THE NEW BATTLE OF IDEAS: HOW AN INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION WILL RESHAPE SOCIETY

2021 ◽  
Vol 257 ◽  
pp. 118-124
Author(s):  
Paul Collier
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Economic Crises ◽  
The Social ◽  
Intellectual Revolution ◽  
Key Policy ◽  
Policy Problems

Britain, like many other societies within the OECD, has been facing cumulative and interdependent social, political, and economic crises which came to a head shortly before COVID. The shock of COVID has accentuated these crises, creating a state of policy flux in which all long-established intellectual frameworks have proved inadequate: across the OECD, public policy has largely abandoned them. Fortunately, across the social sciences, history and philosophy there have been important new advances by major scholars which cohere and provide a more sophisticated account of society. While they will ultimately prove inadequate as new complexities emerge, for the present that offer the best guide available for policy. This essay provides an integrated review of this recent literature and relates it to some of the key policy problems.

A Note on “Public Policy”

1973 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 661-664 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Vaison
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Studies ◽  
Policy Analysts ◽  
Government Body

Normally in political studies the term public policy is construed to encompass the societally binding directives issued by a society's legitimate government. We usually consider government, and only government, as being able to “authoritatively allocate values.” This common conception pervades the literature on government policy-making, so much so that it is hardly questioned by students and practitioners of political science. As this note attempts to demonstrate, some re-thinking seems to be in order. For purposes of analysis in the social sciences, this conceptualization of public policy tends to obscure important realities of modern corporate society and to restrict unnecessarily the study of policy-making. Public policy is held to be public simply and solely because it originates from a duly legitimated government, which in turn is held to have the authority (within specified limits) of formulating and implementing such policy. Public policy is public then, our usual thinking goes, because it is made by a body defined somewhat arbitrarily as “public”: a government or some branch of government. All other policy-making is seen as private; it is not public (and hence to lie essentially beyond the scope of the disciplines of poliitcal science and public administration) because it is duly arrived at by non-governmental bodies. Thus policy analysts lead us to believe that public policy is made only when a government body acts to consider some subject of concern, and that other organizations are not relevant to the study of public policy.

Guidelines for Submission to Ethics & International Affairs

2002 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-188
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
International Conflict ◽  
Economic Justice ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

Ethics & International Affairs, the journal of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, seeks original articles analyzing current developments and dilemmas in international affairs in terms of choices, decisions, and values. The goal of the journal is to create an interdisciplinary forum in which a broad range of public policy issues can be addressed from ethical perspectives that may originate in philosophy, religion, or the social sciences. Recent issues have contained articles on international conflict, social and economic justice, the environment, and human rights.The journal is open to diverse views, yet committed to the basic idea that the promotion of peace and human dignity is a universal good.

scholarly journals Transaction Cost Economics: An Assessment of Empirical Research in the Social Sciences

2008 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey T. Macher ◽  
Barak D. Richman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Transaction Cost ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Transaction Cost Economics ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Empirical Literature ◽  
Comprehensive Review ◽  
The Social ◽  
Considerable Support

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the empirical literature in transaction cost economics (TCE) across multiple social science disciplines and business fields. We show how TCE has branched out from its economic roots to examine empirical phenomena in several other areas. We find TCE is increasingly being applied not only to business-related fields such as accounting, finance, marketing, and organizational theory, but also to areas outside of business including political science, law, public policy, and agriculture and health. With few exceptions, however, the use of TCE reasoning to inform empirical research in these areas is piecemeal. We find that there is considerable support of many of the central tenets of TCE, but we also observe a number of lingering theoretical and empirical issues that need to be addressed. We conclude by discussing the implications of these issues and outlining directions for future theoretical and empirical work.

scholarly journals Public Participation in the Social Science: A Systematic Literature Review

PERSPEKTIF ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 728-738
Author(s):  
Muhammad Ainul Usama ◽  
Ulung Pribadi ◽  
Al Fauzi Rahmat
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Public Participation ◽  
Systematic Literature Review ◽  
Analysis Tool ◽  
Government Information ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Right

Public participation is the right and obligation of citizens to contribute to development by contributing to initiative and creativity. Public participation has also attracted a lot of attention from academia as a concept of public policy. The authors conducted a systematic literature review of published articles in the social sciences to enhance our understanding of public participation. Some of the main issues are explained in this area through the NVIVO 12 plus software that qualitative analysis tool. The main issues are community, development, government, information, and interests. This article raises several propositions on the matter. This article suggests some new topics for further research.

Evidence-Based Policy Making in the Social Sciences

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Fuzzy Set ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Design Thinking ◽  
Simulation Modelling ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Social

The purpose of this edited book is to make the case for why the social sciences are more relevant than ever before in helping governments solve the wicked problems of public policy. It does this through a critical showcase of new forms of discovery for policy-making drawing on the insights of some of the world’s leading authorities in public policy analysis. The authors have brought together an expert group of social scientists who can showcase their chosen method or approach to policy makers and practitioners. These methods include making more use of Systematic Reviews, Random Controlled Trials, the analysis of Big Data, deliberative tools for decision-making, design thinking, qualitative techniques for comparison using Boolean and fuzzy set logic, citizen science, narrative from policy makers and citizens, policy visualisation, spatial mapping, simulation modelling and various forms of statistical analysis that draw from beyond the established tools. Of course some of the methods the book refers to have been on the shelves for a number of decades but the authors would argue that it is only over the last decade or so that increased efforts have been made to apply these methods across a range of policy arenas. Other methods such as the use of analysis of Big Data or new fuzzy set comparative tools are relatively more novel within social science but again they have been selected for attention as there are growing examples of their application in the context of policy making.

Deliberative Policy Analysis

2018 ◽  
pp. 583-594
Author(s):  
Frank Fischer ◽  
Piyapong Boossabong
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Policy Analysis ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Practical Method ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Policy Decision Making ◽  
Policy Problems

Deliberative policy analysis has its origins in the argumentative turn in policy analysis. It emerged as an alternative to the use of standard empirical-analytic methods of the social sciences to solve public policy problems. Not only has the conventional neopositivist approach failed to produce the promised results, it has generally operated with a technocratic, and largely an anti-democratic, bias. Basic to deliberative policy analysis is a method for bringing together a wider spectrum of citizens, politician and experts in the pursuit of policy decisions that are both effective and democratically legitimate. This chapter begins with an outline of the theoretical perspectives underlying deliberative policy analysis. Then, the process and practice is illustrated by the case study, which shows how the approach has moved from a theory to a practical method for policy decision-making.

scholarly journals Restructuring the Social Sciences: Reflections from Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (01) ◽  
pp. 165-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary King
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Sparse Data ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Research Teams ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Type ◽  
Sparse Data Sets

AbstractThe social sciences are undergoing a dramatic transformation from studying problems to solving them; from making do with a small number of sparse data sets to analyzing increasing quantities of diverse, highly informative data; from isolated scholars toiling away on their own to larger scale, collaborative, interdisciplinary, lab-style research teams; and from a purely academic pursuit focused inward to having a major impact on public policy, commerce and industry, other academic fields, and some of the major problems that affect individuals and societies. In the midst of all this productive chaos, we have been building the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, a new type of center intended to help foster and respond to these broader developments. We offer here some suggestions from our experiences for the increasing number of other universities that have begun to build similar institutions and for how we might work together to advance social science more generally.

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