Social Science Space

Some of the top institutions in Europe have dropped down the annual Times Higher Education World University Rankings for 2013. The UK and US continue to dominate while leaders in France, Germany, Netherlands, Russia, Belgium, Ireland and Austria have seen their stars fade. The results are likely to spur on advocates of a scheme to produce a measurement of university excellence that better reflects the strengths of universities outside the US and UK.

Taking the top spot in the THE rankings for the third year in a row is the California Institute of Technology. Oxford has also maintained its position in joint second place but in a tussle between the East and West coasts of the US, Harvard has pushed Stanford into fourth place, having regained its position next to Oxford at number two.

We’re living in an age of technology, with exciting new devices being released at a tremendously fast rate. It is […]

            Fifteen universities across the UK will receive £19.5 million to overhaul their social science […]

As even liberal arts colleges continue to turn their back on the liberal arts, where will the technocrats produced by higher education hone their thinking skills to address the current crisis in governing?

All criticism of the genre notwithstanding, textbooks do have a central role to play in turning sociology students into sociologists. Sometimes I do wonder, however, whether it is time to re-invent the textbook.

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

With poverty now rising to levels not seen in a generation, many scholars are revisiting the still controversial theories connecting culture to class. Currently the great recession is accelerating the outsourcing and deindustrialization that has been decimating the economic well-being of all Americans for almost a generation.

Like many academics, I was quite oblivious to the virtues of using digital social media for professional purposes for rather a long time. Then one day earlier this year the scales fell from my eyes.

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.