University rankings might claim to provide an index through which students, faculty, and the general public might ascertain a number of things: the quality of education provided by an institution, the potential for networking at an institution, the breadth and depth of research being performed at an institution, and more. The institutional quest towards topping the university rankings can, however, derail efforts towards the improvement of society and higher education at large.

Most institutions see the market as the only legitimate form of organization, but different visions towards public policy, some involving artificial intelligence, have been the subject of consideration from academics and politicians alike. Under what circumstances, and to what extent, could artificial intelligence replace the market as the end-all guiding force in crafting reasonable public policy? Brexit may play a leading role in the transition.

After a friend gave the reviewer a copy of ‘The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy’ by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, it gave him lots of food for thought: Working at a university, after several years of postdoctoral fellowships, why, indeed, not slow down?

A decade ago, Elizabeth Buchanan and Erin Hvizdak set forth, in the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, some of the key elements that have since guided guiding ethical academic use of internet research methods.

One of the most salient aspects of what generally makes a ritual a ritual is that the action itself is divorced from real life or its real life roots – and that fascinates anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse. By his own admission, what intrigues the latest guest in the Social Science Bites podcast series is that ritual is “behavior that is ‘causally opaque.’

Wade Clark Roof, a sociologist of religion whose work examined the evolving spirituality of the Baby Boomer generation in such words as A Generation of Seekers, has died.

In the last 20 years or so there has been much excitement, particularly in science and technology studies, about Actor-Network Theory. One of its most distinctive features is the way in which it ascribes agency to material objects. Perhaps we should not be crediting Bruno Latour or Michel Callon with the original insight – but an English humourist, Paul Jennings.

Today, and into the future, consulting archival documents increasingly means reading them on a screen. This brings with it opportunity — imagine being able to search for keywords across millions of documents, leading to radically faster search times — but also challenge, as the number of electronic documents increases exponentially.

The last in a series from Adam Seth Levine. “Diversity increases creativity and innovation…interacting with people from different backgrounds…can [also] be a source of…conflict.” With that possibility in mind, Adam Seth Levine wanted to know if the experience itself was enjoyable.

Mengwei Tu, a lecturer in sociology at East China University of Science and Technology, describes her encounters with two postgraduate students from Pakistan. They highlight both China’s potential to become an attractive destination for international students and the difficulties involved in the internationalization of a society that was isolated from the outside world for much of its recent history.

The future of the academic monograph has been questioned for over two decades. At the heart of this ‘monograph crisis’ has been a publishing industry centred on the print publication of monographs and a failure and lack of incentives to develop business models that would support a transition to open digital monographs. In this post Mike Taylor argues that if monographs are to be appropriately valued, there is a pressing need to further integrate monographs into the digital infrastructure of scholarly communication. Failing this, the difficulty in tracking the usage and discovery of monographs online, will likely make the case for justifying further investment in monographs harder.

Can social science’s impact be boiled down to improving and enriching lives? In recent years, there has been an uptake […]