Social Science Space

The year 2017 turned out to be the start for mainstream behavioral economics after a leading practitioner in the field won a Nobel prize for his work. Throughout 2017, The Conversation asked experts in economics, psychology and other areas to address the power of this burgeoning field, as well as its potential for misuse. Here are some articles for your consideration.

Developing an effective response to sexual harassment in the academic industry — by no means a new phenomenon, notes Robert Dingwall — requires us to consider questions about institutional memory, occupational cultures, and organizational silos, rather than badly behaved individuals.

How well do sociology departments in the UK teach sociology that originated in the UK? Asking that surprisingly hard question may produce usable insights for academic Britain, argues our Robert Dingwall.

Fire safety is not just an issue for engineers. People build buildings, people live in buildings, and people use (and abuse) buildings. That creates a need for social and behavioral work to accompany every nail driven.

The UK science policy establishment has been remarkably sanguine in the face of its government’s plans for Brexit, argues Robert Dingwall.

We often use the metaphor of a war to describe the human struggle against disease. This is a very unhelpful way of thinking, because it generates the sort of hubris exemplified by the Chan Zuckerberg program.

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.

Sense About Science is recruiting six ambassadors to represent the Ask for Evidence campaign and give talks to different groups […]

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.

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.

The general election manifestos of five of the UK’s biggest parties contain sweeping claims about the causes of crime and policies to reduce it. Experts are warning today that such broad statements are nearly always wrong, and are calling on politicians to stop misleading voters.

The arrival of a report calling for the British government to better support social science has raised questions about the role, responses and responsibilities of a ‘public sociology.’