Social Science Space

In an effort to prevent ‘gaming’ the REF, new recommendation from Lord Stern cuts down on the freedom of academics to move from institution as they see fit. Is the cure worse than the disease?

As Ian McBride has commented in The Guardian, one of the strange features of Britain’s EU referendum is the resignation […]

The result of the second UK referendum on membership of the European Union appeared immediately as a tragedy, says Robert Dingwall. It has rapidly degenerated into a farce, which may yet have tragic consequences.

Rebutting Daniel Nehring’s recent post asking if sociology still matters in Britain, Robert Dingwall responds that sociology does have a good story to tell about itself, even in the age of austerity.

Another disease in the tropics has the World Health Organisation in a lather, and again biomedicine’s response will not be all that useful in the short term. Social science can help now to address the underlying problems that help the Zika virus to spread — if policymakers will listen.

Revisions to the U.S. government’s regulations on ethical treatment of human research subjects that would exempt some experiments from direct oversight by institutional review boards are facing pushback from paternalistic guardians, says our Robert Dingwall, who don’t seem to believe subjects are competent to make decisions on their own.

The Federal Register is surely not everybody’s bedtime reading. It is where the US Government formally publishes certain official documents, […]

With most works of art looking at the past, the real focus is the present. The new movie ‘Suffragette,’ writes Robert Dingwall, invites us to think about the consequences of political systems that are supposedly democratic but systematically exclude many voices.

Bully for the researchers who have developed a vaccine can build resistance against some instances of malaria, says Robert Dingwall. But before the WHO recommends for its adoption, he suggests a harder look at user-centered design and cost-benefit analysis may be in order.

A new report from the World Health Organization on the response to the African Ebola outbreak backs up what our Robert Dingwall has been writing all along — by downplaying social science lives have been lost. The question now is whether a new WHO can improve.

After an unplanned visit to an American dentist, Robert Dingwall reflects on the power and the role of the case study

There is no point in improving the innovation pipeline for antibiotics, argues Robert Dingwall, if the drugs that come out at the end all fall into the same chaotic patterns of use as today.