Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
Banning Books Threatens the Freedom to Read
Banned Books Week is an annual event, typically held the last week of September, celebrating the freedom to read. The celebration sponsored […]
Encounters with (Constitutional) Monarchy
Robert Dingwall notes he never met the late Queen Elizabeth. He did, however, once try to bar Charles’s entry to the Cambridge Union Debating Society…
Whither Nudge? New Evidence Review Questions Its Efficacy
New research reviewing an influential 2021 paper supporting the efficacy of the ‘nudge’ and others now warns nudges may not have any effect on behavior at all.
The International Sociological Association Should Be Ashamed of Its President
ISA may not have any great love for the richer countries of the world, argues Robert Dingwall, but its president should be capable of telling the difference between mutual aid among sovereign nations and a desire to subject other countries to external domination.
What Ethnographers Have Learned from People Who Use Drugs
Can ethnography, long characterized as a lower tier of evidence in studying drug use, find things other approaches miss?
After Rana Plaza: Scholars Study Exploitive Labor Regimes in Bangladesh
Worker exploitation in garment supply chain factories is not just about sweatshops, note the authors of “After Rana Plaza: Governing Exploitative Workplace Labour Regimes in Bangladeshi Garment Export Factories” which appeared in the Journal of Industrial Relations.
Social Scientists Explain Community Bail Funds
Community vail funds are set up as a way to help the more than 80 percent of the over 650,000 people in jail in the U.S. have not been convicted and are presumed innocent but can’t afford bail.
King Canute and the Cult of Zero Infection
The humility of King Canute in the face of nature is worth recalling as a check on the enthusiasm for zero-infection. It is a fine-sounding slogan but do we really want to live in a society where everything else is sacrificed to this goal?
