Wargaming as a Methodology: The International Crisis Wargame and Experimental Wargaming

2021 ◽  
pp. 104687812098758 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Schechter ◽  
Jacquelyn Schneider ◽  
Rachael Shaffer
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Experimental Design ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
International Crisis ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
New Research

Background. Wargaming has a long history as a tool for understanding the complexity of conflict. Although wargames have shown their relevance across topics and time, the immersive nature of wargames and the guild-like communities that surround them have often resisted the social scientific advances that occurred alongside the evolution of warfare. However, recent work raises new possibilities for integrating wargaming practices and social scientific methods. Purpose. Develop the experimental wargaming method and practice. Prioritizing the focus on iteration, control, and generalizability within experimental design can provide new opportunities for wargames to answer broader questions about decision-making, crisis behaviors, and patterns of outcomes. Method. The International Crisis Wargame developed in 2018 demonstrates the viability of experimental wargaming, and models the process of theorizing, designing, developing, and executing these wargames. It also identifies what makes games more or less experimental and details how experimental design influenced choices in the game. Conclusion. Experimental wargames are a promising new tool for both the social science and the wargaming communities. A proposed new research agenda for experimental design within wargames would support this nascent method

scholarly journals A Sociology of Foreign Aid and the World Society

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liam Swiss
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Aid ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
World Society ◽  
World Society Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
New Research ◽  
Society Research

This article highlights an emerging research agenda for the study of foreign aid through a World Society theory lens. First, it briefly summarizes the social scientific literature on aid and sociologists' earlier contributions to this research. Next, it reviews the contours of world society research and the place of aid within this body of literature. Finally, it outlines three emergent threads of research on foreign aid that comprise a new research agenda for the sociology of foreign aid and its role in world society globalization.

What’s Love Got to Do with It? The Sociology of Godly Love and the Renewal of Modern Pentecostalism

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amos Yong
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Interdisciplinary Work ◽  
Social Scientific Study ◽  
Pentecostal Movement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Pentecostal Theology ◽  
Social Scientific

This article uses the recent work of sociologist Margaret M. Poloma to argue that developments in the sociology of Pentecostalism have the potential to revitalize a classical Pentecostal movement that can be otherwise understood as languishing. In particular, the social scientific study of benevolent service in various segments of the Pentecostal movement provides the springboard for the argument. After locating the interdisciplinary work of Poloma and her colleagues on godly love within the broader context of social science research in the last half century, this paper will explore its implications for the future and renewal of especially the classical Pentecostal movement, for Pentecostal theology and self-understanding, and for scholarship on Pentecostalism.

Feudal Europe, 800–1300: communal discourse and conflictual practices

1992 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Science ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Structural Theory ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Fundamental Significance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Scientific Argument

The discipline of international relations faces a new debate of fundamental significance. After the realist challenge to the pervasive idealism of the interwar years and the social scientific argument against realism in the late 1950s, it is now the turn of critical theorists to dispute the established paradigms of international politics, having been remarkably successful in several other fields of social inquiry. In essence, critical theorists claim that all social reality is subject to historical change, that a normative discourse of understandings and values entails corresponding practices, and that social theory must include interpretation and dialectical critique. In international relations, this approach particularly critiques the ahistorical, scientific, and materialist conceptions offered by neorealists. Traditional realists, by contrast, find a little more sympathy in the eyes of critical theorists because they join them in their rejection of social science and structural theory. With regard to liberal institutionalism, critical theorists are naturally sympathetic to its communitarian component while castigating its utilitarian strand as the accomplice of neorealism. Overall, the advent of critical theory will thus focus the field of international relations on its “interparadigm debate” with neorealism.

Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism and the Social Science of Marxian Economics

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Westra
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Critical Realism ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Jel Classification ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Marxian Economics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific

This article supports claims that critical realism philosophy of science, as refounded in the hands of Roy Bhaskar, offers valuable knowledge enhancing insight into the advancement of Marx’s research program. However, it maintains that key principles set out by Bhaskar have not been adequately assimilated by those working with critical realism in the field of Marxist studies. When they are properly considered, they point to the necessity of reconstructing Marx’s corpus on a divergent basis from the conventional form it has assumed since the codification of “Marxism” by Karl Kautsky in the late nineteenth century as an overarching theory of history or historical materialism, wherein Marx’s economic studies in Capital are portrayed as but a subtheory. The article summarily breaks down three cardinal scientific principles elaborated by Bhaskar, which carry the most vital implications for Marxism. These are the bringing of ontology “back in” to theory construction, the robust case made for social science as a capital-S science, and the specification of retroduction as strategy for scientific discovery. It then explores the principles with regard to three abiding and interrelated questions of the Marxist research program: first is the very condition of intelligibility of economic theory; second is the question of the raison d’être for the dialectical architecture of Capital; third is the social scientific implications of the cognitive sequence in Marxism. In this endeavor the article introduces work in the Uno-Sekine tradition of Japanese Marxism. It shows how Uno’s reconstruction of Marxism is closely supported by Bhaskar’s fundamental criteria for science in a way that serves to strengthen Marx’s own scientific claims for his work.JEL Classification: B51, B400

Experiments in social science

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Experimental Design ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Hawthorne Effect ◽  
Experimental Conditions ◽  
Control Factors ◽  
The Social

Within social science the experiment has an ambiguous place. With the possible exception of social psychology, there are few examples of strictly experimental studies. The classic study still often cited is the Hawthorne experiments, which began in 1927, and is used mainly to illustrate what became known as the ‘Hawthorne Effect’, that is, the unintended influence of the research itself on the results of the study. Yet, experimental design is often taken within social research as the embodiment of the scientific method which, if the social sciences are to reach the maturity of the natural sciences, social research should seek to emulate. Meeting this challenge meant trying to devise ways of applying the logic of the experiment to ‘non-experimental’ situations where it was not possible directly to manipulate the experimental conditions. Criticisms have come from two main sources: first, from researchers who claim that the techniques used to control factors within non-experimental situations are unrealizable with current statistical methods and, second, those who reject the very idea of hypothesis-testing as an ambition for social research.

Catastrophic Climate Risk and Brazilian Amazonian Politics and Policies: A New Research Agenda

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joana Castro Pereira ◽  
Eduardo Viola
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Research Community ◽  
Amazon Rainforest ◽  
Climate Risk ◽  
The Social ◽  
Earth’S Climate ◽  
New Research

Climate and deforestation impacts are jeopardizing the resilience of the Amazon rainforest, one of the key elements in the Earth’s climate system whose dieback may trigger catastrophic climate change. The potential degree of climate risk that the planet is facing, and current Brazilian Amazonian politics and policies, make it alarmingly conceivable that a tipping point will be crossed that leads to savannization of the forest. However, the social science research community has not yet acknowledged this possibility. A timely revision of the research agenda is needed to address this gap.

Future Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism: Social Dynamics, Contested Evidence

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 394-421
Author(s):  
C.D. Elledge
Keyword(s):  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Early Judaism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Resurrection Of The Dead ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Epigraphic Evidence ◽  
Sociological Studies

In its significance to both Jewish and Christian studies, resurrection of the dead remains a vital subject of biblical research; and it is now widely recognized that the religious culture of early Judaism (ca. 200 BCE—CE 200) played a crucial role in both its origination and early reception. In the present landscape of study, perhaps the most recent methodological advances arise from sociological studies, which attempt to contextualize resurrection within the social dynamics of the religious movements that advanced this hope. Moreover, at the exegetical level, many vexing pieces of evidence have produced conflicting readings of precisely what individual traditions may say about resurrection. The present article treats these topics, including (1) the application of social-scientific methods to the study of resurrection, and (2) readings of contested literary and epigraphic evidence that remains crucial to the scholarly study of the resurrection hope in early Jewish culture.

Autobiography and Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Methodological Considerations

1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Jo Maynes
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Large Populations ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Methodological Considerations ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study ◽  
Historical Social Science

Historical social science—which I understand to be analysis of change over time that is informed by the theories, methods, and questions of the social sciences—has in the past 25 or 30 years established itself as an important area of interdisciplinary study. It emerged at a point in time when, in the United States at least, several of the social science disciplines were dominated by positivist epistemologies and models drawn from the natural sciences. In practice, much of what has been understood as social science history has centered on the recovery and analysis of largely quantifiable sources that allowed the writing of the collective biography of large populations—the ordinary people arguably under-or unrepresented in classic historical accounts of previous eras. Drawing upon social-scientific traditions provided concepts and methodologies for analyzing processes that encompassed everyone, rather than merely the events dominated by an elite, and for studying relatively anonymous collectivities rather than merely the “great men.”

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document