- Nature has an editorial about why investment in the social sciences must accompany investments in the sciences.
If you want science to deliver for society, through commerce, government or philanthropy, you need to support a capacity to understand that society that is as deep as your capacity to understand the science. And your policy statements need to show that you believe in that necessity.
To many readers of CT, this is unlikely to be a particularly surprising statement, but one need only glimpse at the comments that follow to appreciate how controversial the idea seems to some.
- The New Yorker has a long piece about the sociologist Howard Becker and his work about what it means to be a “deviant.” Certainly if you’re a sociologist, it is unlikely that you would not have encountered his work at one time or another during your training at minimum thanks to his helpful tips on how to write as a social scientist.
- The Pew Research Center has an interesting new position of “Director to lead the creation of the Pew Research Center Labs.”
- The new open-access journal Social Media + Society is now ready for submissions (submission fees waved for now).
{ 21 comments }
nnyhav 01.10.15 at 10:08 pm
Noah Smith on ‘sci-jacking’, “the practice of political movements trying to co-opt branches of science for their own ends.”
BenK 01.10.15 at 11:27 pm
The Nature editorial is certainly controversial, if for no other reason than a common perception that the present arc in the social sciences will never achieve an understanding of society as deep as the corresponding understandings in the physical sciences.
Witt 01.11.15 at 1:58 am
I’m glad I stuck with the New Yorker piece past its typical pretentiousness. It actually gets quite interesting toward the end. I especially liked this:
One of [Becker] favorite instances of how power works involves the role of the invisible middlemen who create places for themselves in the muddled center of any bureaucracy—in Brazil, where he lived for a while, they’re called despachantes, but a student of Becker’s has found close equivalents in Chicago laundromats, where they ease the burden of the welfare system.
“They get power by knowing the rules on the box in greater detail than anyone else,†Becker says. “They’re the people you turn to to break the code of the system. That kind of ‘how’ of power interests me more than the fact of power.”
Something I’ve witnessed hundreds of times, but never quite articulated like that.
Bruce Wilder 01.11.15 at 8:03 am
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, reading the Noah Smith blogpost. The Nature editorial seemed to go out of its way to avoid featuring economics as a representative social science.
I wonder what kind of advances in the social sciences society could actually handle.
John Quiggin 01.11.15 at 8:08 am
Is there a good way of distinguishing genuine Open Access journals from the proliferation of spam/vanity ones?
Peter T 01.11.15 at 9:12 am
re Bruce @4 on the Noah Smith post
I have not seen quite that level of un-aware self-certainty since I last read high Victorian boy’s novels. Gave me a laugh.
Sean Matthews 01.11.15 at 11:35 am
Social sciences are important, but the current state of social sciences is possibly a problem.
Recently, my wife delivered a paper at a cultural studies conference, and at the end someone stood up and accused her of being ’empiricist’. There is a whole story behind this accusation, of which, I strongly suspect, the person making it was not aware. That is not relevant. What is relevant is that I am unenthusiastic about letting people who use ’empiricist’ as an insult much direct access to political power.
Chris Bertram 01.11.15 at 1:22 pm
What is relevant is that I am unenthusiastic about letting people who use ‘empiricist’ as an insult much direct access to political power.
Not much danger of exactly that, but Europe’s economic policy makers seem very resistant to empirical evidence of whether those policies are working.
Sean Matthews 01.11.15 at 2:59 pm
@8
No dispute from me – but that’s not an argument for letting more categories of such people near the levers of power, is it?
J Thomas 01.11.15 at 3:09 pm
I can’t resist.
Shouldn’t we make a list of the categories of people who shouldn’t be allowed near the levers of power?
Poor people, obviously — too likely to work in their own self-interest.
Ignorant people, of course.
People who don’t know enough about economics, definitely!
People who belong to cults — Moonies, Scientologists, Catholics, Fundamentalists, Zionists, Austrian-school, etc.
Bankers.
It looks like it would be a lot of fun getting that list put together.
And then we would need to find a way to get close enough to the levers of power to enforce our list. It seems perhaps the people who currently control the levers of power have put us on their list of people to keep away!
Still we should try to take over. I think we’d have a lot of gun trying.
Rakesh 01.11.15 at 3:17 pm
https://www.academia.edu/3271029/Making_Social_Science_Matter
William Timberman 01.11.15 at 3:22 pm
The Left is too hot, the Right is too cold. Noah Smith is just right.
Eszter Hargittai 01.11.15 at 4:06 pm
John Quiggin – The following is a helpful resource on predatory open-access publishers. http://scholarlyoa.com
And yes, it is overwhelming.
Bruce Wilder 01.11.15 at 4:53 pm
J Thomas @ 10
Pretty much anyone who wants access to power should probably be on the list of people who should not have such access.
Metatone 01.11.15 at 8:00 pm
@Bruce Wilder 4 & @Peter T 6
I think Noah’s rock hard unawareness of how economics has already embedded certain political decisions is important though. I can only think of Simon Wren-Lewis in the mainstream who has openly blogged about how choices about what to value are in economics – which is very different to Noah’s concentration on the voting predilections of economists. Anyway, SWL is so rare, I think it’s a sign that there’s a long way to go on teaching people about embedded assumptions. Perhaps that’s something we can work on again in the social sciences.
(Of course, it’s my area, so I’m all for it…)
J Thomas 01.11.15 at 8:12 pm
#14 Bruce Wilder
Pretty much anyone who wants access to power should probably be on the list of people who should not have such access.
Sure. So we need somebody responsible to take over and prevent those people from having access. And who can we trust to do that, better than ourselves? Nobody here wants power except a few who must be carefully purged.
CT collectively has a tremendous breadth of knowledge about the social sciences. If we pool that knowledge and use it to gain power, so we can keep the levers of power away from the undeserving who want them….
My own background is mostly hard science, I’m just an amateur at social sciences. So I’ll just do the scutwork of administration that nobody else wants, and stay out of your way. I’ll try to make sure the little details run so smoothly you don’t have to pay any attention to them.
mds 01.12.15 at 5:36 pm
That’s just it, though, isn’t it? The relentless promoters of STEM, STEM, STEM at the expense of everything else in the acadamy (and at the expense of STEM themselves as genuine intellectual pursuits) don’t seem particularly to care about science delivering for “society.” Yes, they want it to deliver for commerce, but in a manner utterly disconnected from any serious consideration of broad societal benefits or consequences.
john c. halasz 01.13.15 at 5:49 am
Adam Gopnik is the most sophomoric of the stable of writers at that neo-liberal rag “The New Yorker”. Whatever the merits of Becker may be, the idea that the late Pierre Bourdieu was motivated in his work by power-hunger is utterly fatuous, and a mark of bad faith on Gropnik’s part.
engels 01.13.15 at 6:06 am
Why do we want science to deliver for society: is there a postmen’s strike imminent?
Shirley0401 01.13.15 at 9:55 pm
mds @ 17
Yup. And it starts years before anyone hits the academy.
I’ve worked in education, at both the middle and secondary levels. STEM has become some kind of self-justifying end unto itself. It’s the magic word, and nobody’s allowed to question it. Every subject, including reading, is infused with STEM.
Underlying it all is this bizarre techno-utopianism that if people just knew how to code, it would solve all of our problems. And it’s connected to the certainty that everybody simultaneously trying to pursue their own “success” will lead to widespread prosperity, happiness, and progress.
John Quiggin 01.13.15 at 10:30 pm
Eszter: That site was fun. But what I would really like is a “white list” site of genuine OA journals.
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