Some Reflections on “Changing Social Science to Change the World”

1978 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 442-448
Author(s):  
Warren E. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
The State ◽  
Great Care ◽  
Manifest Content ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

One responds to Lee Benson’s conversational gambits with prudence and to his considered formal arguments with great care. If, as in the present circumstance, he is making a “statement,” trepidation is in order. His revolutionary zeal is as formidable as the scholarly understanding which lies behind his advocacy. Moreover, whenever I am tempted to disagree with the manifest content of a Benson argument, I hesitate to express that disagreement because of an experientially based apprehension that I may be totally missing the latent truths that lie within the argument. However, as I recall the SSHA meeting where the presidential address was first presented, I then had the temerity to offer a rather all embracing disagreement with his diagnoses and assessments, if not his prescriptions, where the state of the health of the social sciences is concerned. Emboldened by the realization that I am on record with a public demurral, I will now proceed to restate the nature of my disagreement.

Discourse Analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 88-94
Author(s):  
Elisa Narminio ◽  
Caterina Carta
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Entry Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

This chapter describes discourse analysis. In linguistics, discourse is generally defined as a continuous expression of connected written or spoken language that is larger than a sentence. However, as a method in the social sciences, discourse analysis (DA) gave rise to diatribes about where to set the borders of discourse. As language constitutes the very entry point to the world, some discourse analysts argue that all that exists acquires meaning through language. Does this mean that discourse constitutes reality? Is there anything outside text and discourse? Or is discourse one among many means of social construction? The evolution of DA in social science unearths an ontological debate between ‘realists’ and ‘nominalists’, which eventually reverberates in epistemological strategies.

Africanists and the Challenge of the Mission Veranda

1995 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-34
Author(s):  
Tony Waters
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Graduate Education ◽  
Close Relationships ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Field Workers ◽  
Development Workers

I returned to the United States in 1988 in order to get a graduate education in the social sciences. Three years in rural Kasulu, Tanzania, had taught me that how western social science framed development problems was inadequate. I had some hopes that good social science could address how relief and development workers viewed the African society that surrounded them. To me the close relationships that should exist between the two seemed obvious. I had seen enough PhD. students and consultants to know that their Swahili skills and bush savvy were lacking. But I had also seen enough savvy field workers whose inability to generalize beyond their own project, or systematically frame a problem within a broader context meant that their knowledge would never contribute to a broader understanding of anything outside their small corner of the world.

What is Social Science History, Anyway?

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-480
Author(s):  
Paula Baker
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Science History ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Methodologies

This group of essays came out of an attempt to address the “usually unasked,” “bound to embarrass” question that Eric Monkkonen raised in his 1994 presidential address to the Social Science History Association. As both the social sciences and history have been reshaped in recent years by intellectual tendencies variously labeled “postmodernism,” “poststructuralism,” or the “linguistic turn,” the never especially clear relationship between the social sciences and history has grown even more muddy. The essays that follow are drawn from two sessions of the 1998 annual program of the Social Science History Association. The sessions brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines and cohorts who held divergent ideas about the links between social science and history and different substantive agendas for explaining historical change. A mix of essays that highlight new methodologies for analyzing the past and pieces that offer explanations or remedies, the articles printed here point to some of the central issues in the debate about what social science history might mean today.

Cultural Studies/Asian Studies: Alternatives, Intersections, and Contradictions in Asian Social Science

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Clammer
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
World Religions ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Ancient Civilizations

AbstractThe social sciences in Asia face a peculiar theoretical challenge. Heirs to ancient civilizations and traditions of thought and cradles to all of the great world religions, they nevertheless perceive themselves as suffering from a "theoretical deficit". High theory is almost entirely Western and in fact largely European in provenance. This essay is directed to the possibility of constructing an Asian variety of cultural studies as a response to the hegemony of European social theory, and as an attempt to redress the balance of theory-power in the world intellectual economy.

Functionalism in social science

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Bigelow
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Functional Explanation ◽  
Social Stability ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
New Models ◽  
Functional Explanations

In the social sciences, functionalists are theorists who give an especially prominent role to functional explanations. One of the most influential self-defined functionalists, Malinowski (1926), summed up this view: the functionalist ‘insists… upon the principle that in every type of civilisation, every custom, material object, idea and belief fulfils some vital function, has some task to accomplish, represents an indispensable part within a working whole’. As an example of a functionalist explanation, one might consider the hypothesis, as argued for instance by Evans-Pritchard in his work on the Azande in Africa, that belief in witches generally plays a role in maintaining social stability (1937). In the last few decades of the twentieth century, postmodern, or post-structuralist, sociologists have largely disavowed the pursuit of functional explanations. The extremism of some functionalist theses has been matched by an equal extremism in postmodern antitheses. In denying that everything must be explained functionally, some go so far as to say that nothing should ever be explained functionally. Yet there is liveable logical space between the modernist’s ‘There has always got to be a reason, the real reason, for everything’, and the postmodernist’s ‘There is never any real reason for anything’. We do not have to be card-carrying functionalists to suspect that functional explanations might be found for at least some of the bewildering things that some people do in various parts of the world. New models of functional explanation are emerging from recent ferment in the biological sciences, and these new models may suggest new ways of approaching functional explanations in the social sciences.

Afterword: Struck Dumb? Marilyn Strathern and Social Science

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 283-288
Author(s):  
Nigel Thrift
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Theory Theory ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Social ◽  
Knowledge Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Spatial View

Marilyn Strathern has produced a remarkable body of work that not only demonstrates range and tenacity but also has produced a host of inspirations that have made their way into the world. This Afterword to the special issue ‘Social Theory After Strathern’ dwells on the subject of the modesty of what Strathern is proposing and how it relates to space, noting that her work enables us to forge new practico-theoretical combinations and works of diplomacy between incompatibles which show up the limitations of each party even as they forge new understandings – an approach that chimes with a move towards a more spatial view of knowledge. Theory, to echo Strathern’s gardening metaphor, needs to leave room not just to prune but to grow, the two being inter-related, as she points out. This Afterword also proposes that the extraordinary ability of anthropology to be inside and outside at once might serve as a model for what the social sciences need to become if they are to stay relevant in a world which cannot be reduced to a cipher for theory but still needs to learn from theory – theory which is precarious but spreadable, theory which establishes a rapport, but a rapport with friction built into it.

The Future of the Social Sciences: Between Empiricism and Normativity

2016 ◽  
Vol 71 (03) ◽  
pp. 343-360
Author(s):  
Andrew Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Social World ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Many

This article takes a processualist position to identify the current forces conducive to rapid change in the social sciences, of which the most important is the divergence between their empirical and normative dimensions. It argues that this gap between the many and various empirical ontologies we typically use and the much more restricted normative ontology on which we base our moral judgments is problematic. In fact, the majority of social science depends on a “normative contractarianism.” While this ontology is the most widely used basis for normative judgments in the social sciences, it is not really effective when it comes to capturing the normative problems raised by the particularity and historicity of the social process, nor the astonishing diversity of values in the world. The article closes with a call to establish a truly processual foundation for our analysis of the social world, which must move away from contractualism and imagine new ways of founding the human normative project.

For Your Information

1990 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 25-25 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United States ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
The United States ◽  
Applied Anthropology ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Criteria For Selection

The Society for Applied Anthropology invites nominations for the 1991 Malinowski Award. It is presented to an outstanding social scientist who has actively pursued the goal of solving human problems using the concepts and tools of social science in recognition of efforts to understand and serve the needs of the world's societies through social science. Each nomination should follow the criteria for selection as set forth by the SfAA. They are: 1. The nominees should be of senior status, widely recognized for their efforts to understand and serve the needs of the world through the use of social science. 2. The nominees should be strongly identified with the social sciences. They may be within the academy or outside of it, but their contributions should have implications beyond the immediate, the narrowly administrative, or the political. 3. The Awardee shall be willing and able to deliver an address at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology. 4. The nominees should include individuals who reside or work outside of the United States.

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