Round up of recent social science research (from SAGE Insight)

Headlines abound with the plight of endangered minority languages around the world. Read a few of these and you’ll see some common themes: the rising number of languages dying worldwide, the distressing isolation of individual last speakers and the wider cultural loss for humanity.

In this brief, crisply written memoir, “In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems,” Parisi takes the reader on a journey through his scientific life in the realm of complex, disordered systems, from fundamental particles to migratory birds. He argues that science’s struggle to understand and master the universe’s complexity, and especially to communicate it to an ever-more skeptical public, holds the key to humanity’s future well-being.

Most project management scholars find literature reviews important. However, the success rate of publishing such papers is disappointingly low, as it can be challenging to establish a solid contribution in this type of research. We want to demonstrate how the power of a historical literature review may solve this problem and how it enabled us to publish two review articles based on the same stock of articles.