Politics, Policy, and Crime Ethnography

2021 ◽  
pp. 113-134
Author(s):  
Keith Guzik ◽  
Gary T. Marx
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Public Administrators ◽  
Ethnographic Methods ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Methodological Rigor ◽  
Complementary Role ◽  
The Us ◽  
Justice Practice

This chapter encourages social scientists, policy planners, and public administrators to reflect critically on the methods used to define crime problems and policy responses to them. It argues for the increased use of ethnographic methods in formulating policy by seeking points of connection with quantitative approaches. Quantitative methods are better suited for crime policy given their methodological rigor, instrumental and programmatic orientation, and relatively low costs per datum unit. However, qualitative methods have a complementary role to play, being better attuned to the subjective experiences of crime and crime control and better able to illustrate factors correlated with these phenomena. Ethnographic methods permit reflexivity regarding the broader settings and specific contexts of crime and criminological research. Two cases of ethnographic techniques within criminal justice practice are shared to demonstrate their viability—one from the US Department of Justice and another from Court Watch Poland. The chapter finishes with lessons for researchers and policy planners, including the importance of engaging in collaborative research, triangulating methods, embracing uncomfortable findings, and reconsidering research ethics.

A Generative Sequential Mixed Methods Approach Using Quantitative Measures to Enhance Social Constructionist Inquiry

2021 ◽  
pp. 155868982098627
Author(s):  
Diego Romaioli
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Mixed Methods Research ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
Maslach Burnout Inventory ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Mixed Methods Approach ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative Methods ◽  
Sequential Mixed Methods

In order to enhance core mixed methods research designs, social scientists need an approach that incorporates developments in the social constructionist perspective. This work describes a study that aimed to promote occupational well-being in hospital departments where employees are at risk of burnout, based on a constructionist inquiry developed starting from the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Taking this study as an example, we define a “generative sequential mixed methods approach” as a process that involves consulting quantitative studies to identify criticalities on which to conduct focused, transformative investigations. The article contributes by envisaging ways to mix qualitative and quantitative methods that consider a “generative” and “future-forming” orientation to research, in line with recent shifts in social psychology.

Denaturalizing the Monroe Doctrine: The rise of Latin American legal anti-imperialism in the face of the modern US and hemispheric redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 541-555
Author(s):  
Juan Pablo Scarfi
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Elastic Behaviour ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Monroe Doctrine ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pan Americanism

AbstractThe Monroe Doctrine was originally formulated as a US foreign policy principle, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it began to be redefined in relation to both the hemispheric policy of Pan-Americanism and the interventionist policies of the US in Central America and the Caribbean. Although historians and social scientists have devoted a great deal of attention to Latin American anti-imperialist ideologies, there was a distinct legal tradition within the broader Latin American anti-imperialist traditions especially concerned with the nature and application of the Monroe Doctrine, which has been overlooked by international law scholars and the scholarship focusing on Latin America. In recent years, a new revisionist body of research has emerged exploring the complicity between the history of modern international law and imperialism, as well as Third World perspectives on international law, but this scholarship has begun only recently to explore legal anti-imperialist contributions and their legacy. The purpose of this article is to trace the rise of this Latin American anti-imperialist legal tradition, assessing its legal critique of the Monroe Doctrine and its implications for current debates about US exceptionalism and elastic behaviour in international law and organizations, especially since 2001.

scholarly journals Transnational development training and Native American ‘laboratories’ in the early Cold War

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-490
Author(s):  
Jacob Tropp
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Technical Assistance ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Development Interventions ◽  
Foreign Government ◽  
The Us

AbstractIn the late 1940s and early 1950s, as the US launched the Point Four initiative of overseas technical assistance programmes, a number of American officials, academics, and analysts saw valuable global lessons in the US Bureau of Indian Affairs’ development interventions among Native Americans. These interests culminated in a suite of professional training experiments, involving trainees from around the world, which emphasized cross-cultural development methods and used certain south-western Native American communities as field ‘laboratories’. A foundational seminar programme, coordinated by Cornell University social scientists, inspired additional training initiatives, tied to Point Four projects abroad, which brought foreign government officers from South Asia and the Middle East for similar training in New Mexico and Arizona. These training experiments not only placed Native American situations at the centre of significant transnational conversations about development, but also reinforced and widely circulated particular ideas regarding ‘underdevelopment’, ‘experts” prerogatives, and the politics of development relations.

Teaching “Quanti” – Lessons from French Experiences in Sociology and History

2017 ◽  
Vol 136 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-52
Author(s):  
Pierre Mercklé ◽  
Claire Zalc
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social

The paper’s main objective is to reflect, from both a sociological and a historiographical perspective, on how to use and how to teach quantitative methods in the social sciences. French and American social scientists, whether apprentices or confirmed, often encounter during their work a crucial need to use quantitative methods. But which methods do each favor? And how to teach these methods? In strongly varying national and disciplinary contexts, what are the directions taken by the revival of interest for quantitative methods? Comparing current pedagogical practices may be a heuristic way to raise crucial questions about historiographical uses of quantitative methods, and give way to a cautious advocacy of reflective uses of quantitative methods in the social sciences.

scholarly journals A Constitutional Framework for Private Governance

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 197-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Engel
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Private Governance ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Methodological Rigor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
The Face ◽  
Good For ◽  
The Law ◽  
Interdisciplinary Exchange

Lawyers are the engineers of the social sciences, and their doctors. Neither is good for reputation in interdisciplinary exchange. Social scientists often show contempt for a discipline that seems too close to reality to meet hard methodological standards, and too much concerned by pathologies that are beyond the reach of their methodological tools. As with many prejudices, there is a grain of truth in this one. But not all law is about making decisions and judgements in the face of a reality that is at best partly understood. The legal discipline has its own methodological standards. For the sake of internal clarity, it aims at parsimony. But modelling is not the legal path to methodological rigor. The legal equivalent boils down to one simple question: who asks whom for what? The law splits abstract problems into a series of cases. It reaches parsimony via the selection and sequence of cases. These hypothetical cases are like histological cuts through the social tissue. The legal discipline starts cutting at cases for which existing legal tools seem particularly wellsuited. If these cases are understood, the legal discipline then starts again with the more demanding ones. It is hoped that the sequence of cases leads to an understanding of situations that seemed inaccessible at the outset.

scholarly journals On “tribes” and bribes

Focaal ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2009 (53) ◽  
pp. 105-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto J. González
Keyword(s):  
Divide And Conquer ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Private Company ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Contract Work ◽  
Lebanese Civil War ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Religious Sects ◽  
Local Leaders

The concept of the “tribe” has captured the imagination of military planners, who have been inspired partly by social scientists. Interest in tribes stems from events in Iraq's al-Anbar province, where the US military has co-opted Sunni “tribal” leaders. Some social scientists have capitalized on these developments by doing contract work for the Pentagon. For example, the “Iraq tribal study”—prepared by a private company consisting of anthropologists and political scientists among others—suggests employing colonial-era techniques (such as divide and conquer) for social control. It also advocates bribing local leaders, a method that has become part of the US military's pacification strategy. Such imperial policing techniques are likely to aggravate armed conflict between and among ethnic groups and religious sects. Observers report that the US strategy is creating a dangerous situation resembling the Lebanese civil war, raising ethical questions about social scientists' involvement in these processes.

The China Quarterly and the History of the PRC

2006 ◽  
Vol 188 ◽  
pp. 1092-1097 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderick MacFarquhar
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Communist China ◽  
History Of

When I was appointed editor of the CQ in 1959, my vision was that it should focus primarily on all aspects of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history, but that there should also be occasional articles on contemporary Taiwan and the overseas Chinese. That autumn, I did a quick tour of a few American campuses to try to drum up contributors; basically I needed social scientists. But even those universities with significant China programmes were peopled mainly by historians who were not doing research on the PRC. Benjamin Schwartz at Harvard, who had already published Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, did write articles from time to time on the current scene; at MIT, Lucian Pye was ensuring that political scientists should incorporate East Asia into analyses of comparative politics; at Berkeley, Franz Schurmann (a Yuan historian in an earlier incarnation) was engaged in what became Ideology and Organization in Communist China, S.H. Chen was interested in contemporary mainland literature, and Choh-ming Li (like Alexander Eckstein at Michigan) was studying the economy; at Columbia, C. Martin Wilbur was working on the documents captured when the Soviet embassy in Beijing was raided in the 1920s, but Doak Barnett would not get there till the end of 1960; the only real nest of social scientists examining Chinese behaviour on a daily basis that I found on that trip was located at RAND: Allen Whiting, A.M. Halpern and Alice Langley Hsieh, all working on Chinese foreign relations. The shock of the launch of the first sputnik in 1957 had already led the US government to allocate massive funds to academia for the training of specialists on Russia and China, but the first beneficiaries of the largesse did not start coming out of the pipeline until the late 1960s. With so few potential contributors available, I stopped reviewing China books in case I offended any of them! But the scarcity of talent was also an advantage, for Western and Asian China watchers – diplomats in Beijing, journalists in Hong Kong, businessmen travelling in and out – all subscribed, making the CQ the house magazine of a growing community.

scholarly journals Re-engaging social relationships and collective dimensions of organizing to revive democratic practice

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 745-758 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul W. Speer ◽  
Hahrie Han
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Effect Change ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Us ◽  
Core Practice

The weakening of the everyday practice of democracy around the world presents profound challenges for social scientists working with an applied focus on issues of inequality and justice in social change. This paper examines community organizing (in the US) as an instrument for equitable and just social change, and argues that three interrelated trends are subtly undermining a core practice of organizing: developing social relationships. An expanding technocratic influence on politics, an inflated focus on individual-level metrics for evaluating organizing, and a growing belief that digital technologies and big data leverage greater power, combine to engender an atomized view of people, who are increasingly treated as consumers rather than producers of social change. In contrast, cultivating social relationships fuels the building of community and expanded networks that enables the exercise of social power necessary to effect change. Scholars promoting change for social justice should work to shape tools and measures to serve social dimensions of organizing and support people and collectivities as agents of democracy.

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