper each year.”

    That’s two rolls a week! Where did you get that number?

    • Blackenship

      I’m not exactly sure but if I wanted to know an answer and checked sales data from stores, you can check the market and divide the product among the known population of a given region. This gives you a rough estimate but having worked for the hotel industry, this number actually makes sense. Also, this is just an average and this means one side of the curve uses a few sheets a week and the most extreme probably uses a roll a day. Who really knows?

    • Joseph Lee

      I assume women use a lot of it.

  • Nancy Simms

    Thanks for the article – it has given me a few things to reflect on. I am required to pivot in my qualitative research design, as COVOD 19 prevents me from face-to-face interviews. I am thinking of administering an open-ended questionnaire followed by conducting web-based interviews. I wonder if I can get some feedback regarding challenges that I might experience.

  • pedro

    awesome

  • Vangelis

    This is nazism with a liberal face. SHAME

  • Spiros

    May Hitler be with you…

  • Laura Norén

    A very quick guide to configuring Zoom – with screenshots – from a privacy and security mindset may also be helpful.

    There’s so much to do in going all virtual, I already put this guide together. Figured I might as well share it with others who care about student privacy but just don’t have time to attend to every little detail.

    https://medium.com/@laura.noren/zoom-configurations-5-mins-for-privacy-and-security-29f1514b2e23

  • Rodriguez Benson

    Should I do a PhD, is it worth all the time and effort? Many people I know, who are in the process of earning their PhD, all say that embarking on the endeavor was the worst decision of their lives. What I want to know is…has anyone acquired their PhD and is really glad that they did?

  • Tina Reeves

    Antipolygraph.org his hardly an unbiased source. There are few people that believe the polygraph detects lies. However, it is a useful investigative tool. It’s reliability depends on the qualifications and experience of the examiner, who should be a qualified forensic psychologist. A result that shows deception leads to further scrutiny and investigation. It is working well in the monitoring of sex offenders. It’s interesting that few courts allow polygraph results as evidence when eye witness testimony is infinitely less reliable. If one terrorist is kept off the streets because of a polygraph test result, that leads to further investigation, it has to be a good thing right?

  • Swati Rapotra

    Great list!! I’ve heard of several of those, but have only tried a few.

  • Lucas Krupp

    “At least 26 of Japan’s 60 national universities that have departments of the humanities or the social sciences plan to close those faculties after a ministerial request from the Japanese government, according to a new survey of university presidents by The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.”

    Where can this survey be found?

    Are there any citations for this article? I am not finding this survey post Anywhere on the Yomiuri Shimbun.

  • Mark

    Its time to make marijuana legal. Even for medical purposes, it’s important. thanks for giving useful information.

  • Christian Fogerty

    This is great! Thank you so much for providing links to different articles and scholars.

  • Soumyadeep Nag

    Had fun reading it….really useful

  • Haights

    There are practically none of us and that is a detriment to western society more than it realizes.

    It is the job of the social sciences to make sense of the world around us. Given the rise in hate-crime it is the purview of this discipline to be at the forefront to determine how such depraved individuals foment their values. I feel this authority has failed society due to its drastically one-sided acceptable cannon and failure to recognize a monumental shift in [collective] moral practices.

    When removing the individual from the equation and adjusting towards Post-Modernist Group Identitarianism – certain moral absolutes are reevaluated as new mores gain traction. Historically, Christian doctrine (by extension western Judeo-Christian/Structural-Functionalism) taught individual values such as the suppression of wrath, malice, slander and rage (Col 3:8). Conversely, these same values are frequently and collectively rationalized, often encouraged, notedly openly extoled, or consciously or unconsciously viewed as an essential force in the intended and necessary defense of group identity. I contend this contrast demonstrates a fundamental shift in worldview and consequently contributes to an ensuing divergent climate tainted with increased suppositional mistrust, mischaracterizations, or even hostility.

  • Lisa Baker

    Great tips! First poster presentation coming up in July, so your info was great!

  • oasiseducon

    Good way of explaining, and nice article to take data about my presentation topic, which i am going to convey in university.

  • Ian

    “Clearly, Savile was a career sexual predator”, was he?
    Anymore than lots of famous rich people who have women, young or otherwise looking them up for the purpose of sexual congress?
    I am just idly searching the net, looking for an article that shows any actual physical evidence against Jimmy Savile.
    For instance, copies of the complaints made against him in the 60s, do these actually exist still?
    Is there any evidence at all, except for the hordes of possibly neurotic loons, who come out of the woodwork for publicity and money?
    My curiosity was pricked by an interview with a nurse who worked in Stoke Mandeville when he was heavily involved there, that I heard on the radio, who, going against the zeitgiest, said she was unaware of any misbehavior, and there were no rumours or gossip between the nurses either.
    So, is there any physical evidence at all?
    Do the police complaints still exist? Not the new ones, but the original ones that were made decades ago?
    Just wondering.

    • acuriousyellow

      If you want exhaustive coverage of the entire fiasco track down moor larkin blogspot subtitled Jimcannotfixthisblogspot moor examines every piece of ‘evidence’ every report, commission, operation yewtree etc etc and lays it all out for all to see the falsity, Kant and double dealing that went on, also another blogger, rabbitaway adds further expose to the steaming mess and finally Susan cameron-blackie, who went under the nom de plume “Anna Raccoon”,now deceased a family court lawyer and former resident at the duncroft school where back in the 60s js was supposed to have had his pick of the girls who knew the 2 who made the ‘allegations’ and says they were liars, also merion jones, BBC man who broke the story was the nephew of the miss Jones that ran duncroft fabricated his little tale and it all served as a nice distraction from the burgeoning rape gang scandal and subsequent- ongoing coverup

      • M. Owen

        Jimcannotfixthisblogspot and the rest of the sources quoted so eloquently doesn’t sumount to guilt beyond a reasonable doubt as judged by ones peers in a Court of law and thus surely the fact remains of innocence until proven guilty? A few armchair detectives can’t take the place of the full CPS process. Much too many lawyers relief I’m sure🤣🤣

    • M. Owen

      I have to agree. How much cold hard objective physical evidence is there? This country is built on a judicial system requiring innocent untill proven guilty. It would seem that requirement counts less and less in this day and age! While I don’t minimalize the importance of each person’s statements, unfortunately it doesn’t amount to objective evidence and that fact really needs to be considered before condemning any person.

  • Academic Blueprint

    As part of your research project you need to break down your skills into what you liked. Really agree with you here!

  • Hashem ElAssad

    “I got a comment that Tetlock is ‘positive about the value of hedgehogs. He says they ask good questions, ones that foxes wouldn’t necessarily think to ask. That might put him in the hybrid camp.’ I need to emphasize this point: the three categories are not intended as black/white issue. Tetlock indeed might fit in the hybrid category as well as the genenralist group for there is overlap between all categories; I put his concept in the generalist camp because the “aggregate success rate” is used as one of the advantages for generalism. But that doesn’t mean his concept does not see the value in both generalists/specialists.

  • Stephen Quilley

    Robert, as a sociologist of 30 years (in the Eliasian mostly) I couldn’t agree more with this assessment. Sadly it is not going to happen. And actually the more that advocacy sociology embraces identity politics and engages without restraint or reflection in the culture war, the more I find myself alienated from my own discipline (even though I grew up on the Green/Left and consider this my natural home). I just read tweets from a sociology professor at CUNY (Jessie Daniels) proclaiming that any white families perpetuate white supremacy and racism; and that whites should disinherit their kids to prove their anti-racist credentials. People like Jessie would make a good subject for a sociological investigation – but the fact that they are fairly unremarkable mainstream professors at good schools is bizarre and just a little frightening.

  • Tom

    This is wonderful, Thank you

  • John Shelton Rankin

    It does not seem clear as to the meaning of “good migrants vs. the unwanted ones.” Is the difference equating good with legal immigration and unwanted with illegal immigration; or is the reference to good law abiding vs violent/organized criminality? If the latter meaning, that is an issue anywhere.

  • John Shelton Rankin

    Sociology’s early focus on ” disorder of social and economic change in the 19th century.”, is demonstrated in Durkheim’s work on Suicide; especially his emphasis on inseparable “social types” of societal integration and corresponding types of suicide. Unlike much leftist propositions, Durkheim’s implicit prediction that rising violence results from anomic-anomie dis-integration, can be tested. Conversely, consider the rise in violent crime after the radical movement(s) of the 1960s.

  • Peter

    Alison really understands how a prisoner feels and should be treated. I truly admire a person like Alison. I totally agree on “see prisoners as people first”. Prisoners deserve to be treated equally.

  • Aryan

    Alison is a perfect example of a criminologist. She saw goodness in every prisoner. They should be treated as a person. If I’m a prisoner, I can easily trust Alison.

  • Sawadogo Nate

    Ithanks Prof Dingwall for this provocative post. you’ve really made the point. In the natural sciences, so often, the detached character of theories goes with association with authors. There theory is less boring e.g Mendelian theory ; Pythagoras theorem etc. The quest for scientific identity may have driven us too far beyond even the model discipline

  • Leonard J Waks

    Surely it is ironic that a research tool that is becoming ubiquitous and shows up twice daily in every scholar’s in-box violates every norm of research. IF RG is the research gate, it should keep itself out.

    That said, because the RG score is out there (I seem to have two extremely different ones) it would be useful to know its correlation coefficients with other measures. Validity is interesting but difficult. It would just be interesting to see the correlations as a kind of weak validation.

  • Angel G.

    Thanks for sharing! Really good summary and description of the principles.

  • Richard Hinton

    I can imagine a future for society without technocrats (experts, managers, a business sphere.) And I can imagine a post-human/anti-human future with them. But there is no (human) future conceivable without societies, politics and some form of economic organization and the reflexive, critical study of it. Social scientists aren’t cheerleaders for society’s dispersal into adaptive systems and anyone who advocates for it is not a social scientist at all, but is on the Koch bros. payroll.

  • Hair Salon

    Once your research is successful where are planning to sell your products?

  • Karen Page

    I totally agree that “The state versus federal legal status of cannabis and cannabinoids can make it complicated for hospitals to develop policies around medical marijuana use.” Let’s fight for cannabis legalization!

  • Stephen Hunt

    It might be helpful to quickly clarify what was unique or particular about the exploration that added to the effects

  • Taylor Bishop

    Thanks for the interesting article about positive psychology. I had no idea that this aims to help people flourish and make the most of their lives through empirical research and theoretical models. I’m kind of interested to learn how these models are developed, especially if it could take several years to refine them for positive psychology.

  • mike

    Hi, I am wondering why nobody has commented on this and probably many more incidents like this in this country, I am still disgusted, for the attitude toward my wife and myself at this airport in particular, ps hope everybody has a nice time this xmas travelling like cattle through this modern day ”hellhole ” of an excuse for an airport! ms11122018

  • Bashar H. Malkawi

    Although many universities focus on scientific programs and research, social science is still sacred and the origin of other fields of study and researcg. It is a great thing to have a space whereby author can communicate their work. Bashar H. Malkawi

  • Artslover

    The colonization of universities by the thinking of capitalistic corporations is going to kill them. Universities must pursue truth and the well-being of mankind, and not exclusively the money of rich donors. Without the arts and the humanities, perhaps life is not worth living.

  • ADEL

    nice post

  • Aaron

    It appears even more states are coming online! Soon the entire country will embrace what has always been and always be a miracle planyt!

  • windows 10 error code 0xc00000f

    This is absolutely true that this was an issue when I created the new team at Microsoft Research and I didn’t find any magic solutions. Social scientists when they are being calibrated using the frameworks applied to hard scientists have a difficult time.

  • steve wilderson

    Robert, I just had a conversation with Rush Limbaugh on his radio show Oct 11. I made the statement that I thought he was one of the greatest Sociologist of the century, He said he had never considered the idea but was intrigued. What are your thoughts

  • Turyahikayo Innocent

    i gardauated with abachelors in social sciences among with many graduates and had agreat love for social sciences. i believe there is need to define social science to young scholars and also reflect its importance in shaping policy and guidance to the sociaty. i believe as SPS can start an initiative here in Uganda. thanks

  • Krzysztof

    … I am afraid, that measuring the scientific effectiveness of a scientist by number of cites, recommendations, followings and reads is like the measuring the effectiveness of a secretary by a number of used paper clips … (with all respect for secretaries … , of course …)
    Moreover, appear by that the “strange phenomena”, like e.g. “scientific cooperatives”, in which a few scientists write papers and each other writes as a coauthor his colleague … , and in references next papers of the colleagues … – in that way every of them can get even hundred papers and cites every month … So it is like the mentioned secretary whould use a few paper clips for a one paper …
    Of course, the cites are good to measure the scientific activity, but under the condition that a number of cites would be divided by a number of coauthors …
    It is important to put the question: “what is the goal of scientific works ?”
    I think that for technical sciences the goal is an introducing in the industry a product which gives money for a producer as well as for a scientist-author of a patent, but also a bonus for people …
    So I think that should be measured the number of: products introduced in the industry, patents and books with scientific theories … – special bonus should be for the product made according to the patent, which would be the optimized case of the theory published in the book …
    The papers which should be reports of experimental or theoretical researches are only partial contributions of above, … and should be measured with a very low score note …
    Of course, still there is the old way to measure a value of the scientific effectiveness … , I mean the prices of books, papers, patents, designs …

  • jennifer

    Great discussion with Ann Oakley

  • vikas sharma

    hello. Can you please elobrate more on the second line which explains the philosophical explanation of human nature by Hobbes and Rousseau.

    • Olivia Butze

      Hi there! When it came to human nature, Hobbes and Rousseau were famous for their differing views. Hobbes believed that the natural state of humans was brutish. He believed that civilization’s duty was to step in and correct this primal state. Rousseau on the other hand thought the opposite. He believed that humans were inherently good, but it was civilization’s fault that we acted poorly. This century long debate is an interesting one to consider, especially when discussing our motivations.

  • Jennifer A Harris

    This was a great show! I am so happy you are producing this series. I look forward to each one. Glad to learn more about implicit bias.

  • Seth Kaufman

    I agree. Having gone through school and graduated college, the stark differences between how learning is done in the “Real World” versus what is demonstrated in the classroom setting, are night and day. Having a more active learning centered approach would benefit all involved, primarily the students.

  • Peter's odhura

    I want to be receiving new post on HR

  • Corbin Treacy

    Nice post! Great content. This information is really helpful. Thank you so much for sharing this post.

  • Dusica

    Thank you for this analysis! I am also puzzled and sometimes appalled by the RG score. I even wrote to them once, but they never replied. My complaint was about the fact that they count as an article anything that is published in a journal. Some conferences publish 300 words abstracts in the special issues of some journals. Hence, people who have several such conference abstracts have much higher RG score (every abstract is valued as the full paper). This makes me mad, but they never reacted to my e-mail…

  • Manoj Pandey

    I have come across use of blogs and sometimes social networks for science communication. Some bloggers very religiously blog, and the blog is not part of their formal mode of communication (in academics and teaching).
    At the same time, some science/ research bloggers have shared that writing posts on established research blogs is a better and less-time consuming way of blogging as the contributor does not have to maintain the blog.

    • Ricard luke

      great reply

  • Dr. Michael Pak

    From Dr. Michael Pak

    This is a good article by Robert Timo Hannay (April 20, 2018) – congratulations on the thoughts and input.

    You are right about several issues brought up, including that people often do not have good answers or even good questions. And yet, they still have to fill in the time with some explanations and conversation that sounds good, sometimes (or often) without actually being relevant to key issues.

    Some people fill in the conversation lines with relevant information, some with things that sound well, and there are people – unfortunately – who can fill in the space with many things (written text, images, sounds, etc) deliberately meant to be confounding and drown out or interfere with key information (this is sabotage).

    Examples of just such activity can be found on Facebook timelines/posts and Google. As an example: under the search term DOCTOR or Dr., the drop down menu should include relevant names of deserving physicians or PhD’s, before including parodies of the title or subject.

    This brings up a key issue or question: How does someone determine the relevance, value or correctness of a service or content (of a text or conversation, for example) ? It is difficult, especially without professional knowledge or experience. It often takes effort and careful attention over time. Observation of outcomes helps.

    In 2003, the U.S. Patent office gave me the patent for the Three-Dimensional Model of Human Behavior – a universal system for behavior analysis and prediction. It represents to social sciences what the Quantum Physics is to physical sciences. This is not a light statement or conclusion It is based on many years of work.

    More information is on my web site and the U.S. Patent 6581037.

    Keep up the good work. Feel free to contact me if you would like more information or have ideas to discuss.

    Best regards,

    Dr. Michael Pak

  • Hope Parisi

    Hello, I am citing the podcast interview (printed version) with D. Massey for a paper I am writing. How do I cite it in MLA8 or any other format–I can derive the MLA8 format if you share with me any example of how to cite it.

    Thanks so much!

    Hope Parisi
    hopekcc@aol.com

  • Mia

    Easy a Entrepreneurial capability is when they determine the capacity to identify opportunities, run new businesses, drive innovations and learn from and adapt to changing circumstances. •Supporting and implementing high-quality entrepreneurship education in school systems, higher education and in vocational education across a broad range of subjects (including technical and scientific fields).
    •Encouraging closer links between education institutions and the private sector (e.g. involving entrepreneurs in coaching and mentoring students and giving guest lectures, or through apprenticeships in companies).
    •Providing training targeted at entrepreneurs ( – someone who thinks of an idea to sell to someone and takes the risk in hope of profit. )

  • Clive Boddy

    The problem in a democracy is in determining just whom will prove to be a good leader. Those who have done well for themselves may be attractive because of their potential to do well for the populace. Their charisma may be mistaken for good character, their expensive clothes for good taste and their ruthless self-promotion for strong leadership.Such political leaders can find it easy to get elected by significant minorities of the population. However, their dark traits of insincere charm, lying, cunning, selfish greed, irresponsibility and willingness to claim the good work of others as their own, often mark them as high in psychopathy. In the corporate sphere in Australia the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry is finding plenty of evidence of systemic and institutional psychopathy while individual corporate psychopaths have long been assumed to be attracted to the financial services sector. On the other hand Odysseus was relatively humble among the leaders of Greece and it is humility rather than charisma which often characterizes truly great leaders. Like the Odyssey, decades of leadership research also suggests that the quality of life in a human community depends on the quality of its leaders. It is the history of how leaders emerge that we fail to learn from.

  • Jim Gibson

    It is about time to legalize cannabis even for recreational use. It’s a good thing that states are considering it. Yes to marijuana! Thank you for the insightful info!

  • islam

    the download link directs to the previous episode, Mills’.

    • Sage

      Eeek! Thanks for notice. It’s fixed now.

  • Jonas

    Interesting. Here in Scandinavia a belief that it is “odd” or “bad practice” to promote an existing staff member to a professorship from within the same university is completely unheard of. In fact the opposite may be true, being promoted within the same university is the normal career path and applications who already work at the same university tend to be favoured when applying for permanent positions.

    • Sage

      We’re happy with the style in your request. Thanks for asking!

  • Garry P.

    It would be insane not to include the student loan interest deduction. Why penalize people for going to college?

  • Garry P.

    How come there is never any mention of the meat industry? They are, by a wide margin, the #1 contributors to pollution and climate issues on this planet. Neither the left or right ever bring this up.

  • Anonymous

    Excellent – thanks for a very thought provoking interview

  • blogging

    Hi colleagues, its fantastic paragraph on the topic of educationand entirely defined, keep it
    up all the time.

  • Andrew

    Good work, Daniel. What I’ve noticed in my institution is the way elitism is strengthened via appointments – we have an elitist president appointing fellow elitists, and creating a monoculture of staff and postgaduate students with connections to elite institutions and networks.

  • Chetan Gupta

    Hello Robert

    We all know the importance of science in our daily life as everything happens with any of the laws of science whether It’s from Physics, Chemistry or Biology. Science is the most important subject in our life and a student should always learn about it since when the school get started.
    I really liked the way you explained everything in this article and I always love to teach science to my younger brother and sisters. I am glad that you had shared this article. Keep sharing..

  • sewa manlift

    Wһen someone writes an artjcle he/ѕhe retains the image of a
    uuser in his/her miknd thаt how a user can know it. Therеfore that’s why this
    paragraph is perfect. Thankѕ! http://fiaalbania.com/

  • Nicholas

    Right here is the perfect blog for anyone
    who would like to understand this topic. You understand so much its almost hard to argue with you (not that I really would
    want to…HaHa). You certainly put a brand new spin on a topic that’s been written about
    for ages. Great stuff, just wonderful!

  • John Devonshire

    “Jenkins’s standing as a journalist is beyond question.”

    Given the level of the British media in general, this is not saying very much.

  • Anonymous

    The second video is missing – It is a repeat of the third commandment.

    • Sage

      Thanks for alert – fixed now

  • Val Humphreys

    It would be optimistic to hope that the pure gold of a concept does not undergo some alchemy and turn into base metal when inserted into the often heated debate about child abuse, especially where deaths are concerned. The security services face a similar challenge – how do they identify and stop someone from blowing themselves up and nearby strangers? After those outrages, it can also seem obvious these individuals should not have slipped through the net/dropped off the radar, in the usual phrase.
    However, although more deaths are involved, the security services do not seem to get such harsh criticism from the media.Social science concepts are not often picked up in everyday debates – ‘moral panic’ being another even older exception to that rule.
    The Pelka case is incredibly sad – first a child is killed, then both those involved commit suicide in prison.

  • Aaron

    Agreed – however I’d like to amend that it should be the privilege of the Parents (or Guardians) to introduce them to the arts and local culture of their community. The panacea of this epidemic is more exposure – parents are the ultimate arbiters of positive or negative experiences in a child’s life – not schools.

  • Larry Lundgren

    This site has so far refused to accept my post, telling me that my website address is invalid.

    Therefore in this trial I make the simplest possible comment.

    The New York Times Editors and most columnists apparently belive that the US Census Bureau system is not to be questioned. They and most commenters display their firm belief that there are genetically distinct races. I have tried for 3 years to get the Times to publish one serious article on the American Concept of Race.

    I have failed. Is there someone who can get through to the Editors.

    I use the http://www.seekonk.se simply to see if this will work.

  • Edward R. O'Neill

    What a lovely analysis.

    I especially like the connection to Goffman, as Goffman is the most ‘aesthetic’ of sociologists: his sociological work is to see how aesthetic, dramatic, and theatrical devices play a structuring role in social life.

    For Goffman, privacy and publicness are intertwined. And you latch on very well, I believe, to the way the viewer’s observation is a part of Hopper’s work.

    Beautifully done.

  • Norberto

    An impreѕsive ѕhare! I have just forwarԁed this onto a coworker who had been conducting a littlе research ߋn this.
    And he actually bought me lunch simply because I stumbled upon іt for him…
    lol. So allow me to reᴡorɗ this…. Thanks for the meal!!
    But yeah, thanks for spending the time to discuss this subject here on your web page.

  • Tiana

    The only reason we fear death is because we are so busy to chase the worldy live. We are so content to prepare life in the next 5 to 20 years like death will never come.

    Unfortunately we FORGET to prepare the death it self and whatever might come after death.

    The problem is, we dont know what will come after death and HOW to prepare for it. So we just busy and pretend like death will never come to us.

    The Big question is to find out what will come after death.
    And surely, someone create us humans for something.

  • michael scully

    I wholeheartedly agree with this mans view at luton airport, my wife has been subjected to the same treatment as the man above,not once but umpteen times, i could go in to detail about this but cannot subject my 62 year old wife to be degraded this way, I hope somebody sees this and tries to act upon it as i have with absolutely no redress or apology for their disgraceful cavalier attitude, ms 19 sept 2017

  • Pablo Markin

    This is a good point. At the same time, if bodies disbursing public support to scholarly research, such as the Austrian Science Fund, are to have a long-term impact on the sustainability of the entire academic ecosystem that they directly or indirectly finance, either Gold or Green Open Access can be one of the more important venues for that, since the discourse on impact factor scores reinforces the dominant position of few private, profit-oriented publishers in the paywall-based journal sector. High adoption rates of Open Access seem to indicate that slowly gains in acceptance in the academic community: http://openscience.com/the-performance-of-the-austrian-science-funds-open-access-promotion-policy/.

  • Casey Wimsatt

    On the one hand, they insist on very exacting standards for inclusion, and on the other hand, they completely and steadfastly ignore a key measure of rigor, treatment fidelity. There is no rational way to reconcile these diametrically opposing approaches. The WWC says treatment fidelity is not feasible to measure, but they have no problem insisting on study criteria that are equally if not more difficult to achieve.

  • Great podcasts!

    Hello David and Nigel

    I want to thank you both for your Psychology Bites and Social Science Bites podcasts. Often fascinating, always clear. It must take a lot of work to organise and produce. They’ve introduced me to a lot of new ideas I might not have encountered otherwise. I appreciate them and feel I should say so.

    This episode on social mobiltiy was interesting. It’s sometimes ideologically and dogmatically assumed that the people at the bottom of society are the same as the people at the top, but that the people at the top had a head start and other advantages. Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps not. If people were swapped at birth would the outcomes be the same? My understanding from adoption and twin studies is that genes play a huge part in what a person becomes, but whether the people at the top and bottom have different genes I don’t know.

    I question whether social mobility is a good thing to aspire to. It’s mostly left unmentioned that social mobility is a zero sum game. If social mobility is about status, where there are 100 people, person 100 is at the top and person 1 is a the bottom. For someone to rise in that hierarchy, someone else must fall. In this system there will always be unhappy people who are falling and always be unhappy people who are at the bottom. In my view it would be better to have a society in which everyone can live a happy life, whether you are person 100 at the top or person 1 at the bottom. Someone might respond that people can still be happy if they are falling or at the bottom of the hierarchy, but if this is the case, why concern ourselves with social mobility at all?

    It was also noticeable to me that Clark didn’t speak about racism or the social position of black people. Listeners are left to read between the lines on what he might think about that. Rather than leave it implicit, it would give more clarity and show more intellectual courage to make it explicit. If the people at the top may have superior genes, the implication seems to be that the people at the bottom may have inferior genes. If this is what he thinks, explicitly bite that bullet. In fairness, he had only had 15 minutes so he can’t cover everything. Interesting episode.

    Again, thank you for your podcasts. If I had more money and was higher up the hierarchy I’d make a donation. Great work both!

  • Dr Raymond J RITCHIE

    I am an Australian first generation graduate and PhD (Science). The attitude of the elite to the first generation graduate can be summed up in a way similar to the British attitude to educated Indians under the Raj. Make good use of them, work with them, sleep with them if you must but you should never quite trust them. It took me years after I got my PhD to realise that because of my socioeconomic background the elite would never bring themselves to trust me. I am 63y.

  • Peregrine Smythe

    Complex issue that is affected and influenced by many different factors – health is controllable to a degree…

  • Andrew Lapointe

    This was a great read. I would be interested in seeing the same research done on the “new” RG Score now that they have added reads. Thanks for this content

  • Albert Trotter

    does it mean that everything that human being could possibly do would be re-done by the machines? sounds good but does it mean that sooner or later there won’t be any work for humans to do? no jobs?

  • Chidozie C Nnaji

    I know of researchers on Researchgate who have high RG scores despite not having published in journals with impact factor. If impact factor accounts for over 60% of RG score as you claimed, how can you explain this?

    • Facundo Palacio

      60% is not 100% (still remains 40%). Under the model proposed, I guess it may have lot of low impact publications, or many interactions with colleagues, or a combination of both.

  • Amod

    What is the criteria for RG score

  • John Rankin

    Much of the discord and disconnected talking at each other that prevents rational discourse on the subject of “race” my be reduced with a less ideological and more empirical approach. Is it “race” or racism that is the core issue?

    Referencing observable skin tone, ethnicity, subculture, crime statistics, education, residence, etc., directly, is more rational than using concepts with greater connotations than consistent definitions or empirical precision.

    Do light skinned and dark skinned people differ in their reported participation in and views of crime and its causes? Do city and small town or rural dwellers differ? What about those preferring Hip Hop, rock, or classical music; or those with advanced degrees, some college, high school grads, or early dropouts; or atheist, Christian evangelicals, Muslims?

    The idea here is not to deny the social/existential importance of “race” as a meme, while also not conflating reactions to perceived or imputed bias with the epidemiology of social problems.

  • Bob Konrad

    If there is an emerging conservative sociology in the US, it might be perhaps represented in a book of readings: Zake, Ieva, and Michael DeCesare, eds. New Directions in Sociology: Essays on Theory and Methodology in the 21st Century. McFarland, 2011. These authors give a new profile to the Austrian School (Hayek) and Karl Popper, by resurrecting their core motivation for theorizing as a reaction to “totalitarianism” in favor of an “open society” rather than emphasizing the methodological contributions, as do most reviews of theory. They critique sociological theory of the late 20th century as leaving out or minimizing agency of individuals and give some thoughtful reinterpretations of “postmodernism” not dismissing it completely. They mention people like Leo Strauss, who have been ignored by sociology, but have been influential among a certain group of conservative political figures in the US. They also profile some methodological innovations that are worth exploring including the use of introspection, comparative historical method, and auto-ethnography. .

    The effort of the chattering classes in the US to try to understand populism, Trumpism, or nationalism could benefit from examining if not explicitly adopting some of these viewpoints and tools. Clearly conventional social science has been taken by surprise by contemporary developments in the real world.

  • Romance-films

    Something i think some of these commenters should hear:
    “If you stick a knife into my back nine inches pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. You pull it all the way out- that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even begun to pull the knife out, much less try and heal the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.” Malcolm X.

  • Anonymous

    Read Karl Popper, you cannot combine statistics and science since science is falsified if there is evidence contrary to a theory, whereas with statistics you can ignore the outlier. This is the reason almost all academics do not consider psychology a science in the proper sense, it isn’t a pseudoscience either though unless you are adamant that it is science – it is a SOCIAL science.

    • Anonymous

      Using your logic biology and chemistry are not sciences either. Karl Popper may be venerated by many naive scientists, but his views have long been discredited for not solving the problems of inference that he tried so hard to solve.

  • Mass Communication

    I was curious if you ever considered changing the structure of your website?

    Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.
    But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better.
    Youve got an awful lot of text for only having one or
    two pictures. Maybe you could space it out better?

  • Ed

    Very entertaining and enlightening podcast. In times such as these, the theories which were discussed so elegantly here are as powerful and relevant as ever. In these uncertain times also, it was good to see Social Identify Theory presented as an idea with positive potential and not as a counsel for despair. We need hope and practical strategies at present, and as someone once said “There’s nothing so practical as a good theory”.

  • AM

    Hi, the links for the webinar don’t lead to the webinar recording, but to the article about the original event. Thanks!

  • Jake Willard

    “Dear Sir/Madam,

    I found one of my photos on your website with incorrect attribution. The original photo, (which I own the license to) is located here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/keoni101/7127698863

    And the incorrectly attributed instance is on this page:

    https://managementink.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/the-csr-agenda-part-5-of-5/

    I truly appreciate and I’m so happy that you chose to use my image. It’s both flattering and satisfying. Producing images that can actually be used is my main goal.

    I really hope you will continue to use my image, but the creative commons license for this image requires appropriate attribution. Please attribute the image to http://www.liveoncelivewild.com and link to: http://liveoncelivewild.com/Global-Perspective/

    Thank you in advance for taking time out of your day to help me take care of this.

  • Ronald G. Accoo

    Though it will not be possible, I am forever trying to “catch up” on the contributions of Black Americans. Achievements which were either ignored or suppressed when I was in school, not even in many cases were their names mentioned; I should seek who they were. It is a pleasure to have discovered another source which will help lead me out of the dark and towards “catching up. I have my own little history find through my genealogy research. Thanks.
    Ron Accoo

  • alfachemistry

    Thank you for sharing, although I graduated from a ordinary university which is not well known.

  • Elmer Rich

    As professional problem solvers, we need facts, data and the best evidence to guide action. Paradoxically, in the discussion of popular science, science education and the use or misuse of facts in “decision making” we have, effectively no research on our dependent variables – what ever they may be.

    Let take the simple statement: “Scientists must use all reasonable vehicles…” How is “reasonable” to be defined and measured? By whom and over what period of time?

    Another example: “There is strength in numbers, and more than 2,300 scientists have signed an open letter” OK, where are the experimental facts to support this claim? What are the dependent variables? How is “strength” measured? These kinds of unsubstantiated claims form the bulk of the conversations on pop science and policy and science ed. Handwaving at it’s worst.

    Further, we have no coherent theories and models of animal behavior, let alone human, let alone humans and technical subjects. We simply do not know how information and action work together.

    Instead we are, predictably, following cultural and ideological presumptions and assumptions about action and the external and informational stimuli and processes that are involved. Currently, the discussion of facts and science and any kind of behavior and action is “faith-based” and based on platitudes. That will just create more obstacles to problem solving.

  • Scott

    I agree that distracted driving is a big issue. I do wonder, however, if there are studies that show distracted driving because of a device and how that relates to distracted driving of having other people in the vehicle. Is a device more distracting?

    Aside from laws against using devices (and actually enforcing them) I don’t see any reasonable progress toward solving the issue.

  • Nigel

    Robert Dingwall remains the sanest voice on these matters. He deserves a prize for his tenacity. That prize should be the avid and coherent support of the social science community. By ‘coherent’ I mean that all the relevant UK professional associations should join together in supporting the relevant US professional associations in lobbying the Trump administration to treat the inclusion of social science in the IRB process as an instance of excessive and unnecessary over-regulation. If we must have Trump at least let us get one good thing from his administration.

  • ken

    Yes, depressing. Elimination of the “excluded” category was very disappointing. Filing out an “exempt” application requires just as much work as an “expedited” one.

  • Magnus

    I agree with Daniel_L – not cited doesn’t mean not read. I wish there was a way of accrediting papers for their use in undergraduate teaching that was equivalent to monitoring citations. Also in some areas 5 years is nothing – e.g. taxonomy and in others the work is out of date after even a few years.

  • Swift Minds

    This a very interesting article listing valid points from an honest aspect. Also, I found the data and stats you provided unexpectedly interesting. This is a good summary of the SAGE survey. Thank you for taking time to putting it together.

  • Gaye Frie

    Interesting that one of the most important factors is almost an aside-that the behaviors that are successful for men aren’t for women. And this factor than calls into question the title “Women’s Own Behavior Boosts Gender Disparity in Academia” and associated assumptions. If women are essentially punished for exhibiting the behaviors that lead to success for male, how can you suggest that it is the women whose behavior boosts disparity. Rather, the women are in a double bind-not experiencing a double standard. And a double bind preclude success regardless of the women’s own behavior.

  • Joy Butler

    It was interesting to learn that British dentists use a minimal amount of anesthetic, if any is used at all, when performing a dental procedure. Growing up in the US I have thought of a numb mouth after having a cavity filled as routine. I have always expected to be made to feel comfortable when visiting the dentist. I never really saw my experience at the dentist as something unique to my culture.

  • Jonathan Hoffman

    Why not this simple formula for scientific value and impact?

    Average impact point of publications X average citations X number of publications

    • Neelima Gupta

      I fully agree. The formula for calculating the RG score is not clear

  • Jane

    Is it now time for a Professor co-op? The great bypass of the powers that be? Bare bones instruction with complete academic freedom. Like an intellectual commune.

    What is stopping all of you? Do it with Skype. Do it in person with simple surroundings. Be your own brand. Start the revolution on social media. Get the millenials behind you. Be free.

  • John MacInnes

    Jonathan makes valid points about the misuse of statistics. I’d add that the problem is made worse by poor understanding of statistics, which makes it easier to twist them without fear of being caught.

    But his last sentence is utterly, utterly wrong: he has the ‘how’ and ‘why’ the wrong way round. Accept this logic and you end up leaving evidence and facts behind and live in Trump’s world. Evidence becomes pure opinion, prejudice, reputation or authority. This quickly becomes dangerous and poisonous. I can lie and cheat to my heart’s content and every time I’m caught I can insist that the stats, facts or historical record are just cooked up by whoever dislikes or disagrees with me.

    If we insist on the how, we accept that while robust stats sometimes tell us things we’d rather not hear, they also allow us to hold others to account too.

    If we insist on the why then my stats are always perfect and yours are rubbish.

  • Martha McCaughey

    Fascinating! Isn’t there a Sage webinar on this coming up soon? is it possible to add the info here? I don’t know when that is, and can’t find it on Sage’s website.

    • Sage

      Your comment on Social Science Space about the webinar came even as we were holding it. Here’s a link to the archive: A Debate on Academic Freedom.

  • Ranjan Ray

    I was shocked and deeply saddened to learn of the death of Sharit Bhowmick. I first met Sharit in Delhi in the second half of the 1980 s, when I joined the Economics Faculty at rhe Delhi School of Economics..Sharit was empolyed at the time as a Reader in the Deparetment of Sociology at Delhi School. I struck an instant friendhip with Sharit and spent many hours in his company till 1994 when Sharit left Delhi. I was very impressed with Sharit’s social awareness and his keen desire to help people with a poor quality of life. He wanted to use his writing skills to bring to peoples’ attemtion the plight of those who are exploited and endure sub himan conditioins in all walks of life. He stood out as one who placed muich less weight on his own academic aspirations and much moire on helping others enjoy a better quality of life using his scholatrly talents. Though I did not keep in touch with Sharit since our days at DSE, as I had also left Delhi, I regularly read his pieces on informal sector workers, and could see his sincere desire to focus attention on the desperate working and living conditions endured by several of them, especially those working in tea plantations.
    Scholars like Sharit are hard to find, and his loss will be deeply missed. I didn’t know his family, but can I pass on my heart felt condolence to them on this sad loss.

    Ranjan Ray
    (Monash University, Australia)

  • Edward John Allen

    The issue of the Monarchy’s role and people’s perception of it are of real importance (I say this as someone who believes that there is no real place for a Monarchy in a modern egalitarian society) so I got excited when I saw the show’s title, but it was really disappointing to learn that research was so old! Many things have shifted in society since then that make a “read thru” on this research hard to justify.

    Now, if you can find more contemporary takes on the issue, count me in!!

    thanks for your efforts, I enjoy the show (for the most part!)

  • Anonymous

    “It’s really controversial as to whether animals have emotions or not, and I think that really depends on how you define emotions. If you defined the emotion of disgust as being a system that drives you to avoid parasites and pathogens that might make you sick, then of course the same applies to animals, and C. elegans a one millimeter long nematode worm alive today, put it in a Petri dish, put it with a pathogenic organism, and what does it do, it worms its way away from the pathogen. In other words, it’s doing disgust, it’s doing disgust-­‐driven behavior.”

    I disagree. You don’t know why the nematode is moving away. It might be fear – the truth is you can’t read the nematode’s mind so you don’t know what it’s feeling (actually we can’t even do that with people). Btw, animals do experience emotions (fear, anger, etc., are the quite obvious emotions) Beyond that, they can express like or dislike of food or how we show affection for them. What is contested is whether they have the ability to rationalize or think. They obviously don’t do it like humans, but they can learn. There are horses that are great escape artists – but would they be able to connect eating too much grain to foundering? I don’t think so.

  • Matthew Dell

    I think that you can certainly get a lot of useful information from studying psychology, however, there is a major problem with it. 30 years ago it would have been thought that let’s say you have a trauma, that you need to work out your feelings, nowadays they say not to ruminate at all – so what happens 20 years from now, do we say that ruminating is actually natural, and necessary? The answers are constantly changing. With hard sciences, when we discover gravity, we don’t go back on that in 20 years. When we discover atoms, we don’t go back on that in 20 years. Psychology is the equivalent of looking at a computer screen, seeing some behavior, but rather than looking at the actual code, we are doing studies and making assertions about how it all works, and making some correlations to the hardware. We don’t know how the software of the mind arises from physiology, not the way we understand how software arises out of hardware in a computer system, but we are making all sorts of assertions about how it works nonetheless. If someone tried taking this approach to debugging a computer, it would be an absolute failure, and utterly wasteful, because they simply don’t actually know what’s going on.

    • Albert

      Sorry to disagree but other scientific ‘facts’ have been proven wrong time and time again (just look at poor old Pluto). Psychology does what all other sciences do, draws conclusions given the information available at the time. Based on your description of a science, only mathematics could truly claim that title

  • Matt Ray

    Wittgenstein’s point is that you can’t readily determine the meaning of common language, because ordinary language was not built to have an obvious and simple correspondence between words and meanings.

    At the end of that passage he says, “The silent adjustments [required] to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.” He is attacking the philosophical practice of analyzing ordinary speech as though it were a royal road to meaning when, in fact, common speech was never made to be especially clear or insightful.

    Instead, one has to work a great deal to figure out how words interact and what they mean. Ordinary persons can use a language very well without knowing precisely what each word means or how those words relate to more fundamental propositions.

    Rather than revealing the truth, ordinary speech often hides it. That doesn’t mean people sometimes choose complicated phrases. It means that ordinary speech is not so obvious as it seems especially for technical or philosophical purposes. Ordinary speech is often clear, because it feels familiar even though it is not actually precise. I.e. (if you’ll pardon a foreign phrase) it is reassuring to the audience in a way that inhibits understanding.

    When discussing delicate topics, our everyday words are often freighted with connections, references, and prejudices. For instance, does the word ‘race’ refer to (1) loosely related groups with a common ancestor in the distant past, (2) groups with hereditary moral characteristics, (3) a social construct comparable to ‘witch,’ or (4) a demographer’s convenience for sorting data?

    Wouldn’t it be helpful to have special words that do not call to mind very different associations for different people? Rather than using the regular words, we could use this technical vocabulary to speak with great precision. If we want to talk about something both delicate and obscure (race, gender, etc.) it is helpful to use special words that are designed to refer very specifically to one aspect of a problem or to one particular thought.

    Using familiar words in unfamiliar or restricted ways tends to increase confusion by creating false impressions and is thus counterproductive. One should try to be clear and precise. I agree with your central contention. But scholars sometimes avoid ordinary language, because ordinary language has inherent defects that make it less useful for technical purposes. Gibberish is honest in that you know you don’t get it. Ordinary language often lies by making you think you understand when you do not.

  • Robert C

    Is REF mean to create a market for academics? I thought it was a mechanism to distribute public money among university departments. If it is supposed to help individuals in this way then I think this should be transparent. Let’s see what individuals are actually producing. No one cares if sports stars are paid a lot and produce results.

    Moreover, if it is about allowing academics to reveal their worth, then we need to deal with a fundamental market failure around REF. Many academics have a distorted market value as they have outputs in highly/lowly ranked sources which will not be highly/lowly ranked in REF. In my area, marketing, we have 5 x 4* star journals but the last REF found 4* marketing papers in over 40 journals! In fact, 40% of 4* marketing outputs in REF 2014 came from just 3 journals – all of which are ranked at 3*! (Indeed, across business and management stats revealed that there is almost no difference between a 3* and 4* ranked journal in REF). In my situation, I am sitting on 4 single authored papers in those 3* ranked journals. I have just been turned down for promotion because I don’t have any papers in 4* journals . Am I over- or under-valued? Going by REF, probably under-valued as it is likely I have at least 2 x 4* papers. Going by the REF market, I might be over valued – my institution has a benchmark of 2 papers in 3* and 2 papers in 4* ranked journals.

    On a side note: Where sports stars are paid through public money they do not tend to attract outrageous pay and are held accountable to reviews on their performance in order to secure more funding. Sports bodies have to do this too against other sports. This seems like a more relevant analogy.

    I’m really interested to see how many academics are evaluating Stern in terms of their employment prospects. I’ve yet to hear anyone say why it would make REF a less accurate assessment of research produced by universities. What was it Upton Sinclair said: You’ll never get someone to agree with you if their salary depends on them not agreeing with you. How true.

  • Anonymous

    I like to think of psychology as philosophy once was in ancient Greece, a kind of proto-science. Philosophers were pretty much the pre-cursor to science as we know it today. It wasn’t until Aristotle that the scientific method was even invented. I imagine if we dismissed men like Plato and their ideas entirely we probably wouldn’t have progressed to science as we know it today.

    Psychology isn’t perfect, but at present it’s all we have alongside neuroscience, which can only provide so many answers by itself.

  • Rita Schepers

    An excellent article.

  • Tammy Hervey

    Thoughtful as ever and I don’t disagree. But I’m interested in the real spatiality of your proposal, given that so much of the pre-referendum debates (which continue) were conducted virtually. Why did the media pay attention to the virtual then, but won’t now?

  • 3D cell Culture

    Anthropology, quite different from other social science subjects as its much more abstract than psychology, engineering and ergonomics science. And in general social science is more abstract than applied science. As biology and chemistry focus on live and the reaction with them and they can produce an concrete results like design a drug, taking use of them to make plan and so on. But it’s the combination of all the sciences, the world can run in the way it does. More such introduction articles are welcomed. They help people in none science fields and none social science fields know more, and then may be have more choice.

  • Richard A.

    If you go onto ISI and search how many articles are never cited, have a single citation or 2 citations, the results are quite consistent. Published articles that have zero citations range from 12-20%. Those with 2 or fewer range for 16-25%. The reason in part is that ISI includes meeting abstracts that are rarely cited (about 50% of the non-cited articles). Thus, articles that are never cited is 5-10% range, which is much lower than the 65-90% discussed in other parts of this discussion (this is primarily for the physical sciences). Certainly a thought provoking discsion!

  • Clement Adelman

    The absence of any sociological voices before and after theRef dismayed me. Here in France there has been considerable socilogical but mainly demographic analysis in the media. Where are the replacement
    Stan Cohens, Stuart Halls. et al?! I agree with you entirely. Now what canbe done so late?
    Retired Prof.

  • Bryan

    Can this also be a link to the publish or perish attitude towards funding? I’ve seen people under pressure just to publish articles otherwise their funding is taken away. Maybe we do need to have a good look at ourselves and that replications should be required and taken more seriously. I know I’d trust something more if the effect could be found in more than one study, but they don’t get the funding, it’s always something new and different that needs to be the latest article. We MUST go back and give ourselves a good solid foundation to build on, replications are required. Should method sections not count in word counts and therefore allow for all the information to be given in clear detail? It will be a long hard grind, but worth it.

  • Mr Bill

    Thanks for the post. This is exactly what I was looking for. I have a 3,000 word paper about beneficial microorganisms and farming that I need to get online. Thanks for the help.

  • Drug Design

    Yes, it’s not a one-time issue, but requiring a long term devotion and attention. Hope more people can realize this and began do something within our reach.

  • Douglas Taylor

    Perhaps we should rather focus on teaching academics about business?

  • Gregory

    I am writing an article for the Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering. In fact, 90 % of scientific articles are cited at least one time. The data base is Web of Science Core Collection and the time frame
    I chose is 2000 to 2005. Of the 5 million papers in the humanities, sciences, engineering and medicine only about 500 000 are uncited until now. The citation rates increase (as low as 98 %) in some fields but in the humanities they are lower but still around 70 %.

    \

  • Oisin

    Have you read the book? Do you think his claims are incorrect in some way? I feel as though there was no engagement with any of the ideas he puts forward at all, the evidence clearly points to him being correct in his assertions.

    You say he’s right-wing, yet he clearly supports government spending on preschool programs proven to drastically improve children’s personality profile later in life, resulting in higher income, higher rates of employment, and lower crime rates. That’s an example of a non-neoliberal policy which he clearly advocates in his book and in public talks about the book.

    Also, he still only has just under 500 Twitter followers. If this was a marketing ploy, it failed.

  • Ed

    My impression is that David Goldblatt is talking for 20 minutes how much meaning and interesting story is to football but I waited and waited and he never sad anything interesting.

  • Cyclo-RGDfK

    If we all recognize that antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest threats to public health that we face today, we have to do something about this. All the experts emphasise the importance of raising awareness of the problem of antibiotic resistance both in the medical community and amongst patients.

  • elyomnews

    David Edmonds: But also, I guess at the root of this is a question about what we are, I mean whether we are individuals, or whether we are best understood as part of some kind of collective.

    I think we are best understood as part of some kind of collective.

  • Chris

    Quantitative skills can create a large impact within social sciences but you do need to execute some caution. There are aspects of quantitative research that you need to be careful, such as the timing of the research you’re conducting or the volume of the study, which can affect your findings.

  • charles

    “Hard scientists” dismiss psychology because its methodology is dangerous to real science and decreases the credibly of science as a field.

  • Scott Willows

    Colleen, I do not think our customers give a damn whether the wine in their glass has been genetically modified.
    Their concerns are taste, appearance and price.
    I have always had an issue with anti-GM crusaders.
    If you live in Africa and your family has to worry about starving every year….GM products are just fine.

  • t nyamwanza

    could this be an extension of entrepreneurial culture. where are the departure points

    • Mia

      Easy an Entrepreneurial capability is when they determine the capacity to identify opportunities, run new businesses, drive innovations and learn from and adapt to changing circumstances. •Supporting and implementing high-quality entrepreneurship education in school systems, higher education and in vocational education across a broad range of subjects (including technical and scientific fields).
      •Encouraging closer links between education institutions and the private sector (e.g. involving entrepreneurs in coaching and mentoring students and giving guest lectures, or through apprenticeships in companies).
      •Providing training targeted at entrepreneurs ( – someone who thinks of an idea to sell to someone and takes the risk in hope of profit. )

  • Angel Healy

    Yes. Social Sciences is really an important aspect in a lot of things. And right now, it’s actually a good time to take advantage of these studies because Big Data and IoT are thriving, which makes the consolidation of data easier. Also, social media is a new avenue that can be incorporated in this study.

  • Angel Healy

    Both points are valid. The other one’s concerned with the cyber security while the other is all for privacy and freedom of expression. Where do we draw the line? Which side does really weigh a lot? There should be a compromise from both ends, which will satisfy each other’s rights.

  • Michael Case

    It does not matter what kind of law the goverment implement, until gun control got stricter we will not be able to control gun violence.

  • Michael Case

    The reason why Americans don’t study gun violence is because they think gun ownership is a god given right, to them and gun violence is usually out of an accident. They would rather watch a violent movie rather than a movie with a naked body which is totally natural. But the bottom line here is they do not take gun violence seriously and violence is part of the culture.

    Guns is to American what is sex is to France. It is just part of the culture.

  • Harvey

    When someone writes an post he/she keeps the plan of a user in his/her brain that how a
    user cann be aware of it. Thhus that’s why tbis post
    is perfect. Thanks!

  • Alankrita

    “Greate” “Ministry of Education Downsizing ” MEXT demands that the wording of its order has been confused, with Education Minister Hakubun Shimomura issuing an announcement in late July denying any aim to pull the fitting on HSS. In September, Kan Suzuki, his exceptional counsel on advanced education, composed an extensive foreswearing in Diamond, a business magazine, recognizing that the wording was questionable and that the approach was inadequately verbalized and did not include adequate discussion with different partners.

  • Sue Jones

    Very interesting take on this. I did see Perkins’s say something along the lines of “there’s nothing like a bit of censorship to promote a work”, and wondered myself about It being “an astute marketing ploy meant to promote the career of the book’s author and the sales of the book’s publisher.” Even more interesting was Perkins’s sudden following of Charles Murray on twitter.

    Absolutely agree that “The Welfare Trait ought to be a dire warning to British sociologists. The book and the debate it has sparked amount to a hostile takeover of discursive terrain that, for many decades, used to be covered by the sociological imagination, accounts of social citizenship, and dedicated engagement with the social production of inequalities. ” But in addition to this reductive discourse, there is also the matter of the systematic political disenfranchisement of those poorest citizens, and a refusal on the part of government to engage with those marginalised groups at all. Hence the Conservative preoccupation with a positivist approach to “social research” and a dismissal of first-hand witness accounts – qualitative evidence – as merely “anecdotal” – and a dogmatic insistence that “no causal relationship is established” between the welfare “reforms” and adverse consequences, increased mortality, increased suicide and mental distress. There is, however, a well-established correlation that requires further investigation.

    I felt that Perkins’s also served as a political kite-flying exercise – pushing steadily at the public’s moral boundaries. Allport’s ladder.

    https://kittysjones.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/the-importance-of-citizens-qualitative-accounts-in-democratic-inclusion-and-political-participation/

  • Craig Thomas

    In reference to;

    “in the course of later human evolution, so this number seems to have been fixed pretty much within our species as a whole”

    “OK, and here you get the other side of the constraint, namely, it costs brainpower to manage groups of this size.”

    An interesting podcast! But it has brought some questions to mind. Over a course of the last hundred thousand years human cogitative ability and intelligence (assuming that is what you are referring to with brain power) has changed a significant amount. My question is if “brain power” is effectively expanded and the constraint of the group management spectrum is this brain power why has the 150 (or 100-200) not evolved accordingly with in the last hundred thousand? If its constraint has broaden why is the number still fixed? Could there be another explanation for the constraint?

  • Prof P.K.Pattnaik

    Dear Sarah-Louise Quinnell..
    Greetings. In India there are 5 types of Individuals who opt for Ph. D Research 1. A teacher who needs promotion in his/her career 2. An Academically good student who is jobless and needs scholarship for survival 3. An Intellectual Idiot/ Public servant who is in habit of acquiring academic degrees just to prove his intellectual brilliancy and 4 A person who’s job is to do research 5. A person having special passion for research.
    Now the next question is who cares about our research? Most Governments seldom care about these. If state wants to find out some thing it would constitute a Commission or Committee.. If it is a private company it would hire a research organization. Therefore, as such individual researcher has no importance. He /she has to work for an organization.
    To my understanding, state must invest education for social transformation and development. Education and research not only enhances the logic of life but also competency. But the million dollar question is “Do state need such people”? The reality answer is NO. We want bionic persons who will work as we direct them to but will not ask any question. To day, new areas of research has emerged i.e How to con consumers and investors. How to evade taxes lawfully. How to swindle public resources in the pretext of entrepreneurship . How to evade Government Standards in legitimate way, How to blackmail a helpless patient in the name of modern diagnostics and how to buy human labour at throw away price with out the threat of Strike and How to start a war in the pretext of Human rights, democracy and religion and terminate millions of human life in most effective manner.
    Gone are those days when researchers worked for humanity. To day we are more involved with NEGATIVE research.

  • Dallas Simpson

    Just stumbled upon Doreen Massey’s work through a short facebook posting.

    “Whereas space is material: it is the land out there. But there’s a dimension of space that is equally abstract and just a dimension, so that’s the way in which I want to think about it.”
    Exactly!

    The dimensional reality of ‘Space’, or ‘Spaces’ (realms of quality) is profound. (And also I am not simply referring to the space component of ‘spacetime’ or Euclidean 3-space). From the principles of dimension theory, expressions of potentiality in spaces transforms the nature of those spaces, whether physical, or mind spaces, or other abstract and real spaces. The expression of positive potentialities are the fundamental cause of positive transformation through ‘positive re-attributisation of the space’, causing a cascade of positive evolution and emergence. Equally the expression of negative potentialities can give rise to pollution, and decay. More importantly the expression of negative potentialities in spaces can actively ‘close up and lock’ their potentiality (negative re-attributisation) for positive evolution by fundamentally changing the quality of those spaces. Principles of justice are embedded in this model.

  • Alankrita

    MEXT demands that the wording of its mandate has been misjudged, with Education Minister Hakubun Shimomura issuing an announcement in late July denying any aim to pull the fitting on HSS. In September, Kan Suzuki, his exceptional counsel on advanced education, composed a long refusal in Diamond, a business magazine, recognizing that the wording was vague and that the arrangement was inadequately explained and did not include adequate interview with different partners. Suzuki says the aim is to inspire colleges to concentrate on what they improve get ready understudies for the employment market as a survival system to help hailing enlistments.

  • silky sharma

    MEXT demands that the wording of its order has been misjudged, with Education Minister Hakubun Shimomura issuing an announcement in late July denying any goal to pull the fitting on HSS. In September, Kan Suzuki, his unique guide on advanced education, composed an extensive disavowal in Diamond, a business magazine, recognizing that the wording was questionable and that the strategy was ineffectively enunciated and did not include adequate discussion with different partners. Suzuki says the aim is to motivate colleges to concentrate on what they improve get ready understudies for the occupation market as a survival methodology to support hailing enlistments.

  • mahfuz

    Another reason not to encourage any funder to specify a set of impact metrics at a particular point in time is the growth

  • mahfuz

    who in turn also receive their funding from the government?

  • chuck

    Nice photo — except that your bishops and knights are reversed (on the wrong squares).

  • Jon

    Thanks for reposting this here! 🙂

  • mahfuz

    The film’s moral ambiguity on the issue of violence is distinctive. Both Mulligan and Gleeson are reluctant users of violence, compared with others of their part

  • Behrouz Behnam

    Might be irrelevant to what you mentioned here; but Researchgate website does not work properly recently. They might be interested to know that there is no clear and easy way to contact when there is a problem with their website,

    • Simon

      agreed, Researchgate website does not seem to be working properly recently. Is there a clear and easy way to contact when there is a problem with their website and the RG score?

      • Simon

        Hi Research gate answered me within 1 day and arranged the problem… I take my comment back and give them 5 stars

  • Lady Light

    I have confidence that Twitter datum research could be utilized as a brilliant solution to assemble datum concerning varies public health solutions to address people around the world. It is also a easy way to get the much needed datum to the public health officials regarding attitudes and beliefs and benefits about the vaccinations (2009-2010) H1N1 (Swine Flu) pandemic that will help families make more informed choices as to what their best options are to treating & protecting their children. Thereby, supplying policy makers and public health officials with quality data to make proactive decisions that generate sound result that really services the people.

  • Nico

    Thanks for posting this!

    Do you think there is a desire within the scholarly community for an improved reading experience of journal articles on e-readers?

  • khamsat

    Some genuinely great posts on this site, thankyou for contribution.

  • Ramsay

    Thanks for the insight. I have been toying with the idea of an e-reader as I am not keen on reading large volumes of work on my laptop. But I’m also faced with not wanting to print a lot of materials and kill a bunch of trees.

    I still may get one, but with all the academic reading ahead of me, it is good to get points of view from people who are already using e-readers

  • Peter

    Well, I go to university in America so I don’t know of the differences. Anyway, the way I see it is, the idea of going to college is instilled in all high schoolers. And the vast majority of them are only following what’s expected of them, they don’t know what college they want to go to. Half my school went to Penn State just because a lot of their friends went so it sounded like a good party school.
    That means there’s a huge market for universities to tap into, the high school students that don’t know where they want to go, they only know they need to pick somewhere. And the marketing is the easiest way to get them. In my opinion, of course.

    Also, I think there may be a typo in the last sentence of the first paragraph.
    “Scholars likewise need to be market(ing)”

  • Debby Andrews

    Cynthia,

    For some reason, I’m unable to access the full review through this message (although I can do so through my library connection). ‘thought I should let you know in case there’s some kind of systemic problem. It may just be me!

    We missed you in Seattle. I do enjoy your blog—lots of good references for my current research.

    Happy new year!

    Debby Andrews

  • jeremy

    I’m so glad you posted this. You hit the nail on the head. Also, if you’re doing a review, for say Common Ground Publishing 😉 you can’t really annotate and mark up the text. I mean, you can, but ultimately, it’s just so much harder than say, highlighting, pen scribbling and throwing the completed text in a scanner when it’s complete.

    It seems to me that these issues would be really really easy to fix, maybe the scientific market is too particularized to make it worthwhile. You should post an update when/if you find the perfect reader.

    I’ve been using a Kobo, but I use calibre to put all of my texts on it, and unless you’re doing them in bulk, it can be a time consuming process.

  • Issac McDew Opehema

    Marc
    I am facisnated by my surroundings and I always asking question which field should study for my future career and I have this burning interest about studying psychology apart from Political Science. Could you tell me psychology is the way forward for interpreting future events seems the world is moving into most advance and complex society?

  • tylert

    do you know why his articles werent published in any peer-reviewed journals? Take a guess.

    After you are done taking a guess read about survivorship bias:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

    want a simplification? Ok, you notice things that come in the form X->Y because Y is louder than Z, so it might be that X->Z many many times more often you still notice X->Y more. Why is this important? Because it ruins his whole methodology.

    The wealthy leave more proof of their existence on earth, not fair perhaps but the truth. So, if you study history you should see wealthy people more than poor people. X->Y rarely but it is loud when it happens. Put it another way: upper class white american gets killed and everyone hears about, 40 people get killed by some warlord in africa and it doesnt even make the indepth coverage section of the BBC.

    Let us pretend a Man is a lawyer and had 5 children. Because he is a lawyer he leaves a paper-trail. He was admitted to the bar, he argued in court, he joined lawyer clubs etc. 4 of his sons are poor and 1 becomes a lawyer. The one that becomes a lawyer produces a related paper-trail. According to this professor’s methodology that is two generations of wealth transference. Despite the fact that 80% of the children were not successful the wealth transference was 100% successful.

    Now, imagine this process goes on for 300 years. This original lawyer has 9,765,625 decedents in 10 generations. Of them only 10 were financially successful or 1 out of 976562.5 or 0.0000001024% however wealth transference is still 100%

    Now if you will excuse me the black president of the US is speaking on the news and I want to catch it.

  • Fredrick Welfare

    Leading up to the Great Recession, there was a decided pressure on all homeowners to sell and upgrade their house. Many people sold and bought ‘more house.’ To claim that the housing bubble was not described or predicted is an incredulous statement. Even today, there are few total descriptions of the global economic totality and most indicators of change are abstract. That economists are unable or unwilling to determine a state of homeostasis which is affected by variations in human decisions or environmental impacts is a sign of naivete or secrecy.

    Humans do make evaluations of others on the basis of what they like or do not like, and they attribute to others the same decision-making basis. Liking or not liking others determines evaluations of them. This perspective is not entirely distinct from an evaluation of one’s own course of action in terms of self-interest. The implication is that economists are not admitting to what they like or dislike and non-economists are not making decisions that are in their self interests. The latter is more likely due to public ignorance and the economists should be more forthcoming.

    Giddens described processes like structuration, reflexivity and the double hermeneutic. These concepts refers to the notion that change occurs as one incorporates new policies, rules or interpretations of others behavior and intentions. Therefore, statis is unlikely and dynamic spontaneity more likely. A self fulfilling prophecy is based on a false assumption; a false definition of the situation is just as bad as a definition of the situation which is disliked. It is convenient to claim that there are so many factors that we cannot adequately describe the causes of the problem and another to understand that the causes of the problem are highly organized.

  • Bob

    For a subject field to be a Science, its theories Must Be Falsifiable.
    There are no “ifs” or “buts”. Theories must be falsifiable.
    Theories of Psychology are not falsifiable, there for, Psychology is not a Science.
    Psychology is a Pseudo-Science.
    Neuroscience is a Science.

    • Anonymous

      Psychological theories are falsifiable. No “ifs” or “buts.” Thete has not been much effort in the Psychological community to do so, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible.

  • annette

    where can i buy this?

  • Naeem

    No doubt the Emmanuel response is worth while and leads us in long way. The history of management, changing paradigm of work and organization made us learn that organizations are working not only for economic achievement only. The stakeholder are many and organization satisfy these stakeholder in many different ways. Resource based point of view of organization also confirm these stances, Moreover, conversion of resource theory also agreed to the similar point of view. In nutshell, the organization performance viewed in economic lens would be a limited one. We have to use multidimensional lens to grasps the organizational performance.

  • Emmanuel Osafo

    For me, limiting organizational performance to economic outcomes is deficient because, other behavioral outcomes contribute to the overall wellbeing of the organization. Thus, the organization comprises of both the physical structures, strategy, processes, and of course the humans who run the organization, among other things. Many organizations have collapsed not because they were not doing well economically but, because of character failure of some members of the organization. I will prefer the holistic approach in defining organizational performance rather than just economic performance.

  • Anaya

    Education has many problems, but the desire to solve those problems is not one. But because we can not cover many problems in one story, we will focus just problems, now we need the solution, Quick Dissertation Help provide good solution for easily learning.

  • Scott

    Interesting article. I looked at the photo first and then I read the caption. Never once did I think of them as anything other than a hard working family.

  • Anonymous

    Japanese ministry denies this rumour.
    There are some misunderstandings among the public concerning the notice issued by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology that: “MEXT thinks that academic disciplines related to the humanities and social sciences are not needed for national universities.” This is in fact untrue. The thoughts behind what were issued as a notice by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology are as follows.

  • Isobel Munro

    Fascinating. How do you keep young people at school long enough? What is the proportion of PhD’s who have come from poor families? Are there worthwhile jobs for young adults when they have completed their education? I obtained a master’s degree aged 68 and am belatedly completing a PhD at 82 despite compromised health, it probably keeps me going. My research is on old women and I have found that education is one of the factors contributing to their their longevity, others include social connectivity and genetics.

  • Dylan

    Devil’s advocate…

    You are an academic at a university in the developing world. Your research is original for that country but not necessarily ground breaking internationally. Say the country is a small Caribbean island of just over a million people. No international university press is interested in publishing the work as it would not appeal to a large audience. Do you simply not publish the work in monograph form and head in the journal direction or is another option to use a vanity press in order to make sure some copies get out locally? Yes its not a publication for your tenure track application but it is valuable to the small nation you are in…

  • Earl H. Kinmonth

    This would be a much better story if it was based on fact. Unfortunately, it is not. I have looked at the original Japanese language text of the Ministry of Education directive to Japanese national universities. There is no call for the abolition of departments or programs.

    Even if there was such a call and even if it was implemented, it would not mean much. The prestigious Japanese national universities have been since their 19th century inception been focused on engineering, science, and medicine and in some cases agriculture. For example, at the most prestigious institution, the University of Tokyo, there are more 13,000 undergraduates but only 219 in the humanities and less than half that number in education.

    Japanese private universities can easily fill the demand for humanities and education graduates.

  • Will Stewart

    This is exactly what the Kishi government proposed in 1960. You will remember that Kishi was the former Class A war criminal, released by the Occupation and then rehabilitated, who had previously been the minister of armaments in the Tojo govt, and prior to that had been head of ‘pacification’ of Manchuria -since Vietnam, we know what that means! Kishi also happens to be the grand father of Abe, and for many yrs Abe lived with Kishi. ,
    The directive that the AbeAso govt is now imposing on Jpn universities is a carbon copy of what the fascist Tojo govt imposed on universities during the war…

    • Earl H. Kinmonth

      Kishi was NOT a class a war criminal. He was detained but not charged let alone convicted.

  • Socrates Johnson

    lol the japanese are too smart to fall for “progressive” education like stupid and communist americans put into place here in the last century creating the dumbest and most useless generation of americans of all time.

  • Wm Holden

    Aristocrats like Abe do not expect the average citizen to understand or participate in governance (an interesting take on the meaning of “democracy”) nor to have the ability or temerity to express their own personal views and support them with evidence. They are instead expected to unquestioningly follow the dictates of their betters, who are in turn expected to follow the example of tradition. Those who are educated to think and who criticize the existing social and economic order foment disharmony and upset the all-important “wa” – a “wa” that serves the interests of the plutocracy.

  • Tracy Lightcap

    Minister Shimomura and Prime Minister Abe can’t see the noses on the front of their faces.

    All they have to do to see the relevance of the social sciences is turn on their computers and look at the ads on websites they frequent. Those ads are the direct result of political scientists and sociologists who wanted to find a way to manage increasingly large datasets and analyze their contents. The applications – Hadoop is a good example as is R – they developed allow companies that collect data – website scraping is also the result of social science research – to put it into databases that allow Big Data analytic techniques to generate the data that targets advertising, And that’s only part of the story. Did they think that doctors, of all people, came up with the new diagnostic data analysis that’s transforming health care? Or that advances in causal analysis – advances of immense significance – were thought up by businesses? Come on. No business is interested in basic research.

    But let’s be frank: Japan, like China, has always been a laggard in basic research. In both countries the post-secondary educational institutions don’t seem either interested in doing it or capable of pulling it off. Believe me, this is ok with the rest of the world. It keep both places behind the waves of new technologies coming up now.

    • Anna

      I studied political science research methods in school and am currently learning R and SQL and hopefully someday soon, Hadoop. Currently I work in marketing, analyzing large datasets and tweaking overall marketing strategy for Fortune 500 companies every day. I believe my education has allowed me to not only think broadly, but uniquely position me for a career in big data. Outside of the humanities where else can you learn multivariate regression, significance testing, types of error and biases, game theory, and other concepts that allow you to look a data and understand it? Therefore I agree 100% with what you are saying, because your example is pretty much my life.

  • Thomas F. Pettigrew

    I recall Reagan at a press conference, answering a question about
    Federal funding of the social sciences, blurting out in anger,
    “Why fund the enemy?”

    Do you recall this? And if so, do you know the date of this
    Thanks,

    Tom Pettigrew, Research Professor of Social Psychology
    University of California, Santa Cruz

  • Nancy

    I completely agree with Ana! Everyone is in danger of being his ideas stolen, especially scientists and people, who are working on the web (designers, freelance writers) . But sometimes plagiarism could be unwitting. Fortunately, everyone is able to check himself and avoid at least word-for-word plagiarism (as it was mentioned in the article) due to development of IT. Some are really helpful

  • Dr.Uma Sreedhar

    It’s a wonderful article and a very apt in the current scenario. This is very useful for faculty teaching Wage and salary administration and also for those who handle Sales and Distribution paper.
    Dr.Uma Sreedhar

  • Harvinder Singh

    Objective of Education is cultural upbringing of the younger generation and not employment generation only. Employment is only one component of it. There is difference between skill development and education.

  • Ian Patterson

    Interesting and worthwhile contribution to this important and topical matter. One area, that maybe ‘we’ should all ‘do something about’, concerns that captured the observation in the penultimate paragraph, viz: “politicians’ claims that there exists a battle between ideologies”, and the further comment that these are “so dangerous”. I heartlily agree with this, and the remark that this “feeds the belief in an in-group and out-group”. Many people are quite vulnerable to this sort of thing, especially when they see/hear it reported ‘on the News’, eg when a senior politicians rhetoric is reported thus. Then, a person’s perspective afterwards may contain remarks along the lines that, ‘It must be [true] – I heard it on the News!”. This is dangerous; it does nothing to reduce the risk of ‘radicalisation’; and indeed, following principles of ‘suggestibility’, it may do a lot more to promote domestic terrorism that almost anything else our politicians may do. The challenge is, of course, ‘How do we tackle ths?’

  • forhad

    1. Thank’s a lot for assistance…

  • Latoya Barker

    Very interesting article! People don’t always know how to reduce energy use, indeed. There is some information but obviously it is not enough. I am trying to explain to my kids that we should take care of our planet. Reminding people about the importance of preserving the planet is one of the most important things nowadays. Best regards!

  • Gihan

    That is very true. Unfortunately, some of us graduates never find the mentorship to learn these rules and get socialized.

  • Yohann

    Thanks for sharing
    @Clara you can buy this book on Amazon

  • Robert Dingwall

    This article nicely highlights a problem that has been too lightly dismissed by OA enthusiasts, namely that this tends to shift search and verification costs from journals to readers. The injunctions in Virginia Barbour’s last paragraph may simply be the application of common sense – but when you have to perform them for every single paper you read, they are time-consuming and costly. Traditional peer-review and quality marking by journals streamlined this process from the beginning, which is why it came to establish market dominance over exchanges of correspondence or oral presentations of papers to learned societies. It is a very Hayekian solution to the problem of the unattainability of perfect knowledge. Predatory and light-touch review OA journals may lower costs to authors but they pose serious problems for readers.

  • james

    It does’nt matter what country or what political party is involved, All politicians eventually consider only one thing…re-election. It does’nt matter what their original motivation was, re-election will become their “God”…all else is secondary.

    james

  • Adam Jacobs

    “Unfortunately, we now know that around half of all clinical trials, on the treatments we use today, are withheld from doctors, researchers, and patients”

    No, we don’t know that at all. That’s a nice soundbite, but I’m afraid it’s not remotely evidence based.

    It’s possible that back in the bad old days in the last century only about half of trials were published. But that’s changed very much in recent years, and recent estimates tend to show about 80-90% of trials are disclosed.

    What’s the figure for the overall %, including old trials and more recent ones? No idea. No-one has ever calculated it.

  • Robert Matthews

    Really appreciated this debunking effort. Always fascinating to see how a myth gets started, and to have someone dig out the references. Thanks !

  • james

    Politics means self interest. Period.

    james

  • Andy Rhodes

    I’m a huge fan of this book.

    I’ve been in a weekly book group for six years and after one year of my salesmanship and heartfelt convincing they agreed to read Pinker’s exploration of the decline of violence. I’ve debated the contents for the past three years in person and online with liberals and conservatives. They have knee-jerk criticisms that they tend to maintain no matter how much data one puts forward. Of course, Pinker writes about a lot more than the data in his book. He has many theories and analyses that one can challenge. Many academically oriented people in my group did. My point is try and make sure lots more people are exposed to the overall fact that violence has declined. Then, we can listen to Pinker and others who may help us understand or formulate our own theories as to why this happened and what might be done to continue and even improve the trend.

    I’ve included a few dozen nice color charts related to the text here:

    https://persuademepolitics.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/now-most-peaceful-time-in-world-history/

    More can be found through an image search for “steven pinker better angels charts”.

    Through my many discussions on “Better Angels”, I’ve developed and revised multiple times an overview statement for the book along with attaching or copying many charts that Pinker put together. Here is my latest version:

    ——————————————————————–

    Much of the information below comes from Steven Pinker’s book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”. This remarkable text evaluates and combines the work of dozens of historians to show that, contrary to popular opinion on the left and right, the planet has become far more peaceful than in any other time in history. Terrible things like warfare, rape, murder, legal and illegal slavery, bullying, lynchings, racism, sexism and animal abuse are all in radical decline. This process started when societies began to organize away from hunter-gatherer communities between 7,000-10,000 years ago into structured civilizations, but shifted to an accelerated level of reform during the 18th century’s Age of Enlightenment and afterward. By absolute numbers and percentage of population, the trend is downward in violent behavior.

    Whether intentionally or not, the media often makes the global situation look like everything is getting worse or at least not significantly improving. That’s just not the case when it comes to acts of violence. There still is plenty of harm being done by humans to one another, but thankfully it’s far less prevalent overall than in 1965 or 1805 or 1585. Through a very large range of historical narratives, archaeology and statistics, the human condition generally reveals itself as more barbarous the further backward one looks. On a recent note, the U.S. crime rate now is half of what it was in the early 1990s. This includes places known to be more dangerous like Baltimore, Washington D.C, New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia. Between 1973 and 2008, rape decreased by 80% and murder became 40% less common. According to the FBI, from 2001-2010, the crime rates went down in categories of violent crime (20%), forcible rape (13.8%), robbery (19.7%), aggravated assault (20.8%) and motor vehicle theft (44.5%).

    When using percentage of population as a guide to study the scale of war related deaths, the worst atrocities of the 20th century don’t top the historical list. Just 4 horrific events of the 1900s make it into the top 20. Only 1 makes the top 10, as WWII ranks 9th. Archaeological evidence from almost 40 pre-state societies of eras as far back as 14,000 years ago and up to those active today show an average of a 15% violent death rate because of trauma evidence in the skeletal remains. The Middle Ages hovered under 10% and gradually lessened. The 20th century, even with all of its devastation and human suffering, had a rate of a much smaller 3%. The 21st century is astronomically low in comparison, 0.03%. That’s 500 times less than typical pre-state levels of brutality. Contrast modern levels of carnage to that of the American Wild West, where the percentages ranged up to 30% or higher in each town. England, for another example, now has a murder rate that is 35 times less than in the Middle Ages.

    The Wikipedia page about this book summarizes the proposed causes for the decline in violence:
    ——————————————–

    Pinker identifies five “historical forces” that have favored “our peaceable motives” and “have driven the multiple declines in violence.” They are:

    The Leviathan – The rise of the modern nation-state and judiciary “with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force,” which “can defuse the [individual] temptation of exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge, and circumvent…self-serving biases.”

    Commerce – The rise of “technological progress [allowing] the exchange of goods and services over longer distances and larger groups of trading partners,” so that “other people become more valuable alive than dead” and “are less likely to become targets of demonization and dehumanization”;

    Feminization – Increasing respect for “the interests and values of women.”

    Cosmopolitanism – the rise of forces such as literacy, mobility, and mass media, which“can prompt people to take the perspectives of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them”;

    The Escalator of Reason – an “intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs,” which “can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others’s, and to reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.”

    From – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature
    ——————————————–

    For an interesting video presentation/summary of the contents of this book, see this link:

    A great web site that can be used as a reference to double-check this data is necrometrics.com, where typically a half dozen or more historians contribute their estimate on the death toll for each significant historical event. As far as I have been able to study, Pinker many (if not most) times chose one of the conservative numbers in the ranges.

  • Anonymous

    While the swift change in HE as described by the author is true, it is still true that there is something fundamentally wrong at Essex, beyond the general problems present at HE. Let’s start with the basics: Essex University – on several occasions – have breached the Employment Law with an astonishing level of arrogance and ignorance. This is evidenced by Employment Tribunal cases lost recently by the University of Essex. Unfortunately, it also seems that at least partially, these breaches of the Law were encouraged by the senior management of the University. Besides, as I experienced while working at Essex University, totally uncivilized forms of behavior and bullying by line managers are rife and tolerated. If you dare to raise your voice against any of these, you are risking losing your job, intimidation of staff is common. Decisions about promotion and dismissal are often motivated by personal reasons rather than professional ones. The British Employment Law is frequently breached. A group of employees: Part-time Teachers are treated as outside of any legal protection and their rights are often ignored.

  • Anne Murcott

    Interesting blog. But, haivng ‘left with a second prescription for a couple of days’ worth of a powerful narcotic/analgesic combination’ which gave you a severe headchae you understandably stopped taking them. Byt then you ‘threw them away’??? Where did you throw them – in the bin? into the sewer system? Should you not have returned them to the pharmacy for controlled disposal?!

    • Robert Dingwall

      Actually I disposed of them into the sewer system because the pharmacy was closed and I was leaving town. Seemed safer than adding them to the tip for the maid. Not as bad as using this route for antibiotics

  • sbk

    Psychologists typically do not provide conceptually coherent and theoretically grounded definitions for their key “constructs”. I will not debate “happiness” (a mark on a Likert scale representing what?).

    Let’s take the subject of over 7,000 published academic papers since 1970 — the self?

    I defy anyone to provide a consensually sanctioned, theoretically justifiable definition of this presumed causally potent psychological entity. You cannot. Indeed, psychologists cannot determine– within the clan- if the self refers to an experienced reality, a mechanistic outcome or sheer illusion.

    Wittgenstein saw this conceptual vacuity clearly more than 70 years ago. Alas, since then little has changed — save for the now accepted practice of populating the formerly verboten black box with stipulated mental mechanisms.

  • Vinnie

    They are not available for free. Disappointing.

  • Dr.Sandhya

    Hi,

    This is sandhya post doc fellow in economics, I find people how are having same feelings like me, today i have same problem that what next after my research. Though how good we are at our research they are no opportunities. I feel that I am over qualified. I feel it as a failure, I get weird thoughts in my mind. I Love teaching and Research . I get up set thinking what next ??????

  • Benjamin Geer

    It’s odd that this article doesn’t mention the causes of ostracism. Many people are ostracized because they’re from the wrong social class, or have the wrong skin colour, the wrong facial features, the wrong religion, etc. Ostracism is perhaps merely a symptom of widespread social inequalities and forms of discrimination. Schools are one of the places where inequalities and prejudices get reproduced, so perhaps the focus should be on that.

    The idea of a ‘designated friend’ chosen by adults sounds horribly humiliating for the ostracised child.

  • Cartel Circuit

    The link at the top of the page doesn’t relate to the content of the page, it looks like the anchor text is incorrect. Would love to know what book you were referring to.

    • Sage

      The link has been updated to refer to the book, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth.

  • Robinson Onyango

    am an undergraduate at university of Eldoret, I that all of you for your motivation on how Quantitative skills has help u prosper in your lives. am taking it as a common course for my studies falling within the eight unit am doing. Currently am a first year undergraduate hoping to graduate in 2018 and i hope i will be like you. Thanks you all for your motivation.

  • Burcu Uzer

    I was just able to listen to this podcast and agree on the comment above. The title suggests that the podcast is about protest movements but the last ten minutes is only about the assessment of social science methodology. I would suggest a revision of the description of the podcast on the web site.
    Thank you.

  • Zomby Poet

    The real issue is violence against women.

    Ask your representatives:

    What are their views on Sharia Law?

    What do they think about the following statements:

    The West Will Tolerate Itself To Death.

    Why Do We Tolerate Violence Against Women?

    What are their plans to halt violence against women around world including:

    1) Female genital mutilation
    2) Punishing rape victims
    3) Honor killing
    4) Strapping bombs to children
    5) Sexually enslaving women
    6) Murdering homosexuals
    7) Child marriage
    8) Domestic Violence
    9) Disciplining or Punishing Wives

  • Steffen Schmidt

    Wonderful. Here is the problem. The time it would take to implement this is prohibitive for most professors. Research, papers at conferences, grants, and refereed publications are the ONLY way to get tenure and promotion.
    So what we need is gaming apps for political science that professors can download and use. Plug-and-play.

    Imagine what the world would be like if every person had to create their own custom version of Facebook or Twitter. This whole ramification needs to be “commercialized” and the sooner the better.

  • Michael Pyshnov

    The provenance of corruption in science.
    It’s simple: over several decades, scientists were removed from the administration of science, and the officials, who have nothing to do with science replaced them.
    The officials have policies and politically correct politics, they cover up the corrupton, and this is their main occupation. That’s not just in social science.

    Please, see http://www.universitytorontofraud.com
    This story and the 50 documents are prohibited for reporting in the media.
    If you like to help me, please, make an effort to publish it.
    Michael Pyshnov
    (My email is probably hacked, so, please, answer on your site.)

  • marie algeria

    As a muslim myself, i find the movie very interesting and clever. i adore chris morris’ use of humor in ”four lions” . I agree with the fact that this movie could be of great use as a base of a debate, as it could spark different opinions and reactions. Personally, I hold to the idea that Chris Moriss’s intentions are harmless and traditionally created as an eye opener. So, well done Chris and Mr. Farrar !

    PS. KashimJ you are making absolutely no sense whatsoever, and if I may pick a quote to sum up your illogical view of Islam, it would be ”Dogs contradict Islam” by Barry.

  • Ira Allen

    This is interesting to see–thanks for sharing this research!

    In such discussion, I think it’s important to recall how very different are the reading practices back behind citational practices.

    So, in much of the humanities, people primarily cite articles that they’ve read reasonably carefully and–most importantly–are engaging with in some way. Sure, you get a little drive-by citing (I’ve been guilty of it myself, as a friend recently reminded me regarding a reference I made to a book of his), but it’s not the absolute norm. Because most humanities fields don’t see knowledge as a positive accumulation of justifiable true assertions, people primarily just cite texts with which they’re engaging in making their current argument.

    By contrast, in the social sciences and still more the physical sciences, the drive-by citation (preferably multiple in one go) is de rigeur. It would be easy for a shortsighted humanist to mock that as reflecting scientists’ non-engagement with what they read, just as it would be easy for scientists to be shocked, shocked at the awful amount of humanities scholarship that simply goes unread.

    Both positions are wrong. If you are making positive knowledge, or reasonably believe yourself to be soon so, for the most part, it really *is* sufficient to scan the intro and results/discussion of papers that you pile up as evidence of knowledge about x in the world. In this case, your citational practice reflects your reading practice. And both are intimately linked with your epistemology. So, too, the humanist. The literature book that goes uncited has not necessarily gone unread. It hasn’t necessarily even been without influence. It just hasn’t played a key role in anyone’s argument yet, where arguments are a matter not of the accumulation of positive knowledge but rather of the timely and the plausible.

    I’m sincerely unsure how much scholarship–in any discipline–gets carefully read. Probably not much at all, by percentage? But I’m also not persuaded that less humanities scholarship is skimmed in a cursory fashion than is skimmed in the sciences/medicine or the social sciences. It’s just that what one does with that skimmed reading varies on the basis of varying senses of what it means to make knowledge.

    So, I wouldn’t go giving all too many points to academia’s detractors just yet. The results aren’t really in.

  • John Holmwood

    Like James Wilsdon, Robert Dingwall argues that my criticism of the narrow and one-sided report produced by the Campaign for the Social Sciences is made from a different, one-sided position, that of a Marxist-inflected commitment to public sociology. He suggests that the recent Report produced Campaign for Social Sciences “implicitly acknowledges the other criteria relevant to policy or programme evaluation: equity and humanity.” Neither of his claims is correct. There is no implicit acknowledgement of the public value of social sciences in the report other than a thoroughgoing instrumentalism; and there is no repudiation of utilitarian aims for social science or quantitative social science on my part (for example, I was an active supporter of Q-Step). My argument is quite specifically that a campaign for social science should be a campaign for a plural social science. It is Robert Dingwall and James Wilsdon who do not support plurality. And, of course, it is the public, not politicians, who, in the last analysis, fund social science.

    It doesn’t serve Robert Dingwall’s argument for “detailed empirical study” and “equal respect” for all positions that he is prepared to characterize my argument without reading it. He calls me “one of the UK’s most prominent public sociologists” and comments further that, “Reinventing a classic Marxist position, public sociologists appoint themselves to speak for those whose consciousness is false or are disengaged from the channels of influence in a society.” Perhaps I can quote from the conclusion of an article on the topic.

    “My conclusion, then, is that precisely because sociology is a contested field all sociologies—professional, no less than public—are in a critical relation with each other. The critical role cannot be assigned to one kind of sociology. However, because our field is contested, we have problems in carrying our knowledge into the public arena and having its claims accepted or its legitimacy unquestioned. I shall suggest that this does make sociology “dialogic” but it is a dialogue in which we should expect a public contestation of our claims, just as we contest the claims of each other. This does not undermine sociology as a professional practice. In contrast, I shall suggest that it constrains us to be rigorous in our practices, modest in our claims, and open to the surprise and pleasure of learning from others, including those we might construct as adversaries. We share spaces as sociologists, but we do not need to share assumptions. This suggests a revised understanding of professional “ethics.” We are members of broadly based professional associations in which we can mutually benefit from our differences. Yet, how we conduct ourselves may well have consequences for others seeking to make their different contribution to the dialogues in which sociologists are engaged. Political neutrality is central to the corporate organization of sociology, not because it secures objectivity, nor because social inquiry can, or should be, value-neutral. It is central because it creates the space for dialogue and is the condition for any sociology to have a voice.”
    <>

  • Dylan Crane

    In most of the occasion we are really worried about our career growth. Without any career goal we can’t predict any kind of success in life; therefore we need better career growth with motivation and challenges. So it is quite better to be more conscious about our career through the help of proper dedication and determination. I hope most of the people are also taking the help of different career coaching service in order to deal with their low profile career growth.

  • Mike

    “…the harder sciences engage in downward social comparison with psychology–Hard sciences seek to maintain their elevated position in the science hierarchy, and sometimes they accomplish this by disparaging the softer sciences.”

    The above unsupported opinion is not exactly productive toward lending more credibility to psychology. Most ‘hard’ scientists would read this sentence and then rightly discount this article as an example of the fuzzy thinking with which they do not care to ‘share a table’.

    The reality is that we do not yet possess the requisite understanding of the human mind and resultant personality nor the measurement instruments that will be needed for psychology to yet rise to a better status within the science community. That day may come, but rushing it only makes psychologists appear to be non-scientists, in a practical sense, who value self-interest over objective perspective. Again, this does not ingratiate them to the science community at large. A good scientist can and will always do an accurate-enough assessment of his or her field of interest. A bad scientist will rationalize.

  • Lydia Walter

    thanks Howard. I will print this so I can remember what we saw, heard and did on the trip. Very well done.
    Time to come visit with Marilyn. 703 850 6661.

  • Marc

    In my studies of sociology and psychology and some hard sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.), I’ve found an interesting distinction that I think, though the ship has sailed, would have made I think an enormous distinction as to how psychology is perceived by the public. This relates to how we perceive two groups of historically influential peoples in the history of psychology.

    The first group I will call the “Proto-psychiatrists”. The beginning student is briefly exposed to thousands of years of non-scientific explanations of behavioral abnormality, including humors, demonic possession, and the like, and then usually with Freud are told “here is where psychology begins”. I think this was the first mistake. Freud’s historical impact on and value to psychology are undeniable by anyone willing to be honest with themselves, but the problem is found in every responsible text book: no psychoanalytic theory in whole is falsifiable. Yet in modern classes, where we stress the scientific method and proper research practices, More than half of the historical “greats” in psychology–who are essentially those known (to some degree) by the public, are no more scientific than those imagining humor imbalance. Jung’s collective unconscious is no more falsifiable than Plato’s Ideas/Forms. And contemporary social influence combining with a total lack of objectivity (truly, almost complete subjectivity) without utilizing the scientific method as a framework made absurdities, such as “penis envy” possible. (And no, Horney is not an example of the science of psychoanalysis correcting itself–it was just another person who happened to have very different personal experience subjectively asserting alternative argument”.) In short, I’m going to suggest that everything I have encountered that preceded Skinner has FAR more to do with philosophy than it does the science of the human animal.

    The second group that I will mention I will call “the famous criminals”. In the article above, the author states “…even famous psychologists like Stanley Milgram are guilty [of burying data to support their hypothesis].” There are a number of studies and psychologists who are ubiquitously taught in Psychology classes around the country–Milgram, Zimbardo, and Skinner are the three most common in my experience. Their work is a collective expression in cruelty that could never be sanctioned by any ethical review board. I have frequently asked my professors “if their methods were so harmful as to necessitate the creation of these review boards, why do we continue to raise up these people as frontier heroes, instead of briefly acknowledging their work as it relates to ethics, and then use responsible, peer-reviewed research for teaching the actual psychological lesson?” The best answer (and perhaps most honest answer) I’ve received was that you can’t get as compelling results with mice, so that level or work can’t be achieved under the current ethical rules. If that’s so, it’s sad.

    I will bring my argument together and say that the psychological community had and has the opportunity as to how it wants to portray the proto-psychologists and the famous criminals. In Psych 101 terms, if instead of being the crucial founders, they had been categorized in a grouping as the conceptual precursors to what we today call modern scientific psychology, I think people who criticize psychology for not being especially consistent in its scientific rigor would have far less ammunition, and the public at large would has far few anecdotes about “legitimate” psychology which we must accept are accurate, and yet embarrassingly lacking in all of the methodological standards we cherish today.

    • Chris

      Thank you so much for this Mark! Very well written.

  • prickle

    “Is Higher Education Losing Its Progressive Potential?” Hopefully. Hopefully the terrible legacy of the New Left is finally fading. And if you are believe that higher education is a platform for your parochial political biases, then I hope you will be leaving the academy as well. Then we can get back to work.

  • Susan

    The link to the free article does not work, unfortunately.

  • Marika Rose

    There’s much of value in this description of the distortions that the REF produces, but to suggest that the solution to systemic and structural issues is individuals changing their attitudes is not only naive but potentially damaging. Academic staff under increasing pressure from institutions. We are increasingly precariously employed, increasingly anxious under the ever-growing demands from universities and departments. Individuals who fail to do what is demanded of them, however much this arises from a desire to “pursue scholarship beyond the tyranny of excellence” are punished by their departments and their universities. We’re not totally powerless, but if things are to change we have to find ways to work together in solidarity, not blame one another for capitulating to a system that is holding a gun to our heads.

  • connie stahlman

    To Dave Cantor

    You may be interested in a memoir written by a cop who was undercover for 10 years straight in Boston.

    The Passage by Phillip M Vitti- a memoir of an undercover cop in Boston in the 60s
    his email is philthepassage@yahoo.com

  • Ana MC de la Barca

    “Plagiarism of ideas may occur when an author presents someone else’s ideas…”. An idea per se is not protected by a copyright and it can be proposed by more than a person (sometimes at the same time). Therefore, it is not plagiarism until the idea is published and someone different to the author uses it without cite to the original work.

  • PRice

    At the risk of wading into a quagmire, it’s hard to take this study’s findings seriously, that there are new and significant hardwired differences in human male and female brains in additional to what we already knew, because the authors do not explain all the factors involved in why they found what they did.

    For example, can we raise kids in our culture along typical gender roles and biases, then at ages 12-14, say that the differences in their brains are solely due to their genders?

    To do so would be to ignore what is known about epigenetic and environmental influences in shaping the brain.

    http://surfaceyourrealself.com/2015/02/15/problematic-research-on-hardwired-differences-in-human-male-and-female-brains-surfaceyourrealself/

  • prickle

    This is one of the most idiotic things I have read in awhile. As a scientists, I am embarrassed that you call yourself a colleague.

  • Louwrens Pretorius

    To read:

    Matthew Crawford, The Case for Working with Your Hands
    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

  • David Walker

    OK, here’s an argument (copiously citing journalism). Where’s the social science? What are the dimensions (or analytic basis) for ‘national tapestry’. Can the asserted contributions of overseas students be quantified or demonstrated in a rigorous way? Where’s the counterfactual against which the argument can be clarified.
    It’s good that social scientists should take part in public debate but isn’t it important that they bring authority, based on data and analysis?

  • amanda r

    Congrats to Beverly Diamond on an amazing achievement! I have a great deal of respect for her, for working so hard to promote cultural diversity in the musical field.

  • Jeff

    I agree Phillip. I think SPOCs have a future whereas MOOCs have run their race, mostly – the boosterism and rhetoric is dying off rapidly and woe those universities which invested a squillion setting them up. In fact I am going to try and turn a current subject delivered as flipped learning into a SPOC as a test. Regards, Jeff

  • Bita Shakoory

    It is an interesting view; though not a healthy approach, especially on part of women authors. I am a woman in academia, and have fought (and continue to fight) this battle first hand. My critique is that psychosocial differences between genders is very inherent to “gender”. You cannot expect women to become like men in order to be treated similarly. Just because women do not negotiate does not mean they should not be promoted. The issue is that women are penalized for the same attributes that are applauded in men. Naturally this negative response is psychologically prohibitive. So, while women’s behavior enhances the gender disparities, it is not an independent predictor of gender disparity and may well be created by the very causes of gender disparity.

    The fact is that academia (at least in medical fields) is both hierarchal and chauvinistic, and personal-favor-driven. The policy changes can help, but a good approach would be having an impartial panel of “equity committee” in each academic center to serve as a resource for people who feel discriminated against.

  • Cathriona Kearns

    I agree that WHO and indeed all multinational agencies involved in health response need to collaborate with social scientists and have representative on decision making teams. cultural indifference is something that has no doubt contributed to the spread of Ebola and is something that WHO really needs to address, not only for Ebola but for any epidemic/pandemic. Community understanding is paramount to engagement and where cultures differ on how they view the disease as is allegedly happening in guinea then alternative ways of reaching an understanding in my opinion are required. This will not only reduce risk to the communities of those affected but also reduce risk to those medical and aid workers working on the ground.

  • Jennifer Bazeley

    A more detailed article on our use of FLCs and scholarly communication was published in the open access journal “Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication”, volume 2, no. 3, and is available at http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol2/iss3/8/.

  • John

    Companies that have been part of the Malcomb Bladrige Award have been doing this since 1988. At Xerox (1989 and 1997winner) we engaged customers and suppliers in problem solving to maximize the effectiveness and build lasting relationships.

    John

  • Anonymous

    Actually, his whiteness is a massive hindrance, even if the parentage clause did not exist.
    The information contained under the heading ‘Onwards’ exemplifies ignorance of the happenings in the Zambian political sphere. Guy Scott was tolerated by the Zambians as Vice President out of respect for President Sata; also the ceremonial role of his position.
    The protests, riots and placards individuals are holding in certain areas demonstrates this.
    Zambia is not ready for a white president.

  • Elizabeth Meehan

    As a person who was active in attending meetings and seminars in the two years leading up to the referendum – and enjoying the whole experience, I pretty well agree with Robert Dingwall’s analysis. However, his use of the phrase ‘national identity’ carries risks. That is the ‘moniker’ nearly always unleashes the kind of response exemplified in some of the previous comments. For all my life, it has been regarded as a ‘fact of life’ that all Scots are nationalists, some of them seeing the national interest as best pursued through union with England, Wales and, – since 1922 – more ambiguously perhaps, Ireland/Northern Ireland – while others see the repeal of the Treaty of Union as the best way forward. This makes nationalism and unionism in Scotland different from that in Northern Ireland; i.e., as points on a spectrum rather than as zero-sum opposites. What was at issue in the referendum was, not visceral identity, but governance. Amidst a general feeling outside London and the South-East that the governance of the UK has become dysfunctional, people in Scotland, including those of other nationalities on the electoral register, were lucky enough to have a readily identifiable territorial unit as a peg on which, if they so chose, to try do do something different and better. One of the leading historians who has included in his works reference to the existence of something like the nationalist/unionist spectrum since the 18th century is Tom Devine. When he told a BBC Newsnight ‘anchor woman’ that he was a reluctant ‘yes voter’ and that it was about governance, not national identity, she wouldn’t even let him finish before turning to her other guests to try to get them to say something about the nastiness of national identity and nationalism.

  • Kitty Smith

    Add my Representative, John Sarbanes (D-MD), to the list of champions.

  • Robert Dingwall

    This really is very misleading because it assumes that the Gold model of OA is the only future. With the exception of a few biomedical funders and the UK Research Councils, Green OA looks a much more likely future and is not really a problem for those of us who do not have grant funding to pay for it – although, personally, I intend to retain my intellectual property rights rather than have my work repurposed and exploited by anyone who feels like it. One of the virtues of being independent.

  • Robert Dingwall

    Surprised to see no mention of the most relevant recent source: R. Dingwall, L.M. Hoffman, K. Staniland (eds) Pandemics and Emerging Infectious Diseases: The Sociological Agenda, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2013.

    Does nobody do proper literature searches any more?

  • KashimJ

    Muslims must protest “Four Lions,” it is insulting Muslim fighters and trying to turn people away from Islam!!!

    This film makes fun of people who dedicated there lives to the cause of Jihad and the struggle against the west & Israel.

  • Toby Rosenbloom

    As a property specialist, it is always pleasing to see the number of reported property-related crimes falling. This gives househunters looking to move to a new area confidence, while sellers can gain an uplift in value if their property is in a safe area.

  • Mathieu Deflem

    Please note that Bill’s paper on vagrancy laws was *not* influenced by Marx, because Bill had not read Marx yet at that time. It is a strange case of independent discovery of sorts. Once published, however, the paper did lead Bill to read Marx because others had begun to identify him as a Marxist. Bill discuses this strange influence after-the-facts in an speech he gave at the ASA sociology of law section. It is online via youtube.

    • George

      I agree with you here mate

  • Virgo Kyri

    The problem with both unionists and separatists is a failure to objectively analyze the philosophy behind national and ethnic identities. They are ideological constructs. One isn’t born something. One learns and chooses their national identity. They are what modern anthropologists sometimes reference as “imagined communities”. One imagines a distinct special relationship between themselves and large groups of other people based on some ad-hoc criteria. Nationalists personify themselves as if they are part of a singular organism.

    There is no Scottish values. No Scottish genes. And certainly not British ones either.

    There are genetic differences between individuals in different regions but national identity isn’t a synonym for race or breed. Humans don’t typically procreate by the rules of dog breeders. There is genetic variation between individuals of any given national identity. As a general rule of thumb, the larger the nation, the bigger the variation between individuals. This is because the probability of two humans mating weakens proportionately with distance. Our genes know nothing about national ideologies. All they keep track of is whom we have loved.

    Without a principled approach to nationalism it’s mostly incoherent gibberish and/or chest beating to argue someone is this or that. Part of the blame for this is the the inconsistent use of analogy. In the mind of a unionist… differences are trivial. In the mind of separatist they are large. They are emoting themselves to their identities by amplifying properties that appeal to them and muting properties that don’t.

    The inherent dishonesty of nationalism can be quickly uncovered by asking precise questions.How many similar genes, and which specific ones, must two individuals have in common for their ethnic identity to be “real”? Which particular values must the person hold to qualify? Which ones exclude them? Asking even the most extreme nationalists these questions will result in different answers and/or vagueness.

    Sadly nationalist myth spreading its not limited to extreme nationalists. Even mainstream press encourage nationalist myths. Irresponsible populist politicians are perhaps the worse. Every time I hear Cameron speak about the “British people” or “God” I cringe. We need more truthful language than this from our alleged leaders.

    We humans are more advanced than our ancient ancestors but there is clearly room from growth.

  • David Walker

    In their different ways, aren’t RD and SS raising the same question. Do universities in ‘our’ kind of society have a national vocation or have they floated as free of nation state identification (some might wish jurisdicton) as the big private companies. During the Referendum campaign the universities conspicuously withdrew from civic identity, both by their corporate silence and their cultivation of the view that Scottish independence ‘didn’t matter’ to their vocation. It’s a risible position. Institutions as large as the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh would bulk even larger in an independent Scotland where, unless observer behaviour during 2,000 years were suddenly to cease, their size would provoke the (nationalist) political leadership of Scotland.
    I’d love to see data on the voting of university staff in sub-elite institutions in Scotland. Anecdote says of social scientists in elite Scottish universities they were, across most disciplines, uninvolved and indifferent – getting on with preparing journal articles for elite (global = US) academic publications.
    Commentators have hailed the Referendum campaign as an explosion of public interest in politics. It doesn’t look like it provoked much soul-searching or existential inspection on the part of institutions that once (the career of Adam Smith is embelematic) embodied Scottish identity.

  • Stephen Senn

    I’m a Swiss who has an English wife and mother (neither of which entitle me to British nationality, which I don’t have), British children (born in Scotland) and a Scottish son-in-law and English daughter-in-law. I lived for many years in England and also twice in Scotland for a total of 17 years. I have also taught and studied at English and Scottish Universities.

    One particular point that the Scots and (often) the English don’t like to recognise is how much they have in common. In fact from an outside-of-Britain perspective they are almost indistinguishable: fish and chips, beer, football, betting, good sense of humour, not very knowledgeable about the rest of the world but generally very helpful to foreigners etc etc. Even the supposed difference in accents is less than claimed or at least does not follow national boundaries. A Scot from Inverness will more easily understand an Englishman from Devon and vice versa than either will understand a Geordie or an Aberdonian. (And any Glaswegian who claims to understand the Doric is a liar.) The single most important difference I have observed is that when the Scots play football the English will cheer for them unless they are playing Scotland and when the English play football the Scots will cheer for the opposition, whoever they are.

    In fact, the national differences are largely constructed and artificial. I would say that in many aspects they are analogous to the differences between football tribes. You can argue that Liverpool supporters are fundamentally different to Evertonians but the most important difference is that they have decided to be one or the other.

    Those who assert an affection for their Scottish identity do so for a particular construct, itself a reflection of many confusing accidents. For example, the language Scots was never spoken by the ethnic people the Scots who settled Argyll from the 5th century onwards but is that of the northern English and in fact was referred to as such prior to about 1500. Furthermore, many of the classics of Welsh literature come from Southern Scotland and the Viking influence was maintained in the north and west for centuries with Orkney and Shetland only being acquired by Scotland from Norway at the end of the 15th century. In fact Scots nationalists take it as being beyond discussion that Scotland is and should be what it was in the 16th and 17th centuries (with Orkney and Shetland but without Berwick) rather than what it was before or what it has become since.

    As someone who has taught in two Scottish universities and one English one I simply don’t recognise the differences to which Robert refers. Yes, there is some difference at the very beginning of study but it is much less than he claims and both offer specialised education in honours. For example, no Scottish University nor English one as far as I am aware makes any attempt to instill a knowledge of foreign languages in any science student. A Scottish university scientist will graduate from this or her university just as much a monoglot as his or her English counterpart.

    None of this constitutes an argument against Scottish independence but most of the arguments I have seen in favour simply assume the conclusion as a premise. “Scotland is a naturally independent entity, therefore it should be.” Fair enough, but if nationalists were honest about this they would recognise that there is no reason it should stop there. Simply replace ‘Scotland’ with ‘Shetland’ in any argument you use and it works just as well.

    So what it comes down to is this: 45% of the population voted for independence. I think that this is a great shame but agree it has to be dealt with. However, again, honesty is called for. If 55% is not considered an endorsement of the Union, what percentage in favour would Robert consider was an endorsement for independence and why, when almost any constitution you can think of, including that of the SNP, requires more than a simple majority to change it, was the bar set so low?

  • Engrami

    Hi! I am the founder of Engrami. We are building a product along the lines suggested in your article. We believe socialization can solve both motivation issues as well as address another fundamental motive for learning i.e. what can I do with this learning. We will be launching a closed beta soon and can be found on twitter @EngramiApp.

    Thanks
    Sandeep

  • Yaron Rosenstein

    Sorry, but all I see are declarative statesments.
    You claim social science generates empirical results, where is the evidence ?
    Social science can not be considered science unless it adopts the null hypothesis.
    Until then it is just quackery.

  • Clare Leon

    Dr. Gracia’s insights into the problems associated with the introduction of new legislation to deal with domestic violence are very pertinent. The issue lies, not in increasing the range of legal mechanisms available to victims, but in increasing effective practical long-term supports for victims who want to free themselves and their children from an abusive relationship.

  • Izzy

    Great article, I strongly agree that technology improved universities, to be honest I can not imagine universities without technology today.

  • MIKE e. OGBEIDE

    Good article this is the reason history is very critical in our lives.

  • Joanne Gaudet

    Your post hits on some of the core issues when studying journal peer review as a scientific object of study. The relational dynamics in post-publication open review with public participation are most likely to foster rational decision-making with non-anonymous referees (maximal accountability) and open access to all editorial judgements (transparency in judgement). Full access to the original manuscript also leads to greater author-manuscript accountability… Following are a few preprints I propose:

    Socio-historical:
    http://hdl.handle.net/10393/31319 – Gaudet, J. 2014. Investigating journal peer review as scientific object of study: unabridged version – Part I. uO Research. Pp. 1-24.

    http://hdl.handle.net/10393/31320 – Gaudet, J. 2014. Investigating journal peer review as scientific object of study: unabridged version – Part II. uO Research. Pp. 1-20.

    an abridged version http://hdl.handle.net/10393/31161 – Gaudet, J. 2014. Journal peer review as scientific object of study. uO Research. Pp. 1-11.

    Contemporary shaping:
    http://hdl.handle.net/10393/31238 – Gaudet, J. 2014. All that glitters is not gold: The shaping of contemporary journal peer review at scientific and medical journals. uO Research. Pp. 1-23.

    http://hdl.handle.net/10393/31415 – Gaudet, J. 2014. An end to ‘God-like’ scientific knowledge? How non-anonymous referees and open review alter meanings for scientific knowledge. uO Research. Pp. 1-12.

    Empirically investigating purported resistance to new ideas at journal peer review:
    http://hdl.handle.net/10393/31198 – Gaudet, J. 2014. How pre- publication journal peer review (re)produces ignorance at scientific and medical journals: a case study. uO Research. Pp. 1-67.

  • Stevan Harnad

    DOE: The Importance of Requiring Institutional Repository Deposit Immediately Upon Acceptance for Publication

    A peer-reviewed journal article is either accessible to all its potential users or it is not accessible to all its potential users — only to those at subscribing institutions.

    Open Access (OA) is intended to make articles accessible (online) to all their potential users, not just to subscribers.

    OA comes in two forms:

    Gratis OA means an article is accessible to all its potential users.

    Libre OA means an article is accessible to all its potential users and all users have certain re-use rights, such as text-mining by machine, and re-publication.

    For individual researchers and for the general public the most important and urgent form of OA is Gratis OA.

    The reason Gratis OA is so important is that otherwise the research is inaccessible except to subscribers: OA maximizes research uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

    The reason Gratis OA is so urgent is that lost research access means lost research impact and progress. The downloads and citations of papers made OA later never catch up with those of papers made OA immediately: Gentil-Beccot, A., Mele, S., & Brooks, T. C. (2010). Citing and reading behaviours in high-energy physics: Scientometrics, 84(2), 345-355.

    The moment when a peer-reviewed paper is ready to be made OA is the moment when the final, peer-reviewed draft is accepted for pubication.

    Sometimes there can be delays of months before the pubisher’s version of record (VOR) is published.

    And some (a minority) of publishers have imposed embargoes of up to 12 months on authors making their articles OA.

    The delay from acceptance to publication, and the delay from publication till the end of any OA embargo all mean lost research access, uptake, usage and progress.

    DOE and OSTI have been mandated to adopt a policy that ensures that OA is provided to federally funded research — by 12 months after the date of publication at the very latest.

    This is not a mandate to adopt a policy that ensures that OA is provided at the very latest possible date.

    Yet that is what DOE has done — no doubt under the influence of publishers.

    The interests of research and hence of the public that funds it are that research should be made OA as soon as possible.

    The interests of (some of) the publishing industry are that it should be made OA as late as possible.

    The DOA has adopted a policy that serves the interests of the publishing industry rather than those of research, researchers and the tax-paying public.

    What I am saying is _not_ that the permissible OA embargo needs to be reduced (though that would be very welcome and beneficial too!).

    What I am saying is that even within the constraints of a permissible OA embargo of 12 months at the very latest, there is a simple way to make the DOE policy much more powerful and effective, guaranteeing much more and earlier access.

    All that has to be done is to make immediate deposit of the author’s final, peer-reviewed draft, in the author’s institutional repository, mandatory immediately upon acceptance.

    Not just the metadata: the full final draft.

    If the author wishes to comply with a publisher OA embargo, the deposit need not be made OA immediately.

    Institutional repositories have an automated copy-request Button with which a user can request a single copy for research purposes, and the author can comply with the request, with just one click each.

    This is not OA, but it is almost-OA, and it is all that is needed to maximize research access, usage and progress during any permissible OA embargo.

    And besides maximizing access during any permissible OA embargo, requiring immediate institutional deposit also mobilizes institutions to monitor and ensure timely compliance with the funding agency’s requirement.

    The metadata for the deposit can be exported to the PAGES portal immediately, and then the portal, too (like google and google scholar), can immediately begin referring users back to the Button at the institution so the author can provide almost-OA with a single click until the end of any embargo.

    There is no need twhatsoever to wait either for the publisher’s VOR, nor for the end of the publisher’s embargo, nor for Libre OA re-use rights: those can come when they come.

    But immediate institutional deposit needs to be mandated immediately.

    Otherwise the DOE is needlessly squandering months and months of potential research uptake, usage and progress for federally funded research.

    Please harmonize the DOE OA policy with the corresponding EU OA policy, as well as the HEFCE OA policy in the UK, the FRS OA policy in Belgium, and a growing number of institutional OA policies the world over.

    Stevan Harnad

  • Huf, Stefan Prof. Dr.

    Dear sirs,

    free access to the article is not possible

    Best regards
    Stefan Huf

  • Professor Low

    Dear sir,

    When have you seen capital heavy and politically vested institutions react to long-term change catalysts in mere two years? Your argument reminds me of how horse-buggies were written about a few years after cars saw mass production. I hope you remember to come back to this article in ten years to verify your claims.

  • Donna

    I am looking for other Mental Health settings that have incorporated Cialdini’s Principles.

  • tiffany267

    Reblogged this on Tiffany's Non-Blog and commented:
    Capitalism is the only means to a more sustainable world. “The issue of currently unregulated, but potentially hazardous, chemicals in consumer products is not well understood by the general public, but a number of proactive consumer product companies have voluntarily adopted strategies to minimize use of such chemicals. These companies are exceeding regulatory requirements by restricting from their products chemicals that could harm human or environmental health, despite the fact that these actions are costly.”

  • Joanne Abbey

    The link is not allowing access to the full text article. Is that by design or in error? I would like to read the article please

    joanne abbey

    M +61 412 537 939 | T +61 2 9745 5583 W corporatewellbeing.com.au A po box 201 haberfield australia 2045

  • Dick Heupel

    An economic developer for more than 30 years – and a proponent of small central government – I can see the argument from both sides.
    Who would argue against federal seed funding for cancer research, birth defects, volcanic activity aka “hard sciences?” Perhaps those that forget the Department of Defense and space programs circa 1960 that fueled a tech boom in the 1980s and 90s that facilitated the gadgets we can’t live without today.
    At the same time, our modern communication devices contribute to a continued shrinkage of the globe, nearly day-by-day.
    Base-lined with widely disparate cultures, religions, and customs, count me in for a share of social science research along this lightly-trodden path.

  • shelley gilbert

    Don’t include females when you talk about violence and “humanity.” When
    it comes to violence, you’re only talking about males. Boys and men are
    violent. They are the humanity you are talking about. Girls and women
    are not violent. We like to get along. We create, not destroy.

    • John Doe

      Preach it, sister! Women can do no wrong whatsoever! They’re all perfect, saintly goddesses! Women have never done anything violent ever!

  • Jim Vaughan

    Very interesting “bite”, especially in combination with Valerie Curtis on sources of contamination. I want to propose another hypothesis, which would be that wearing Fred West’s clothing is repugnant not because something supernatural is transferred, but because we start to identify with West. Touching money he had handled wouldn’t repulse us to the same extent (yet we are as likely to get contaminated).

    Owning an original painting similarly more closely identifies us as having a special connection with the artist. It is not ectoplasm but relational closeness that is gained.

    Likewise, I would argue with West’s clothing or to a lesser extent, Hitlers cookbook. It brings us closer to them, like an actor assuming a role, for which costume and props are all important. Much less powerfully, because less uniquely, we can dress like them, or wear a similar moustache, but sharing an object intimate to them is to share a part of their identity.

  • Tony Lock

    Where has this phrase “hard evidence” come from? Is it being borrowed as a form of informal vernacular from the legal system? In my, admittedly limited, time participating in social science discourse (as a psychology major), I haven’t come across any official use of the terminology and have not seen where the legitimate use of “hard evidence” is employed.

    Can anyone shed light on this ponderance? Thanks.

  • disqus_5az3dpKpwk

    It’s the other way around: Galeano is a Nacional–not Peñarol–supporter.

  • Center for Services Leadership

    Reblogged this on Center for Services Leadership Blog and commented:
    Great to see new research that’s happening on the intersection of multiple disciplines. With large amounts of data that companies are accumulating through various communication channels finding new methods and metrics for timely and accurate analysis is becoming more and more critical. This research tested a new framework that allows to automate the analysis of customer feedback through a text mining model. The article is currently available free on Journal of Service Research website.

  • Matthew Hoffman

    I’m very glad that you have written this commentary. While none of my
    own research has involved subjects engaged in illegal activity, every
    time I go through the IRB process I am moved to reflect on what it means
    for social sciences. The examples highlighted in your commentary
    represent the experience of researchers who are sympathetic to subjects
    whose activities are illegal. Another important branch of research
    involves subjects whose activities the researcher might be strongly
    opposed to, e.g. mafia activities or insider trading, which means that the
    intended application of the research is purposely contrary to the
    interests of the subjects. In this case, although the research may be
    of great importance to society, the researcher is likely to find herself
    on the wrong side of both the law (if the research involves “deep
    hanging out”) and the IRB committee.

  • John MacInnes

    There is no such ‘clique’.
    Q-Step is about repairing the almost complete inattention to any QM in sociology degrees. Its not only employers who say this, it is graduates too, who discover that basic skills in ‘counting’ are fundamental to getting a good job.
    No ‘quants’ person who is any good overlooks the manifold dimensions of measurement error and its implications. However they also think about the implications of the only alternative: non-measurement error.

    In the natural sciences year one students spend a lot of time in the lab. They do this not to pick up vital technical skills for use in later life, but to learn that the basis of any science, social or natural, is empirical evidence, and that the latter does not grow on trees waiting either to be picked or interrogated by a would-be philosopher. Observation and measurement, how to go about it, and what can and cant be done with the results is fundamental.

    Year one of too many sociology courses: a smorgasbord of theory, largely unconstrained by anything as profane as empirical evidence (except by way of ‘illustration’) and useful mostly for penning opinion pieces in the broadsheet press.

    ‘Skepticism’ about quantification appears radical, until a little bit of thought is given to the implications. If good measurement isn´t possible, then anything, literally, goes. Climate change? Increases in income or wealth inequality? Discrimination? Evolution? All in the eye of the sufficiently skeptical beholder. This is ‘sociology’ of shock jocks, Tea Party and the Daily Mail.

  • Peter Davis

    I think there is the danger of a “straw man” argument here. I am quantitatively inclined, but I hope I am not so blinkered as to fail to see the limitations of the approach. I teach research methods, and my main goal is to try to ensure that well-rounded social science graduates are “ambidextrous” between quant and qual (at least before any later methods specialisation). What I find is that over 95% of sociology and political science graduates are essentially innumerate (unless trained in North America or certain parts of Europe). Almost all PhDs adopt a qualitative methodology. My first degree was in history, so I have nothing against qualitative approaches. The problem I have is if some core social science disciplines give up almost completely on a particular analytical skill set and thus rule themselves out of whole swathes of public and policy relevance. This is not the same thing as wishing for quantophrenia. It is just trying to retain analytical versatility and relevance in social science.

  • plant27

    The idea that quantitatively illiterate British sociologists’ “skepticism about quantification is a positive contribution to societies and organizations” is risible. Why should any sensible person take seriously criticism of quantitative social science by a professional group characterised by people who by and large cannot even read a crosstab? It is like listening to Nigel Lawson on climate change.

    I’m frankly embarrased to be part of an academic community that wears its ignorance like a badge of honour. Unfortunately this learned helplessness communicates itself to undergraduate and graduate students, and the cycle continues, with British sociology becoming ever more marginalised in how much it can influence public policy, or, let’s be honest, say anything interesting at all.

  • presidency college

    Students are studying well in India when we compare to other countries. From the school days, the students are giving more important for the studies. So when they use to join college they had already prepared well for the college life. Many colleges like presidency in India are providing best courses like mba, mca, msc, etc. Nowadays the parents no need to select the college for their childrens. Because they are more active childrens, selecting by their own.Students are selecting top colleges in various cities in India like chennai, bangalore, kolkata and mumbai.

  • stefanie Boyer

    Thank you for reblogging this, rbstat.

  • Kip Jones

    This commentary is a reworking of the script for a seminar at
    Bournemouth University, October 2010, which was the foundation for a
    Chapter in Popularizing Research (P. Vannini, Ed., Peter Lang
    Publishing).
    A Princess in a tiara and gown greeted audience members at
    the seminar; they then each received a bag of popcorn.

  • Thomas Arildsen

    For the perhaps more coding-oriented, I would add that writing in LaTeX or perhaps Markdown or reStructuredText and synchronising via Git (GitHub or Bitbucket) works extremely well.

  • Malory Nye

    Thanks, this is a very thoughtful piece that raises a lot of useful issues. Academic publishing is changing, and perhaps the comparison with newspapers is very useful. In an era of 24 hours, the online paper is continuous, and also updatable when required. The open-ness of newspapers to guest and regular bloggers and non-journalist voices is also made possible by thinking beyond the confines of what can be fitted into the print space. As also is the blurring of the distinction between newspaper and TV news.
    The framework of the academic journal does serve a particular purpose, and will continue to do so even as it evolves (or is transformed) within the context of new technologies and new cultures of academic (and information) consumption. At the heart of this are matters such as prestige/distinction and the harsh practicalities of tenure, promotion, appointment, and external (and internal) departmental scrutiny (what we have come to know as REF in the UK, the national ‘Research Excellence Framework’).
    So the development of any new journal exercise needs to be structured around 3 central questions:
    1. What is a journal for? (Why is the journal publishing papers, about what, and who for?)
    2. What is the academic threshold? This is the one that comes closest to the issue of prestige and status. But scholarship is extremely multifaceted, and goes far beyond the written word – new technologies mean that the ‘gap’ between writing and other visual and audible academic forms has become meaningless. Basically a journal can be a collection of papers, blogs, books (or semi-books), videos, podcasts, photo montages, and much more beyond that – so long as there is a sense of the academic purpose (and threshold) that unites and confirms the content.
    3. How to ‘print’? And here the question is not really about print v web, but rather web 1.0 v web 2.0 (and beyond). Can we envisage a journal becoming as interactive as Facebook or some other social networking site (which is not far from what Academia.edu is becoming)?
    The rest is, as they might say, merely economics (who collects the money) and politics (who decides what is prestigious or not).
    Thanks again for stimulating these thoughts about the future of journals. I am a journal editor (Culture and Religion, with Routledge), so I have a lot at stake here – as do all academics.

  • etseq

    Ugh…William Saletan? Might as well cite Charles Murray

  • Daniel_L

    The research is very nice to have, and this is certainly a conversation worth having. I wonder, though, whether a 100% citation rate–even in medical journals–is really a desirable goal? For two reasons: 1. Articles can have influence without ever being cited, at least in theory – they could be taught in undergraduate courses, or shape someone’s thinking in a way that’s not really cite-able in a literature review. Probably most that have that level of influence would also get cited, though. But reason 2: maybe no one’s citing those articles because no one’s doing research building on them in any way. That could be because the article is just not that interesting/worthwhile/important, but I sure wouldn’t argue that means those articles shouldn’t be published. Or it could be because that area isn’t a hot research area at the moment.

    Put another way–it’s only a problem if articles don’t get cited if we think the *reasons* they’re not getting cited indicate a problem with academia. As I understand the humanities, it’s their job to think deeply and carefully about texts/arty stuff (and teach students how to do the same). I don’t think they’re failing at that if most of their work isn’t mentioned by anyone else in some later work. The more sciencey-disciplines are supposed to be advancing our understandings of various things, so presumably most work on topic X should cite much previous work on Topic X, but not necessarily ALL previous work on Topic X. So some papers on Topic X might get read but not cited because some other papers are more important/more clear/more timely etc.

    tl;dr: I can think of lots of reasons for less-than-100% citation rates that don’t indicate any intrinsic problems with academia.

  • Art Konstantino

    This Jonathan is cool! I will turn 60 at the end of the year 2014. I recently met a very educated and intelligent woman from India. She was running for a School Board position. I complained about schools being run from Washington versus by local and state standards. She agreed. I mentioned that people have been trained to have blind faith in what they are taught and to give homage to their leaders. She agreed. Then I told her that I blamed the religions for this problem of blind faith. I explained that in normal Trinitarian doctrine, we have God the Father who watches over us and keeps and eye on things. Then we have God in the form an “only begotten of God” Son who found it necessary to be put to death because God, the Father messed up and someone had to pay for all that the children of God did wrong. Thirdly of course, there is the unseen “Holy Spirit” which God created to follow His children around and guide them because they were just not capable enough to lead their own lives. Man will always carry the burden of original sin and stupidity because of the first thinking male and female on the planet. Finally, there is Satan. He is NOT a part of the Holy Trinity but He is the smart one. He knows exactly how to mess things up. He knows how to make good people immoral. He knows how to pervert Politicians and other good men. He knows why it is OK for people to live strange and sorted lives and he capitalized on that. Satan knows our weaknesses. Enter, once again, God. God created Satan to really mess up His created children just to prove a point. “If you love me, you will keep my hundreds of commandments. If you disobey me and do not repent, I will surely destroy you in a burning lake of fire once you face Me at the White Throne Judgment!” God no longer cares whether or not you are His child. This sounds like the modern prison system, doesn’t it?
    There are four different and active characters in the brains of Trinitarians. Remember, the books say that God created Satan as well. It almost sounds like a deliberate ploy to create schizophrenic people. I know men with that problem. I understand how they became that way after interviewing them. Many of these poor guys are on so many medications. They all smoke cigarettes as their coping mechanism.
    Think about all the opinions and teachings written in books and what is written here on the internet. It is almost like Google has become God, “He who is the Source of ALL KNOWLEDGE!” Ouch, what power hath we here?
    So, all this mumbo jumbo of mine to say “I have learned what is morally correct for myself through my own journey in life. I have learned most things the hard way, which I do not regret. I am happy with myself. I am finally mentally stable. (At least I think so!)” I would like to see the world become morally stable. It will take a lot of retraining of human minds. It is worth it however as I have seen amazing transformations of peoples lives. I believe we all have a switch of a sort in our brain. We can turn it on or off at will. I recall the young boy in Boston recently that sliced up 20 schoolmates and referred to them as Plebians. He wanted to see them suffer. He wrote the note, I think, 3 days before. He had built up such a level of hatred over a period of time that he finally had enough and “threw the switch of mass destruction.”
    Finally, Jonathan, I encourage you to write a handbook. Let the handbook be simple enough for 5th grade readers to learn from. I know you are well learned. Sometimes, your language can keep you from reaching the audience that needs you most. Thank you for all your work. Don’t stop. Don’t let the Establishment dissuade you from your personal sense of intuition! Art K

  • Harald

    “Particularly within the social sciences, given the nature of the
    research, scholarship, and activism that many of us work on, to practice
    race and gender discrimination is to spit on our own Hippocratic oath.
    Our students and our peers deserve better.” Agreed.

  • Harald

    An interesting article with a misleading headline. I’ve seen the table
    from the research paper – it showed a small measured preference in
    responses to white men over white women (small, to the point that I
    could not tell whether it was statistically significant – the table
    quoted only the total sample size, not the total from each population)
    and a much larger measured preference in responses to (for instance)
    women with Spanish names over men with Spanish names (though, again, if
    this subset of the sample was small, this *might* again fail to be
    statistically significant). “If you want an academic mentor, and you are
    not, by some definition, a white Anglosaxon, there is a study that
    suggests you might be better off being a woman” would be a more accurate (and
    more puzzling) title.

  • librairie

    Yes, speak TRUTH to power!! One great man!!

  • majoreyeswater

    I’ve been following a very interesting blog / discussion at http://www.rectofossal.com/tamiflu on this study – I think the author has upset the BMJ as they’ve been stung into responding!

    • Robert Dingwall

      http://www.rectofossal.com/tamiflu/ is a really good discussion and takes on the methodological issues in much more detail than I could do here.

  • Peter

    One of the things that gave antivirals a bad name was the political drive behind the “containment” phase of the 2009 pandemic.

    Despite the evidence that antivirals are most effective if given promptly, and that systems were not able to provide them promptly, we had the ridiculous situation in the Midlands that HPA was obliged to provide antivirals to people, and to encourage them to take them, even though the systems were unable to get the drugs to them within a week of onset of symptoms. This served no useful purpose, but caused side-effects and risked driving resistance. It was opposed by many; but HPA was instructed that it had to continue because a minister had decided that it would make him look good to be able to say that “everybody… was offered antivirals” (even though this was done too late).

    We’d have been much wiser, once our inability to provide the drugs to everybody had become apparent, to focus on providing them to people who’d been exposed and who were in high risk groups; but this was not permitted.

    1. English PM, Carroll K, Majeed A, Sundkvist T, Millership S, Chambers S. A/H1N1 flu. Policy on antiviral drugs needs to be revised. BMJ (Clinical research ed) 2009;339:b2728 PMID: 19586985. (http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/339/jul08_3/b2728).

  • Debora MacKenzie

    Indeed, “you could read virtually all the coverage of the BMJ paper without being told that an equally serious study had only just published contradictory results”. Virtually, but not all. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25397-is-stockpiling-pandemic-flu-drugs-shrewd-or-misguided.html?full=true#.U00SPGeKCUk Please note statistical manipulation. Also relevant: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23744-evidence-that-tamiflu-reduces-deaths-in-pandemic-flu.html#.U00RyWeKCUk and the same group’s very similar attack in 2009. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18271-bmj-criticisms-of-tamiflu-questioned.html#.U00SF2eKCUk

    • Robert Dingwall

      Thank you, Debora. Very helpful.

  • Stevan Harnad

    In Canada, We Like “OA” But We Don’t Understand What It Means

    There are two ways authors can provide Open Access OA):

    One way is for authors to publish in an open access journal (“Gold OA”), which usually means having to pay to publish.

    The other way is for authors to publish in any journal they choose, and to make the final, peer-reviewed draft OA by self-archiving it in their OA institutional repository (“Green OA”.)

    Green OA is full 100% OA, and it does not cost any extra.

    It is quite astonishing (and somewhat disheartening) that both the Phase5 questionnaires and the responses made the single most common error about OA that has kept recurring across the past two decades, which is to assume that “OA” means “Gold OA.”

    OA progress will be much more successful when this persistent canard has been definitively laid to rest.

    Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10209/ Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html

    Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L’Harmattan. 99-106. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/

    Harnad, Stevan (2013) Recommandation au ministre québécois de l’enseignement supérieur. http://www.mesrst.gouv.qc.ca/fileadmin/administration/librairies/documents/Contributions_courriel_facebook/02-2013_-_Stevan_Harnad_-_Recommandation_au_ministre_quebecois_de_lenseignement_superieur.pdf

    Harnad, Stevan (2013) Comments on Canada’s NSERC/SSHRC/CIHR Draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy. Canadian Tri-Agency Call for Comments, Autumn Issue http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/358972/

  • Terry McGlynn

    Dr. Jahren’s post came from her website which clearly did not identify that the material was creative commons or public information, so it can only be excerpted in small bits given fair use guidelines. This post should be removed promptly, with apologies to the author.

  • Hope Jahren

    You guys never contacted me. This is NOT COOL. You flat out cut & pasted this from my website, which I maintain on my own dime.

    • Hope Jahren

      Wait, Michael Todd is a talented journalist whom I know, who contacted me, and to whom I permished. He’s a really good guy that I respect a lot. I can’t find his name anywhere on this page, but it should be. He mentioned he worked for SAGE, which is some part and parcel of socialscencespace or something, idk? Plus what’s with the photo of the pink river. The metaphor works better left to the imagination. Gripe, gripe gripe … etc.

  • nnamelet

    Rep. Lipinski’s remarks lead me to another less conventional line of thinking. It’s one that I think would better serve the social science community in the long run than only reacting to the NSF cut by lobbying. Social scientists have the scientific skills and intellect, the time and resources, and the responsibility to educate future leaders and help solve the nation’s human problems. But have they done a good job? Have they taken an objective look at our current university research and curricula and evaluated the degree to which they serve the nation?

    I pointed out at a recent MPSA roundtable that political scientists get their basic research material from society. But an estimated 95% of their research products are circulated within academic disciplinary media. Is this an effective yield to society? Does it build a public constituency to support research funding?

    Yes, academic social scientists are not entirely to blame for the assymetries in above kind of relationship because peer-reviewed research and publications provide the bulk of credentials for academic appointments, promotion, ands tenure. But if entrenched policies put social scientists in a bind shouldn’t they be the first to identify and seek changes in them?

  • Jim Till

    “Still, 189 percent of academics who have published open access say they have spent their own money in the process.” Large percentage!

    • Sage

      It’s no wonder they’re leery of OA! Let’s try 18 percent. Thanks for catch — wish I’d caught it before hitting publish.

  • s_c_f

    There was nothing scientific whatsoever in the two papers. They were an attempt to smear and harm the reputations of individuals, and the papers were filled with falsehoods and flawed methodology. The author of this article does not even have the qualifications to review a scientific article in psychology, climate science, or any other scientific discipline. In fact, there are numerous falsehoods in this article as well. It is clear to anyone who follows this story that the climate of intimidation is coming from people like Elaine McKewon herself. The retraction of the second paper was obviously justified and here we can see here that the review of that paper was seriously flawed and biased.

    • Richard_Arrett

      Done.

      Clearly there is some overlap.

      So?

    • Richard_Arrett

      Or maybe you are implying their is coordination?

      That would be conspiracy ideation!

      Which is ironic and pretty funny – when you think about it.

  • hunterson

    The more the Lewandowsky gang complain and distort the record of the faux papers and the demise of the second one, the more they come across as ill-informed, ill-willed and obsessed. They seem ignorant of climate science, uncaring of the norms of ethical behavior, and deliberately deceitful regarding their work and what happened to it.

  • stevesailer

    It’s a very good book.

  • college essay writing services

    Titles are really important to put importance because this will help people to know on what is your writings all about. It must also made perfectly, it’s really helpful that you put some another insights in doing this.

  • Michael Snow

    Just the facts, Ma’m. http://www.frontiersin.org/blog/Retraction_of_Recursive_Fury_A_Statement/812

    As we published in our retraction statement, a small number of complaints were received during the weeks following publication. Some
    of those complaints were well argued and cogent and, as a responsible
    publisher, our policy is to take such issues seriously. Frontiers conducted a careful and objective investigation of these complaints. Frontiers
    did not “cave in to threats”; in fact, Frontiers received no threats.
    The many months between publication and retraction should highlight the
    thoroughness and seriousness of the entire process.”

  • ClimateLearner

    Elaine is a casualty of the climate scare campaigns. She will have been exposed to them all her life, and did not have the intellect nor the fortitude to check the reality and see what a flimsy foundation the scares all stood upon. Now she has damaged her own career as a result.

  • jimcraq

    I thought this was going to be about given names (or “first names”), but it turns out to be about surnames (family names or “last names”).

  • Kaedwon

    “Denial is defined as “a refusal to accept that something unpleasant or painful is true.”

    You mean unpleasant, painful and true facts such as there has been no global warming since the Clinton administration? Who are the real “deniers” anyway?

    The Lewandowsky paper should never have been published in the first place, on ethical as well as methodological grounds. His conflict of interest goes (or should have gone) without saying.

    To quote Dr. Tol: “Naming and labeling people is such an obvious ethical and legal minefield that this episode casts severe doubt on the judgement of the authors, referees and editors involved. The fact that the length of the investigation was closer to a year than a week raises further questions about the judgement of the publisher.”

  • John

    Its pretty sad when you jump over the thought that you may be wrong and right political damage control.. The science of political science isn’t very scientific at all..

    Replying to valid criticisms with,: I know you are but what am I” deserves to be defunded into the dust bin..

  • TerryMN

    For being “an Inside Story” from someone who is pursuing a PhD in Journalism, this article gets a surprising number of basic facts wrong. I hope the author finds time to reply to both the Frontiers update and some of the commenters here, or at least correct the article.

    • PhilJourdan

      Sadly, she is not alone in getting so many facts wrong on basic reporting. That seems more the norm today than the exception.

  • Richard_Arrett

    After reading the new statement from Frontiers I now wonder if the two sentence change Elaine is referring to is the same article as the ” substantially similar” article which Frontiers said “did not deal adequately with the issues raised by Frontiers”. Or was their a different article submitted much later?

    Now we know there were ethical issues reviewed in the Frontiers investigation and the decision to retract was based on ethical issues – not legal issues.

    What I still wonder is what did Frontiers review determine as to the academic issues (i.e. flawed methodology). We have yet to hear if Frontiers had a problem with the scientific basis of the paper. I look forward to hearing more about the academic issues (of which there seem to be many).

    • Les Johnson

      I think this says it all about the scientific basis of the paper:

      Frontiers will continue to publish – and stand by – valid research

      My emphasis.

      • Richard_Arrett

        I am sure the paper is not “valid research” – but I still want to see the results of Frontiers internal investigation. Thank you for posting at SciAm (and here).

  • Les Johnson

    Is there anything that Elaine Mckewon got right?

    Frontiers says it recieved no threats, and that it was concerned about the rights of the subjects. It relayed this to the authors, who agreed to re-write the article. On resubmission, Frontiers found that the initial objections had not been met, so pulled the paper.

    http://www.frontiersin.org/blog/Retraction_of_Recursive_Fury_A_Statement/812

    • Carrick

      I would like to see a statement from Mckewon that she was unaware of this additional context when she wrote her critical comments, because otherwise she is guilty of deliberately misleading people, I suppose under the misguided assumption that details of Frontiers internal review would never be made public.

      • Richard_Arrett

        I agree. It may very well be that the peer reviewers were out of the loop between Frontiers and the authors of recursive fury. At least I hope that is the case.

        If so – perhaps Elaine Mckewon is now also wondering about the ethics of Lewandowsky.

          • Carrick

            It is interesting that McKewon ideates conspiracy theories herself and was asked to review this paper. Is it the fact she imagines boogiemen a qualification for critically judging this paper?

            I’ve not yet found another plausible explanation for assigning the review of this paper to a graduate student.

            If people like Lewandowsky and McKewon did not exist, “Big Oil” might have to invent them. As things currently stand, they can just pop popcorn and watch.

  • Paul Matthews

    The claims made by Elaine McKewon in this article have now been shown to be false. Frontiers have issued a statement, confirming that

    ‘Frontiers did not “cave in to threats”; in fact, Frontiers received no threats.’

    So her claim that “threats of litigation started to roll in” appears to be a total fabrication.

  • MikeR

    I see that this article is published on two sites. On this one, there are a number of detailed comments disagreeing strongly with the author. Several of them bring evidence.
    On the other site, there are essentially no such comments. There are a lot of comments agreeing with the author, then a few others disagreeing that make no real sense. And then there are about _one half_ of the comments Removed by Moderator. Just sayin’.

  • David

    “Until recently, it was unknown whether these patients were truly
    unconscious, or whether they had some awareness of their surroundings
    and just could not respond. Starting in 2006, Owen and his colleagues
    have shown that some of these patients are able to respond meaningfully,
    proving that they are indeed aware of their environment. They achieved
    this by using functional brain scans to measure brain activity in
    patients as questions were asked. One patient has even learned to change
    his brain activity in such a way that he is able to answer “yes” or
    “no” to questions.”
    It is not too difficult to find the BBC story that relates to this claim (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8497148.stm) but harder (not much harder) to find the research article in the New England Journal of Medicine. The former reports that Owen asked patients in a persistent vegetative state to imagine they were playing tennis, and four our of 23 patients produced a pattern similar to that of a healthy volunteer. The latter report claims that five out of 54 were able to willfully modulate their pattern of brain activity in this way.
    One patient, that is just one patient out of 54, was able to use that distinct pattern of brain modulation to answer, “Yes”, or ,”No”, to biographical questions, and could get five out of six questions right, in response to questions such as, “Is your name X?”
    Now of course, that is very important, very intellectually exciting, and may well be life changing for the individual concerned, and nobody would wish to diminish that achievement. But it does seem rather flimsy ground on which to reshape the whole way that we think about consciousness, or to imply that autism, depression or schizophrenia are just more complicated cases that will be resolved as the technology improves.
    It looks to me that this makes Catherine Loveday’s case, that there is a serious danger of over-estimating what brain scans can tell us.

  • BarryWoods

    Retraction Watch has most of the original information, and a number of the complainants appear in the comments.
    The first Article
    http://retractionwatch.com/2013/03/28/why-publishers-should-explain-why-papers-disappear-the-complicated-lewandowsky-study-saga/

    the second article..
    http://retractionwatch.com/2013/04/03/update-lewandowsky-et-al-paper-on-conspiracist-ideation-provisionally-removed-due-to-complaints/

    and if any reader wants to see most of the ethical complaints (look in the comments under what’s left of the abstract)
    http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073/full

    If we just focus on one co-author Michael Marriott (whose affiliation Climate Reality Research seems to be a vanity creation (no records to be found) was publically attacking people that were named in the paper, both before during and after the research period. Michael runs a one man blog called – Watching the Deniers.

    Calling myself (and Anthony Watts, Deniers, Disinformers, [part of] denial machine, as writing ‘Bullshit’, ‘Verified Bullshit’ and as suffering psychological defect – Dunning-Kruger. Mike Marriott (aka Watchingthe Deniers’) runs his blog attacking the people named in the paper, and he was loudly cheerleading, the original paper of Lewandowsky’s, that Fury was a response too.

    Perhaps that is ok with a 2nd year PhD journalism ‘peer reviewer’ student, but the field is psychology, the Journal is Frontiers in Psychology and usually just the mearest hint of a conflict of interest, or ethical compromises, would be considered inappropriate… and Marriott’s conduct is way over that line and Prof Lewandowsky judgement is highly suspect, by chosing such a partisan ‘researcher’. who like himself was an active particpent in the ‘climate wars’

    I explained Michael’s conduct to a senior editor in Zurich, showed him all the publically available information – from Watching the Denier’s blog, and the data was pulled in 30 minutes, and the paper 4 hours later. My call was perhaps just the final extra piece of information, a tipping point for the journal, after ten days worth of similar observations by a number of people.

    If we want to discuss ‘intimidation and bullying’ –

    The lead author is a RS Medal Winning Professor of Psychology, with a large university behind him, he has access to the international media, and write very publicall, vs I am a member of the public, with a blog, who criticised his original paper.
    But of course, the journal and UWA have investigated and found nothing wrong ‘ethically’, so what do I know, should I just now bow down unquestioningly to their wisdom? and accept the ‘it was just legal threats explanation’ being touted around the internet.
    There is a real journalistic story to be found here, but journalist these days seem to churnalise press releases and believe what they are told by the very interested parties that were criticised.

  • Carrick

    I’d like to address the issue of climate denier, since McKewon brings this up. Even though, to my knowledge, I have never been described as a “climate denier”, I do not have kind words to say about people who insist on using terms to label another group, that the other group views as derogatory, as McKewon is clearly doing here.

    To start with, McKewon’s own words:

    No fewer than 97 percent of climate scientists now endorse the scientific consensus on the reality, causes and significant risks associated with climate change. The term “climate change denier” or “climate denier” describes an individual who rejects the science of climate change and the considerable body of evidence on which it is based. It has no further meaning or connotation beyond this.

    When one discusses consensuses, it is important to address what that consensus is. I usually break it down into the following:

    1) The Earth has been warming.
    2) CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas, and the amount of CO2 is increasing, leading to greater warming. (Humans are causing climate change.)
    3) This warming will lead to effects on climate that will cause net economic harm and increase human suffering.
    4) The cost of adaptation is greater than the cost of mitigation.

    In this link on Lucia’s blog post critical of McKewon’s article, lucia points out that 3&4 couldn’t fall under “denial” because these would be “economic facts” (in which case we can argue about which ‘economic facts’ are true fact and which are false facts).

    It’s important to point out that 3 and 4 do not have indisputable proof of veracity. indeed one of the main arguments for mitigation tacitly assumes that 4 may not be true, when it invokes the “precautionary principle”. If we know 4 is true, we need not invoke a principle based upon the premise that it is likely false, but that the danger that it is real is large enough, that it should be addressed as if it were true.

    • John Dawson

      You make a crucial point Carrick – to conflate the 4 points into one is to a fallacy that is almost universally applied by AGW alarmists. I would like to divide number 2 into: 2) CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas that warms the planet. 3) CO2 is increasing. 4) Humans are causing an increase in CO2 and therefore warming the planet. Making 7 points altogether.

      Sticking to your 4 points, I would agree with the first two, would be skeptical about 3, and deny 4. To conflate that and call me a “climate denier”, which is exactly what AGW alarmists do to people like me is just ad hominem evasion.

      And it makes a mockery of the “97% of scientists agree…” line. IF 97% of scientists agree with your first two points, that’s significant (although not proof). But IF 97% agree with your third and fourth points their opinions carry no more weight than those of any other educated opinion since it is not physics or climate science that is required to answer those questions but a range of disciplines from agriculture to economics.

  • stevenmosher

    As someone who rather liked the Lewandowsky paper, I’m surprised that Elaine,a reviewer, got facts wrong about the paper and facts wrong about it’s eventual retraction. The paper could have used a minor rewrite to avoid many of troubles that plagued it. It’s baffling that this option was not taken. The reviewer also seems to have no knowledge of the actual people who requested that changes be made to the paper. None of them are what those of us active in the debate would call “deniers.” Some, in fact, have expressed their belief in climate change for the past 7 years. This is highly ironic since the paper itself attempted to document several forms of conspiratorial ideation in the climate debate. If we classified Elaine’s particular style of thought used in this article using the methodology adopted in the paper she reviewed we would conclude that she exhibits at least one of the forms of conspiratorial ideation in her piece. Namely, she identifies the journal as a victim of a intimidation from “denialists.” Of course, if she actually checked on who actually complained about the paper and tested her belief that they are all “denialists”, she would have to face some rather uncomfortable facts. In short, Elaine gets the facts wrong and gets them wrong in a way that ironically exposes the fundamental weakness in the paper which any rookie reviewer would have caught.

    • lucia liljegren

      stevenmosher,

      Beyond Elaine not seeming to know the actual people who requested changes, what they requested be changed she also seems to mischaracterize the paper as “a narrative analysis of blog posts published by climate deniers”. My blog numbers in the group of posts evidently published by “climate deniers”. Yet, I have always maintained:

      1) CO2 causes warming.

      2) Man has introduced CO2 into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and this is detectable.

      3) There has been detectable warming since the beginning of the industrial revolution– and at least some of this is due to CO2 and that this has been detected in the thermometer record.

      Those who read my blog know this is my position and always has been.

      JeffId and others whose posts were quoted and cited in Recursive Fury also believe 1-3. It’s not at all clear to me which ‘scientific fact’ Elaine imagines either or us (or anyone else) denied. As she provides no evidence that we bloggers are ‘climate deniers’ using her definition (or any other one), it’s not at all clear where Elaine developed the notion that the analysis was from blog posts published by climate deniers. As she was a peer reviewer for this paper and evidently this notion about the “climate denier” status of the bloggers features in her evaluation of the value of Recursive fury, I would invite her to enlighten us. In particular I would like her to tell me precisely which items at my blog she — acting in her reviewer capacity– read to form the conclusion that I— one of the bloggers quoted in Recursive Fury– am a climate denier.

      I’m also a bit amused by her characterization of the paper as

      theoretically strong, methodologically sound, and its analysis and conclusions – […] – were based on clear
      evidence.

      Given her high opinion, I invite Elaine to reread a section in Recursive Fury and explain how the analysis or conclusions are “theoretically strong [or] methodologically sound”] Specifically where Lewandowsky et al write

      …Those variables are revealed by statements such as: “Given the lack of evidence that he [first author of LOG12] tried to contact skeptic blogs, and his bizarre excuse for not reporting the blogs he tried to contact when describing his methodology, some people suspect he didn’t try very hard to contact skeptic blogs. But that suspicion is not a conspiracy theory” (emphasis added)41.

      Whereas suspicion on its own is insufficient to identify conspiracist ideation, it arguably constitutes one of its core attributes. For example, the suspicion that LOG12 did not contact “skeptic” bloggers tacitly invokes several major presumptions, namely (a) that the authors of LOG12 were willing to engage in research misconduct; (b) that they would invent a claim about a non-event and publish it in the Section “Materials and Methods” when there was no incentive or reason to do so; and (c) that they should have somehow provided “evidence” beyond writing an accurate Method section. The ease with which those presumptions about misconduct and malfeasance were made and accepted provides a fertile environment for the subsequent unfolding of conspiracist ideation (cf. Keeley, 1999; Wood et al., 2012).

      After reading Please explain how the this “analysis” is sound. When doing so, I would like her to keep in mind the following numbered points:

      1) Note that the quoted text (which I wrote) does not say ‘LOG12 did not contact “skeptic” bloggers'”. (And– since you were a reviewer you must be familiar with the blog post quoted and will recall the sentence following the bit quoted explains the rather lackadaisical method Lewandowsky used to contact the blogs– thereby providing the evidence that those who suspected Lewandowsky ‘did not try very hard’ were — in fact– correct.)

      2) Because the quote does not say LOG12 did not contact bloggers, bloggers like me did not need to imagine the authors of LOG12 were willing to engage in academic misconduct– because the quote does not support the notion the authors of LOG12 committed any. (And more over, I never accused him of misconduct nor harbored such thoughts.)

      3) The quote does not suggest the authors of LOG12 “invented” any claim about any “non-event”, and the actual words quoted do not require the authors of LOG12 to have invented any such thing. (And more over, the person quoted did not harbor such thoughts.)

      4) the actual quote does not imply any “tacit” assumption that the authors of LOG12 needed to include additional material in their METHODS section. There was, rather an explicit complaint that authors should answer direct questions about issues pertaining to their paper when readers pose questions after reading the paper.

      If you actually go so far as to read the blog post Lewandowsky was analyzing, you will see the assumptions Lewandowsky suggests I “tacitly” made were at total variance with the ones I explicitly stated — in the sentences after the one he provided. The explicit assumption was not “presumptions about misconduct and malfeasance” but rather incompetence. That presumption was not telegraphed tacitly, but stated like this

      The evidence that Deltoid posted the survey before Lewindowsky’s graduate student’s first contact with Climate Audit and that Lewindowsky may have distributed links to different surveys to different blogs is leading people to suspect him of incompetence. But suspecting Lewindowsky is incompetent is not the same thing as believing in a “conspiracy”.

      In fact: it is entirely true that my believing Lewindowsky is incompetent is not believing in a conspiracy. My describing his incompetence is not accusing him of participating in a conspiracy nor does my believing him incompetent mean I harbor any presumption of “misconduct or malfeasance” on his part.

      As far as I can see, Lewindowsky’s ‘diagnosis’ of conspiracy ideation in my discussion of his incompetence is nothing more than a figment of his imagination. But if Ms. McKewon stands behind her diagnosis that “theoretically strong, methodologically sound, and its analysis and conclusions – […] – were based on clear evidence.”, I think she should explain precisely how that particular bit of the analysis stands up to any scrutiny. In doing so, she should, of course, refer to what I actually wrote in my blog post and point out how one can diagnose all these “presumed” or “tacit” assumptions I supposedly held.

      • stevenmosher

        Thanks for commenting Lucia. I remain dumbfounded as to why the reviewers did not check these facts. Having read a large number of the comments on the events as they unfolded there were plenty of comments that could have been used to support the thesis of the paper. There is no shortage of comments from people who deny the science that show evidence of conspiratorial Ideation.
        Instead, the authors focused in individuals who have openly accepted the main tenets of climate science.
        And I note that now they ironically play the victim

        • Carrick

          Given that I frequently pull up references cited in papers and review them, when reviewing papers, I admit I too am gobsmacked by the claims of McKewan here, with the apparent lack of care with which she reviewed this paper, and further, her willingness to double down on … whatever she’s double-downing on.

          In this case, it appears Lewandowksy’s own narrative is confused, flawed and even self-contradictory.

          You merely have to read what he said carefully to realize there are serious problems with his paper.

        • lucia liljegren

          Stevenmosher,
          Oddly, I’m not sure Lewandowsky could have found many comments suggesting he didn’t try to contact bloggers at all. I doubt if he could find many discussing the notion before Lewandowsky himself introduced his theory that people were suggesting this. For example: Desmogblog reports that Lewandowsky attributes this theory to Skeptics on 9/05/12.
          http://www.desmogblog.com/2012/09/05/research-links-climate-science-denial-conspiracy-theories-skeptics-smell-conspiracy In that post, the link to Simon Turnhills’s post discussing a FOIA request. But no one at Simon’s blog is suggesting Lewandowsky actually failed to contact blogs. Simon is FOIAing emails: his motive? To learn what is in the emails. That is not “a conspiracy theory”, and it’s certainly not suggesting Lewandowsky didn’t contanct people.

          At simon’s blog, someone links to my blog. The topic of my blog post is a discussion of our attempts to learn the identities of the blogs. Why did we want to know? For a number of reasons which ranged from curiosity and also trying to figure out if the skeptical blogs were actually skeptical or had sizable audiences. (Turns out not all were: Roger Pielke Jr.s blog is not a skeptic blog. Fergusson’s “blog” had virtually zero audience.) None of this was an intimation he didn’t try to contact blogs.

          So– in fact, it’s not clear to me that the notion that people were accusing him of not contacting blogs at all wasn’t one he didn’t dream up in the first place. Once he’d introduced it via Desmog blog, it’s rather odd to interpret people responding to the idea he discussed as “evidence” they ascribed to it!

          • stevenmosher

            Lucia, good investigation!
            The only way a reviewer could figure out what you did was if she were a journalist trained in tracking down sources in texts. And Elaine.. well never mind.. forget I made that argument

      • A. Scott

        Lucia … I also was one of those attacked in Lewandowskys Fury, and various other of his published rantings. I also believe exactly as you do:

        1) CO2 causes warming.

        2) Man has introduced CO2 into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and this is detectable.

        3) There has been detectable warming since the beginning of the industrial revolution– and at least some of this is due to CO2 and that this has been detected in the thermometer record.

        When challenged at Lewandowsky’s Shaping Tomorrows World blog that if I didn’t like his results I should duplicate them myself I did exactly that.

        Unlike Lewandowsky – who obtained his N=~1,300 (from memory) survey results on the beliefs of skeptics solely from websites highly critical of the skeptical view, with at best perhaps N=~150 that could be considered actual skeptic responses, I obtained permission from a single source, the largest climate discussion site around – Watts Up With That – and in a matter of appx. 48 hours obtained N=~2,000+ responses, with most appearing to be true skeptic responses.

        Lewandowsky withheld Supplemental data for the LOG12 paper, only providing such when it was officially published. However he failed and refuses to release ALL the data necessary to validate the work.

        Today UWA itself continues to maintain that position – a complete refusal to release the entire data set necessary to review and validate the work and publish a response with the journal … to me and many others a clear violation of the Journal, the University, and ethical rules, let alone the scientific process.

        We know Lewandowsky excluded large amounts of data – including at group and individual levels. We know the sensationalized headline findings of the underlying LOG12 paper were based on literal a tiny handful – 4 to 6 – of responses. We know analysis of those responses showed a very high likelihood they were not from true skeptic, but were rather gamed responses intended to manipulate the poll – a scenario specifically discussed on anti-skeptic sites.

        We know from start to finish Mr. Lewandowsky has manipulated the system and process, then responded to requests for transparency and release of data necessary to replicate and validate his work by attacking those critical of his work and a blanket refusal to release data.

        We know Recursive Fury was exactly that – an attack against those who were simply skeptical of his legitimately suspect results – the direct result of a blog post about using the response of skeptics towards the sensationalized and suspected flawed LOG12 paper against them.

        We know at least several peer reviewers of the Fury paper asked to be removed and/or refused to be listed – each of those reviewers far more qualified than Ms. McKewon.

        We know the Editor of the Fury paper at Frontiers, Dr. Viren Swami, also became a listed peer reviewer, raising a serious ethical issue – when the person responsible for editorial decisions on the reviewers is a reviewer themselves – who then is responsible for review.

        None of these issues have been addressed by the Journal, the authors or by UWA.

        These are all important questions… none of which have been addressed.

  • Simon Fraser

    The first sentence is like, wrong. How could you peer review a paper you are obviously clueless about?

    Were you born clueless or are you just trying to cover up a crappy paper and your even worse reviewing attempt?

  • geoff Chambers

    McKewon says:
    “Yet soon after Recursive Fury was published, threats of litigation
    started to roll in, and the journal took the paper down”.

    The only evidence she gives for this is a link to an article at my blog which reproduces my letter of complaint to Frontiers pointing out that the “Recursive Fury” paper was defamatory of me (I was named in the paper, along with far more prominent bloggers Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, and Jo Nova) as well as being defamatory of dozens of other people named in the supplemental material, including Professor Richard Betts of the British Meteorological Office.

    The accusation in this article that I threatened to sue is false and possibly defamatory, as is its repetition by Graham Readfearn at deSmogBlog and Dana Nuccitelli in the Guardian.

    So many falsehoods in defence of a retracted article! A professor of cognitive psychology specialising in the spread of misinformation and with an interest in discovering the truth would have a field day studying this phenomenon. If only such a person existed!

  • RealOldOne2

    Ellen and her fellow global warming alarmists are the real deniers, of natural climate change.
    Unfortunately for them, there are no peer reviewed papers empirically showing that natural climate variability was not the primary cause of the most recent warming period in the late 20th century.
    Unfortunately for them, there are no peer reviewed papers empirically showing that anthropogenic CO2 was the primary cause of the most recent warming period in the late 20th century.
    Reality: In the last ~16 years humans have emitted over 460 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and it’s caused no global warming.
    Unfortunately for them, there’s no explanation that squares that fact with their hypothesis that CO2 is now the primary driver of climate.

    Their whole CO2 Climate of Fear scare meme is based on flawed, faulty, falsified climate models.

  • harkin

    Why is it that the agw skeptics release their data and the agw alarmists hide theirs?
    #because science

  • BarryWoods

    A comment from under the abstract (Geoff complained to Frontiers)
    http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073/full

    Geoff Chambers to the editors of “Frontiers”
    Author of “Recursive Fury” Michael Marriott runs a blog

    http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/

    Between 28 August and 22 September 2012 he published 13 articles attacking climate sceptics who had criticised LOG12. According to the above article, the content analysis of sceptic blogs was carried out “in real time” starting 28 August, by John Cook and Michael Marriott, chosen specifically for the task for their lack of bias.

    It”s not surprising the raw data (see supplemental data above right) is so full of errors. While collecting the data for this study, Marriott was at the same writing an article every two days insulting the authors of the very data he was collecting.
    In order to protect your reputation, please withdraw this paper.

  • BarryWoods

    perhaps readers should read the comments under the article at Retraction Watch, and of the abstract of the paper itself, to see the actual complaints and decide for themselves.

    this comment is eloquent:

    First, the senior author has an extraordinary conflict of interest. The behavior under study is precisely public criticism of the author’s professional competence. Psychology in particular has a deep concern with the distortions caused by even relatively trivial conflicts of interest.

    Second, it is probably safe to assume that Prof. Lewandowsky did not write his Psych. Sci. paper simply to create the experimental conditions for the Frontiers paper. Still, negative reactions to the Psych. Sci. paper were entirely predictable. This was not a “natural” event. On the contrary, the experimental set-up (the contents and release of the then-unpublished Psych. Sci. paper) was completely under the author’s control. Thus Prof. Lewandowsky created, controlled, conducted, analyzed, and published a psychological experiment without any disclosures to, or consent from, the subjects.

    Third, regardless of whether consent was required for the experiment, the authors published individually identifiable information about, and analysis of, the mental health and cognitive status of their subjects. This is not simply bloggish, lay opinion. This is, mind you, published as objectively determined, scientifically verified, analysis by professional psychologists for publication in a professional journal — concerning named individuals who were not willing subjects and did not consent to participation in a study, or to the release of personal mental status information.

    Fourth, some of the information then turned out to be wrong.

    Perhaps, despite appearances, this is all ethically acceptable in psychology. But, if not, Frontiers has a hard choice.

    http://retractionwatch.com/2013/03/28/why-publishers-should-explain-why-papers-disappear-the-complicated-lewandowsky-study-saga/#comment-52861

    Most of the complaints were with respect to the ethical conduct of the authors and conflicts and vested interests.

  • brianmacker

    Elaine McKewon doesn’t even have the educational background to be a proper reviewer for the kind of paper she reviewed.

  • PapaLouie

    The “Recursive Fury” paper didn’t compare or quantify levels of ideation in the different groups, so how could it find that people who reject climate science are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories? That is wishful thinking and is not a finding of the paper.

  • NikFromNYC

    You didn’t get the memo? Jim Hansen’s right hand man at NASA’s little office above Tom’s Diner put the word out to stop comparing skeptics of the highly speculative amplified greenhouse effect of supercomputer models (that all alarm is based upon) to Holocaust deniers, because it renders you ridiculous:

    http://tinypic.com/r/2lsehp2/5

    Your rank dishonesty is pointed out now to thousands of people who have never heard of you before:

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/01/lewandowskys-peer-reviewer-makes-things-up/

  • geoff Chambers

    I’ve got a Pingback at

    http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/lews-talk-costs-libels/

    which suggests that this article links to my blog, though I can’t see the
    link in the article above.

    There are numerous lacunae and inaccuracies in McKewon’s article, just
    as there were in Lewandowsky’s paper. I shall be addressing these here and at my blog as soon as possible.

  • Jim C.

    An article about finding quality information… and the first in-article link is to Natural News? Linking to a piece on a known pseudoscience promoting site doesn’t help the author’s argument.

  • business angel investors

    I’ve learn some excellent stuff here. Certainly price bookmarking for revisiting.
    I surprise how much effort you place to make this kind of excellent informative web site.

  • Nita

    This is a brilliant, accurate analysis of today’s landscape, not only in Europe and the US, but also in Brazilian academia, where Professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger is simply ignored or dismissed as a partisan-political misfit. Nevertheless, prejudices apart, Unger’s thought-provoking interview shows the normative and theoretical challenges of today’s social sciences (including law and economics) as they all tend to be degenerated into pseudo-­sciences –this interview reminds me of Horkheimer’s remarks on the crisis of social sciences in the 1930s vis a vis logical positivism, on the one hand, and the rise of Heideggerian subjectivist hypes, on the other…

  • protetyka radom

    Appreciating the time and effort you put into your website and in depth information you
    present. It’s awesome to come across a blog every once in a while
    that isn’t the same out of date rehashed material. Fantastic read!

    I’ve bookmarked your site and I’m including your RSS feeds to my Google account.

  • protetyka radom

    Appreciating the time and effort you put into your website and in depth information you
    present. It’s awesome to come across a blog every once in a while
    that isn’t the same out of date rehashed material. Fantastic read!

    I’ve bookmarked your site and I’m including your RSS feeds to my Google account.

  • Murphy888

    Question: The latency stage—when the members of a family, church, school, a family or church or business–know or suspect that molestation is happening–isn’t this typically what occurs in all but stranger abuse? After a while, people know or suspect? That teacher is a little too friendly around children, or the bedroom door is closed a little too often. During this stage, a whistleblower may report. Or the behavior is minimized or “dealt with” to protect the institution’s reputation.

  • BillCourtney

    For the last ten years I have been lobbying a British university to tackle a serious case of engineering research fraud that may have cost many European pedestrians their lives.
    In 2009 the university held a formal enquiry into my complaints but managed to clear itself by citing the prior findings of a ghost committee that never existed. Freedom of Information requests have failed to unearth any documents relating to its existence and one named member has written to me denying membership.
    I can’t say for certain who created this ghost committee but there were three researchers whole behaviour should have been investigated. One was chosen as a scapegoat and the other two were allowed to testify as “independent witnesses” on his behalf.
    Is it pure coincidence that the same university boasts of its ambition to become one of the worlds top twenty five research universities by 2020? Is it also pure coincidence that the enquiry panel was chaired by a head of department, two of whose members were strongly tipped to win a Nobel Prize later that year?
    As a last resort, I have published the evidence of research and formal enquiry panel fraud online. To see this, visit the Cheshire Innovation web site, http://www.cheshire-innovation.com and scroll down to the “Soft bumpers to save pedestrian lives” story.

  • Robert Dingwall

    This, of course, is exactly how universities used to work. In 18th century Scotland, students paid one fee to attend lectures, a second to attend associated discussions with the professor and a third to lodge in the professor’s house and receive personal tuition. All the fees, as I recall, went directly to the professor as their source of income. Adam Smith compared the results very favourably to the indolence of Oxford dons at the same period, who received various types of guaranteed income from their college and clerical appointments without having to deliver any teaching to their students.

  • Afrinda Wahyu Hidayat

    I am prayer to god. He help to you. God bless you . I trust that you must successful.

    http://ngampusid.blogspot.com

  • Julian Pigott

    Fantastic. I want to listen again but the file can’t be found.

    • sagepub

      Julian — we did have a Bites outage, but the podcast series is up again.

  • Fausto D. Capobianco

    Here’s a tax related paper. you will not be able to get the full paper but you can read a nice summary of the findings.

    fdc

  • Tor Gausen

    Interesting interview, but didn’t it veer too much from the initial subject of protest movements? I felt like the last half was all about the validity of the social sciences. BTW, how about an entire podcast dedicated to this quesition?

  • Zeny

    very interesting

  • Chahid

    This is interesting although one cannot help thinking that part of the leadership qualities (if not the main one) is the ability to follow through with key principles/values. The question that arises is what type of personality supports commitment to social justice/environmental care principles despite the pressures from executive management (generally favouring quantity over quality or long term relationships). The debate tends to be truncated (and polarised?) by focusing on gender or other types of differences which tend to sideline these important issues.

  • semangat14

    i’m graduate student too, i hope we will be successfull tomorrow, just keep positive thingking dear…dont be depression, i feel that and something it’s make me far away for environtment, but life must go on and we must can be adaptable with other, so, keep fight foght and fight more, someday we will know and have answer for our success

  • Joanna

    Well, your colleagues become almost like family members and it’s only natural that the better you feel about them, the better is your work and the results. Thanks!

  • Jim Maloney

    A little “false” advertising???

    I don’t know other’s experience but I can not access to article to read it “Free” for the rest of the month. And I am not signing up a bunch of things I may not have time to read and respond to…Sorry. This subject is of interest to me and not all suggestions are.

    I can either read it for free or you can not/stop says such things. You do diminish your crediblility for some of us by doing this.

  • Craig Davis

    The link to download the transcript is not working. Any advice for obtaining an electronic copy?

  • Stevan Harnad

    Hard Evidence: Cite Sources

    It make the hard evidence more credible (and easier for the reader to check) to cite its source!

    For the second figure above (in green) the source is below (Figure 4):

    Gargouri, Yassine; Lariviere, Vincent; Gingras, Yves; Carr, Les and Harnad, Stevan (2012) Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline. In: 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI), 5-8 September, 2012, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Montréal. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/340294

  • John

    Now a days, sustainable business has become a talk of the time in educational institutes. Many institutes like to teach their student about green business. So education in sustainable business is very much effective now.

  • Cheryl

    I like the suggestions for training women in self-assertiveness, and men in communication. This resonated with me because I have worked my way to the glass ceiling that, unfortunately is still intact. I also think that conflict management should be paramount in leadership. Many problems can be alleviated.

  • Holly Buttner

    Very informative article with org. behavior as well as marketing implications. Holly Buttner

  • Dianne Welsh

    Great article and a must read for all disciplines. Dianne Welsh

  • thesishelpdesk

    Working on a thesis is indeed a long and hard process where a student can go through both a plateau and a canyon or what they say as the highest and lowest point in the academic career. It is true that as you work for your thesis, you need to give time for yourself–a time to take a break, a time to relax, a time to breathe, and a time to detach yourself from what causes your mental exhaustion. One cannot underestimate the frustration that a student can feel while working on his most valued research. That is why he also need to have a back-up while fighting that battle between giving it all up and continuing what has been started.

  • Jim

    Any chance of an App for the iPad, like the one you have for Philosophy Bites?
    Keep up the excellent interview BTW! Great to see Social Sciences getting a Bite.

  • Cristián R. Montenegro

    At this point in human history it’s a mistake to put the focus and the emphasis on poverty. The emphasis has been placed on poverty for almost all of human history, and what are the results?: Growing inequality everywhere. Should we trust in such emphasis? Don’t think so. So, these efforts you name are ultimately useless if we don’t work, at the same time and with the same force, for a Convention to Abolish Extreme Wealth to be designed and implemented globally.

  • IamNotmyIP

    Hi Sarah

    In the context in which you speak, I agree with much of what you say. Words can tell you much more, assuming what you are being told is the truth. Numbers cannot lie. Numbers can be used to tell a lie, when given out of context, as in the example of the student feedback. But words are needed to create such context. So yes words are the more important of the two, as they can both enlighten and deceive.

    I also find it amusingly ironic that speegster made a grammatical error whilst criticizing your grammatical errors :0)

  • morazda

    Great article about the war between real faculty and adjunct faculty.

    One of the successful things that Colleges and Universities have done is to pit real faculty against adjunct faculty, and, like the Throne of God itself that a real faculty job is, many real faculty have defended that throne against their fallen brethren and sisters: pawns in the war of a false God.

    The key here is, of course, real faculty joining the cause of adjunct faculty, putting their jobs and health and safety on the line like adjuncts are forced to do each day and bringing that enlightenment and revolutionary spirit back to the academic and intellectual world, and reclaiming these sieged sepulchers from the administrators, bureaucrats, sadducees, the corporations and businesses, that have turned the temples of truth into dens of inequity.

  • Brian Patterson (@BrianSPatterson)

    Hello! My name is Brian Patterson and I work with TradingAcademy.com

    We noticed that you are using one of this page.

    We love this and think it is great 🙂 We just ask that, per our description on Flickr and as detailed on our site, that you please provide attribution for the image by making the image, or a note under it, a link to http://www.tradingacademy.com

    http://www.tradingacademy.com/resources/financial-education-center/financial-images.aspx

    Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks!
    Brian

    • Cynthia Nalevanko, Editor, Management INK

      Thank you for your interest in our article on The Ethics of Corporate Political Spending
      on Management INK! As per copyright standards, all of our imagery is accompanied by the appropriate permissions, and can be found directly below the used image. We hope you continue to enjoy Management INK and all the publications SAGE has to offer.

      – Management INK

  • beachhutman

    It is a world of brave new people programmed (not educated like I was) by something wicked this way comes….Monarch Programming. People now do the bidding of others without demur. To recognise Monarch Programming read anything by researcher Tim Baber, who met Mengele in this context. Mengele was a master programmer who I have traced I think by Villa Almarin in Mougins to his son. and It is possible Mengele might have been working past his sell by date after 1979 on whatever Monarch programming became. The death in 1979 is now no longer an accepted fact in my researches. I suggest 2007 based on an eye ball to gooseberry eyeball meeting in 2002 and the villa being let from 2008. But I may be wrong. It is guesswork when he died between December 2002 and more recently for a man born in 1913. He did study hard. He did work hard. He worked for us. But it was to make us into zombies then I fear, when it (Monarch programming) could have been to end war.

  • Makarand Fulzele

    My point is that gender division in two opposites itself is wrong. I have written one book from medical point of view. I hold the view that man is just the extension of woman. Here is the post

    ’Scientists have somehow missed
    definitions of gender in human beings,” states Dr. Makarand Fulzele. Insights
    gained from years of practice as surgeon makes him wonder if indeed we have
    overlooked facts staring in our face. Nature has a tendency to hide many
    secrets but at the same time it provides enough clues to unravel its mysteries.
    Dr. Fulzele picks up loose threads from life to stitch together the theory that
    man is an extension of woman in his new book, “Man Is the Extension of Woman:
    Know the Ultimate Truth about Yourself” (published by iUniverse). Dr. Fulzele’s
    book explores similarities between men and women against the backdrop of their
    genetic differences, physical variations, and emotional and intellectual
    dissimilarities. Dr. Fulzele who is a successful surgeon further explains in
    his book: The main hypothesis I discuss in this book is that, if a woman lives
    long enough she will be converted into a man physically. A similar thing can
    also be stated about man. It is wrong to categorize humankind into two genders
    as it implicates that they are extremely dissimilar and physically opposite to
    each other. I try to prove that man and woman are just two different stages of
    one developmental process. And physically they are very similar. The ideas
    presented may sound unconventional but Dr. Fulzele implores readers to consider
    his point of view with an open mind. “Your world will not change if you do not
    agree with me. But if you agree with me, how does it change your world? If more
    people agree with you and me, how does it change our world? The possibilities
    are limitless.”

  • priyanka333

    there is no problem but the leadership training should be work in a way so that the leader and the organization should work together and will give a better out come. we should move away from the isolated method and go for a interconnected process for the betterment of individual as well as for an organization.

  • mason winter

    recommended this article to all my students because it is exactly what the lesson was on this week thank you very much for this great article please refer back to my e-mail address and tell me if you have any other articles we can read.

  • Stefanie Boyer

    If you follow the link to the article, it explains how to implement it in the classroom and provides a detailed example with instructions. Good luck, and I’m happy to answer any questions!

  • office blog

    It’s truly a great and helpful piece of info. I am glad that you just shared this helpful information with us. Please keep us up to date like this. Thank you for sharing.

  • John

    .. lead in a friendly and collaborative manner …

    and you are pegged as a weak leader;

    be assertive and dominant and you are penalized for being overly aggressive, micromanager, and a jerk –

    Just lead

  • Forums4Justice

    The U.S. 2+ Trillion Dollar Underground Economy

    Fueled by illegal immigration, the U.S. 2+ Trillion Dollar Underground Economy,
    would rank 9th as a world economy.

    Less than 4%, of all the illegal immigrants in our United States, are working in agriculture.

    ON-THE-BOOKS, EIGHT MILLION ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS are working in, non-agriculture, American jobs, by using false, or stolen SS numbers. Using SS mismatches, DHS knows where these illegal immigrants are working.

    OFF-THE-BOOKS, there’s a rapidly expanding 2+ Trillion Dollar Underground Economy in the U.S,, which has doubled in the last four years, driven by the continued inflow of illegal immigrants, and more U.S. employers contracting work out to them

    Immigration Reform, from the Senate, or the House, does absolutely nothing to address the issue of the out-of-control Underground Economy. It is doubtful that many of the illegal immigrants working in the underground economy would opt for citizenship. The illegal immigrants will still be here working off-the-books, and as long as there are jobs are available, more illegal immigrants will come … 1/8th of our economy is OFF-THE-BOOKs, tax-free, under the table. An estimated $500 billion in tax revenue is currently lost due to the underground economy. That number is growing.

    How many illegal immigrants are working in the U.S. 2+ Trillion Dollar Underground Economy?

    more at: http://forumsforjustice.com/forums/showpost.php?p=956&postcount=1

  • Natraj

    Excellent. We need to know how to implement it in classroom

  • Hillary Jenks

    While I appreciate Jennifer’s efforts to create that different kind of workplace, I have to question her assertion that the administration fully supports tenure-track faculty lines. I have been tenure-track faculty at her institution, Portland State University, for the past several years, and was supposed to go up for tenure next year. Instead, the administration has eliminated my position. This was not due to my performance – I’ve had excellent reviews and evaluations, and more publications than anyone in my department. The stated reason was budget cuts, although there’s been no declaration of financial exigency, so the union is now pursuing it. I am hearing of this happening to junior faculty more and more around the country, especially outside the traditional departments. So if you save and create these tenure lines, only to have them be turned into glorified post docs at the administration’s will, have we really resisted adjunctification?

  • Trevor Nagle, ABD

    Reblogged this on Leadership Musings of a Skeptical Positivist and commented:
    Customization…or put differently, a focus on CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT…is what sets apart high quality leadership development from run-of-the-mill, what I like to refer to as “Impact-free” development programs. Great article that is a must-read for all leaders and those developing others!

  • David Crookall

    Nice article – needed. Ethics seems to have slipped in many areas, not just in marketing. Low or non-existent ethics in sustainability and climate change, for instance. Some hope for teaching ethics in business and marketing outlined in several articles in “Simulation & Gaming” http://sag.sagepub.com/. Fior example:
    http://sag.sagepub.com/content/29/1/44.abstract
    http://sag.sagepub.com/content/36/3/383.abstract
    http://sag.sagepub.com/content/36/3/407.abstract

  • Batman

    The “academic [you] mentioned”, despite supposedly using sound methods, has a woefully wayward ethical compass. To be sure, if we assume that the average scientist will follow suit and unabashedly produce results that align either morally, ethically, or otherwise with their funding source ( http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2013/summer/suspect-science ) for fear of losing said funding, then we should definitely be very, very worried.

    You’re very right to also point out that (at least HOPEFULLY) this person represents the minority of academics. That said, I think that the call should be to, instead of simply warning of the potential for torrid self-interest replacing legitimate social science, create environments within departments that encourage students and faculty to engage with policy and publicly relevant problems in a RIGOROUS and RESPONSIBLE way. Personally, I don’t care if a sociologist or political scientist or psychologist manages to get rich doing research for a company or state department; hell, we should all be so lucky. In a world where sociology and other such disciplines are critiqued as being stuffy and out of touch with reality, we can ill afford to try and dissuade young scholars or more seasoned academics from engaging with publicly visible and relevant debates. We just have to make sure it gets done in a responsible way, and that even the most entrepreneurial researchers understand and value the need for theoretically and ethically sound research.

  • David Crookall

    Excellent. Very useful in team training and building, especially when using simulation/gaming.

  • Stevan Harnad

    HEFCE/REF Policy Proposal Facilitates Green OA

    Two remarks:

    1. Chris Wickham is quite right that this collection of 8 essays for the British Academy lacks an essay that makes the case for Green OA (self-archiving): it is focussed on Gold OA publishing.

    This is a pity since, as Chris also notes, the rest of the world is taking the Green route; only the UK, because of the Finch Committee recommendation and the resulting RCUK policy preference for Gold, is even considering taking the Gold route, with its constraint on journal choice and its double-payment (Gold OA fees on top of subscription fees to must-have journals that cannot be cancelled). The proposed HEFCE/REF policy expresses no Green/Gold preference, but requires repository deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication, which in fact facilitates Green.

    2. However, Chris misleadingly equates Green OA with embargoed OA, and I suspect his preference for Green might be more because of a preference for embargoes than a preference for OA.

    Green OA means immediate, permanent free online access to peer-reviewed journals. The majority of journals do not try to embargo Green OA, and for authors who want to comply with the embargo of the minority of journals that do, they can still deposit immediately and rely on the repository’s automated eprint request Button to provide requesters with a copy with one click. This Green option is also facilitated by HEFCE/REF’s proposal to make immediate deposit a precondition for making articles eligible for REF.

    Nor should the sustainability of journals’ current subscription revenue streams be a constraint on the evolution of journal publishing in the online era. Green OA mandates can and will eventually allow subscription cancellation, thereby inducing journals to downsize to managing peer review alone, offloading all access-provision and archiving on the global network of Green OA repositories, and convert from today’s over-priced and double-paid Fools-Gold OA fees to affordable, sustainable post-Green Fair-Gold OA fees.

    Harnad, Stevan (2013) Comments on HEFCE/REF Open Access Mandate Proposal. Open access and submissions to the REF post-2014 http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/349893/

  • Stevan Harnad

    Green Open Access (OA) does not mean delayed/embargoed access.

    Sustaining journals subscription revenue streams is not a justification for trying to embargo author-provided Green OA.

  • David Crookall

    Excellent book. One might almost say that the “green branding swindle” is akin to climate change denial by the back door – even more hideous. A must read for all management, business and marketing students, and also the public at large.

  • Robert Dingwall

    The uncorrected evidence from the BIS Select Committee is now online at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmbis/uc99-i/uc9901.htm

    The relevant quotes from David Willetts are:-

    (Reply to Q113) Thirdly, you can set the conditions for the deposit of the data behind the research-the so-called CC-BY option.

    (Reply to Q125) Perhaps the most significant in the long run, but the most technical in the short run, is the third change. There is a prize here of access to all the data sets behind publicly funded research, not just in the UK but in the other leading science nations. I have been at international discussions where, looking around the table, we have recognised that between us we are paying for 75% of the world’s cancer research. Just imagine that every data set behind every piece of cancer research funded by a public agency in the UK, Germany or the US was searchable with a common technical standard. I see linking up the data sets as ultimately the big prize. That again is why I think academic publishing is a genuinely value-added activity. For that you need to agree a set of technical standards and the data has to be available in a certain form. It is not necessarily the case that a cancer expert working away at Addenbrooke’s will also be an expert in exactly how the data for his cancer research project should be made accessible to someone doing another cancer research project in San Francisco. That is the big prize here. Although CC-BY has its detractors and it is not perfect, one of the reasons why I particularly like gold open access is the requirement to deposit the underlying data in an accessible form with a shared technical standard. I think that will be transformational in the future.

    (reply to Q153) The rationale is absolutely clear, and I think there is a significant amount of academic support for our approach. It goes right back to my earlier cancer research example. Part of what we are paying for is the underlying data to be available. That is a really important principle that is very strongly supported by many people in the academic community.

    I see nothing here to justify amending my comments in the original blog post…

  • Sara Miller McCune

    Tom,

    I think this is a really good introduction to Bill Wilson’s address (which I was privileged to hear when it was delivered in DC). You also make an important point about the critical importance that social science research and writing can bring to the formation of better and more just public policy. Thank you.

    Sara

  • Mamadou Bah

    Hello,
    I am in the development field working for USAID for almost 3 years now. My backgroung is Accounting in the bachelor, Economics in the Master and now I am looking for either Sociology or Policy. I am thinking of a PhD in Social Science, or Public Policy/ Public Administration….not only for academia (cause I currenlty teach a project design class at a university in Africa) but for consultancy in the long run. I don’t want something that is 100% therory I reather want a practical view point.
    Do you have any suggestion on good school that are very oriented professional where one can work closely with NGOs and or individual consultant.
    Thank you for you reply

  • codeine

    Your article has verified beneficial to myself.

    It’s really educational and you are clearly very experienced in
    this region. You possess opened up my face to various thoughts about this
    specific matter together with intriquing,
    notable and strong content material.

  • William J. Kelleher,

    William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
    Email: Internetvoting@gmail.com
    Blog: http://tinyurl.com/IV4All
    Twitter: wjkno1

    Don’t forget, the Western Political Science Association just had a big meeting, too. My favorite paper presented there is,
    How NIST Has Misled Congress and the American People about Internet Voting

    A new study of Internet voting in the USA reveals that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has MISREPRESENTED its “research” on Internet voting security. NISTIR 7770 copied from another report on Internet voting – No Science
    Complete study at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2229557

  • Phillip Lord

    Fantastic post. We need more like this. I mean, seriously, most of the time the open access debate is rather straight-faced, about enabling better access to knowledge for all, and helping to reduce the enormous costs of publication, enabling better science and curing cancer. No, wait, my mistake, that last bit is the Daily Mail.

    So, it’s a delight to see Godwins Law finally appearing in the debate. Not before time. More, more, more I say.

  • Robert Dingwall

    This is a very difficult area because so much work has been done retrospectively trying to compare apples and oranges with a lot of statistical jiggery-pokery. These data are interesting – but they are also broadly consistent with Davis’s work – which underlines even more strongly the lack of difference in citation impact over a two year period.
    Davis, P. (2008) ‘Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial’, BMJ 2008;337:a568; doi:10.1136/bmj.a568
    See also the interview with Davis at http://www.researchtrends.com/issue12-july-2009/expert-opinion-3/

    OA may get work read – but this is not the same as citation and impact. How many of us have folders full of downloaded pdfs that we vaguely mean to read some day or which might come in handy sometime?

  • Ahmad Fornell

    One thing that can always knock you for a loop is losing a big account. This, for sure, is a matter for immediate, concentrated attention. But before you make this call, think. You may get only one chance to turn things around. You must be sure you 1) understand the customer’s complaint and reason for canceling and 2) be prepared to address these points in deft detail. You must be as clear as you can be with why this key customer is quitting. What has she said before that’ll give you a clue? People usually don’t cancel without warning; there are omens. What were they? And what have you done and can you do to answer these concerns and make things better? Remember, the goal is keeping this person happy and the account where it belongs: with you. And this is going to take thought and constructive action.`

  • Ted Chelmow, Ph.D.

    Dear Dr. Wronka,

    You raise some very significant concerns about the reduction of resources for research. I share these concerns and appreciate the privilege to add to this dialogue. In recent years funding for research has dropped significantly across a range of areas: health, social policy, social science, the arts, history etc. I equate the term research with learning or education. I also reflect to what degree we sometimes need to research things. I simply mean that issues like poverty, racism or universal health care and universal education (whether it be vocational education or college) under certain light may need no further research — culture seems to know (but disregard) that poverty and racism kill people and that universal health care and universal education would lead to a healthier more productive society. In those instances research dollars might, through a human rights consciousness, be allocated to a different kind of “living laboratory”–the laboratory of our lives–our children in particular–grow our neighborhoods, grow our schools.

    I think the seed for human rights consciousness may lay within our primary schools. City dwelling children, internet savvy children, tv viewing children, blog listening children–all have access to ‘heavy’ news and information. Through these vehicles and perhaps their lived experiences they witness war, violence, natural catastrophes, man-made catastrophes, poverty and hatred. It seems we overlook the opportunity to begin teaching children about a just social order, an order that promotes well-being. A child growing up in the USA who learns the plight of individuals experiencing homelessness or housing vulnerability may grow up to see this as unjust. A child growing up witnessing gun violence or other life threatening crime may grow up with a deep seated conviction to contribute to a much more benign social order. The potential for growing a human rights culture can begin in schools, our homes and in our community discourse.

    There are many sad ironies in this country. Deeper learning from our own tragedies seems to be absent in much of our culture. Gun control is at the forefront of my mind these days. To my reckoning we have had two Presidents assassinated with guns. We have had Columbine Colorado which was preceeded by myriad school shootings and sadly followed by multiple school shootings including the tragedy in Sandy Hook Connecticut. Additionally we have lived through the gas crisis of the seventies only to return to the gas crisis in this century. Our cars continue to be large. Bio diesel has existed since the invention of the diesel engine over 100 years ago. Homelessness has been in our public discourse for hundreds of years.

    The challenges to develop and expand consciousness around human rights, especially right here in the USA, are significant but not insurmountable. I applaud the quest to secure research dollars and research initiatives that will help expand human consciousness around human rights. I only hope that this particular canon of research is released from privileged Ivory Towers and instead passionately takes the form of participatory action research. As we inform each other about injustices and social strengths, we work to bring about a changed social and cultural order. Knowledge is clearly not enough.

    Theodore Chelmow, LMHC Ph.D.
    Human Rights Researcher and Activist.

    • Dr. Joseph Wronka

      Dear Dr. Chelmow,

      To expand research initiatives on how to move towards a human rights culture, how wonderful! I couldn’t agree with you more. The challenge is to use the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights documents that further expand upon the principles of the Universal Declaration as frames of reference for “meaningful” research, such as participatory-action research that you mention and let me add other approaches, like in-depth qualitative research interviewing, focused group interviewing, content analysis, and plain old observation, which some human rights activists have referred to as “bearing witness.” All those approaches are interrelated, of course, yet the thrust of those approaches, and let us not forget at times quantitative research, is that it is important to write about others, with others to engage in creative dialogues to fulfill human rights for all.

      The Universal Declaration, for instance, speaks about human dignity as a fundamental human right. But, what is human dignity? How do people (adults, adolescents, and children) experience it? What situations were there when they were not treated with human dignity? What can we learn from those experiences so that, despite good intentions, which may pave the way to Hell, as Eleanor Roosevelt often reminded us, a person’s sense of dignity is entirely intact. I am thinking here of some of my experiences in Alaska. There, many Alaskan Natives had practiced a subsistence life style for centuries. Along came western helping initiatives, like food stamp programs, welfare programs in general, shopping centers, and the like, all with the aim of helping. Why then did some of my students tell me that things were so easy now, that that is not how they learned to live from the elders? Dignity was earned through developing skills at hunting, fishing, and gathering fruits, plants, and berries, not by collecting food stamps.

      The Universal Declaration also speaks about non-discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, gender, political opinion etc. (Article 2). Its point is that the basic criterion to have one’s rights realized is that one is human…. end of discussion! Some questions then are such “accidental” characteristics asserted in a country’s federal and/or state or provincial constitutions? From the Latin constitare meaning “to choose,” such constitutions represent choices that societies have made to guarantee rights in their communities. Sadly, in the USA at least, the federal constitution does not emphasize any of those characteristics mentioned above, but only some states, which ought to serve as “laboratories of democracy” to use Justice Louis Brandeis’s words, assert those rights. Roughly, as my content analysis of the US Constitution and 50 state constitutions revealed, for instance, 14 states prohibit discrimination on the basis of race; another fourteen on the basis of gender; only one on disability (Massachusetts), and so on. Good research might be to monitor how states are moving towards compliance with the Universal Declaration (and other documents to be sure). The hope is that, should government be our omnipresent teacher as Brandeis reminded us, we the people would learn the importance of non-discrimination and hopefully have a “lived awareness” of this knowledge, carried into our everyday lives.

      Well, that is some food for thought (and action) for now. For the time being, I will stop here. Any comments, constructive criticisms, questions are always welcome.

      Oh, yes. Thank you, Dr. Chelmow for your thoughtful response.

      In solidarity,

      Dr. Joseph Wronka

  • Alton F Ogborn

    Interesting essay. There is a lot of smart people out there! 🙂 🙂

  • tiffany267

    Glad to see sustainability becoming a more visible and respected value in business management circles. Thanks for the nice post.

  • thisisfuerza

    This is a great post! I will definitely be checking out those books. I have recently also posted about bullying at work, as it is such a taboo subject, awareness needs to be raised. It would be great if you could have a read and join the discussion.(Does bullying still even happen when you’re an adult?) http://wp.me/p2FXcc-46

    Thanks
    thisisfuerza.wordpress.com

  • Joseph Attard

    Yes. Unfortunately it is very difficult to get the appropriate security clearance to gain access to prison inmates in the UK and the US. I have experienced this first hand for my doctoral research. Research with these inmates will surely enrich our knowledge base.

  • Benjamin Geer

    While all this is probably good self-help advice, what’s missing here (and I find this strange on a site called Social Science Space) is a sociological discussion of the academic hiring process, specifically how it reflects relations of domination and the power of cliques, as well as entrenched inequalities and superstitions that enable established academics to prevent challenges to their dominance, regardless of their actual competence in their field. I’m starting to wondet whether the purpose if this site is actually to promote a false, rosy picture of social science, rather than to view it critically as a social phenomenon. The focus on self-help, which is basically a subtle form of blaming the victim, seems like the inevitable result of this.

  • dianabuja

    This is an excellent initiative. As a social scientist (as well as a trainer and researcher in smallholder livestock-crop dynamics) I find that the use of my soc. sci. skills often are often brought into the mix ‘incognito’. This is not the case with my biological (etc) sci. skills

  • Jacob Felson

    The explanation for this effect that immediately comes to mind is the greater social controls on women in Muslim-majority nations. But the authors found that the difference between Muslim and Christian didn’t go away when controlling for a measure of women’s freedom. Anyway, this is something that might be interesting to explore in a future paper.

  • Benjamin Geer

    So what are these rules, then?

    Could it be that those who know are hoarding their knowledge?

    • just a person

      Good point.. they are loose among the writing. Seems he doesn’t have the best writing skills, as these rules are not the point of the article, rather the complaints are. Middle school in Jacksonville FL (oh how uneducated) taught us not to stray from the point of the essay.

  • Sarah

    Building teams in general is a hard part when almost all the members are new to each other, i could remember when we are still transistioning to a new structure where we go to a series of seminars just to get the chemistry of the entire team in sync. This is a great article on how to build successul one.

    Great work!

  • Benjamin Geer

    How to enable sociology students to become sociologists? My sociological answer: create jobs for sociologists. I’m pretty sure that employment opportunities influence career choices much more than textbooks do.

  • flood damage

    After going over a few of the articles on your blog, I honestly appreciate your way of blogging.

    I saved it to my bookmark website list and will be checking back soon.

    Please check out my website as well and tell me your opinion.

  • Neil

    Plagiarism is a grave issue and it will be difficult to combat the issues of copied content unless you start using a reliable plagiarism check tool that can detect whether someone is cheating on you.

  • David Walker

    Can I underline three of Harvey Goldstein’s points:
    a) all ‘professional’ data users, especially social scientists, should be pro active and play a leading part in checking the presentation and use of public statistics. This may entail identifying gaps and demanding data.
    b) putting our shoulders to the wheel and trying to raise standards of public debate and public literacy in data. The new Nuffield/ESRC/Hefce initative on quantitative methods in undergraduate social science is blazing a trail. Shouldn’t all social scientists (and historians) be required to possess a minimal level of statistical literacy before they are allowed to graduate – the disciplinary associations and the Academy have a role here. And among the wider public, too: social scientists should be pressing to get more basic data analysis into A level and other post 16 qualifications. The RSS getstats project, which Harvey mentions, is dedicated to boosting for example the capacity of journalists to handle numbers and data better – and there’s progress to record
    c) putting fire in the bellies of the existing regulators, especially the UK Stats Authority, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility and the National Audit Office, in insisting official data is verified and reliable – but also presented in ways that recognise the low level of public statistical literacy.

    c)

  • Ani Munirah

    I have a friend who is reviewing the legal framework for fire and rescue services in Malaysia. And her research is purely qualitative.

  • Tomas Wollenburg

    i love to do adventure travel since it is very exciting and fulfilling activity to do.’

  • Kevin Walke

    Hi,

    I was wondering if you had plans to setup an rss feed so people can download the podcasts using free software? e.g. gpodder
    My partner and I are both linux users, so itunes is not an option for us. If it’s any help I volunteer myself to help set this up for you!

    Kind Regards
    Kevin

  • Ethel

    Its like you read my mind! You appear to know a lot about
    this, like you wrote the book in it or something.
    I think that you can do with a few pics to drive the message home a little
    bit, but other than that, this is wonderful blog.

    A great read. I’ll certainly be back.

  • mel bartley

    It would be nice to see less of these dispairing blogs from PhD candidates in social science. There is a HUGE demand for people with knowlege of social structure plus competence in social statistics. You don’t have to be Einstein, just a sound grasp of how to interrogate a data set. If you are starting from not much of a mathematical background there are huge amounts of help and support available for you.There is a £3000 supplement to the standard ESRC grant for doing advanced quantitative methods. And with the avent of Big Data you are guaranteed a job at the end.

  • Celinda

    Greetings! I’ve been reading your site for some time now and finally got the courage to go ahead and give you a shout out from Porter Texas! Just wanted to mention keep up the good work!

  • Patrick McFadden

    I do talk about the importance of finding your passion – as a pre-requisite to finding work that you love.

    I hope all of us have things in our life that we’re excited about – and those should help us identify our passion. Having a little life experience is a great help in uncovering our passion – because it’s not so much bringing something new into our life as it is uncovering what’s already there. Pablo Picasso said, “All children are artists, the problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

  • Stephanie (Bennis) Shirley

    I’ve always believed our identities and our passion to be closely linked. The more they align with each other, the more we are motivated and driven toward reaching a certain goal. As an entrepreneur, I know I’ve seen this in myself. I really come alive when the work I do is what I’m passionate about.

  • cordieaziz

    I totally agree with this. Just blogged about the dangers of not following your passion! Looking forward to the upcoming parts as well.

  • Mohammed Viquaruddin

    Its a kind of your own that provide such spectrum to the field of social sciences. A valuable platform for the candidate who is a part time job holder and could think better for providing his services as a faculty for Political Science (Visiting). Apart social sciences have great scope for developing/third world/middle eastern nations. As a part of human/humanoid society research expands its vicinity even through electronic medium we can serve our best for all living beings of earth.

  • Mike Taylor

    Oh, silly me — I see it now. I’d not realised this was another piece by the author of the “open access => neo-nazis” piece.

    In the end the question on open access comes down to this: do you want your 106 papers to be read by a tiny set of colleagues who work in the same subfield of HSS as you do? Or do you want them available to the world, shaping opinion, informing policy, and changing people’s lives?

  • Mike Taylor

    I don’t undertand what HEFCE have said that is supposed to imply that they would have prevented you from publishing some of your papers.

  • Robert Dingwall

    Very difficult to know where to begin to correct Charles Oppenheim’s errors or Steve Harrad’s blinkers. Firstly, as was made abundantly clear at the AcSS conference at the end of November, the Finch Commitee Report does not apply solely to research funded by certain funding agencies – it applies to all research by publicly-funded academics in the UK, which means everything produced by anyone with a salary from a UK public university or accommodated by that university on an external grant. Second, academics in the social sciences and humanities do have small but significant opportunities to derive economic benefits from the re-purposing of their journal articles. As David Golumbia correctly notes, OA expropriates those property rights. This is exactly what internet piracy amounts to in relation to music or movies. It has been recognized by the declaration of UK history journals that they will not adopt the CC-BY licence because they want to protect their authors’ rights in a sector where a parallel trade book market exists. Third, quotation is currently restricted by ‘fair dealing’ provisions under copyright law. It is not open to any unauthorized user of my work to rewrite it in full to suit their own purposes: mash-ups are not allowed. When the Open University, for example, wanted to abridge one of my papers for a course reader, I had the unequivocal right to know that they were doing this and to approve their editing to ensure that the result remain faithful to my intentions. CC-BY strip this away. Fourth, it is increasingly clear that Green repositories of pdfs are a pretty poor substitute for Versions of Record with metadata, linkages and usage metrics. It seems that most UK university repositories consist mainly of hotlinks to journal abstracts, which allow these functions to be sustained. AS a content creator, of course, I want my work to be read – but I do not want to be stripped of my rights to derive economic benefit where appropriate or, in particular, to prevent abuse of my content.

  • Benjamin Geer

    I feel your pain. Shipping books to and from Egypt is possible, but it’s expensive and a huge hassle. My solution was to scan a large number of books in London, bring PDFs with me to Cairo, and read them on my computer screen. This worked OK for me; I don’t mind reading long texts on the computer.

  • Bernard Rentier

    First of all, in the traditional model, authors give away their rights to publishers, at least for articles (books are a different matter altogether). But correcting the mistakes and misconceptions in this post is too hard a task. Almost every statement is flat wrong. Whether it is on purpose or just because of a lack of information/understanding is difficult to say and does not really matter. In any case, it is pure disinformation.

  • Neuroskeptic

    Sorry, what’s this got to do with Hitler? I don’t see the connection.

  • Dennis Eckmeier

    I disagree strongly.

    Individual scientists who make DIRECT contributions to translations of their work into products can opt for patents instead of publications, often act as (paid) consultants for the industry or found their own companies.

    Publicly funded scientists are honored for their impact with public grants and prices. If you simply find the knowledge that somebody else can use to create a product, I don’t see why you should be ‘rewarded’ for it by the private sector. It’s like saying everybody who builds machines with mechanical parts should pay Newton and any other physicist in the field of mechanics for it.

    The scenarios of intelectual abuse painted by the author are not ‘future results of open access’, they are happening NOW and have been happening throughout the whole ‘era’ of traditional publishing. If right-wing radicals (for me as a German ‘NAZI’ has a very distinct meaning) abuse your work, spread it among left-wing radicals. 😛

    If you work for industry, you don’t even get public acknowledgement for your findings. Your boss decides whether you may have a piece of the cake or not. Your work is owned by the corporations first. If you are funded by the public, you work for the public and your work has to bring intelectual profit to the public and you will be publicly acknowledged.

    Scientists chose to be in academia. It is increasingly hard to get there and you don’t if you are not passionate about it. I personally find it rather humerous to argue with personal rewards from industry. We have the tools to get those without publishing the traditional way.

  • Stevan Harnad

    This is just to agree with every single point made by Professor Oppenheim. Professor Dingwall’s article was remarkable uninformed.

  • Björn Brembs

    Thank you very much, SAGE, for providing us with yet more evidence as to why universities and other publicly funded research institutions should cut all ties with corporate publishers of your ilk. I’m looking forward to the day when I don’t have to deal with multi-billion dollar corporations any more, who pull the Nazi card on me (I’m German!) as soon as their business model is being threatened by new technology. This day will now come just a little sooner, thanks to you.

    • Sage

      Hello Bjorn,
      Just a quick note from SAGE (this is Mithu Lucraft replying on behalf of SAGE) to add to this thread that socialsciencespace exists for community discussion: neither this, nor any other individual blog post added by a member of this community has been written by, edited or endorsed by SAGE, other than those which are clearly posted under the SAGE account. You can read more about why we launched socialsciencespace here: http://www.socialsciencespace.com/about/. I sincerely hope that this site will continue to attract a range of viewpoints from across the social science community, regardless of their stance. Comments, as you can see here, help to facilitate further conversation with our bloggers, so please do join in. We also welcome contributions from anywhere across the social science community: if you’d like to get involved why not get in touch with our editor via info@socialsciencespace.com? Very best wishes, Mithu

  • Mike Taylor

    Thank heavens the writer of this absurd piece of flamebait Godwinned himself right in the title, saving us the frightening prospect of anyone taking it seriously.

  • David Leigh

    Social scientists sometimes contribute to their own limited influence. Some confuse activism with science, and assume they have the answers before any investigations begin. A little more humility and thoughtful analysis would go a long way.

    One might hope that politicians would be able to distinguish scientific analysis from ideological assertions but, unless the social science disciplines themselves recognize the differences in quality of the two contributions, the public is likely to continue making overly broad generalizations.

  • Stevan Harnad

    “BIOMED IS ALREADY LARGELY OA?”

    Please have a look at the actual data.

    It’s not just the US and the Social Sciences that will not join the UK’s Gold Rush. Neither will Europe, nor Australia, nor the developing world.

    The reason is simple: The Finch/RCUK/BIS policy was not thought through. It was hastily and carelessly cobbled together without proper representation from the most important stake-holders: researchers and their institutions, the providers of the research to which access is to be opened.

    Instead, Finch/RCUK/BIS heeded the lobbying from the UK’s sizeable research publishing industry, including both subscription publishers and Gold OA publishers, as well as from a private biomedical research funder that was rather too sure of its own OA strategy (even though that strategy has not so far been very successful). BIS was also rather simplistic about the “industrial applications” potential of its 6% of world research output, not realizing that unilateral OA from one country is of limited usefulness, and a globally scaleable OA policy requires some global thinking and consultation.

    Now it will indeed amount to “a handout from the British government” — a lot of money in exchange for very little OA — unless (as I still fervently hope) RCUK has the wisdom and character to fix its OA mandate as it has by now been repeatedly urged from all sides to do, instead of just digging in to a doomed policy:

    Adopt an effective mechanism to ensure compliance with the mandate to self-archive in UK institutional repositories (Green OA), in collaboration with UK institutions. And scale down the Gold OA to just the affordable minimum for which there is a genuine demand, instead of trying to force it down the throats of all UK researchers in place of cost-free self-archiving: The UK institutional repositories are already there: ready, waiting — and empty.

    Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Brody, T, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness. Open Access Week 2012

    Harnad, Stevan (2012) Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report. LSE Impact of Social Sciences

    ________ (2012) Digital Research: How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised. Digital Research 2012. Tuesday, September 12, Oxford.

    Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2012) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest. Comments and clarifications on “Going for Gold”

  • rolf knijff

    Come on: how can knowledge double ‘every two years’? How would we calculate that? I don’t know of a ‘unit of measurement’, Not a quantitative, nor a qualitative one.

    Rolf Knijff

  • Lisa Lane

    Unfortunately, in this fast food, buy now and worry later, take the easy route world we’ve slipped into, not enough people are willing to consider future consequences. Even now, with the evidence impossible to ignore, not enough people are willing to look at the impact they have on this impending threat–if it’s not right in front of their noses, causing them immediate suffering, they don’t want to think about it.

    Not only is education key in slowing the exponentially growing snowball we’ve created, but people need to know there are simple things they can do to contribute their share. There also needs to be more incentive to get the lazier and more apathetic factions of society involved, as well as a vocal push toward developing renewable energy sources.

  • Lisa Lane

    I wrote WORLD-MART when I worked as a manager for a large, corporate retail chain. The experience was a huge eye-opener, to say the very least. I found that there was a ridiculous disparity between workers’ pay, manager’s pay, and that of the “corporates” at the top of the food chain. I remember once sitting in a managers’ meeting, fuming at the fact that the company had decided to spend ten MILLION dollars to change their storefront signs all across the country–and yet was too cheap to pay their lower management anymore than ten to twelve dollars an hour (capped).

    Moreover, the corporate environment has produced a generation of polo shirt-clad “expert idiots”–people who are poorly trained in their departments, and therefore of little to no help to customers. The majority of them are apathetic about their jobs given their minimum wage pay and erratic shifts. Worst of all, however, is the destruction of small businesses they leave in their wake. I’ve also worked for a “mom-and-pop” business that sold the same types of products, and the difference in hands-on training, employee welfare and pride, and worker turnover was astounding.

    I’ll check out your post on climate change–another subject I feel very passionately about (and also covered in WORLD-MART, coincidentally enough).

  • Lucy Berbeo, Contributor, Management INK

    Thanks, Lisa. This sounds like an interesting read and a relevant one. Though it’s a scenario perhaps as frightening as that of “1984,” it certainly hits close to home.

    Please check out today’s post on getting folks to act on climate change, too: http://bit.ly/V2PmTm

  • Lisa Lane

    I would like to encourage you to check out the novel, WORLD-MART, which, among other things, speculates a future in which the world has become a corporatacracy.

  • Lucy Berbeo, Contributor, Management INK

    Thanks for sharing these additional resources, Margie! This project is right up social marketers’ alley, as they aim to change the behavior of individuals for society’s greater good. Educating the public is crucial, as is encouraging individual action. As the SMQ article concludes, if we can learn to stop littering, we can surely learn to step away from the plastic bottles.

    We’ll be covering more sustainability-related topics in the coming weeks, and would definitely welcome your insights!

  • Scott Colby

    People behave according to the contingencies of reinforcement. Every behavior can be attributed to six causes:

    We behave according to six causes:
    1. Genetic Endowment
    2. Pre-natal chemical environment
    3. Post-natal chemical environment
    4. Pavlovian Conditioning: stimulus-stimulus-response
    5. Skinnerian Conditioning: stimulus-response-consequence
    6. Traumatic factors

    These are the causes for behavior and they work through generalization, discrimination, avoidance behavior, punishment, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, etc…. People are violent or non-violent because they had reinforcing causes for their behavior based on an evolutionary history, environmental history and the current situation. You are an oxymoron that writes ignorant books because you were conditioned to give all causation to the brain and none to the environment, ironically the environment made you ignorant and makes you never stop writing idiotic books as your Harvard degree and calling yourself a scientist makes you popular to pseudo intellectuals so your modus operandi is determined. You will always ignore The Reluctant Alliance: Behaviorism And Humanism and it’s documented facts that improve the human condition. Your behavior has been conditioned to be pathetic and reinforce ignorance. Have A Day!

  • David Golumbia

    I just want to emphasize the point you make about corporations. While I work in the humanities where corporations are unlikely to profit from my research, the fact remains that the OA movement is almost entirely focused on the not-for-profit sector, despite the already-heavy reliance of industry on research that was in part funded by government. Because that research is protected by intellectual property laws against which there is currently no credible protest, the OA movement ends up saying that poorly-paid academics must be forced to give their work away for free to corporations who already stand to profit from it, but can now do it even more widely and without cost–exacerbating the “closed knowledge” problem rather than truly addressing it, and soaking up potential profits (from “technology transfer”) from academics and/or giving theme serious reason to consider withholding publication even more than they already do.

    The problem OA claims it wants to solve is to provide access to knowledge to those who would otherwise be unable to get it. That problem is real, but largely applies to specific parts of the world. Rather than blanket “open access,” this problem could be addressed with direct provision of resources to countries, institutions, and sites that can demonstrate (through some very minimal identification process) that they would not otherwise be able to access the material—this would primarily be for parts of the developing world, which have the most credible case for the access part of OA. But corporations stand to be the major profiteers from OA as it’s currently defined, which is beyond ironic, since there is no reason at all to think they will return the favor in kind.

  • Kacie Phillips

    What a wonderful post! I am so glad to see the work of amazing Texas Tech faculty presented here. Both Dr. Cogliser and Dr. Gardner are amazing assets the Rawls College of Business here at Texas Tech. Great read.

  • Benjamin Geer

    This is a good and much-needed analysis, but what can we do? Publications and job applications barely leave us enough time to sleep and eat, never mind think about some kind of collective action. I think the people who might be able to work on this problem collectively are those who already have jobs, not those who are struggling to get one.

  • Sentime

    Would you kindly send me the electronic copy of this article as i am busy writing a paper along this issue.Contested spaces: mega-events and the production of urban
    space in a post-apartheid city: the case of Newtown,
    Johannesburg

  • Emily

    It would be great if you could broaden the pool of the social scientists you interview. Almost every interview has been with a while, male academic from either the UK or the US. Surely you could feature some of the many, many other types of researchers doing important work.

    • Alison Taysum

      I agree Emily, all networks will need to think carefully about the balance of patterns of participation particularly in the social sciences if there is a serious commitment to developing vibrant and just societies.

  • Shirley Wishart

    The research ethics guidebook site has a section on research under the English Mental Capacity Act 2005 and the Adults with Incapacity ( Scotland) Act 2008. This is incorrect. The Scottish Act dates from 2000

  • Dan Scott

    Hi Simon

    Thank you for your post. As the publisher of two OA journals set up specifically to offer an alternative to subscriptions, you concerns are highly pertinent and ones that I have looked in to deeply. Below are some responses to you points:
    “I continue to believe that learned societies and commercial publishers have a shared interest in opposing open access.” – yes I agree, particularly as many commercial publishers will not be able to replicate the revenues they currently generate from subscription charges by charging article processing fees, institutional memberships or other models.

    “Government-sponsored research assessment exercises have revealed a high degree of correlation between publication in top tier international journals and research excellence.” – yes, but the funding framework is geared in part to journal choice, which perpetuates the system. This is a problem, not a virtue, because these top tier journals are highly selective; the review process is far too slow; authors continue to lose copyright ownership; publishers can almost charge what they want, however inflated the price is; and the taxpayer continues to pay twice, for the initial research and then to read it.

    “a new model would be introduced on the assumption that the producer will pay for the privilege of having research published in a top tier journal.” – in the short term, at least, I don’t think there will be significant take up of article processing charges by authors. Much more likely is that low-cost institutional memberships will allow researchers from a university to make unlimited submissions without further charge, for a given period such as a year.

    “If journals are open to submissions only from those who can pay for publication the contributor pool will be significantly smaller. In addition work that is of an acceptable standard, and paid for, will be privileged over work that is of a higher standard but has no financial backing.” – no, I don’t agree with this: It would be ludicrous for any respectable publisher to diminish quality and editorial integrity in such a way; most OA journals will offer fee waivers in cases of demonstrable need; and there are plenty of subscription-fee journals that are mediocre.

    “Currently, neither contributors nor reviewers stand to lose or gain any direct monetary advantage. A system based around contributor payment loses this element of trust. Can any reviewer believe that their quality judgment will override the will of a high-paying contributor?” – the reviewer won’t know whether an article is paid for or not, or by whom. Journal integrity will be preserved. This argument could as easily be made about subscription journals, by asking whether authors from universities that pay high subscription fees are favoured in the editorial process.

    “Access to the scholarly marketplace would be constrained by the producer pays principle. Producers working for rich institutions, or receiving funding from government or charitable bodies, might be able to pay to have their work published. Doctoral students, early career researchers without permanent posts, established scholars employed by institutions who use their resources in different ways, would all be denied access to publication in journals.” – again, I disagree for the reasons outlined above. Nobody is going to set up an open access journal in reaction to subscription barriers and immediately create a whole new set of barriers.

    “Why should international scholars, with different funding regimes, wish to publish in UK-based journals at high cost?” – I thought payment only applied to British-funded research?

    Some food for thought which I hope is useful in the debate.

    Kind regards
    DAN SCOTT
    Director
    Social Sciences Directory

  • Mary

    Hello,
    Very good article, the truth is that every day is what ocurrre. As a hotel owner, I always left wondering whether we adapt to the times to come or not …. I recommend you form yourselves on the issue of revenue management. I after much hesitation, I took a course at the end Revenue Management, which is both professional hotel and tourism sector but focused on positions, as people who want to gain knowledge of the latest trends in Hotel Management. I made it through http://www.cesae.es/index.php/24-revenue-management/49-revenue-management/, and I can say I am delighted. Good agenda, very práctco I could apply to my day to day in my hotel management.

    I hope you serve.

    greetings,

    Mary

  • David States

    The example cited, quoting an excerpt from a published work with attribution, pretty clearly falls within fair use so it really does not matter whether or not the primary source was published open access or under copyright. The big difference is that a reader could follow up and read the primary source material if it is published open access, but the vast majority of readers would not be able to do so if it was published under copyright only accessible through academic research libraries and expensive subscriptions.

  • Charles Oppenheim

    It is difficult to know where to begin to correct the errors in this piece. Scholars do not get economic benefits from their journal articles at the moment, so why mention economic losses? Neo Nazi or other groups can already quote, selectively or not, from academic papers to promote their cause along the lines described already. The author seems to be confusing the recommendations of the Finch Report – which only applies to research funded by certain funding agencies – with the broader push towards Open Access, and in particular towards so-called “green” repositories, which impose no obligations on authors as to the licence they use. The idea that the prime beneficiaries will be large corporations is also peculiar – the prime beneficiaries of OA is the general public at large. The term ‘copyright piracy” at the end is nonsensical. I would have expected that scholars would WELCOME wider dissemination of their results.

    • Dennis Eckmeier

      Absolutely. I am a researcher and I don’t know any scientist in academia who does not want his work to be read by as many people as possible. It is also seriously annoying when you want to read an article your institution has no subscription for.

      I also see academics making personal profit from their work without hiding their results from the public… literally on the same floor I work on.

  • Esther Adu-Dwumaa

    Yes it seems that everybody uses pop culture as an expression of their difficult circumstances, white and black!

  • Esther Adu-Dwumaa

    That’s a scary thought!

  • Mark R D Johnson

    Sara & Paul’s comments ring very true to me – I have to declare an interest – both as the founding author of the journal Diversity & Equality in Health & Care (Radcliffe Publishing), and as an author currently revising for the n’th time a co-authored article for an Open Access Journal – who is battling to prevent the University admin from foreclosing on the unspent residue in the project account!

    The reference to prejudice against LGBT research is also there for all sorts of other ‘sensitive’ topics like ‘race’/migration/disability – which is why we set up Diversity with a very far-seeing managing editor some 9 years ago! (as Diversity in Health & Social Care)! Many ‘mainstream’ journals avoid such topics or restrict the number of papers they will accept on those minority interest themes. Any action-oriented research or interdisciplinary study tends to run across similar problems. There are specialist journals – yes, but of low impact: and of course the much vaunted ‘Impact Factor’ (s) are highly commercial – restricted largely to a selection of journals covered by certain abstracting processes (medline is very restrictive on which journals it covers) or publishing houses – but to keep my journal alive (and yes, we are considering offering an ‘author pays’ option) needs money to keep the publishers fed and their offices open! But otherwise if not ‘peer reviewed’ what you produce is ‘grey literature’ and might well be excluded from ‘systematic reviews’ (the ‘Gold Standard’ of evidence based policy and practice) as being ‘Grey Lit’. (no, avboid obvious puns/links to recent best seller). To be fair to the equity group in Cochrane and Campbell Collaborations, they do encourage wider searching and inclusion, but most medical searches at least are highly specific and exclusive.

    So, does Finch help? No, i don’t think so.

  • kath

    We are not quite out of the jungle yet are we? working in an office I see this kind of deferrable behaviour a lot amongst the interns that we bring in after they have finished university and are usually fairly inexperienced in the art of workplace politics!

  • Dan Scott

    Dear Sara and Paul

    Thank you very much for your interesting article. Whilst I agree with parts of your assessment, I disagree strongly with others, for the reasons that I will explain below. Fundamentally, if scholarly research was an effective model that, unfortunately, happens to be expensive then perhaps I would agree more, but it is not. Academic publishing is a deeply flawed, archaic, wasteful, monopolistic industry that is absolutely ripe for the sort of overhaul that has been mandated for by the Finch Report.

    I set up Social Sciences Directory in January as a ‘gold’ open access, multi-disciplinary journal.
    The project came about because I was concerned about the obvious and manifest issues within scholarly publishing. If you were starting from scratch, I thought, how would you do things? I then read a number of articles about some of the open access publishers in STM and it seemed to provide solutions to the problems. However, these benefits have not yet transferred to other disciplines but will do in time, so I thought I could be the one that facilitates that move.

    My starting point is unusual, in that I don’t come from either a professional Editing or an Academic background, but have worked in different forms of publishing for nearly two decades and most recently in scholarly publishing for six years. I have always been on the commercial side, and have seen at first hand both the practices of subscription publishers and the impact of austerity measures on library budgets (for more on that, you can read a blogpost that I published on the LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences blog – http://tinyurl.com/chx327h). Whilst I am a huge admirer of the pioneering open access publishers such as PLoS ONE, I do believe that article processing charges costing thousands of dollars, and institutional memberships costing tens of thousands of dollars, are still huge barriers for many academics and departments. Going back to the age old argument that reviewers donate their time for free, but that editorial and production does incur costs, I wondered what would be the minimum price that could be charged, that would cover these costs but not be off putting to potential authors. The figure I decided upon was £100/$150/€120. What will happen next year? Will the prices shoot up? Absolutely not! In fact, my desire is that the growth of Social Sciences Directory will allow APCs to reduce over time and for the company’s status to change.

    Social Sciences Directory is intended to appeal to a broad audience, which will include researchers and faculty but also postgraduate students, possibly undergraduate students and practitioners that are either interested in keeping up with current research or have useful additional content to contribute. User behaviour is changing and searching for content by keyword is now normal practice – the results might come from research papers, but there is a wealth of additional material (conference proceedings, company research, dissertations, presentations, news reports etc) that could also be of value. Research in one field could also have an application in areas that are unintended, and the inter-disciplinary nature of a large collection of work will help to cross-fertilise ideas.

    Our peer review process is based on technical soundness, which cuts out the subjectivity of assessing whether a paper adds to the body of research knowledge (particularly if similar research is stuck behind a subscription paywall). If the reviewer is satisfied that the work is sound, it will be deemed fit for publication. This process has become established in other publishing areas, mainly STM, and has significantly reduced the time to publication for authors, meaning that their work can be disseminated and cited more quickly – I would like to bring the same benefits to researchers in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

    Apart from a handful of premier titles that represent the pinnacle of their scientific discipline, the title and format that the content comes from will be of little consequence. This situation might take longer to arrive at because publication in ranked journals is still so important for individual tenure and department funding but I still believe that is the direction of travel.

  • craig kelly

    Thanks for the information. Following the link now. Climate Change is an intressting topic.

  • kath

    As the snippet with the army major above shows having the ‘group mentality’ is a really important element of all this…I think that, unfortunately, most people have a fairly large moral black spot when it comes to accepting unethical behaviour by members of the group they identify themselves with…you can really see this in international finance.

  • Jeff Pooley

    There’s a lot of circular logic in this kind of thinking–what is really a kind of evolutionary functionalism. The steps are to take a contemporary phenomenon (say, workplace gender relations) and then reverse engineer an evolutionary story that fits the phenomenon. As long as it’s a tight-fitting story–the evolutionary logic seems right–there doesn’t seem to be any need for real evidence.

  • Lilly

    An intriguing discussion is worth comment. I do believe that you ought to
    publish more on this topic, it may not be a taboo subject but typically people do not speak about such subjects.
    To the next! Kind regards!!

  • ipsol

    Does genetic factor really affects human behaviour? How did Biologising humans to mere organism start?

  • Sugel

    Very simply, in cases where private profits and public interests are aligned, the idea of corporate social responsibility is irrelevant: Companies that simply do everything they can to boost profits will end up increasing social welfare. In circumstances in which profits and social welfare are in direct opposition, an appeal to corporate social responsibility will almost always be ineffective, because executives are unlikely to act voluntarily in the public interest and against shareholder interests.

  • Kelly Elshfey

    Those who are working remotely could be left for their own devices. lacking two essential ingredients for achieving superior productivity; the one which is considered highly important is the social contact. where interaction with fellow members of the organization will enhance commitments to organizational goals. being a member of a real team is more motivating than a virtual team. it also facilitates learning from other team member’s experience on a daily and hourly basis. we can safely assume that personal development is accelerated for those who work directly with their team more than those who are working remotely.
    As for the leaders of the team we can also assume that those who lead from distance will lack the necessary personal daily one-to-one interaction with their team members. from what I have noticed, i have found out, motivating those who work remotely becomes difficult, there motive and their needs are less understood if not less recognized by their team leader. Hence weekly face -to- face meeting must be arranged on a formal as well as social level to facilitate direct communication between team members and their leaders.

  • Chhaya Atwal

    This is an great site, I will definitely be sure to add
    your site to my bookmarks

  • sanjeevkverma

    Very sad incident which signifies the growing intolerance in the society. The clamor foe supremacy and false sense of pride at the cost of humanity is the biggest threat to the mankind.

  • Ingo Rohlfing

    I think one should always be skeptical when we are witnessing overwhelming methodological trends in the social sciences, so this is a welcomed warning. But I think two things deserve clarification. First, one can hardly make a case against the inferential leverage of RCT (meaning internal validity). Unlike any other method, the setting described in the main text allows one to assign a causal effect to the treatment. RCT might not be always feasible, but any departure from RCT renders causal inference more protracted and one should be cognizant of the inferential problems of observational designs of whatever sort. Second, the text alludes to the complex interplays of multiple factors producing an outcome. This is an ontological premise that might or might not be true. If it is true, a RCT might fail in discerning a causal effect because it does not adequately model the data generating process. In this instance, the RCT yields the correct inference that the treatment at hand does not suffice to induce a difference on the outcome. On the other hand, if a RCT happens to capture the interplay and manipulates a single element of this interplay, we get evidence that the treatment is causal within the given setting (called causal field by Mackie). This means a knowledgeable researcher should take into account that the treatment works *within* the modeled setting. Thus, the RCT would yield the correct inference again. In total, I am therefore less skeptical as regards the value of RCT.

    • David Canter

      No doubt that the RCT can help to point towards specific causes, but my general point is that not all scientific understanding emerges from identifying specific causes. Furthermore, to use this mechanical cause/effect model as the template against which other forms of insight and understanding are measured is to limit the development of scientific knowledge.

  • Ali

    Hi All. Your comments about feeling lost post Phd are most insightful and very relevant to anyone who’s recently finished. Despite the attention increasingly being paid to career development by grad schools throughout the PhD process, I believe many academics actually encourage students to treat the PhD process as an end in itself. I re-entered academia as a mature student after 10 years working in the field. I too now feel somewhat lost wondering what to do next. Although I’ve loved exploring the theoretical aspects of my field, the (often non functionalist questions) you ask during your PhD often preclude a return to what you were doing before. But ultimately, however unsettling, I think that’s a good thing. For as mateusz and Mark smith eloquently suggest, not only does this require you to re-define yourself (aka identity!) post PhD but it also gives you an opportunity to defy convention about what you’re expected to do afterwards. After all what did you do your PhD for???? In this sense feeling odd afterwards is s good thing and should prompt you to rethink what (and who) really matters.

  • David Canter

    One crucial component of these attempts to generate an equation that relates the power of social science to that of the ‘hard sciences’ that has been lacking in these discussions is the differences in the sizes of the budgets that support research. It took Billions of dollars to get some indication that it was unlikely, probably, that the Higgs boson did not exist. When really major social science projects are funded on a suitably grand scale they change the very nature of society, how people relate to each other and what we take it to be human. Studies of human sexuality and organisational effectiveness, come immediately to mind. But thes ambitious challenging, well-funded projects are the exception not the rule.

  • estgirl2

    Yes, David, I do also think it’s sad that skin colour should be related to behaviour, but it seems that that it is what people still tend to think. I just don’t understand why it is that we think that way. Why we think that way is an unanswered question for me. We don’t seem to be colour-blind at all.

    For example, there seem to be, perhaps uneducated, stereotypes thrown about concerning, for example, black, Asian and white people’s sexualities and some of the stereotypes are not just offensive, but frustratingly confusing. On the one hand, it is thought that race and sexuality have nothing to do with each other, on the other hand, race and sexuality are somehow linked in the minds of some, it seems. Yet it’s not just sexuality, it’s also other types of behaviours, as diverse as how well or how poorly people of different ethnic backgrounds perform at school to saying that some people of certain genetic backgrounds, particularly race, (even though it is probably a small genetic factor compared to other genetic factors) are more prone to crime than others.

    It does, a lot of the time, seem unbelievable, but these still seem to be the stereotypes. Why is an unending question for me.

  • estgirl2

    Or perhaps it could be that the problem is not science itself, but the fact that we do not know all the answers that science gives. The problem is that we do not know everything about science?

  • Simon

    This sounds like an interesting study. I am currently conducting some ethnographic work in an organisation where remote work is the norm and have had some interesting discussions with the senior manager as to how he maintains a “connection” with his remote co-workers.

    An important aspect of this organisation is their values-led nature. Of late I have been discussing with this senior manager how he maintains the values of the organisation and facilitates and encourages these particular values to “live” in the work his remote co-workers accomplish.

    Technology, as you have noted, plays a role in the relationships this senior manager develops but there are also important factors relating to recruitment and induction that are crucial for the development of a productive working relationship.

    I understand that you are considering the dynamics of leadership, however, I was wondering if you had considered the implications this has with regard to the culture/values of an organisation and how they are interpreted and acted upon (or within) by the remote workers themselves. To me, this would raise some interesting findings with regard to the representation of a particular culture and how a culture might still play an important role to an individual even though they occupy a liminal space “outside” (yet inside in many respects) the organisation.

    Anyway, thanks again for the interesting post!

  • Jeff Pooley

    Wonderfully lucid discussion. One angle neglected, probably a sacrifice to concision, is the effect of economics’ rationality and utility-maximizing assumptions on public discourse and even individuals’ self-understanding. In a small way at least, economists’ descriptions have been self-fulfilling: we imagine ourselves, to some degree, as self-interested agent because economists have been describing us this way for decades.

  • estgirl2

    That’s very interesting. From some of my social circles we know of the phrase ‘African time.’ I’m not sure whether you are familiar with the term, but it’s used to describe Africans’, most likely black Africans’, sense of time. We seemed to have observed that, or it seems to be thought that, Africans are unable, or find it difficult, to start things on time. In fact, it is thought that they only start things hours after the activity was supposed to be started.

    For example, if a conference or a party was arranged for 2 o’ clock, Black Africans would start walking in at 4 o’ clock.

    There have even been jokes about this.

    I mention this because you talk about genes and I think that being black is, I don’t know, is it a genetic factor?

    But yes, and we in the family tend to find it hard to arrive at events on time, and some of us think it’s African time, and we think it is time for a change for Africans and their sense of time.

    Could the problem be related to the social attitudes of black Africans rather than the simple fact of them being black Africans?

    • David Canter

      It is so sad Esther that you think for even one moment that good time-keeping has anything to do with generics. It is even sadder that you think it possible that the very limited aspect of your genetic make-up that influences skin colour may also relate to any other aspect of your constitution. On top of this, time keeping is such a socially determined phenomenon, and varies so hugely between individuals, cultures and subcultures and different times and stages in life that there could be no way for it to me genetically determined. It is precisely because of these sorts of damaging ideas that I think it is so important to challenge the attempts to explain all human actions with reference to biology.

  • estgirl2

    I personally think that certain Sociology textbooks were really helpful and quite interesting, especially the ones that discussed different themes and perspectives which provided different theories for the behaviour of different social groups. I also liked the ones that, along with that, included different research methodologies. So I really enjoyed Haralambos’ and Holborn’s Sociology: Themes and Perspectives, a really fat book with all sorts of sociological topics, ranging from the family to the sociology of health and illness.

    I also think Haralambos’ and Holborn’s textbook reflects how good textbooks can be when they reflect the differences between contemporary society and past society. For example, at one time, in the early stages of Sociology, that is, classical sociology, things such as the body and health and illness would not have been considered for sociological study. Now they are, as are many other issues. So, if used wisely, I think textbooks can be a great source of information.

  • Tom Shillock

    “The central argument against biologising can be illustrated with the analogy of trying to understand how the modern motor car has come into being and how it works by knowing only which bits heat up under different conditions. It would be very difficult to make sense of a car from this limited information. But just looking at the pharmacology and neuro-anatomy of people, with metaphors taken from our evolutionary past, is doing something even more simple-minded. It ignores the power of language and culture, self-awareness and consciousness that combine to create the uniquely human person.”

    That seems to me a false analogy / metaphor of scientific investigation in biological science. The rigorous step by step ways in which scientific investigation proceeds, when at its best, is not simple minded because it cannot account for every phenomenon that we can observe right now. Though not doing so is in a sense frustrating it does not entail or imply a fundamental limitation of the enterprise. As Socrates made clear knowledge is rare and difficult to acquire whereas we all have opinions. The history of scocial science is characterized by a fairly low yield of knowledge considering the effort put into it when compared with physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy and even biological science which include genetics / genomics / proteomics and the other ‘omics.

  • Gerald Ferguson

    I still do not see economic-social commentary dealing with dishonesty. It must be part of human decision making, rationalization, and gambling behavior. We all know now how often it occurs.

  • Austin Burbridge

    This website refers to a “podcast” for “Social Sciences Bites” — but I couldn’t find any reference to a valid URL, eg, RSS feed, for such a podcast.

    The Twitter @philosophybites mentions a podcast and offers a link to http://www.socialsciencebites.com, but that is not a podcast URL.

    I looked up Social Sciences Bites in iTunes, and found a URL there. Assuming that it is, in fact, the same podcast referred to here (no way to confirm since there appears to be no mention of an iTunes entry on this website), here is the URL. Maybe someone should consider passing this along to the visitors of this website: http://socialsciencebites.libsyn.com/rss

  • Robert Dingwall

    I was wondering when the obsessive Steve Harnad was going to show up here and start spamming this site. Readers can assess for themselves whether he has actually grasped my observation that authors have intellectual property rights as content creators, that the Finch Report makes no acknowledgement of these and that Open Access is just as much content piracy as illegal file-sharing sites for music or video content. Steve comes from a particular part of the academic world where the incentives are very different from mine. If Open Access makes sense for him, that’s fine – but it is no reason to impose it on the social sciences and humanities as well. Moreover, I shall argue in my next post that it makes less sense for his part of the research world than he thinks.

  • Stevan Harnad

    OPEN ACCESS IS ABOUT AUTHOR GIVE-AWAY CONTENT, NOT ROYALTIES

    The Open Access movement is about making peer-reviewed journal articles accessible online to all users, not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe. Every single peer-reviewed journal articles is an author give-away — given to the journal, to sell, in exchange for peer review. The peers review for free. All the authors want is that their work should be accessed, used, applied and cited. No royalties sought or received. No piracy here, just research and researcher self-interest. What would be piracy would be for publishers, fully paid by subscriptions revenues as now, to try to prevent authors from supplementing the subscription access to their articles by providing free online access for those who cannot afford subscription access. (And that is exactly what the publishing lobby has tried — and now failed — to do).

    None of this has anything — whatsoever — to do with author royalty- or fee-seeking publication, which is what copyright is designed to protect.

    Harnad, Stevan (2001/2003/2004) For Whom the Gate Tolls? http://cogprints.org/1639/ Published as: (2003) Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access. In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003. [Shorter version: Harnad S. (2003) Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 49: 337-342.] and in: (2004) Historical Social Research (HSR) 29:1. In: Origgi, G. & Arikha, N. (eds) Le texte a l’heure de l’Internet. Bibliotheque Centre Pompidou: Pp. 77-103. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/texte2.pdf

  • Sergio Franklin

    It´s always important to discuss and de-mystify the peer review process. As 91% of researchers, according a survey carried out in 2009, think it is necessary to keep good science. I agree we should show its value to the public, mainly to “Young Science network”, who want to know more about peer review process.

    Sérgio Franklin MsC in Information Science
    Universidade Federal da Bahia- Brazil

  • Dan Scott

    Social Sciences Directory (and, shortly, its sister site Humanities Directory) is a multi-disciplinary journal that uses OJS and is modelled on PLoS ONE. I worked in subscription publishing for and became increasingly disillusioned with the flagrant waste of taxpayers’ money, as well as the many flaws within the publishing system itself – loss of copyright, time-to-publication, peer review, the funding systems etc. There is, in my opinion, a great deal wrong with the system and I want to do something about it. Having set my face against the status quo, I am now encountering at first hand many of the obstacles that are in-built in the system, particularly in the UK with the REF. Having agreed a consortium model with Eduserv and disseminated information to universities throughout the UK, there is a good level of support in principle but five main, recurring objections:

    1. No budget. I have tried to learn the lessons from other publishers that have set up as OA but then set article processing charges in the £000s and institutional memberships in the £00,000s. Social Sciences Directory has set APCs at £100 and institutional memberships at £2,000 (with a discounted offer through Eduserv). If the objection about price is genuine – as I am sure in many cases it is, although this could also be a question of timing at year end – then it shows how tight budgets are in many cases. Which only goes to show how unsustainable the present model is, because there is no sign that publishers are slowing their rate of output, designed to relentlessly increase their share of wallet. Library budgets could not keep pace before, and since the GFC and the imposition of austerity measures they certainly cannot now.

    2. Lack of ownership for OA funds. This is, I think, a separate point to the one above. The notion of OA publishing, particularly outside STM in areas such as social sciences and arts & humanities, is still not established. Several librarians that I have spoken to have said that they simply don’t know who would pay the APCs or memberships. Effectively, they are falling down a crack between the library and faculty departments, neither of whom is taking a leadership role in putting in place effective systems and examples of best practice. I suggested in a recent JISCMail post that this needs to be dealt with, possibly by a body such as JISC or IFLA.

    3. Lack of interest by faculty. Perhaps naively, I thought that if alternatives were offered that could be shown to be fair, viable and address the issues, there would be strong support. I have certainly had many expressions of support, but also several examples of a dismissive attitude to any notion of change. I can’t help thinking that this is mainly because most academics operate within a cosy system that rewards them well and insulates them from basic practices such as P&L. Again, as a taxpayer I think this is unacceptable and needs reforming.

    4. Wait and see. The upshot of these is that most universities that have replied to the institutional membership offer have said that they are interested in principle, but will not be an early adopter. The problem with this, of course, for an operation that is self-funded and operating on small margins, is that prevarication suits the status quo but works against alternatives and stifles new entrants (it will be the traditional publishers who latch on to OA and begin to offer their own variants who will benefit). I am currently soliciting papers from other parts of the world and submissions are coming in, but it is a great shame to me as a Brit if the UK drags its feet and fails to take a global lead in this area.

    5. Institutional repositories. Several universities have said that they have established IRs and are encouraging their faculty to deposit papers there, although in some cases they were having problems of their own to make them work. Naturally, I support IRs but wonder if they are an effective solution – many subscription publishers allow authors to publish papers in their IRs, which suggests they do not see them as a threat ie. The work will not be effectively disseminated and therefore not pose a threat to their subscription sales.

    As you can imagine, I was delighted when I read the Finch report. The ‘academic spring’, the Elsevier boycott, the White House petition, David Willetts’ speech in May, the Wellcome Trust’s mandate and the Finch report have all brought the issue of funding and scholarly publishing in to the public domain in a way that it has not been before. Now is the time to act on the report’s recommendations and demand change.

  • alansloane

    On Twitter, you asked:
    Livingstone argues for “triangulation” of research methods – Can researchers do this without big funding? Where does this leave #socsci?

    Drawing on my own, very different scale research (doing a PhD that mixes the methods of Social Network Analysis with Ethnographic techniques and analysis) I think there is indeed a difficulty in the “stretch” that’s required to combine methods. However I don’t think the difficulty is related to big funding or big scale, because not all research needs 25K survey responses (it seems they were even done face-to-face, amazing!).
    Rather the difficulty is in having the requisite depth of expertise in several different methodological approaches. So it really forces social scientists to move away from individual projects and into team-based ones. But then we need to be able to collaborate, co-ordinate, and span the very different approaches and midsets that will be represented in such projects. In that regard I thought Prof Livingstone’s comment, towards the end, was particularly interesting:
    “But I do like to do a good number of interviews myself and I do like to get stuck into the survey analysis. So I just have to be very stretched in terms of skills.”

    So that’s one way to do it – have an experienced, capable and hard-working person who can “do it all” and bring the team together!
    But while that lets you scale up in terms of geography, number of interviews/survey responses etc., I think it would run into trouble if you tried to increase the number of methods you used – there’s only so far you can “stretch” any one individual’s skills.

  • Bala Salisu

    Rebellion for it’s sake is dysfunctional; rebellion against dysfunctional norms is regenerative. The challenge is to distinguish one from the other in today’s highly complex workplaces and to develop safeguards for and against regenerative and dysfunctional rebellions, respectively.

  • estgirl2

    It’s an interesting question. For example, I have been thinking about the theory of poststructuralism and how it doesn’t seem to work in the real world.No one really seems to buy into it, not even students who learn about it, and not even lecturers who teach it.

    That is, we are taught about how some theorists have said that structures no longer work or never have and yet, for example, even when doing an essay on poststructuralism you get marked down for not structuring your essay. Do you see the irony or is that just me?!

    Therefore poststructuralism is just another theory that has to be memorised for an exam, so that we can get marked, and they do this with all the students, to see who’s memorised this and is ready for that and who has not memorised this and is therefore not ready for that,and so on, hence the factory model is an appropriate one. That’s the structure about an essay about poststructuralism.

  • Anne Murcott

    Thank you for an intereseting article. Mine is less a comment, more a request. The statement that adults’ eating preferences are established early in life is widespread. Far harder is finding the underlying research evidence. Is anyone able to lead me to it please?

  • idealistic scientist

    You seem to be assuming – though curiously you never explicitly state this – that ‘open access’ means that the author has to pay the journal to publish her paper. This is by no means the case. There are various ways that the goal of open access can be achieved. One is that the author can put the paper on a preprint archive, such as arxiv which is widely used in physics. Another is simply for the author to put the draft paper on her web page. Another possibility is that a group of idealist and enthusiastic young sociologists – if such people exist – could set up their own electronic journal, free to authors and readers. This has been done successfully, see for example The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics.

  • Ingo Rohlfing

    It is true that the social sciences are getting increasingly “hard” because RCT, more often called lab and field experiments, are getting increasingly common. Moreover, my impression is that social scientists are getting better and better in constructing natural and quasi-experiments, i.e. designs where the treatment is set by nature but can be taken as if it were randomized.
    Having said that, the question is whether hardness is what always counts. In the natural sciences, RCT do not limit the research questions one can answer (at least that’s how I see it). In the social sciences, in contrast, subordination of the research question to the feasiblity of an RCT might leave some highly relevant questions unadressedIf we deal with observational data, we should simply acknowledge the limits of our study instead of pretending to have a quasi-experiment at hand that is a plain observational design in fact. Although I am not an interpretivist researcher, one should also remember that hardness and RCT are simply incompatible with some legitimate strands in the social sciences.

  • Laura Servage

    In my humble opinion, more attention ought to be paid to how the social sciences are taken up by media and policy makers. Attended a very interesting panel at American Educational Research Association conference in 2010 — message was basically that academics consistently drop the ball when it comes to communicating research findings beyond the pages of academic journals.

    As for anti-intellectualism in politics — particularly American politics — just…sigh. Heavy sigh.

  • Tina Hanson

    The social sciences are the key to understanding societal behavior. Intelligent and successful individuals understand this as the means to direct and encourage change. Understanding the needs, drives and motives of people will dictate how new programs are implemented, how cooperation is achieved and ultimately the success of any endeavor. Attempts to marginalize these fields of study are usually undertaken by people (or groups of people) who wish to marginalize the people in their own societies in order to keep them uninformed and powerless so that thier own agendas can be met without opposition. This movement is not only objectionable but frightening as well.
    Most Sincerely,
    Tina Hanson

  • Dena Rosko, MA-ComL

    Hi, In general less than half doctoral students finish, and of those that do, only a small percentage end up teaching or in a tenure track job. The problem is systemic; schools say the PhD exists to train professors, but to me that’s a siloed self-perpetuating institution ill-prepared to reach out and contribute to society as a whole, or even in a given sector. So it’s best to transition higher education program design to applied research, or research practitioner degrees that train students in consulting, reform/policy, entrepreneurship, community development, and/or grassroots efforts and the like and as salient to the given discipline.

    I also blog and curate more ideas about higher education reform at http://bit.ly/pjxead, http://bit.ly/z3oCX7, and http://bit.ly/xZR9Ci

    Thanks for sharing,
    Dena
    http://bit.ly/wy09EW

  • Ron Prinz

    The many behavioral and social sciences fields are quite diverse. What Biglan is talking about, and what Gutting is overlooking (or not aware of), is the emergence over the past 25 years of a cross-disciplinary field called prevention science. Many randomized trials (akin to clinical drug trials) have been conducted demonstrating that it is possible to reduce or prevent serious problems in children and adolescents when interventions are implemented properly. Neither prevention science nor medical trials are 100% effective–but the key take-home point is that programming and interventions to promote healthy child development need to be grounded in evidence, not pontification, speculation, or idiosyncratic assumption. Effective preventive interventions tend to be a blending of public health efficiency (including cost effectiveness), practical and appealing programs, and flexible delivery. Some of the best parenting/family-based programs, for example, are readily accessible and offer parents multiple ways to partake. Let’s not go back to the “old days” when the public thought Freud was the basis for program success; testing Freudian theory was like trying to hit a cloud with a sling shot–you never knew if you hit it!. Behavioral scientists know how to measure child behavior, academic performance, family functioning, social adjustment, and nurturing environments. The science of prevention is alive and well.

  • Jesse Drucker

    Gary Gutting might as well declare that the world is flat. The allegation that “hard sciences” produce more reliable results than do “soft sciences” was invalidated 25 years ago. Larry Hedges published an article called “How Hard Is Hard Science, How Soft Is Soft Science?” in 1987 that demonstrated social scientists actually achieve greater consistency when measuring behavioral properties than do physicists when measuring supposedly stable physical properties. In his meta-analysis of studies that measured the mass and lifetime of subatomic particles, Hedges found that 46% of them had statistically significant disagreement. In other words, physicists cannot really even agree on how much the objects of their study weigh, and those properties are alleged to be constants. Hedges reported that there was greater consistency across studies that measured the effects of open education on attitude toward school, the effects of desegregation on educational achievement, and the effects of teacher expectancy on I.Q. The social sciences actually have more reliable instruments than do the physical sciences.

  • Jeff Temple

    Thanks Tony. Any chance of getting an abridged version of this published in the NYT?

  • Matthew C Mahutga

    Tony Bigland’s rejoinder to Gary Gutting’s criticisms of the behavioral sciences is dizzying in its review of even a small piece of the experimental research that takes place across our disciplines, and thereby goes very far in showing that the behavioral sciences are well equipped to produce cumulative scientific knowledge. I would only add to this the important observation that experiments are anything but a panacea. While experimental research is admirable for its ability to isolate causal relations because of its ability to rigorously control, there is no shortage of research showing that experimental research is weak on external validity–it very rarely approximates the real world. This is particularly true of the social world, where our data points are equipped with the ability to learn and adapt to their environment almost instantaneously. Indeed, the behavioral sciences have made tremendous scientific advances by adopting the logic of the experimental method–attempting to control for confounding influences that might explain away spurious correlations–to the social world. The development of both econometrics and social network analysis over the last 100 years is two small but shining examples of the way in which behavioral sciences contribute to the methodological toolbox of modern science, and thereby the panoply of scientific knowledge. While the findings published in social science outlets can and should be measured against the rigors of the scientific method, equating findings from non-experimental research with non-science is a serious distortion of the strengths and weaknesses of experimental research.

  • David A. Swanson

    As a demographer, I count myself as a social scientist. By a social scientist, I mean those that are largely confined by the nature of the world to doing non-experimental research, much of which is done using “statistical controls.”

    In addition to having statistical and other controls on hand, demographers also can do ex post facto accuracy evaluations of forecasts (predictions). Because of this ability, they have developed general guidelines and criteria not only on what constitutes an accurate forecast, but also on what constitutes a “good” forecast (Smith, Tayman, and Swanson, 2001).

    Errors are made in all demographic forecasts. However, the alternative is to simply assume a demographic future is the same as a demographic present. This alternative provides a means of evaluating forecasts that goes beyond accuracy. That is, one can evaluate a forecast not only for its inherent accuracy but also for the “proportionate reduction in error” it provides relative to assuming the demographic future is the same as the demographic present (Swanson and Tayman, 1995). Using this approach, evidence suggests that one obtains a more accurate picture of a demographic future by forecasting (Swanson and Tayman, 1995) than not forecasting.

    It may be the case that many social science predictions be evaluated in a similar manner. That is, they can be evaluated not only for their accuracy, but for their “proportionate reduction in error” relative to not predicting anything.

    In regard to designed experiments celebrated by Dr. Guttings, I close by noting that the renowned statistician, G. E. P. Box observed in his 1987 book on experimental design with Norman Draper that “…essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful.” Demographers who do forecasts are keenly aware of this maxim and I would speculate that those who actually run designed experiments are as well. I am not sure about philosophers and others who conduct neither experimental research nor non-experimental research.

    References

    Box, G. E. P. and N. Draper. 1987. Empirical Model Building and Response Surfaces. New York, NY: Wiley.

    Smith, S. K., J. Tayman, and D. A. Swanson. 2001. Population Projections for States and Local Areas: Methodology and Analysis. New York, NY: Kluwer Academic /Plenum Press.

    Swanson, D. A. and J. Tayman. 1995 “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Evaluation of Demographic Forecasts.” Population Research and Policy Review 14:233-249.

  • markgraybill

    In coming from a social neuropsychological perspective, I look at Gutting’s doubts as originating in naiveté. However, if we look at all of the fields involved in the solution generation for social problems, even psychology, I can understand his doubts. If you look at mental healthcare for instance, you’ll find a success statistics only slightly better than chance – regardless of what mystical philosophical theory they originated from. But it may be we are using a telescope and should be using a microscope. Unfortunately, the obstacles are deeper than those political or scientific.

    I just took the summer of from a Ph.D. program that focuses on human social nature so to work on a publication on bullying. From an inside perspective of the K-12 academe, and a father and grandfather, the only vantage point that can promise real solutions is the social biological nature of people. This vantage point is so novel to the extant perspectives that I am finding few that get it and no fealty links.

    One of the many problems we face is how limiting Western thought is regarding human behavior. The focus of solutions seems to be either at the population level or at the level of non-social, individual vectors. There seems to be little focus in the popular solution domain on the normative social vectors of behavior that occur at the individual level regardless of the power such understand has to explain behavior even at the population level. Such a vantage point is also missing from this article.

    Understanding the social nature of individuals at the sociobiological level through the lens of evolution provides the “particle physics” of social science. However, traditional blue-blood social sciences seem to have little interest in such vantage points. Maybe this is due to competition? I argue that when we can apply findings from the perspective I suggested in this post, only then can we begin to truly understand groups and populations and thus social problems. But we first have to stop spinning up philosophical theories comprised of social ideas and constructs that from the real world of nature offer little explanation.

    I join Stephen Hawkins that Gutting’s field is obsolete. Philosophy has failed to keep up with science in answering tough questions. So instead we should join the social sciences with biological science, since we have the wealth of findings and the technology to do so successfully.

  • markgraybill

    In coming from a social neuropsychological perspective, I look at these attacks as naiveté. If we look at all of the fields involved in the solution generation for social problems, even psychology, I can understand the views behind these attacks. If you look at mental healthcare for instance, you’ll find a success statistics only slightly better than chance – regardless of what mystical philosophical theory they originated from.

    I just took summer break from a Ph.D. program that focuses on human social nature so to work on a publication on bullying. From an inside perspective of the K-12 academe, the only vantage point that can promise real solutions is the social biological nature of children. This vantage point is so novel to the extant perspectives that I am finding few that get it and no fealty links.

    One of the many problems we face is how limiting Western thought is regarding human behavior. The focus of solutions seems to be either at the population level or non-social, individual vectors. There is little focus on the normative social vectors of behavior at the individual level that explains behavior even at the population level.

    Understanding human individuals first at the sociobiological level through the lens of evolution provides the “particle physics” of social science. I argue that when we can apply findings from this perspective, only then can we begin to understand groups and populations and thus social problems.

  • Jim Emshoff

    Tony – great job on detailing both the methodological advances we have made and the results in terms of validated interventions. In addition to illustrating how rigorous the social sciences have become, I think we should also note that the “hard” sciences aren’t really as hard as we often assume. The effect sizes of medical interventions we take for granted as valid, are often quite small. As in the social sciences, arguments continue on how to measure and analyze a variety of biological and physical phenomena – as they should.

  • Robert L. Weiss

    Dr. Biglan has clearly laid out the accomplishments of behavioral science research as these inform varied health related applications. One would be myopic indeed to ignore the range of applications that have been empirically tested and the benefits that have accrued therefrom. Applied research on the scale Biglan summarizes has indeed been sufficiently reliable to produce results that can safely inform public policy. No small feat this.

  • Rachel Collis

    Tony, Thank you for writing this. It is such a good summary of what is happening in this field. This work could have a meaningful impact on so many individuals. My first contact with behaviorism was through Triple P. I used it with my kids and it genuinely worked. This sort of evidence-based intervention is so important – good luck with spreading the word.

  • Robert Dingwall

    I think it is important to stress that social science is not just about dealing with messy, wicked social problems. It is also fundamental to the positive use of scientific and technological innovation in any field. As soon as you ask how best to promote innovation, you are asking a social science question about incentives, regulation and organization. As soon as you want to get an innovation out into the world, it ceases to be a matter for science or technology and becomes a challenge for social sciences. Who will use it? How will they use it? What adaptations will they make and how can the innovator capture that feedback. If politicians think innovation is going to make an important contribution to getting the world economy out of the present crisis, then investment in the social sciences – and large areas of the humanities – makes a fundamental contribution. These disciplines are not ‘nice to have’ or ‘bleeding hearts’ clearing up the casualties of capitalism: they are essential to prosperity and economic success.

    • Ziyad Marar

      I completely agree with you on that point. In an article to explain we have launched social science space

      http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2011/02/why-we-have-launched-socialsciencespace/

      I set out at five reasons why social science is so important. The fourth of those reasons, which I extract here, echoes your argument:

      4. Natural scientists are arguing for the importance of social science in delivering behaviour change necessitated by the science itself – Climatologists for example routinely argue for the need to shift our focus from the science (which is relatively settled) to the social science problem of changing behaviour in order to tackle global warming. At the launch event David Willetts talked of the difficulty medical researchers face in getting vaccines adopted in societies that are suspicious of Western medicine. They are calling for help from social anthropologists to address the problem.

  • Carlos Fernandez Bla

    …The friends of these separated men, as a group, we think, are more empathetic to their situation, than we would expect from members of less affected groups. That’s, in those neighborhoods, a little charitable help, will go a long way to palliate the effect of the men who are absent. In the form of aid
    with housing, children school difficulties, and employment of the specially strong women in the community.

  • PROF. Dr.M.P.Regmi

    Your discussion is interesting, I will will write in detail later. OK.
    With regards,
    Prof.Dr. M.P.Regmi

  • Ricardo

    This is a fascinating conversation with Harré. It reminds us of the way knowledge in the social science is ‘situated’ but this doesn’t relegate it to the realm of the anecdote. It also has implications for empirical researchers seeking to naively produce ‘what works’ or ‘replication of novel projects’ for policy makers. It is as we know much harder than that. There are also interesting insights here about ‘validity’ and the sense of a convincing story for stakeholders or subjects of research being an important component of such assessments. Thank you.

  • Tim

    Is this podcast available through Stitcher and/or iTunes?

    • MZurn

      Find Social Science Bites on iTunes here.

  • DJ

    Hi there, thanks for the interesting podcasts. Is it possible to subscribe them by Google reader or software such as Juice?

  • James

    Just a quick question. Is it possible to download the podcasts to i tunes?

    many thanks

    james

  • Dr. Chris Johnson

    I guess you oppose the views of the majority of the world including those of the Pope, most of Christianity, Islam, most of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, the Dali Lama and Baha’is that are pro heterosexuality in terms of the sacrament of marriage and shacking up. Typical liberal sociologists which find any behavisor which doesn’t harm (in their view) others as socially acceptable are preaching this in most sociology classes except mine.

  • Anonymous

    Any cahnce of getting an rss feed?

  • Mayuk Dasgupta

    This podcast on ‘what is social science’ is an excellent piece of document and challenges and justifies the existience of social science as an discipline in today’s world.

  • Prof.T.Krishna Kanth

    It sounds interesting to read about “what is social science” and of course and the utility of the social science to the society at large.

    Many thanks to you all

    T.Krishna Kanth

  • Washington

    Some of the best research is going on outside the academia. But some of it doesn’t get published in formats that get indexed, so they are “lost” with time. For instance, research by large government agencies and the firms they hire can be as good as anything you’ll find in academic journals. As you note, this research is not likely to be as theoretical…but still, it’s a considerable amount of knowledge being created.

  • Washington

    Can you make transcripts available? Would help many of us to access this material. Seems like a great resource. Thanks.

    • MZurn

      You’ll be pleased to know that transcripts are on their way!

      • Washington

        Thanks!

  • Susan Gallagher

    3-C Institute for Social Development in Cary, North Carolina (USA), is a great example of an organization outside of academia where PhDs in psychology and other social sciences can pursue research, publish, and develop evidence-based programs. It’s a research and development organization focusing on social-emotional health. I’m sure there are other similar organizations out there.

  • Ogez Ajoku Esq

    Knowledge,and learning should not be commercialized. Globalization,in its true sense entails cooperation and integration,rather than competition. The advanced western powers do not want to accomodate cross pollination of ideas with other nations. This attitude of theirs have variously proved woeful. They commoditize all things,including themselves. Your last paragragh attests to this trend.

  • Ogez Ajoku Esq

    I totally share your dismay. The so-called advanced nations of the west tend to view globalisation as diffusion,assimilation,and/or inculcation. These folks do not view globalization as sharing and robbing minds. They also ignore to consider the real and bitter reality that their compatriots(citizens) yearn to learn and know about other nations and peoples other than theirs.Thus,the western powers shield real knowledge both from us and also their compatriots. They feel irrelevant whenever people from our part of the world exude knowledge and briliance.
    My culture and locally made textiles are always in high demand. But they do not want to grasp that. Their compatriots wallow in so much ignorance towards what happens elsewhere. Globalization should not be all about the west and their products. They know we possess more interesting stories and exciting issues about us. We surely have to depart from their stereotypes.
    I am always available to further deliberate(comment) on burning issues such as this. cheers

  • Tina Hanson

    Very interesting perspective. As I was reading the article I had to wonder why, in a country (USA) where marriage is no longer a top contender for social status, that we have placed this issue in the forefront? So many foundational issues/rights like discriminatory housing, employment, and the right to come of of hiding seem to have been overlooked and pushes aside. Regardless, the West has decided this to be the “Gay Issue” of the times and therefore thrusts it on the international table with expectations that all should devour it with the same hunger that we have. Have we not put “the cart before the horse” so to speak? Very interested to see how China deals with this and other issues, please keep us posted on your research.

    Most Sincerely
    Tina Hanson

  • Christopher B Mugimu

    Sarah, I find your submission so intuitive. I have for a long time failed to realize the power of networking. I strongly agree with you and I have come to realize that it worth spending time and energy. Although it may appear to be time consuming, but it is a great tool to build synergies in unexpected ways. For upcoming academics and consultants reconciling and balancing all the activities and demands associated our role remains a challenge. I should do any way. Thank
    Christopher Educational consultant at CCOED International and Senior Lecturer, Makerere University

  • Dr. santosh Kumari

    As a Plant Physiologist, never get time to string my thoughts and understanding of the society and social behaviour, when my two daughters question me about social issues i.e. how has the teacher – student relationships changed now a days than it was in 1960. My elder daughter is a new student of arts (Sociology, Psychology and history), we are generally busy with sciences.We would like to know what are the issues for research in sociology.Social science space will definitely improve our thinking process.

  • Denny Seiger

    I agree whith Clive. In addition I suspect that universities use exactly these rankings to draft their target journal lists.

  • Denny Seiger

    I agree whith Clive. In addition I suspect that universities use exactly these rankings to draft their target journal lists.

  • Academy of Management Africa Conference

    Update: Program Submissions Deadline: May 15, 2012!

    The Academy of Management is calling for papers, symposia, and workshop proposals for the AOM Africa Conference January 7-10, 2013. To download the call for program submissions or learn more about the Academy of Management Africa Conference, please visit: http://aom.org/africaconference or email the program organizers at: globalconference@aom.pace.edu

  • M Brees

    I thoroughly enjoyed this article on IRBs by Prof Dingman. I rarely see articles done on the rights of the scholar to publish. In the US the core task of the IRB is to protect the subjects of the research by carefully reviewing questions of harm and confidentiality. A latent function of these committees also seems to be to protect a university from bad press by exposing student attitudes or behavior when it might be impossible to hide the identity of the university.

    This leads me to wonder if the discussion might have been somewhat displaced. Looking at the classic cases that led to the IRBS, among other things, – Milgram’s studies of obedience, Zimbardo’s prison experiment, Ascsh’s studies of conformity, and the infamous Tuskegee studies – To create ethical codes for social scientists, and to create oversight groups with the authority to enforce these codes.

    Perhaps a simplistic issue has to do with boundaries: the rights of those studied and the rights of to author(s). In the US, the issue of whether a text is publishable is taken up by peer reviewers, while ethical issues are taken up by IRBs. If IRBs take up the work of deciding what is to be published, a boundary has clearly been violated. However, I am very uncomfortable moving this boundary into the morass of First and Thirteenth Amendment issues. To equate free speech and accurate scholarship creates a space for poor scholarship, and in the end, for intentionally misleading scholarship. The individual does have the right to speak: does the community not have the right to receive scholarly support in evaluating what the individual says? Does the community have the right to presume or create gated pathways through which texts are filtered in terms of accuracy and a grounding in actual data?
    M Brees

    • Robert Dingwall

      An interesting comment. Nothing in what is being discussed prevents peer review determining that some kinds of speech should be taken more seriously than others. You wouldn’t hold the National Enquirer and the New York Times to the same standards but they are equally part of the public realm protected by the First Amendment. In the same way, we can discuss each other’s ethics, as social scientists did before IRBs were invented.

      Schrag’s book is interesting for the way it discredits the conventional history of IRB regulation of social and behavioral sciences as a response to abuses by psychologists – Tuskegee is down to the medics and there are really good arguments why there should be independent review of biomedical research. Zimbardo’s work was signed off by an IRB – but he comments in The Lucifer Effect on how this approval blinded him to what was actually happening. It was only when his girl friend stopped speaking to him because she was so appalled that he stepped back and saw the abuse for what it was. Ethical regulation had outsourced his human ethical sensibility.

  • Francisco Vieira

    Congratulations, this is a very good point. I feel the same when people discuss about emerging economies, like Brazil, for instance. Generally, they write under a narrow perspective and people in these countries do not have access to what they write.

  • nic groombridge

    I regret i cannot attend but see my work on CCTV – some the earliest (1994!) and covering both ‘effectiveness’ and cultural issues too.

  • Tony Butcher

    This is an issue that I find extends beyond the purely academic world.

    I work in social services and find that, since finishing my M.A. in Social Sciences, gaining access to journals and other academic works in order to apply them to good working practices is very difficult. It is impossibly expensive to gain access to ALL journals which would benefit good practice in social care and it begs the question – what use is the research if it cannot be fully disseminated to those who practice?

  • Bruce Ravelli

    Daniel,
    could not agree more. We as sociologists always “talk the talk” about globalization but we rarely “walk the walk”. My hope is that the new generation of sociologists will see our world as more synthetic and integrated than the current one.

  • courtney hughes

    Thank you for this! I am a PhD student and I work part time as a public servant. I also teach sessionally at my university. I don’t know if academia is necessarily the path I want to take, despite loving teaching. I think a mix between academia and the public service, in a research capacity, is an excellent fit for me. Thanks for this! CH

  • Bala Salisu

    At the risk of sounding trite. I must repeat that a picture says more than a thousand words can. Researching any aspect of management using photographs as central tools and materials is certainly interesting. However, we need a well grounded methodology in that regard.

  • Vidya Ananthanarayan

    With all due respect to your point of view, this line bothers me: “…a clear alignment of one’s early-career research agenda with the priorities of institutional sociology seems to be essential for survival.” In other words, make sure your research agenda makes you marketable in terms of career? As academics and scholars, shouldn’t our agenda be the pursuit of truth? Or aligning our research to our passions and interests because that is what fuels them, and not the “publish or perish” model? If we succumb to the marketable paradigm, then how do we teach our students better?

    For the record, this is not a personal attack on your. This is a beef I have with academia in general. And I know only too well about the need for survival and marketability. Catch-22. That said, I completely agree with you on the need for breadth, depth and coherence in the research agenda. With interests in digital media, education, instructional technology, social media, and sustainability, I am grappling with this issue myself. Here’s wishing us both balance and the opportunity to go where our heart, soul, and intellect lead us while still ensuring survival :).

  • Sarah-Louise Quinnell

    I love the job I have now and I love the opportunity that thinking about my PhD as a process has given me. By unpacking the product I got to see the huge range of skills I had developed while undertaking my research.

    I also take alot of positivity from the comments I get on these blogs and the discussion they generate as an early career researcher its nice to be able to engage and pass on some words of wisdom to those coming along behind. That for me is something very important.

    • Pauline

      All of this schooling and then… “alot,” really?!

  • Mark Smith

    I am entering into a doctorate in social science while working FT. My masters is a MFA in Art & Anthropology of Art. I really don’t want to limit myself to academia. In fact I much more see a measure of success by what you apply all that great knowledge to. I work with disabled veterans returning from the war find new direction in their lives and help them pursue their career and educational dreams. As a vet of the same manner and experiencing a few of those close calls I realized that one must do whatever they love to do. My work seizes me. I have an endless reserve to craft and refine the programs I develop because the work is doesn’t seem like work at all. So here I am reading about this at three in the morning having just finished some more “work” without effort or exhaustion but with excitement to hurry myself to tomorrow so I can wake up and get back into what I was doing tonight. Maybe after some great string of successes when i am much older and needing to slow down some and fit the iconic professor visual i would want to do that. I say for right now, enjoy life and pursue today. That’s my two cents anyway.

    • Mae

      Wow. You are speaking my language. I love my job as an academic adviser and am considering a PhD program as well. It seems I work 24/7 but it’s not work at all. I have been on campus 40 already this week and it is only Thursday and I’m up @ 5 am working some more.

      I realize there is a level of non respect from faculty toward anyone that is not a tenured faculty. You must rise above this and do what you want for yourself. I love working with students and helping them realize that they don’t have to have it all figured out before they graduate. I especially love working with adults who feel ashamed that they don’t have a degree yet. I tell them that everything about their life has value and has brought them to this point. They see me as happy and successful and I am able to tell themost that my journey wasn’t alays known but I always kept on trucking a seized every opportunity to be happy and successful.

      I do teach a portfolio course but the PhD will be for me and no one else. I may gain some more respect but this respect will be from those who are shallow. With or without the degree I don’t plan to make any drastic career changes.

  • Mateusz

    I have always considered PhD as an additional result of research interests of mine rather than a goal itself. You just do your work, read and write, do some field research because there is this problem that you want to examine. In the end you find out that the whole work (thesis) might be doctoral thesis.
    Therefore I am not surprised that if someone thinks of PhD as a main goal, might have some problems after finishing it. One must redefine themselves once again. And this process, as all social scientists may know, is quite hard ;). Small change in a perspective may change the whole attitude.

  • Pat Donohue

    Happy to see you still fight the good fight Marianella. God Bless in all you do, Pat

  • Pat Donohue

    Marianella , happy to see you still have the energy to fight for freedom, God bless, Pat

  • Ernestina

    Hi there Sarah

    Thank you for a fantastic blog. I am a Master’s student, should be submitting my work for examination soon. I am particularly amused by your story and experiences of life post PhD. I’m looking forward to a PhD soon, maybe in two years and I think your insights have shed some light in this stage for me personally since we dont really get to share about these things especially if we are all located sparsely across the globe. I thank you and appreciate your effort for sharing such invaluable insights..like “what they dont tell you after a PhD” :).

    I am excited about life in academia once I start writing and publishing articles and editing and mentoring other upcoming social science postgrads but I hope the prospects of another life outside of academia will be somewhat not so bleek. Your blog has started me on a new thinking journey to think about everything now rather than leave it to when its all done.

  • lsankovich

    Thanks for the great blog….nice to know I’m not alone in some of these thoughts…thx for sharing!

  • thetragicmuso

    Fantastic blog and I find myself in a very similar situation, although I got my PhD in music. I think humanities postdocs find themselves in a very similar positions; there being a large leap between getting a PhD and a lectureships – postdoc positions few and far between.

    I have also begun working on the admin side of thing (research support) and get a similar sense of stigma despite the fact that I love my job and find it just as interesting as my PhD.

    It would be nice to see a move from administrators being understood as failed academics to them being valued for their specific expertise.

  • Patricia Howard

    I have been unable to gain access to the article, which is a pity as I may have discovered what I ‘could be’ duplicating. So please forgive me if I repeat what might already be included in your study.
    I was particularly interested in your comment on the literature that might not be existence on the topic of ‘reactions to organisationl change’, as numerous studies have been carried out in the Psychotherapy field. Most psychotherapists of course conduct qualitative studies, however there may be among the findings some of what remains to be explained, with quite naturally various terminologies.
    As a ‘Family Practitioner’ and ‘Organisational Consultant’,
    my observations of employers, and the employee’s reaction to change is not disimilar to family members function and behaviours when they are faced with the many crisis’s that families incur.
    If we consider the family as a system with it’s hierarchical grading, which in effect the organisation functions in a similar way, the organistional members will be making their many diverse attachments according to the system they were born into.
    Each member of the organisation will bring their own unique family history to the mix, and there we have the opportunity for members to re enact their feelings, emotions, moods, and the relationships that may create the environment that may cause either strong reactions to any change or more manageable and understandable responses.

  • Left Brain Right Brain Test

    That article sounds very interesting, I would definitely like to learn how I can apply these leadership techniques in my practice. Leadership as a driver for innovation is certainly a novel approach.

  • Edwin Rutsch

    May I suggest further resources to learn more about empathy and compassion.
    The Center for Building a Culture of Empathy
    The Culture of Empathy website is the largest internet portal for resources and information about the values of empathy and compassion. It contains articles, conferences, definitions, experts, history, interviews,  videos, science and much more about empathy and compassion.
    http://CultureOfEmpathy.com

    I posted a link to your article in our
    Empathy and Compassion Magazine
    The latest news about empathy and compassion from around the world
    http://bit.ly/dSXjfF

  • Sarah-Louise Quinnell

    I agree with you, everyone knows my eclectic personality is there for everyone to see and I do mix and match between the professional and the personal. I have also written posts that come under the more ‘controversial’ nature. However, at the same time I respect my employer and the fact that they may have different ideas and issues abbout how I present myself in connection with them so I think it is a balance between what and what not to share which will lead us nicely into the what to share part of this debate.

    • AnneMarie Cunningham

      Hi,
      My first reaction on reading this was that it is a pity to start with what we shouldn’t share rather than what we should.
      I agree with Jennifer that without risk-taking one can not develop mastery (after Dreyfus who I am reading at the moment). But novices may benefit from guidance.
      Thanks
      AM

      • Sarah-Louise Quinnell

        The reason why i started with what not to share is because when you enter employment and sign your contract things change regarding how you present yourself. I have had to add disclaimers etc to my twitter accounts and rightly so, in my opinion, I am not my employer they are not me but we work together so you have to think about these issues.

        What to share will be coming up next month

  • Jennifer Jones

    Hi Sarah, thanks for the post. It’s got me thinking.

    I’m not sure if I agree with restrictive self-censorship, for one, it has taken me a while to admit to myself that, actually, it is much easier for my soul (as in, being true to myself) to put what I feel should go online – without rationalising it as a ‘professional’ outcome (I mean, what is professional when we are talking ‘social media’? a facade? a let’s pretend game?). In fact, if I hadn’t admitted that to myself, I would have gave up the internet and/or academia (probably academia) a long time ago.

    I always tell myself that I wouldn’t want to work for anybody who couldn’t understand the motivation behind my online presence – because that online presence is not a separate entity to me, it is me, – and my instinct tends to right on this case. Of course, there have been times when I’ve made huge risks with what I have said online, and I will probably make a million more mistakes in the future. It’s who I am. I challenge things. When I try and control those niggles, I battle with myself instead of what I disagree with. A battle with yourself, when you win you still lose.

    I think there is a conflict between being a person and being an employee. Why shouldn’t my own personal views represent my university? It is the people within the space that make up the collective identity of an organisation, which in turn shapes the complex viewpoints that is required in a digital age. It shouldn’t be the other way around, policy before people. But that’s often what happens. That way I always say to people to be who they want to be, not what they think others want them to be. That way we don’t need to kettle ourselves through our own self doubt. These spaces deserve to be critiqued, don’t let the notion of an academic ‘career ‘stop you – otherwise what is the point?

  • Anthropology deGuy

    Looking forward to a world of Anthropology properly funded by private organizations with a vested interest in reaping the rewards from amazing finds (which people love to learn about). Perhaps we’ll have to tighten the belt on intellectual property? Or maybe the world will wake up in the face of Discovery Channel content deficit?

  • @empsocsci

    Social scientists/humanities scholars should treat this idea with caution. The degree of algorithmic (or even intentional) pre-filtering of twitter’s various API feeds is unclear, tweeters are clearly a non-representative (& non-random) sample who are self-selecting a) as users/tweeters and b) as those who choose to make tweets public and even c) those who choose to allow geo-coding of tweets if that’s your analytic interest. Response bias is therefore unclear and potentially unknowable. Generalisability of results is therefore dubious.

    I’d encourage anyone thinking about using these and related kinds of data to consider @katecrawford and @zephoria’s Six Provocations for Big Data & reflect on it first.

    Ease of access to tera-streams of data is no excuse for bad (social) science 🙂

  • Ayansola Ebenezer

    It has been empirically researched that human is a product of nature, nuture and environment. However, the environment is considered the most influential, as it interacts with the human attitude formation, psychology, perception and behavioural tendencies. In addition, the human mind is a fertile ground for such attitude formation. The social media children are exposed to today represents an environment that is difficult to screen or flter considering the laws protecting their providers.Thus, we are helpless in our quest to control the kind of media our children consume. The highly commercialised society has been blinded by the drive for profit margins at the expense of highly cultured social values. The implications are that gradually a new foundation of antisocial cultural values are been entrenched while the desired norms are eroded. There is need for policy makers to wake up to their responsibilities by instituting the necessary constitutions which can safeguard and protect our children from the dangers the social media potend. We can not fold our hands and watch our whole value system fall apart like a pack of cards. As social Scientists, it’s a battle we have to take headlong. We are saddled with the responsibility of waging war against unhealthy social media misrepresentations. How to fight this battle should be the focus of our intellectual strength. If we don’t take the necessary steps now, we will all fall victim of and be consumed by the impending calamity it will deal our children and the future we are working hard to preserve. While the corporations are hiding behind the principle of “freedom of speech” without due consideration for ethics and social values, we, on our part, should take bold step towards elaborate counter-campaign or creation of awareness among stakeholders on the dangers embedded in the commercial campaigns of the corporations. Thanks.

    • RobinNJ

      Ayansola,
      Rather than demonize corporations for hiding behind freedom of speech, how about demonizing good old fashioned parenting. You are aware that parents are a strong first building block for children. They are the first agent(s) of socialization depending on whether it’s a family or single parenting family. It begins at home, the Government cannot get involved in what you do in your own home, just as they cannot tell you how many children to have. Poverty starts when irresponsible people have children they know they can’t afford. If you can’t afford to support yourself, you should refrain from sex, or take precautions to prevent pregnancy. Responsibility for ones actions is the key. So basically EDUCATION at an early age in the ways of responsibility, manners and consideration towards others from kindergarten to 12th grade should be incorporated into our education system is my solution.

  • profkprabhakar

    One of the most important comment is the limitations of Jack Walsh Model of throwing out employees out of jobs and trying to increase firms value. However, the inhuman practice still continues despite continued evidence of importance of human capital. How do you explain removing aged employees and substituting them with younger employees or out sourcing work that costs less for the organization? What is the societal cost of losing the ecosystem that employees bring? For example the number of employees working in US computer hardware is less than 1,65,000 ( which is the same as during 1980’s) and shifting all the manufacturing to organizations such as Foxconn with dubious distinction of human resources practices. Foxconn is phenomenally successful. For every one organization that gives importance for human capital, we can find ten which are successful who really do not bother about human capital. Can you explain this pardox?

  • Clive Boddy

    What would be interesting to do would be to get a panel of marketing practitioners to rank marketing journals by relevance and interest to them as businesspeople. This may well demonstrate to what extent the ‘top’ marketing journals have moved away from relevance and got lost in promoting mathematically elegant and sophisticated papers which are about nothing substantive or of real interest to anyone in business.

    Advertising may be more about the sizzle than the sausage but marketing cares about the sausage as well. Can marketing journals be accused of putting style before substance in what they publish?

  • Clive Boddy

    What would be interesting to do would be to get a panel of marketing practitioners to rank marketing journals by relevance and interest to them as businesspeople. This may well demonstrate to what extent the ‘top’ marketing journals have moved away from relevance and got lost in promoting mathematically elegant and sophisticated papers which are about nothing substantive or of real interest to anyone in business.

    Advertising may be more about the sizzle than the sausage but marketing cares about the sausage as well. Can marketing journals be accused of putting style before substance in what they publish?

  • Saghir Hussain MBA (HR), (MKT)

    the idea given in the paper is supported, but diversity in necessary, in the competitive globalized market, the firm those are flexible and diversified will survive.

    Bahria University
    Islamabad Pakistan

  • Saghir Hussain MBA (HR), (MKT)

    the idea given in the paper is supported, but diversity in necessary, in the competitive globalized market, the firm those are flexible and diversified will survive.

    Bahria University
    Islamabad Pakistan

  • Arlene Feinstein

    My daughter is almost 5. She does watch DVDs, but is very sensitive to “scary” ones, meaning anything violent or psychologically “scary.” She does love, TV, however, and demonstrates cranky “withdrawal” symptoms when I try to turn it off.
    Honestly, the over-consumered society wants to marinate our children in a broth of advertising and materialism. It’s practically counter-culture to not let your kids watch TV, not let them eat crappy food that is the norm, or not take them to Disney movies. My daughter has not seen a single disney princess movie, but she knows all the princesses
    Ultimately, it’s government’s responsibility to “correct” problems like obesity and the drug companies’ “mission” to help kids overcome ADHD, while industry continues to feed us and our children crap, lots of chemicals, and electronic stimulation. But, it would be sacreligious to hold businesses responsible.

  • ailsa

    I would disagree with your rationale re 1.
    The precedent is “could you study letters to the editor in a newspaper as these are in a public space. And the answer is yes.
    The only difference for a non password protected message board- and this is a big difference- is that it is easy to say on one that you would like to undertake research…this is not so easy on newspaper letters to the editor. Because it is so easy, it should be done.

    Point 2.
    I agree its not ok to marginalise a vulnerable population further. But theres a deeper issue here: respecting autonomy may also require the creation of autonomy
    voice is not an unproblematic concept.

    Good topic, complicated by international concerns re legislation and expectations also.
    Will look at ur other refs.

  • Dr. LTC

    What extremely insightful and important commentary this is about the potential of electing another “anti-science” US President. After eight years of President Bush’s “other” war — the “War on Science” (as termed in one of the most powerful pieces I’ve ever read in Scientific American) — it is terrifying to think of the implications of electing another education, specifically science, ignorant government official. I’ll never forget the many bumbling, inarticulate speeches and comments Bush gave in regard to such issues as stem cell research and discontinuing support for public school systems that chose to teach something beyond abstinence-only sexual education. Far too many Americans are wont to believe that what the political pundits set on our agenda as the “most important” issues are truly the most important issues. In a Country where several K-12 education systems have already moved away from or are considering dropping teaching such fundamentals as non-computer mathematical computation, cursive handwriting, and US and world history (never before has the adage about those who are ignorant of history will be forced to repeat it been more salient), we can neither successfully sustain, nor should we tolerate, the blow to our knowledge-base that an anti-science president would surely level against our citizenry.

  • Sarah-Louise Quinnell

    I compiling this post I was looking to illustrate how you can use social medis, new media, web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it within academic research and professional development strategies. It is not a sociological critique neither am I trying to add to a body of sociological thought, I am a Human Geographer who integrated these tools and applications into their PhD research and has established an online ‘identity’ for promoting my work etc. The above post is based on my own experiences of using these technologies within my PhD and within my post-doc career to date and is provided for those who may want to look at what technology can offer them.

  • shakti pathak

    The real challenge is for social scientists. They need to suggest new ideas in mending habits of children. Cartoon movies, vedeo games on environmental and other value based issues with as much attractions as other easily available business house sponsored and propagated visual materials must be given prominence with wide coverage with the help of UN and nation states so that futre generations could contribute more and more in the betterment of humanity.

  • David Jackson

    I’d opine that there is NO “social media”. In point of fact, the whole notion that there is truly any- thing of a genuine “social” nature about blogging, texting, or otherwise feigning communication with a social being is ludicrous. It is, at best, a substitute for real interaction and, at worst, a pathetic ruse.
    I’m more than just a little suspicious of my own involvement in this site: On the one hand, I am starved for some insight and reasonably intelligent social science dialogue, since what I’m subjected to at this so-called university is little more than consensus academics and the meanderings of biased and socially (historically) stunted PhDs who live in the lack-luster world of a dilattante’s opinionated view of the “real” world of today. (May the Great Pumpkin save us all from sociology of dead theorists and theories, especially when they are so far from practicable that you can’t even excuse them. Though there is nothing wrong with history, and there is certainly nothing wrong with understanding how we “got here from there”, there is something very wrong with a blanket expectation of the acceptance of yesterday or the day before as the only path to tomorrow.)
    I’ve been searching for some wisdom or, at least, some insight; my delusion, being self-imposed, is rapidly getting the best of me.
    I don’t know if anyone else can relate, but I am in two 400-level sociology classes that are so close to my high school sophomore course that I am bored and pis—, at the same time. I really can re-learn or learn at a library, the same as most anyone else who really wants to. It isn’t of any known worth to spend thousands of dollars to be told that the assumptions and perspectives of a bunch of dead guys
    are all there is of functional social science, or a foundation of understanding how and why cultures succeeed, fail, or change. (I’m still loking for a “professional”: that would be, in my “unscientific” view,
    a so-called scholar who, at the very least, didn’t stop thinking – learning – when (s)he received the PhD.
    Even someone with one, and working on the second, would be a real treat. I’ve actually had a couple of friends who held multiple doctorates and, to my knowledge, are still working or various other degrees. Such people spoil life, in their own way. And, they are just as outcast, because of their ambition, drive, and unrelenting pusuit of knowledge, as anyone who is excluded for not “achieving” whatever the norm might be. Norm? I’ve witnessed the norm…It is of no value to anyone, except maybe those who feel superior for having marginally exceeded it.)
    My academic interests in sociology are about to come to an end, unless I can discover a way, place, or person that will somehow “show me the money”. I am about to quit the discipline, forever. In reality, I have done my time and have come up short and disappointed.
    I realize that my ludicrous experiences at the hands of adults who haven’t learned anything or had an original thought in 30-40 years, is likely something of a fluke; however, at this juncture, it is all I have to go on and I’m stuck with it…Woe is me, right?
    As to an “identity”, I have, in the past, spent about 25 years teaching people things that could, literally, save their lives; I’d estimate that only about 8% of them took much of the information or the newly-developed skill-sets very seriously, for any longer than about two weeks; so, I really doubt that there is a whole cohort of people who would ever really “follow” much of anything I have to offer. (I’ve also become somewhat disinterested in trying to influence anyone: People do whatever they please. They really have little abidding interest in anyone or anything that make them feel as though they didn;t know something or had to learn something that they somehow feel “entitled” to…This is why women make better “self defense” student than men.)
    I’ll check back from time to time. And, if anyone has any suggestions as to how or where I can find one or more intelligent, unbiased, and forward thinking source of sociological theory and development, I’d appreciate some assistance. The topic is too broad and the world is too populated to imagine that the prejudiced, cowardly, and incomplete consensus model of education that I’ve found myself involved in is all that there is. If I ever wanted to be wrong about something, this is it !

    David Jackson

  • Yusdin Gagarmusu

    talking about children education especially in such digital age, it must be taken into consideration that all technology devices (TV etc) can give harmful effects for children development. it can be worst if parents nowadays don’t pay attention to the issue.

  • mbrees

    I found the article fairly straightforward, with one main point that certainly has wide implications. Kate Roach makes the point that, when the public hears the word ‘science’, it thinks ‘natural science’ because the public has at its disposal and is familiar with numerous images, both good and bad, that support this connection. When the public hears the phrase ‘social science’, it has no imagery to support this connection, making social science in a way unthinkable. Social science needs an “obvious single public identity” (Kate, above). I would like to address this point.

    First, I am so pleased to hear discussion of this amorphous group called social sciences, as if it were in some, even undecidable, way indeed a unitary phenomenon. However, much of the actual experience of students in the U.S. still compartmentalizes the various disciplines, even to the point that an interest in interdisciplinary studies is legitimated only when it receives status as a new department. If we academics want the public to view social science as a unitary reality, our students, part of the future public, need to experience this reality clearly and frequently enough that it makes a lasting impression. Along this line, support from our natural science colleagues could make a real difference.

    Second, as we all know, at least in the U.S., (I do not want to sound like I am attempting to make global statements), for most of our students, the only experience they have of many of the social sciences, takes place in the Introductory course. We might want to ask to what extent do our various departments value the Introductory course, and what needs to happen in this course to make it more memorable, with the discipline seen as a valuable part of this open system called social science, when professionals and politicians look back at their university experience?

    In other words, we need to ask to what extent we ourselves perceive and experience the unity of social science, and then we can ask, how might we pass on, re/present, this so that our students can perceive and experience this unity for themselves.

    Mike Brees

  • Sylvia Hall

    Classical liberal education which was considered as elitist in Post colonial societies like Jamaica is also under tremendous pressure as more and more focus is given to technical/vocational education. There are serious implications as educational access has not only economic consequences but is also class based.

  • Judith Kahn-Donald

    4. – “writing for a blog is a different skill” – I can relate to this comment and it is how I have always tried to write, particularly as most of my professional life, I have written for and about bureaucrats and politicians in turn conveying their information to the general public/taxpayer – you have to be able to write to the lowest common denominator. A university professor once told us that he didnt want us to regurgitate the text book in our thesis. If we can write so that our mother can understand, then we truly understood the intent and the message of what we were trying to write. It has always stood as a very valuable piece of information.

  • Anonymous

    I believe the riots may be underpinned due to a drought of available street drugs. Which caused a drop in income for young people/adults involved in the distribution and thereby not getting a wage.

  • Peter Jeyaprakash

    Social Science is inclusive. The very fact that it is a social science gives it the right to include and adopt scientific methods and techniques to qualify the quantitative data. There is no need to look at this convenience as if social science is lacking in something. No science for its part evolved exclusively on its own. The word science does not create a barricade and there is no disjuncture. We need to look beyond this compartmentalization and recognize social science as a major contributing field to understand various social anomalies and its characteristics. Take for example the word community. It can mean a community of bacteria or virus or electronically charged particles exhibiting similar characteristics. In all this there is a commonality. when there is a grouping of either living or non-living things there is always a similarity in behaviour. We sometimes call certain human characteristics as sheepish. Why ?. NGOs are a different genre because they are a tool for Social Science to reach out to the people in a scientific way. NGOs use Social Science for their work to be effective with the beneficiaries. What one views as parochial (if you meant that it is provincial or unsophisticated) is only subaltern. In India if I find that the huts of a low caste community suddenly burns out of nothing and if the explanation is that it happened due to some sacrilege of some kind then I have to adopt chemical science methods to explain a socially stigmatized phenomenon. Sherlock Holmes ? Aha.

  • Zainab

    the negative and harmful effects of media are now not only a considerable and mind boggling issue for west but its also getting its feet stronger in non industrial and eastern nations. the reason behind can be the changing world into a global village, easy accessibility to the world media, computer and other technology gadgets like mobiles, i-pads laptops etc. Secondly, the children and teenagers are now more inclind towards computer games, video games, television commercials including violent animated movies than playing physical games or being involved in productive activities, and the reason for this can be assumed to be less facilities for out door games, security conditions and lack of quality time provided by the parents or families, the case is some what similar for east and west. here in the eastern region the major problem is of lack of awareness about these issues in the general public and as the nations are developing they take the excessive use of latest gadgets by their of springs as a symbol of status, or interest in technology or a way of becoming hi tech.Therefore in all this mess they ignore the harmful effects of media, video or computer games on the physical, psychological and emotional as well as behavioral health. But unfortunately due ignorance on the part of communities, researchers, health professionals, parents the issue is getting worse in this region as its already been in west and Europe.
    Here i must say that as world is getting smaller due day by day technology advancements, the issues are getting similar for east, west and even Europe, so in order to address these issues it will be more feasible to look at them collectively to ensure a better, safe and healthy environment not only for the western and European children but for the children of the whole world.

  • Robert M Yawson

    I also sincerely believe that the position adopted in reaction to Gov Scott’s statement is negative. To generalize his statement, which is despicable I admit, and make it a right wing or Republican conspiracy towards anthropology and social science in general is itself as negative as Gov Scott’s pronouncements. To position social science and anthropology in particular within one political orientation, takes the rigor of scientific integrity out of the discourse.

  • Daniel

    Obesity, violence, tobacco, alcohol… as the main topics about “Raising our children in an electronic media world”. I will also love to discuss more about positive aspects and challenges. When I think in the electronic media world and my daughter new topics emerge in my mind: is she going to learn to communicate (to use videos, website, social networks, mail for her communication goals)?, Is she going to be able to find accurate, rigorous, useful information to solve her problems? How is she going to organise her life to be able to get the maximum profit from electronic media? Is she going to be able to enjoy off-line pleasures (friends, family, nature, games, books, music and so on)?. Is she going to learn something about all this at the school?.

  • Arturo

    “Natural scientists do have distinct advantages when plying their trade in public.” deserves some explanations. In public meetings, in particular in front of NGOs’ activists, natural scientists can be strongly questionned if they do not adhere to the audience’s expectations.

  • Karl Smith

    The “problem” with the social sciences is not that we have lost our way from the “over-the-top physics envy” of the old masters, but that we have failed to educate the general public that such physics-envy was and remains misplaced. Clearly even (some) people who are interested enough to read an article such as this remain under the illusion that social phenomena occur according to simple cause-and-effect laws that might be deduced, explicated and disseminated. This is an illusion which continually short-changes those ever elusive entities that constitute the social — those creative, unpredictable, rebellious, conformist, malleable, plastic, imaginative, cooperative, competitive critters we call human beings. It is worth noting that physicists left the world of simple cause-and-effect explanations to mechanical engineers and rocket scientists a century ago, and moved their enquiries into a realm that is almost as uncertain as the social sciences.
    Where the social sciences lost their way was in accepting a (very common) misconstrual of science as a quest for straightforward causal explanations, rather than accepting that what defines science is the perpetual openness to continuing enquiry. Ironically — or pathetically? — every move by social scientists to provide greater certainty (such as reductive socio-metrics) moves us further from a capacity to better elucidate the human / social condition. One of the greatest errors, building on the heritage of the Enlightenment, is the idea that humans are rational animals, and that by extension social action is rational.
    Undoubtedly we are rationalizing animals, and through reason we can arrive at post facto explanations for social actions and phenomena. But human / social action is never purely rational; hence never wholly predictable. The best comics, novelists, playwrights, etc are fully aware of this, and work it into their narratives. Hence, they get a much warmer reception from the public than social scientists who attempt to explain away the mystery, folly and foibles of our subjects in search of the laws of causation.

  • Dorita Arapaki

    Every child , like the adult, is the product of our commercial culture that grows in the last decades. The only difference between them is that the child is the most potential and persistent buyer for these companies, able to convince even the most strict parent to consume. So, we are the ones to put the blame on this addictive process, which thrives in the subconscious context of the constant advertising via TV and the internet. The problem is not only the great responsibility that we have as adults or as teachers towards our kids, but also the fact that we do the same thing: we consume and we make money to achieve this goal, no matter how “natural” seems this goal for an adult. But for the children, as for the adults, pleasure and succeess and the need for the fulfilment of these two purposes, can justify the means. We have taught everybody that he or she should be always satisfied with as much goods as he/she can. Maybe it is time to reconsider the whole value system of our socioeconomical and cultural structure, and then redefine it. Of course that would be also a new taxonomy, but we need to start over, to create something new, disposed of the dominant material – centric politics. So the violence, the addiction to internet or video games, the massive advertising and the endorsement or the intolerance in this problem, is only the tip of the iceberg. Therefore, a correlation between these symptoms with the predominant socioeconomic context should include our dialogue, so to acknowledge, to record , to interpet and to suggest some of the evident or even implied presumptions concerning this issue.

  • jgahler

    how do I change my password to something intelligible?

    • Sage

      Hello James, if you check your email we’ve sent you a note which should help. Thanks!

  • johnwilliams

    The problem of the social sciences is this: there are no (or very few) testable theories or law-like generalisations in the social sciences that can be used to get things done, with a better-than-average chance of success. As long as social scientists see themselves as the critic and conscience of society, and not as research workers who are interested in finding out how social phenomena actually work (in the sense of cause-and-effect) then the “poor” image of the social sciences will persist. I agree with Bennie Berkeley in that post-modernism has ruined social sciences. While the Old Masters were perhaps a bit over the top in terms of physics-envy, their aims were true.

  • Bill

    Whats’ the name of the BBC radio show? A link would be useful…

    • CfSS

      Dear Bill

      The radio show is Radio 4’s ‘Clare in the Community’ about a rather hapless, well-meaning but very woolly social worker.

  • Bennie Berkeley (PhD

    I think the article implies not just need for re-branding the social sciences but for its complete re-organization, re-concetualization and re-creation in order to illustrates their pivotal role in social well being. The fact is that some persons outside the social sciences (and some within it) do not appreciate their significance. They continue to hold to the view that it is only through natural sciences that human progress and advancement can be attained.
    The significant contributions of the 19th and early 20th century founding fathers (e.g. Comte, Spencer, Marx, Durkheim and Weber) seems to be lost primarily in postmodern times. I think we need to go back to basics (the classics) in order to regain a true sense of science and the social sciences.
    These disciplines must not be allowed to die for they bring with them enormous benefits via enhanced critical thinking skills and powers of inquriry.

  • Christel Manning

    Of course. It would be great if politicians paid more attention to social scientists. But until they do, perhaps it’s time that parents paid more attention too. I know too many progressive parents who decry the ill effects of advertising and violence in the media–and then continue to plop their kids in front of the TV and buy them violent games.

    • Brian, ATP

      Indeed. The negative effects are not directly experienced at all, or to a lesser extent, by those who eliminate or reduce the exposer. While it is clearly true what has been put forward by this article, none of this occurs in a vacuum, way too many variables to start putting forth mindful policy initiatives that might have unintended, unjust restrictive outcomes, not to mention all the unmentioned, unanalyzed POSITIVE things that we take as granted, i.e. cell phone communication that enhances safety. Put it this way- If you have ever listened to US Supreme Court debate and discussions, it is rare to have one side be unequivicly convincing; they are all super sharp and make good points, never seems 100% clear to proceed one way or another. So, alas, we have to do “the right thing” whatever the cost, upside / downside, sacrifice etc. I do not play video games, my kids do sometimes, but they are internet games that generally use creative building of virtual farms or cities, and yes my boys do military stuff, but they look like Leggos. So we spend as much time as I can with them, never enough, but enough that I can know that we have done our best to teach them about relationships, love, kindness, patience etc., and that they will probably not kill 10 people to steal a car (or whatever that crazy game is!)

  • Anonymous

    Of course. It would be great if politicians paid more attention to social scientists. But until they do, perhaps it’s time that parents paid more attention too. I know too many progressive parents who decry the ill effects of advertising and violence in the media–and then continue to plop their kids in front of the TV and buy them violent games.

  • Christel Manning

    Of course. It would be nice if policy makers paid attention to social scientists, but given that they aren’t, (or at least not enough of them are), perhaps we might call on parents to pay more attention to such research, and, more importantly, to act on their concerns. As you point out, studies showing the ill effects of advertising and violent video games have been around for a while, and I know many progressive parents who decry these effects as well . . . but they keep plopping their children in front of the tube and keep buying them games. I’m sceptical that we can convince politicians to act, or that passing legislation would be effective, unless we convince adults that kids will be ok without, or with a lot less, media exposure.

    • Anonymous

      Every child , like the adult, is the product of our commercial culture that grows in the last decades. The only difference between them is that the child is the most potential and persistent buyer for these companies, able to convince even the most strict parent to consume. So, we are the ones to put the blame on this addictive process, which thrives in the subconscious context of the constant advertising via TV and the internet. The problem is not only the great responsibility that we have as adults or as teachers towards our kids, but also the fact that we do the same thing: we consume and we make money to achieve this goal, no matter how “natural” seems this goal for an adult. But for the children, as for the adults, pleasure and succeess and the need for the fulfilment of these two purposes, can justify the means. We have taught everybody that he or she should be always satisfied with as much goods as he/she can. Maybe it is time to reconsider the whole value system of our socioeconomical and cultural structure, and then redefine it. Of course that would be also a new taxonomy, but we need to start over, to create something new, disposed of the dominant material – centric politics. So the violence, the addiction to internet or video games, the massive advertising and the endorsement or the intolerance in this problem, is only the tip of the iceberg. Therefore, a correlation between these symptoms with the predominant socioeconomic context should include our dialogue, so to acknowledge, to record , to interpet and to suggest some of the evident or even implied presumptions concerning this issue.

      • vimala

        The media especially the TV and the many programmes that are shown during prime time and other times, have strong impact on children’s mind. They are still very young and immature and would not be able to select the right message from the wrong message. Many programmes and advertisements are obnoxious and making children see these would onl affect their thinking adversely. The programmes that are capable of generating good value system and good habits and good thinking are important. A few porgrammes on the protection of environment, keeping surroundings clean etc will go a long way in creating these values in the children.

  • Edward C. Pease

    While the push from both legislators and students for more practical and marketable skills is understandable in the current grim economic climate, it is disheartening to see liberal education colleges and programs stampeding for the exits. At conferences of Arts & Sciences administrators over the past year, deans and provosts have engaged in abject hand-wringing, or just capitulate altogether. Not so at Utah State University, a land-grant university where the faculty and leadership of the College of Humanities & Social Sciences have taken exactly the opposite approach: ramping up the rigor and telling the story of the lifelong building blocks of our curriculum—the heart and soul of our university and of our students’ career foundation.

    Here in Utah, as elsewhere, state lawmakers have taken aim at higher education, and the wrongheaded concept of “degrees to nowhere” represented in many of our disciplines has traction. But far from knuckling under, Utah State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences has fought back, telling the story of the value of what we teach with a new core curriculum leading to “degrees to everywhere,” and a new magazine whose name, LIBERALIS, proudly takes on the know-nothings. See a student story on “‘Degrees to Everywhere’—new magazine explains liberal education” at http://hardnewscafe.usu.edu/?p=5571.

    We owe it to our students and to everyone’s future to give them access to great ideas and the capability to think critically about them. Beats welding.

  • Marianela Manzanares

    As a resident of Venezuela, a country ruled by a totalitarian government, I only have to say that whenever a governor, or any public functionary for that matter, states what a citizen should or should not study, think, say or do, that means one and only one thing: freedom is either lost or in the process of degradation. And when that happens everything else is lost. With all due respect for your authorities, never let them take your most precious value, the value for which you are envied which is freedom for all!

    • mbrees

      Thank you for your perspective .. in some ways you offer a focus for our defense of the Social Sciences. The ultimate goal of the Social Sciences is to give students the tools for participating in a free society. How can a person enter into or even understand a discussion of economics if that person has no background in economics? (This question could be adapted to each discipline.) To live in and support a free society, a person must have a basic knowledge of at least some of the disciplines that constitute the Social Sciences. On the other hand, the Social Sciences need to make clear to students how a discipline’s courses promote or enhance the understanding and practice of freedom.
      Thank you, Mike Brees

  • Sage

    During and following the Academy’s conference on the Riots of summer 2011, the speakers were all asked for their thoughts on where the priorities lay for social science research. You can read these and add your own thoughts here

  • Sage

    During and following the Academy’s conference on the Riots of summer 2011, the speakers were all asked for their thoughts on where the priorities lay for social science research. You can read these and add your own thoughts here

  • Sage

    During and following the Academy’s conference on the Riots of summer 2011, the speakers were all asked for their thoughts on where the priorities lay for social science research. You can read these and add your own thoughts here

  • Sage

    During and following the Academy’s conference on the Riots of summer 2011, the speakers were all asked for their thoughts on where the priorities lay for social science research. You can read these and add your own thoughts here

  • R. Dall'Acqua

    Scott’s statement maybe a god-send for graduates of anthropology. The field is very important. The ability to view the “human condition” and transfer it into everyday applications is a great way to improve modes of business and development. Unfortunately, many employers are as ill-informed of anthropologys value as is Gov. Scott. For as much energy is being used to send to Scott, I would like to see the AAA and its subsidiaries go on a PR campaign to disseminate the merrits of our field.

    Anyone who has attended an institution of higher learning, and pursued a degree in anthropology has faced the question “Anthropology, what are you going to do with that?”. During our tenures as students, this questions was fielded with humor and disdain. For many of us, after graduation, that question has haunted us, although now its consequences are all too real. Perspective employers see no need to hire someone who has great critical thinking ability and a consciouness for culture. If anything, I would say that in this market, they are looking for those with no attention for the human condition and more focus to a bottom-line.

    Please, those of us who have graduated from a school of anthropology, those who will soon be receiving a diploma, or those who plan to spend their lives in acadamia, let us take the chance that Gov. Scott has given us to show the public and private sector the value of anthropology in a practical setting.

    • Elizabeth Favre

      I am in agreement with Robert Yawson in so far that healthy dialogue removes unjustified anger out of it.
      With Manianela on freedom, and as such opinions from any source, of course must be dealt with in a practical setting as R. Dall’ Aquaca.

      All in all it must in the end be about tax payer’s money and a true accounting of it. That is the source of anger in our country and in our communities, and our homes. Lyz

  • missnshah

    Critical thinking is being anayltical, having an very objective view to life.
    Cynisim is a form of denial, negative thinking, skepticism is when you deny certain beliefs, myths or legends exist.
    Whether critical thinking explains the reasons why cynisim differs from skepticism I am not sure, as I think it depends on the individual.
    I consider my self to be a critical thinker, I am neither a skeptic or cynic as I believe in all, I am very open minded, however I consider myself to be a realist.
    I am not entirely sure that critical thinking can explain cynisim or skepticism, it depends on the individual brain, the genetics even.

  • T. Krishna Kanth

    Sabbatical leave is an opportunity for the talented individuals, of course some may misuse it, but it is advisable to keep it and protect it for the benefit of creative individuals. As we all know prophesing is not all that easy and all that wont come without slogging and hard work. If the institutions to grow and creative ideas and individuals to embrace to the new thinking, there should be “sabbatical leave”.

  • sanjay

    in RS faith and sant mat, the mind talked about seems to be different from the mind talked about by a psycho analyst, the later talks about the material mind whereas material mind is simply an instrument in the santmat analysis……

  • Rejs wycieczkowy

    Hello. Very interesting post. Can I add a link to this blog to your account on Twitter?

  • shane lloyd

    Dr Day I am a 42 yr old ex nurse just about to commence a degree in criminology and I agree with you, times have most definately changed since I was a young person and I have been guilty of using such tropes as you have described. Obviously this attitude is just not going to cut it and more care and respect for young people is needed when trying to understand their needs and behaviours. Thankyou for this insight 🙂

  • Lorna McConville

    We’ve looked into the feedback about Richard Dawkin’s contributions to SSI. We’re sorry that it’s not possible to read his contributions, as it turns out his involvement in the journal was through his participation in the very first colloquium at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in 1972 on ‘Animal and human ethology’ which gave birth to the section Biology and social life in the journal.

  • Kylee Bone

    Nice review! This is truly the type of information that needs to be shared around the web. Sad on the search engines for not ranking this blog post higher!

  • Anirudh Kumar Satsan

    I have established an analogy between practice of meditation and psychoanalysis.

    Julian B. Rotter (1970) writes in his book Clinical Psychology “Other professions which overlap clinical psychology are those of the psychiatrist, social worker, lawyer, speech pathologist, and religious worker. All these professions are concerned in one way or another with the individual’s adjustment to a special set of circumstances”.

    Now the question arises what does a religious worker does to help an individual for his/her adjustment with himself/herself and with the society? The one apparent answer is guiding people to perform devotional exercises.

    Perhaps answer lies in the following lines:

    Psychoanalysis emphasizes free association, the phenomenon of transference, and the development of insight. Psychoanalysis helps a person understand himself/herself better. The goal of psychoanalysis is to acquire self-understanding and knowledge of the sources of anxiety.

    According to Swami Vivekananda, “During meditation the mind is at first apt to wander. But let any desire whatever arise in the mind, we must sit calmly and watch what sort of ideas are coming. By continuing to watch in that way the mind becomes calm, and there are no more thoughts waves in it. Those things that we have previously thought deeply have stored into unconscious mind and therefore these come up at the surface of conscious mind during meditation.” We may call this ‘auto-catharsis’ sort of free-association, unconscious mind talking to conscious mind. Meditation provides us insight, understanding of self and increases our psychological strength. So we can draw some analogy between practice of meditation and psychoanalysis. .

    According to Swami Vishnu Devananda:”Through meditation, the play of the mind is witnessed. In the early stages nothing more can be done than to gain understanding as the ego is observed constantly asserting itself. But in times its game become familiar, and one begins to prefer the peace of contentment. When the ego is subdued, energies can then be utilized constructively for personal growth and the service of others”.

    According to Radhasoami Faith: “…strong desires, embedded in the mind, are awakened in Bhajan (a type of meditation) by the current of Shabd (sound).

  • Mark Hawker

    Can anyone point/link to any article that Richard Dawkins has published in this journal? Seems an odd choice but happy to be enlightened!

  • dr max farrar

    thanks Mike. it was broadcast the other day – hope you got to see it!
    best wishes, max

  • Mike Donnelly

    Very thoughtful review, thanks!

  • jorge Esqueda Hernán

    I’d like to know if you send updates by email. If so, yo have my email adress. Thanks a lot.

    • Sage

      Hi Jorge,
      All members, unless you opt out, can receive a monthly email newsletter from socialsciencespace summarising the latest posts on the site. Look out for it in your inbox! Thanks, the SAGE team

  • omalichababy

    I think this problem applies in other discipline apart from sociology. In the area of Mass Communication down here in Nigeria, you will find many people at the M.Sc level but 2 -4 persons at the PhD class.And when they finally graduate only one will come back to teach.I see the problem as lack of incentives in the academia; unemployment;and the quest to explore less strenuous areas(that is; research free zones) So the sociologists that are moving out are not interested in teaching and wants to fix themselves somewhere else; or maybe there is no job satisfaction in that field

  • nightingale26

    Nic, I can’t even find the “contact us”. I wanted to “contact us” because I’ve reveived spam in my mailbox here (the following):

    glory sent you a new message:

    Subject: glorywest10@yahoo.in

    “Hello ,
    How are you today ? .
    I hope you are fine and all is well with you, My name is miss glory i saw your profile at socialsciencespace.com which really interest me and i decide to communicate with you, and it will please me if you will be my friend, write me with my email at (glorywest10@yahoo.in) so that i will give you my picture and tell you more about me, hope to hear from you Glory.

    Whoever “Glory” is, could you all please block him/her/it? Thanks.
    Linda

    • Sage

      Hello Linda,
      We’re very sorry to hear you’ve received spam on your socialsciencespace account. We have now removed the user from our system. We appreciate your flagging this to us and hope that you will continue to find socialsciencespace a useful site to visit.
      Kind regards, Mithu Lucraft, SAGE

  • Thomas Thompson

    Thanks for the shoutout to Tahrir Documents. I’m one of the folks who works on the website, and I just wanted to let you and your readers know that every document we post is available in English translation after the click-through from the main page to the specific article. Every word of original Arabic is translated to English by our volunteers prior to posting.

  • Ernestina Nkooe

    I think this conversation is interesting and worthwhile for everyone especially considering our political and historical human relations which have always been marred by race. Race is, and will always be,a factor to some degree in the structure and transformation of our illusive relations. The United States is privilged to have social science that speaks to these important social issues..the fruits of a solid democracy, fluid but solid. South African academia in comparision is not as priviliged to contest ‘social space’ through critical social theory and science but I think it will get there..

  • Jill Rutter

    Vicky: very interesting comment..and I think you certainly have a good point.

    not sure on the Big Society — you might distinguish between the big political concept which is hard to evaluate per se vs the opportunity it offers of having multiple different providers/ approaches which does have huge more possibilities for looking at what works (if we ask the question at the start and build it in). Payments by results is in a sense a way of trying to discover what approaches work.

    one of the big issues in the way we do policy is that we always go for grand scale straight away; commit huge amounts of political capital etc.. .another way is what we set out in our report “system stewardship” – to allow policies to grow adaptively toward a goal with scope for feedback and learning … (but this requires much mroe rpaid feedback than conventional evaluation)

    but there are some binary choices where you can’t do this…. to build High Speed rail or not; to stage the Olympics…. what you need there is to really test all the underlying assumptions that you need to make for it to work

  • Chris Newfield

    Sarah – really nice. I especially like your identifying the core objection to NCH as its failure to address the core need of mass access and general social development (not your terms, sorry!) and working on projects like the Social Science Centre as an alternative. I’ve been a big defender of restoring the US version of the huge public university that at least in principle aimed at mass quality, but more than half of me now feels that this is a waste of our efforts, and we need to start building the escape pods (networks) before the still functioning pieces get hived off into e-learning corporations or somewhere else. looking forward to more

  • Susan M

    Excellent piece.

  • Vicki Bolton

    I’ve just come back from the Social Policy Association conference which focused on the Big Society. It struck me that one of the key problems in evaluating a policy platform like the Big Society is its size (not to mention its nebulousness…). I guess that politicians treat their big ideas differently to their small ideas: small ideas may one day be evaluated the way you suggest, but big ideas are a separate species. I don’t really know enough about the history… How was National Insurance evaluated? The NHS? Or were these big ideas just implemented? I suspect the latter, and I think that scale of change is what politicians are aiming for when they lay out their big ideas.

  • Danladi Dele Agbeyo

    This is a beautiful rendition that says it as it really is. Another name I can give it , is God in the brain. Man created god sometime during our evolutionary journey in the African savanah, out of ignorance and the fear of the unknown.

  • Catriona Moore

    Hi Steve,
    Just to emphasise that the sentence you quote is taken directly from the review by Glenn Altschuler. I think he probably meant it to provoke debate!
    Catriona

    • swbbrown

      Catriona – Good point. He got my feathers ruffled a bit. Maybe this is a good time for me to reflect on my biases and unconscious motives. – Steve

  • swbbrown

    My commet refers to: ” The Believing Brain provides a splendid opportunity, for anyone open-minded enough to take it, to sort out the relationship between beliefs and reality, superstition and science.” This sentence feels at if it could be translated to: The book supports my notions of the world, and if you are smart like me you will see my view of the world and that “science” is independent from and superior to other forms of faith. I say other forms of faith, because I believe that science is part faith.

  • pascalesz

    YES Lets Academics in the real world !

    I would even add, lets compel anyone willing to start a phD but also anyone likely to direct a phD thesis to first explore the real world before setting the topic of a phD!
    As a management practitioner having been called to work in several business schools both in Belgium and in different African countries, I couldn’t agree more with what you state!
    To me, competition over publication is only one part of the explanation as to why academics have isolated from the real world and subsequently they do not influence public policy formulation.
    Public policy formulation is based on identified or likely problems. Knowledge in universities is organized in departments and fields. Usually problem analysis and solutions require the combined knowledge of different fields. Public servants and other decision makers do not have the expertise to decide who should cooperate in order to offer a comprehensive view of a problem and its subsequent appropriate solution. Academics only know part of the problem as their expertise is based on one field. Multi-disciplinary cooperation is extremely challenging. Fields have a technical jargon that collides with other fields technical jargons. Methodologies used and accepted as scientific in one field may not be scientific in another field.
    My own experience in research is problem-based. My research is a direct response to my students (managers and entrepreneurs from different countries) who challenged me! The management disciplines, techniques, fields and know-how did not work or would not work in their own country !!!

    You can get a glimpse of the issue at work on http://www.workingwithafricans.com

    Not many academics wished to explore this topic as it questions who they are and what they have been doing so far. This hampers the solutions to real life problems and adversely impacts on the status of researchers as reference to formulate policies;

  • claugonzaval

    very goog¿d review!! not only in Australia, the universities needs to have a real via of connection between public policies, investigations ande citizens, thsnk you very much!

  • Imran

    Very good & updated reading material is available on your website.
    Really like it.

  • Jotaebe

    I’ld like to add two things: 1) I find quite more disturbing when professors or more advanced students (i.e. when more powerful academic agents, as Sengupta said) plagiate their own graduate or undergraduate students. Here, in Argentina, for instance, is quite common to see papers wrote by one or more people from a professor’s team and signed by him -without any kind of recognition to the actual authors of the text. 2) In understand that new technologies make easier the copy of some other’s text -and also to discover this; nevertheless, it’s not an internet-dependent phaenomenon. Actually, as Umberto Eco said (back in the late seventies) “if you are going to copy some other’s phd. dissertation, make sure he lives far away enough”

  • Jaime Torrinhas

    The problem of the world and of the nations is not the economy nor the finances. The problem is in the persons, in the beginnings and values that were degraded, great because of the classes you politicize what give a bad example. We live in a jungle from stone where everything is possible (!?), where the individual interests are put on top of everything! When it so is…

  • Katrina Cortes

    It is really good to know that the congress did this kind of initiative, at least we know that they are ‘listening’.

  • A. Sengupta

    The issue against plagiarism is quite complex. It can start from outright copying to motivation and use of others’ idea without acknowledging it. However the question of power is important. If an academically powerful individual plagiarize, it may get unnoticed. No voice can be raised against. In India, I had a bitter experience of having to change an original version of a paper to get it published in a reputed journal. To my surprise, this original version got published under the authorship of the referee of my paper All protest here s meaningless. However, it is easy to catch an incalcricant .student because he is hapless.

    In some cases , however, there is simultaneous development. Wallace cannot be charged as copying from Darwin in the development of evolutionary theory. Similarly neither Einstein nor Hilbert might be charged of plagiarism in the development of General Theory of Relativity.

  • Ayesha Khan

    Thanks for your comment, Robert. Actually our effort to do something about ethics review is related to the fact that we suddenly were told by a research donor that we could not publish our research findings because we did not have an ethics review of a health/social science related study. Our experience thus far suggests that these reviews have a lot to do with suppressing research findings rather than encouraging better research. We though we would set up our own board so that medical review committees do not represent the only kind of ethics review process available in Pakistan. It is very tricky, especially as you mentioned the context of Pakistan, since so much of what we do is observation and informal interviews in the field, etc. But we thought better that we try to work out these issues than be dictated by medical review boards! Ayesha

    • Robert Dingwall

      Thanks, Ayesha. This is a nice example of the tyranny of the biomedical model in its application to social science research. Actually, you would not have any problems publishing your findings in many social science journals, unless your sponsor is actually forbidding this, because they have not taken on the policing role adopted by biomedical journals. If you look at typical sociology papers, they rarely make reference to ethical review, although, of course, editors do retain discretion to refuse publication if they think work has been unethical, as a matter of their own professional judgement. Having said this, if you have to have a review process, then it is better to have one that you control, which is something that I have been exploring with some European colleagues. Of course, social scientists are real experts in designing systems that achieve symbolic rather than real compliance, although French medics do not seem to be too far behind!

      • Anonymous

        Okay, that sounds interesting. Can you think off-hand of some social science journals that do not require the ethics review process? Yes, we have experienced ethical regulation in our context thus far as a control mechanism, but we would hope to protect social sciences (if possible) by developing our own ethics review process. Ayesha

        • Robert Dingwall

          Unless anyone has other information, I cannot currently think of any sociology or socio-legal journals that require evidence of ethical review. These are the fields that I publish and edit in but I cannot vouch for others. If there are some out there, perhaps we can ‘name-and-shame’…

  • Eliza

    Thanks for sharing this.Last week I decided to look for free lance writing Jobs actually had started registering on one site but decided to read the reviews first. I was shocked to see that most of the work involves doing dissertation assignments and Thesis for People and one of the positive reviews being advertised was” I scored an A in the book review so and so did for me” I cant imagine the many people who walk with fake degrees courtesy of these companies.
    Last week too I turned down my friend from kenya who had requested me to look for somebody to write an academic esearch proposal for her For money.. She had requested me to give her comments for her proposal but all what she sent me was cut and pasted articles from the internet and she expected me to write an excellent proposal for her. I gave her guidance but she has not come back to me. It is happening in Kenya too

  • Alice Mani Jacob

    This is true in most cases.I am talking about higher education. Many students are not genuinely interested in studies; they come late to classes, absent themselves from classes, talk ,dream away or indulge in playful activities such as games and sending messages on mobiles.Yet, they expect the tutotrs to do wonders when it comes to appearing for external exams. If they score poorly,it is the fault of the tutor. They have the weapon of ‘faculty evaluation’ with them which they use indiscriminately .They write ill about tutors whose classes they had never been to. The systenm need to change!

  • Thiagi

    This was an interesting article, but the primary question is why are undergraduates ‘academically adrift’? I am from Sri Lanka. I completed my BA over a year ago, and something I was constantly told by my lecturers was how lazy we were – academically, how we don’t seem too interested in reading anymore etc..

    It does seem to me that the younger generation in general, seem to be drifting further away from academic discipline..have there been any studies on the possible reasons for this? Youth are very active in social networking cites because knowledge is disseminated in simpler and tech savy ways..students no longer need to read through an entire book – they just have to google it and read a synopsis. I do hope to read this book – if it’s available in SL that is!

  • kirstyb

    Kia ora – my name is Kirsty from New Zealand and I would like to put out a call for anyone who is interested in Critical approaches to Appreciative Inquiry. Literature seems thin on the ground but I am looking at community mental health organisations (NFP or NGOs) and particularly how a discourse like Recovery, or Strengths Based Practice can become embedded within wider, more powerful discourses such as biomedical and managerial. I want to use Appreciative Inquiry as a descendant of Action research that can give voice to marginalised and less powerful voices ie their chance to tell their stories of success and effectiveness. But I also want a crtically ‘appreciative’ approach, in the sense of ‘coming to know and understand’ the context in which they are situated and thereby developing effective strategies towards transformation and a preferred future.
    Would really appreciate help with literature that supports this track – unfortunatel too much AI lit seems open to the criticism of Pollyanna ‘flim flam’. Cheers

  • K.Chakravarthy

    Coming from an academic environment that cares more for acquiring degrees rather qualitative research, I have seen doctoral research evolve into a huge recycling industry in collaboration with the very universities that are supposed to provide filters for such happenings. The concept of external research has reached such ridiculous levels that plagiarism is a part of parcel wherein the supervisor/research guide writes for the scholar for a fixed amount of money. This output is obviously rehash from several already awarded doctoral dissertations/books and the evaluation is so poor that not a single person i know have been caught in the process. Standards, what are they? And yes I am from India.

  • Isabel Canhoto

    I can relate to this issue wholeheartedly. Teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels, every time I receive a paper I find myself questioning the origin of the words printed there. The university where I teach in Lisbon has made an application available to lecturers which enables us to detect plagiarism. Google also comes in handy.
    Being a PhD student myself, I can relate to BOTH sides of the issue. And I cannot be emphatic enough about the need to curb these situations. Plagiarism goes against everything science and research and knowledge should stand for! Science and research and knowledge are NOT about cutting corners and doing it the easy way – which is basically what plagiarism is (also) about.
    It is true that the younger generations (the “digital natives”) do come from a culture of global sharing and no authorship concerns (to a degree…). But in academia another culture has to be the paradigm. And for me plagiarism is above all a question of intellectual dishonesty. It must be fought – and those who do it exposed.

    • De' Joe

      i couln’t agree more with you Isabel. Here in Ghana, it is one big problem. Students don’t seem to quite their search for an easy way out .. dubbing anothers work and words seem pretty cool for most. What a shame. As a tutor at the undergrad level, i keep refering them; go back and bring an original work.

  • manjeet chaturvedi

    plagiarism is a crime, a big crime in academic world which is growing largely.
    many people indulge into this, few are caught and reported, but the greater sin is that many others overlook such things knowingly.

  • Muzvare

    I am a student in the process of writing a paper. I was wondering whether there is a internet mechanism where I can check for plagiarism. You know like post my whole thesis and then check to see where I did not acknowledge sources etc.

  • anthroprobably

    Jeff makes a good point; plagiarism takes many forms. Lying about sources is definitely one of the most common ones.

    I have to say that while M.L. highlights the problems universities are facing well, I disagree with the notion that academics have no business calling out “violations of professional behavior” when they see them because many have been guilty of similar violations. That’s like giving up and saying “what’s the point”. I still believe in honesty and integrity. I’m not throwing up my hands and saying “I give up” because others have cheated their way to the top in the past. I did my best as a student and continue to do my best as a professional to give credit where credit is due; and I expect the same from everyone else.

  • Ness

    I agree with Jeff. Plagiarism takes other forms – from blatantly copying (not to say, verbatim) one’s work to owning someone’s concept as his own. And sadly, not everyone has the time to check this, often relying on citation and references. This issue is often made known when someone else notice the plagiarized work. Media, albeit, the Internet, has made it worse. Students, and “professionals” find it free to copy and submit information, as if their own. What has happened to creativity and originality? Has the academe been neglectful in developing these?

  • melissaqn

    Convergence between the different sectors of society (not just between the government and the academe) has been the advocacy in every new administration in the Philippines. Usually the endeavour through inter-agency committees (for urgent issues) will start smoothly, but later on when it’s already tough for the government to adhere to what is right and just for the people, the convergence starts to break away leaving the government to do what it wants. The other sectors of society (academe and the private sectors) are really interested to be part of the policy review and formulation at the national and local level, however, it really takes a lot of political will among the leaders of the government and genuine concern to the public for this partnership to work.

  • S. Shetler

    There are many benefits to the census, especially for researchers, yet i’m more interested in the author’s thoughts about the negatives of the census, if any?

    • Ian Cooke

      There are limitations to the effectiveness of the census, some of which we discussed in the exhibition. Probably the most obvious is that the length of time between censuses means that the information starts to get dated (from a planning point of view) in the years immediately before the next census. It’s an expensive exercise, so there have to be decisions about what to leave out. The discussion over the question on religion in the UK 2011 census does also emphasise the need for caution in interpreting the results relating to single questions (in this case, where people’s interpretation of the meaning of the question may have differed).

  • Lagnard

    This is a nice piece of information. I am writing from Tanzania and what holds true in the US is almost the same thing happening in Tanzania higher learning institutions. Our kind of youth are interested in leisure more than studies. They drink to their satisfaction at any time of the day and week. They love friendship than studies. They forget studies than how they can do the same for music outings and making friends. They however, dream of having big office with high pays at graduation. How can we link these together/

    There is someone who conducted a study here in East Africa and established that the first year of enrollment into universities is used by freshers to look for boyfriends and girlfriends. The second year is for concretizing friendship and the third year is a year of full love and leisure.

    The big question here is what type of a new generation are about to have? Who shall govern our countries say ten years to come? Were are we going to get analytical leaders and scientists ten years on the road? Can we say technology shall do the rest and people just rest? Highly disturbing indeed!!.

  • Arnon

    I have written lately two books . One deals with multiple victims murder and the other on intimate partner homicide in Israel. In both books I didn’t look at social psychology as a uniqe field, but instead, I shaw that phenomena that occur in our society can not be explain by paychology or psychopathology alone, but shouls be connected with social and cultural issues. This concept was offered by Durkheim in 1857. I found it true even today. In other words social psychology should be an interdisiplinary model and not a discipline for it self.

  • Jeff

    Plagiarism takes other forms, as well. Claiming “research says” with no citation. Presenting opinion as fact then being unable to back up the opinion. For example, “The USA PATRIOT Act permits discrimination by law enforcement.” This statement may or may not be true, but others have said this already and failure to cite that source and to show that the writer actually read the act is plagiarsim.

  • M. L. Anderegg

    Some twenty years ago, as a graduate assistant at a large university, I caught a doctoral student plagerizing more than ten pages of her twenty page paper. The professor I worked for took the paper and the articles to the department chair. The chair instructed the professor that the student should be allowed to rewrite the paper “without prejudice”, explaining that “this student comes from a strong oral tradition where ownership of words and phrases is a foreign concept.” What was the student’s country of origin? The U. S. A.
    During the past four decades, there has been an embarrassing number of “leading researchers”who have openly plagerized the writing of others as well as proliferating the literature. Where was the academic outrage? It was non existent.
    In summary, academics have scant space to criticize open violations of professional behavior when so many of them are equally guilty.

  • Joanna Bryson

    Re the hegemony, in my experience IRBs are only a problem for research funded through the US, in fact it may be only a problem for research funded through the US Military. I have in the last few years experienced the problem of explaining to UK a regional IRB set up for medical research a social science protocol. I have nothing but praise for our IRB, they worked hard and gave us the permission we needed, but the medically-oriented forms & procedures I went through and the composition of the panel were really not appropriate for social science ethics nor a good use of academic / professional time. Social science needs to be recognised with its own ethics panels and procedures appropriate to the challenges this discipline faces.

  • Paula Skedsvold

    Although the National Science Foundation seeks proposals that are “potentially transformative,” the federal agency acknowledges that these proposals may be difficult to identify and “their transformative nature and utility might not be recognized until years later.” NSF also states that conventional projects may lead to unexpected and transformative results.

    Unfortunately, the report recommends the elimination of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate. Although this recommendation is not likely to gain traction, it does not make sense. Why eliminate funding for research that lies at the core of many of this nation’s challenges including education, health, intelligence, and defense? Also, this Directorate houses the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics which collects data and prepares reports on U.S. competitiveness, our scientific workforce, and STEM education. Again, how does this help?

  • Hr Labor Relations

    Hi..
    This post is quite helpful for the visitors.I found these contents are very much helpful for me.

    Thanks for the post……

  • Ayesha Khan

    Our research organization wants to set up its own ethics review committee for social science research, the first of its kind in Pakistan. I am able to access many documents through other organizations that provide details of how to develop the processes, etc. to review proposals. However, we would want our ERC to be affiliated with some international board so as to ensure its legitimacy. Does anyone know to whom we could turn for that?

  • less critical person

    Hi Alice,

    Out of interest, who asked you to write the article?

    • alice bell

      Ah, just the socialsci website asked for something on engagement – they didn’t ask me to write a particular argument or anything.

  • Phil Ward

    An interesting and measured analysis. I think Phil Willis (who recently gave voice to the growing belief in certain sectors that concentration is the only way forward in a globalised environment at a time of cuts) has the potential to undo the good of the last RAE in identifying and rewarding excellent research, wherever it take place. Interesting to set the ‘concentration agenda’ against the policy in other areas (such as commerce and finance), where it is seen as logical and sensible to spread risk and encourage development and growth of smaller and newer enterprises. I’d also add that such concentration would have a detrimental effect on students: the concensus is that excellent research informs and drives excellent teaching. Separating the two creates a two tier system, consigning the majority of students to second class teaching, removed from the cutting edge of research, and the elite minority to the ivory towers of excellence. Separating the two would be, I think, a retrograde step.

  • A scientist

    I enjoy my science engagement activities too and would like to be see more, but, to be honest, I can’t make much sense of this text. If this is meant to convince other scientists, then you need less waffling and more solid evidence, especially when you promise to be “professional”.

    I was so annoyed that I actually sent this text through the Blablameter:. The result was:

    “Bullshit Index :0.3. Your text shows indications of ‘bullshit’-English. It’s still ok for PR or advertising purposes, but more critical audiences may be skeptical.”

    • Alice Bell

      Useful comment, ta.

      You might like to read some of the content on the NCCPE site (linked to above) if you want a bit of evidence.

  • Ciarán Mc Mahon

    Every time I read an article which includes a phrase like “Every now and again I see someone argue that…” without providing a link or citation, I stop reading.

    • Alice Bell

      That’s a fair point, and I did think twice before writing that. However, I also decided that to point fingers at colleagues would be a worse crime than seeming to be engaging in a bit of ‘strawmanning’.

      (though I’d add I have similar attitudes about people who find the time to comment, but not to bother reading… maybe we’re all a bit too quick to judge?)

      • Ciarán Mc Mahon

        I’m sorry Alice but straw-manning is a worse crime. If you are going to say something publicly, you should be able to take criticism of it – like you have done, and I am doing. That’s the scholarly method – to do otherwise is to rely on hearsay. If your colleagues have said this publicly, provide the link so your readers can judge for themselves.

        Otherwise, the implication is that reasonable people give credence to stories not based on verifiable facts – is that what science is about?

        • Alice Bell

          I think we’ll have to agree to disagree here.

          This isn’t ‘science’, it’s an opinion piece which I was asked to write. So I won’t apologise for my use of rhetoric. When I write academic papers, I cite very carefully. However, I also anonymise research subjects to protect them too.

          It’s worth adding that not all of this sort of talk I’m referring to isn’t always written down, so isn’t always cite-able. I do have one or two I’ve been tempted to respond directly to (THE pieces, etc). But actually feel slightly sorry for the academics in these cases, often they feel the way they do because they’ve been pushed into work by manipulative press officers, etc. I felt it’d be, frankly, a bit bitchy to refer to them directly.

  • pabloam

    Hi, i’m student of sociology, i’m in 2nd year in Universidad de Chile, South america. I think it kind of different our situation in the subject of statistics because we have the obligation of study it. We have four courses of statistics beginning with basics deviation o mean and other basic stuff increasing in difficulty but what i don’t like is the mostly use of software in the process, like spss and atlas-ti. if you allow me to ask, in your own country(ies) the subject of statistics is not a obligation to study?

  • longda

    yes. the theoretical’ terms are a little obscure in the area of the study of the social science ,this is something we must admit ,but in the same time we should notice that the words used in the reports are “unique”—it is some sambols which is short but can tell us a lot of inforation ,that is to say ,if we do not use this one word,then we should waste a lot of other words to describe it.To say it more clearly ,let us just take an example,If we see an “apple” ,so we say it is an “apple”,because we also meet it in our daily life,but If we give the apple to someone who have never seen apple,they will not know how to call them.so we should tell them that “it is a kinds of friutes,it is red ,it taste sweet,and something like this, so it is proper to call it “apple”,though some people can not understand it easily,so maybe it is hard to understand the words used in the works of social science,but the authors are not the person to blame.To solve this kinds of problem,the society can encourage a new trade,whose responsibility is to make the research reports easy to read,that is ,to translate the words used in the research to the ones which can be easily understood by the masses,to make the aricles become essays in the magazine.

  • Murray

    Jargon should be considered a necessary evil. For a field to define its terms in a productive manner, it needs words its can claim ownership of in able to manipulate them accordingly. Social science is no different from natural science in this. Such language does though erect barriers between us and the public. Its for this reason that ‘popular science’ writing exists.

    There are other dangers besides, like jargon’s tendency to prompt navel gazing of dubious social value. As a result, we should always challenge our usage of such terms.

  • rtangco

    Science produces knowledge. And knowledge if it is to benefit humanity should be translated in a form in which it can be understood by those who can use it. Those who can use it usually are those who are in a position to provide financial and logistical support to those who produce knowledge. No one can force a scientist to write articles that are understandable by a bigger readership, however. Still a scientist should not complain that science is not being supported by non-scientists or society as a whole if only a few scientists can understand each other. Worse, if scientists make it a point to be difficult to understand. Then again, if scientists do not need any form of assistance then let them muddle through their own jargon.

  • Harold QIN

    It’s a very surprising comment. Social Sciences are playing a little awkward roles. In China, scholars discussed the problems in the 1930s formally, but unfortunately without agreed conclusion. China has a long history of conventinal Humanity during that time, some scholars believed it is NOT proper for the science invading into the troditional area ocupied by conventional ethics.

  • Dr David Hill

    As usual the social scientists do not comprehend where the great wealth comes from. They do not understand that it takes a very select part and special individuals to start the whole process off. Tweaking here and there will do little in the global markets of tomorrow. It isa bout time taht they homed into the fundamental building blocks of economic dynamism and supported new thnking out of the box instead of the old dogma that has ruined this country.

    In a mere twenty-year’s time to 2031, the UK and the EU will be reaching the limits of despair when trying to capture any major future foothold in the global economic stakes. This will not be due to its people, but their governments with regard to current and medium-term policies. These policies are inherently based in the old thinking that by joining universities and business together we can achieve economic dynamism in the future. It forgets that there are three crucial elements to achieve this – the ‘Ideas’ phase, the R&D phase and the corporate commercialization phase. I say forget, as the primer of this most important energiser for economic wealth creation, the ideas phase, is not taken serious and where it is the most important and fundamental missing factor. For without world changing ideas first the process cannot even begin. The British and EU system does not comprehend what the history of S&T tells us where up to 75% of all the inventions that have made the modern world what it is today, did not emanated within the confines of our universities or advanced corporate research centres of excellence, but in the minds of ‘independent’ innovators, far remote from the final two innovation elements that constitute the ‘innovation chain’. Indeed, the ‘independent’ ideas element is more-or-less nonexistent in UK and EU economic policy. This is unlike what is emerging in the East and where they are now starting to see that the ideas people are the most important commodity that a nation has. In twenty years time therefore with this lack of foresight and new thinking in Britain and the EU, we shall in reality just be hangers-on in the global economic stakes. Therefore for its own good, the United Kingdom and the EU have to start thinking ‘out of the box’ and give total prominence and resources to the initial ideas people. For if they do not we shall see in our own lifetime the inevitable collapse of living standards, the like of which we have shall never have seen before and where our offspring will live to be totally subservient to the economic might and power of the East. That is why it is so vitally important that we create now the innovative infrastructure throughout Europe for our ideas people to flourish and thereby equip our nations with the dynamic products and services that we shall dearly need. When will the UK and the EU realise this is the big question, for it has the most overriding repercussions and consequential economic effects that have never been seen before for the 500 million+ people of the European Union? We really have to start thinking ‘out-of-the-box’ like our Eastern counterparts before it is far too late to stem the economic decline that is now upon us all.

    Dr David Hill
    Executive Director
    World Innovation Foundation

  • Mary G. West

    I too am a regular reader and visitor to sage and interested in joining the Socialsciencespace. Please bring me up to speed on my password. I’d like to read & post. Thank you/mgw

    • Sage

      Hi Mary, if you email catriona.moore[at]sagepub.co.uk she will contact you regarding becoming a contributor. Thanks!

  • Haruna M. Aliero

    I strongly feel the same that Nick Cohen felt about the Social Sciences. There is no doubt that Social Science researchers are too abstract in their formulation and also guided by unrealistic assumptions. The public will hardly take us seriously until when we begin to work within the context of real life situations, and then our theoretical formulations become practicable.

  • Judith Strasser

    This is great – include me.

  • mkimball

    Catriona posted this question on February 2. It is now April 21 and I find no comments and nothing in the forum that responds to it. What does this mean? Should I jump to conclusions and assume that Nick Cohen was correct – precious few in the social sciences (or arts and humanities) are interested in writing for (or writing about writing for) general readers? Or should I be more conservative and assume that this topic is simply not hot enough to draw the fire of debate and discussion?

    My opinion on the matter is that Cohen has created a bit of a straw man. The reason business and “hard” sciences, for example, are farther from the chopping block is not because these fields possess scholars who are more interested in selling their ideas to the public. Has anyone read an abstract in, say, Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering lately? Here’s an excerpt from a 2010 paper:

    The surface of nanoparticles is modified with polyethyleneglycol-derivatized phospholipid to enhance the biocompatibility, water-solubility, and stability under an aqueous media. While the cytotoxic effect was negligible for 18 h incubation even at highest concentration of 500 μg/ml, MnO nanoparticle represented higher level of toxicity than those of Fe3O4 and the commercial medical contrast reagent, Feridex after 2 and 4 day incubation time….

    So, maybe we’re comparing apples with oranges. The real question is our perceptions of the relevance of different kinds of research and scholarly work. What problems are they trying to solve? Some types of business research attempt to solve a range of issues with very real economic impacts. Some types of science attempt to solve problems related to public and personal health. Likewise, some of the social sciences address real-world problems that are implicitly relevant. However, any and every field also contains scholarship that attempts to achieve less palpable objectives – developing theory, deconstructing paradigms, experimenting with radical ideas, etc. Do we need to run a public opinion poll on each of these to determine whether they should be funded? Must every academic pursuit be directly linked to pragmatic concerns and packaged for consumption like a Happy Meal?

    Having said this, I also recognize a certain arrogance in disciplines that pride and preen themselves on high volumes of abstraction and arcane jargon. I don’t know if this arrogance stems from insecurity, isolation, or a superiority complex (or, if all three, what proportion of each goes into the cocktail). I do know one thing that those of us who teach college students learn on a day-to-day, class-to-class basis: if you can make it relevant to people’s lives, they tend to respond positively and even passionately.

    What’s the bottom line? Partnerships. Those of us who can’t write our way out of a wet paper bag guarded by fuzzy kittens should consider collaborating with those who can – science writers, journalists, creative writers.

    Those of us who labor within esoteric postmodern realms or tread remote theoretical landscapes should consider forming creative partnerships with colleagues, within and outside our fields, who enjoy pursuing more concrete lines of inquiry and strive to write engagingly about them.

    Finally, those of us who enjoy writing accessible prose should feel a sense of obligation beyond that arising from our personal objectives and, for the sake of our disciplines and the problems they can help solve, take up the gauntlet!

  • urmi shelley

    Dear Sage
    I am a regular reader and a visitor to sage and
    I am very much interested in joining the Socialsciencespace. I am unable to use my old pass word to login the space .kindly help me in creating the new account.
    thank you
    warm regard

    • Sage

      Hi Urmi,
      We will send you an email to confirm your registration information shortly.
      Best wishes,
      SAGE

  • Henry Zakumumpa

    From a Ugandan perspective, the value of the social sciences is not contested and much taken for granted. I know though that in my university feel the social sciences are the ‘inferior’ sciences. Its is interesting to learn that the value of social sciences in the west are currently under intense debate.

  • Vicki Bolton

    Prof T, Clara – you can contact me and find out more about my research and background
    through my blog (www.confoundingfactor.org). Clara – I am/was an odd kind of economics major at undergrad. My postgrad research sits within the Division of Social Statistics but my co-supervisor is a geographer-turned-sociologist. I tend to think of myself (erroneously) as a political scientist. I may be a little confused, discipline-wise!

    Clara, Rajesh – I completely agree with you about thinking systematically. I took a great course on what might be called research philosophy last year which was a very neat over-view of why this stuff is so important. I’m a bit of a Popper fan, but I really enjoyed reading Bradford Hill, Holland, Freedman etc. as well. It was extremely interesting to look at the limits of quantitative research, actually – really put into perspective for me just how difficult it is to know anything.

  • harmonious1

    hi, I am sorry but it’s no wonder the politicians don’t take you seriously… I mean, for one thing, your point #2 and point #3 contradict. If, as your quote suggests, Giddens is right
    in saying ‘‘most people in politics and the media do not know where they get their ideas from”, then how is it possible that the social sciences have any value, if also ‘the vast majority of the Cabinet are beneficiaries of social science degrees’….

    You’ve just shown you’re your own worst enemy. Who needs politicians to tell you us that we don’t need social scientists, if the social scientists themselves think that politicians with social science degrees have no idea where their ideas come from…

    Give me a break. Please…

  • showler

    I think that Facebook, like most things, is perfectly fine to use within moderation. It is a fantastic social networking site where you can connect with people from across the globe seamlessly; the notion is terrific. Of course abuse of it is when I feel things begin to take a turn for the worst so to speak. Facebook is to be used as a social netwrok after all, not a means to publicise your existence.

    I draw reference to this from David Lynch’s film Inland Empire. While Lynch never openly sggests this, my interpretation of that film is that it conveys how realities can be bled into each other; hard to distinguish from one one another. Just like the actress who struggles to define what is reality and what is her work, some facebook users who abuse the privilege may actually become so besotted with updating their lives and telling the world what they had for the lunch that they, to a certain degree, are unable to remove themselves from this hyper-reality.

    I have friends who are connected and updating their facebook pages every hour of the day and even they admit they find it impossible to function without being connected to facebook. It’s as if Facebook is now their reality, it has a higher purpose than what it should; fantasy and reality merge into an entity which they can’t remove themselves from.

    It sounds ridiculous I know, but with so much media exposure in our lives today it can be difficult to discern the fabrication from the reality, and Facebook is no different. The very nature of an individual updating their status multiple times each day certainly invokes narcissism. There is an assumption that everyone wishes to know about that person’s happenings, even the most mundane things in life. Do we really need to know if someone has had egg and chips for their tea? That conceited infividual would suggest so.

  • Anonymous

    I think you give too much credit to the USA hegemony claim. This is about Universities being afraid of getting sued. In the UK, we operate a system were as researchers we need to ask permission from Central Office to do research. If the proposal can harm in any way the reputation of the University (including with their paymasters, the Govt), it is likely it won’t get approved. It sounds to me that small is beautiful when it comes to research. Perhaps large institutions are not the best place to engage in research.

  • Euro PhD on S.R. & C

    As Director of the European PhD on Social Representations and Communication Research Centre and Multimedia Lab (http://www.europhd.eu) and of the So.Re.Com. Thematic Network of excellence (http://www.europhd.eu/SoReComTHEmaticNETwork), I found very interesting the initiative to promote a debate on social sciences and its impact in contemporary society on global scale. I will contribute to actively promote its dissemination among our European PhD research trainees and partners from all the European countries and many academic Institutions over the world by announcing it via the SoReCom@-NEWS (http://www.europhd.eu/html/_onda03/04/02.00.00.00.shtml).

  • rajeshsinha

    I Feel the same way. Mechanisms underlying phenomenones in Social Sciences, unlike Physical sciences are intangible. It creates great deal of dificulty to create predictive theories, having substantial accuracy. The situation would remain so until we develope more shopesticated research methods, just like telescopes and microscopes in the physical sciences. Such thinking implies that Research methods are of supreme importance as far as advancements in social are concerned. Mathematics are just about logical thinking. It helps overcoming our cognitive limitations of processing information.

    Regards

  • Anthony J. langlois

    This may be of interest:

    Political Research and Human Research Ethics Committees
    Australian Journal of Political Science
    Volume 46, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 141 – 156
    Author: Anthony J. Langloisa
    DOI: 10.1080/10361146.2010.544287

  • Gillian Nieman

    You have hit nail on the head. I am a PhD candidate studying the relationship between Aboriginal people and local government, using a large regional city in Victoria, Australia as a case study site. Local Government is no problem. They understand about signing things. But Aboriginal people are the most over-researched people on the planet, therefore researchers must take time to get to know the community and earn its trust. Knowledge is emergent. I have prepared Plain Language Statements and consent forms, but my Aboriginal participants have said, “don’t wave bits of paper at us”. They know I am a researcher, and what my research is about as I have been in the area for nearly a year now. I don’t feel I can betray their trust by insisting on something that is alien to their way of doing things. My solution will therefore be to ask for validation of anything I write from the community. This was not what I wrote in my Ethics application, so I’m wondering if I’m going to have to go through the process all over again.
    The good news is that I am a member of the Ethics Committee of another University. I’m learning that things cannot always be cut-and-dried.

    • Roberto Castro

      Gillian, the problem you are describing is common in many societies all over the world. I have been in the same situation with Mexican peasants, and with lower-class Mexicans. They even distrust someone asking them to sign anything, as they fear that the government will come and arrest them for something they don’t know. The big problem with these IRBs requirements is that they take for granted a natural attitude (in Schutz’s terms), a habitus (in Bourdieu’s terms) that basically belongs to the middle and upper social classes. In other words, the research problems that Ethics Committees produce by demanding written consent no matter what, can be elicited sociologically. We understand them better than what they understand us…

  • Naum Aloyo

    I have to agree with you. I have a problem now with some members of economic department at the university where i am registered for PhD: they can’t see any economics in the study of urban forestry when there is a lot. They think urban forestry should best be left to geography and ecology? They further don’t see how climate change mitigation is related to economics? Please

  • Prof " T "

    Dear Vicki, first I believe there is a ‘paper’ in this issue. I completely agree with you as well.As an educator, I am continuously shocked and concerned about the moaning and groaning among students when required to take even the most elementary statistics for their undergraduate degree in sociology. As a budding sociologist, it is my belief that these moans and groans from students reflect the very heart of American culture and its lack of priority on satisfying – equally – the need for basics: Reading, Writing, & Arithmetic. As a practitioner, having hired hundreds of individuals, it is frustrating to have limited choices in human capital that meets basic skill set needs: Writing, Reading (assimilation of information), and Arithmetic ( quantifying results).

    I would venture a guess that a majority of the specialists in American industry that produce “research” as their primary role rarely use more than proportions, cross-tabs, and chi-square.

    Given that we agree, how can we ignite a conversation that may lead to a change?
    All the best- T

  • clara

    facebook makes us connected to each other, but connected in different way. virtually connected but not real connection… Seeing other people with their success and how they spend their money (traveling, eating in a luxurious place — from their photograph) can create anxiety, envy, and behavior tends to show off… rather than making friends (real friends) facebook can give you a headache. If you do it just for fun… it’s oke i think…. but not addicted to it..

  • clara

    I agree with you…. I’m a lecturer.. and my student always think that statistic and research methods are boring and difficult to understand… but they are really important… It helps you to think systematically. If there is any questions about research method can I discuss it with you… thx… (Sorry…what is your major?)

  • Aidan Foster-Carter

    Many thanks for this valuable initiative!

    Aidan Foster-Carter
    Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology & Modern Korea, Leeds University, UK

  • ttiso

    This is as true in the U.S. as it is in Great Britain.

    • Patrick Ainley

      As I think I said at the discussion to which Sarah refers, apart from those few academics in the very elite unis who actually welcome the proposals as a way to privatise their institutions out of the system and so, they hope, save their precious research careers, there seemed to me initially two reactions following Browne and government’s response to it. One, among those academics who have been so far up themselves for so long that they cannot believe this will happen to them and another among the mass of teachers in the mass universities who are so ground down they cannot think two weeks ahead, let alone two years! Both lots therefore continue with ‘discourse as usual’ – applying for research funding they have no hopes of getting, writing papers and going to conferences etc. Hopefully now they have some time to think, reality is starting to sink in and we may have some joining up among all the disparate campaigns that have started up and with those students who are still opposed, if they also have not gone back to ‘business as usual’!

  • cnox

    Thank you Mr. Stam for writing this article.
    As a psychologist I strongly agree with you. As a young scientist I feel that I need to add one point. Being thrown out in the life in between the Master, where one could more or less “pick” a theory and use it and the life as a Ph.D. student often economic factors make us beliefers in one “theoretic religion” or the other. It doesn’t even have to be ones own professor, but rather a current trend in the specific scientific community and the monetary pressure that makes one change ones theory and consequently ones scientific approach.
    What I miss most in theoretic contributions is the will to truly communicate in a sense that may truly improve our science.

  • Markus: Child Psych.

    It’s interesting to observe how the relatively young field of psychology deepens, widens, assimilates and sometimes contracts as it quickly evolves into a legitimate science.

    Speaking of economics and social psychology, I recently watched Freakonomics, whose title suggests the relative popularity of the former over the latter, despite discussing topics that are clearly shared by both fields of study.

  • Dianne Heath

    In low income areas physical and mental aliments are never diagnosed. Perhaps there are stereotypes that alter people’s view of the intellectual capacity of children from low income areas. Instead of noticing that the child is not developing cognitively, people just assume that children from lower socioeconomic status are less capable of normal development.
    For example many students in low income areas are often not diagnosed with ADHD which result in increased high school drop out rates. However since people just assume that the students are lazy, undisciplined and unmotivated then they don’t get diagnosed and the cycle continues.
    Social Science Medley

    • Dianne Heath

      Hello! Just to clarify the first sentence, I meant to say many physical and mental ailments are never diagnosed.

  • Nic

    Hi,
    sorry for using this entry to post a comment, but I wanted to let you know, that on my mac clicking to email you via ‘contact us’ does not work.
    SUGGESTION: would it be possible, that you could post somewhere easy to find your email-address please?

    2nd issue:
    one event entry has the wrong year, its on your site stated as 2011, but it is in 2012!
    10th Conference of the World Association for Person Centred and Experiential Psychotherapy and Counseling

    Best wishes,

    Nic

    • Sage

      Hi Nic,
      Thanks to alerting us to these two issues: both pages have now been updated. To get in contact with us please email info[at]socialsciencespace.com or alternatively contact site editor Catriona Moore on catriona.moore[at]sagepub.co.uk

  • Christian Adams

    As any Anthropologist can tell you, there are a plethora of sub disciplines located within the “science ” of Anthropology. These range from Medical to Applied, from Social to heritage. Many Anthropologists at the undergraduate level are ill informed of these sub disciplines, if at all!

    Most Australian Anthropologists are given no idea how to undertake Native Title Anthropology, or how to undertake a Heritage Clearance for a mining company. This situation may be alleviated by better communications between those individuals undertaking research in these fields, however the situation may be better remedied by informing undergrads of what the true nature of their future works may be. I myself consider my profession to be ” corporate Anthropology” as it involves the land, and subsequently is not limited to one thing in particular. Gone are the days of grand fieldwork, rather, as a corporate Anthropologist I may be undertaking a Heritage Clearance one day and the next I am consulting with a mining company. This is where the work lies and many of us seem to be unaware of this fact. The days of studying the Ongo Bongo are long gone, in its place we have tourism , mining, housing and the associated works that are required . This information does not seem to be reaching Anthropologists at large; and it should be conveyed to all.

    This kind of work reflects the changing dynamic nature of Anthropology, as we all know Anthropology is syncretic as is culture. As Anthropologists we need to be aware of the changing nature of Anthropology, this will allow us to merge the old with the new.

    Anthropology within Australia is still in its infancy, we are not even 100 years old yet. However, the changes taking place within Australian Anthropology are not limited to our small nation. Rather than banging on about our new pet theory Anthropologists need to view reality through the correct lens. Corporate Anthropology is not nice, it is not the study of some remote unseen tribe. Corporate Anthropology is what has become required if one is to undertake works in Australia on Aboriginal Land.

    • Catriona Moore

      Interesting comment Christian. Why don’t you do a separate blogpost on corporate anthropology?

  • Vicki Bolton

    It’s hard to disagree with what he says – it’s what he does that causes the trouble. It would be interesting to know whether he has an ideal figure in mind for the percentage of 18 year olds who should go to university…

  • ALISS

    Glad you emerged relatively unscathed.
    one of the best things about rise of new technology is that it is possible for family and firends to find out more quickly what is going on. although on a downside they may know more of the horrors. some examples of this use of social media can be seen at for links to news stories and social media sources see this page from New York Public Radio which has a comprehensive collection of links. http://www.wnyc.org/articles/its-free-country/2011/mar/11/major-earthquake-and-tsunami-video-and-resources/ They include news sites, twitter and the Google Person Finder http://japan.person-finder.appspot.com/?lang=en site which relatives have been using to locate loved ones. Discussion on the use of social media in the emergency can be found on the PBS media blog http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/03/how-social-media-internet-changed-experience-of-japan-disaster-074.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pbs%2Fmediashift-blog+%28mediashift-blog%29&utm_content=Google+UK

  • KASI

    Yes, i agree with Daniel Lende’s.
    The sub-disciplines needs proper communication and better engagement with each other, which would reduce the tensions. In Indian anthropology case it is even worse. We have regional bias within anthropology discipline, for instance, north indian universities dominates physical anthropology and in the south indian universities, it is social anthropology. Between these two regions other two sub-disciplines, Archaeological and Linguistic, lost their identity.

  • Denis Thie

    Already bookmarked your site for future reference and good reads!

  • swbbrown

    I appreciate the perspective of the article. I have been formally trained in management and orgnaization science as well as material science. I work on a daily basis in an organization that is overwhelmingly dominated by engineers and chemists. I value their perspectives and opinoins on many things. My colleagues and I are active in helping to shape regulations, policies, and standards. I often feel that as a group of people largely trained in the physical sciences we become too focused on the technoligies at hand while being somewhat ignorant of the broder social context. As the article discusses, I feel that a better understanding of human decision-making and social psychology could make our group more effective in shaping regulations and policies. Also, as the article implies, I would guess that our ignorance of the “social” is common place.

    On another note, I agree with the comment about bringing knowledge of social dynamics to a broader audience. I agree that field specific jargon and the over-emphasis on being a science has done some damage to the study of social issues. Hopefully, we can showcase our studies of the “social” in such away that it fosters the development of younger peoples’ interests in our fields of study.

  • Max Farrar

    Yes, all that’s true, and well put, but much as I support the view that excellent thinking in social science will help solve social problems, macro and micro, we social scientists are often our own worst enemies. Why do we insist on calling ourselves scientists if we know that poets and painters often make just as great a contribution to social life? So obsessed are with social structures, we rarely really listen very carefully to the people who form society; we often ignore completely those at the bottom of the social pyramid. We usually write and speak in a way that (perhaps deliberately in some cases) alienates us from political activists, let alone the wider population.

    We really need a push in the direction of ‘public social science’ on the lines of Burawoy’s ‘public sociology’. Adding Bauman into the mix, I’d advocate ‘public interpretative social study’, except that the title alone will put most people off!

  • Patrick Tissington

    We seem to be develoing some common ground (and by the way of course intellectually heavyweight!) But would you want the designers to be in charge of finances at a car manufacturer, or the engineers at a rail company? Or the doctors in the NHS?

  • Kelly-Anne Lewis

    Quite true. As a graduate of the social sciences, I couldn’t agree more.

  • Pat Tissington

    Far be it to disagree with the eminent Prof Canter who is a colossus in the field of psychology. But I do. In my view, his example of financial management of a department is probably one of the better ways of doing it I have seen for the people concerned at any rate. It certainly led to less hassle and more time for his research than actually taking an interest in it. I suspect he, in common with most department heads, might not have had all that much training before taking over the role and therefore he did not have many other options available. Behind this it seems that most academics do not regard themselves as needing the training that managers in other walks of life routinely undertake. And it leads inevitably to poor performance. Maybe Prof Canter was a good head of department – I really am not casting doubt on his manifest abilities – but I would draw a different analogy to the monastic one. Giving financial control to academics without first giving them proper training would be akin to the lunatics taking over the asylum.

    • David Canter

      I totally agree with Pat (except that bit about me being a colossus- I am proud to say my weight is well under control). Academics, right the way up to the highest levels of Unversities, have woefully little training, or support, in managing the finances that they are required to look after, although it has marginally improved over the last quarter of a century. But the central point of my comments still stands. If academics ar not an integral part of financial decision making in universities you cannot expect them to take the university’s financial decisions too seriously. Indeed they will use their intellects to find ways of turning the system to their advantage, not the advantage of the university.

  • G Cadogan

    That article on the importance of literature review should be required reading in every classroom, seminar or workshop where research writing is required. I hope it becomes a classic. For those of us who do research and who may “already know” what’s in the article, we cannot take it for granted that all researchers already know that. Again, great article.