Social Science Space

The academic world today is in the process of being colonised by the values, mindset, and operational principles of business.

With larger data sets offering researchers the potential to look at more subtle interactions, big data is becoming increasingly valuable to social sciences, yet challenges remain.

The dominance of form over substance in the academic labour market has become so unforgiving that small flaws may invalidate a candidate´s presentation of self. You certainly can do the job, but you just don´t look the part.

The unsettling truth about the Academic job market.

Social scientists need to make a strong case for their worth inside and outside of academia.

Many sociology departments teach along conventionalist, Eurocentric lines. Nonetheless, a reformulation of the scope of the sociological curriculum seems to be slowly taking shape.

When I was a student, I had teachers who spoke about opportunities to study abroad in terms of things like the ability to widen one’s emotional and intellectual horizon.To today’s hardboiled politicians, journalists, and academic managers, these views must seem quaint and laughable.

Just a few years ago, critical voices could still speak through mainstream media to highlight the dangers of the quickly accelerating commercialisation of academia. These commentators have now been pushed to the margins.

Many PhD graduates are forced into the troubled world of unemployment while, at the same time, being denied a public voice. How is it that extremely narrow standards of professional legitimacy are used to judge young scholars who simply cannot meet them?

Sociology is arguably a global project. Significant approaches to the study of society have been developed in many parts of the world. Yet, students in the North Atlantic world do not learn about these approaches, as textbooks interpret the world in terms of scholars of the region.

Currently, textbooks exist at the margins of the Sociology, summarising and recycling extant knowledge while fundamentally lacking in original contributions to sociological enquiry. This doesn’t have to be.

Textbooks now play a crucial role in teaching in the social sciences. Their importance is mirrored by their abundance; there is an enormous variety of textbooks on the most commonly taught subjects. The rise of the ‘textbook industry’ is not necessarily a good thing, though.