From Community to Communicative Policing: ‘Signal Crimes’ and the Problem of Public Reassurance

2002 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Innes ◽  
Nigel Fielding
Keyword(s):  
Risk Perception ◽  
Fear Of Crime ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Police Practice ◽  
Disorderly Conduct ◽  
The Social ◽  
Crime Types ◽  
Social Scientific

In this paper the concept of ‘signal crimes’ is proposed to capture the social semiotic processes by which particular types of criminal and disorderly conduct have a disproportionate impact upon fear of crime. Drawing upon the wider social scientific literature on risk perception, a sense of how and why different crime types might be possessed of different signal values is provided and some of the implications for current police practice outlined.

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.

Impartiality and the Definition of Corruption

2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 376-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Alan Sparling
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Political Corruption ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Essential Questions ◽  
Social Scientific Research ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Exact Definition

The study of political corruption has been beset by disagreements concerning the exact definition of the term. One definition that has grown increasingly popular in the social-scientific literature in recent years is that proposed by Oskar Kurer and developed by Bo Rothstein: political corruption should be understood as a breach of the norm of impartiality. This article argues that while this definition has intuitive plausibility and while its relative parsimony makes it attractive for cross-cultural social-scientific research, it suffers from a number of the ills attending all attempts to depoliticize inherently political concepts. Not only is the definition insufficient to capture numerous instances of the abuse of the public office for private gain, but it is dangerous insofar as it papers over fundamental disagreements about the nature of the good regime. To insist upon this parsimonious definition of corruption is to foreclose a number of essential questions of political philosophy.

What Can Mechanisms Do for You? Mechanisms and the Problem of Confounders in the Social Sciences

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 210-231
Author(s):  
María Jiménez-Buedo ◽  
Juan Carlos Squitieri
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Causal Association ◽  
Spurious Association ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mechanistic Reasoning ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Way

The idea that mechanisms are crucially important to differentiate between genuine and spurious causal relations is ubiquitous both in the philosophical and in the social scientific literature. Yet philosophers of the social sciences have seldom attempted to spell out systematically the way in which mechanistic reasoning or evidence are concretely used to deal with spurious association and the problem of confounders in the social sciences. In this paper, we analyze two recent such accounts, proposed by Harold Kincaid and Daniel Steel. We show how these two accounts radically differ in their notion of mechanism (a process account, and a complex system account, respectively), and how this ultimately impacts in the way in which they understand the inferential role of mechanisms in the social sciences. We then confront both accounts with the details of a well-known controversy around the purportedly causal association between the legalization of abortion and the subsequent fall in criminality in the United States. We show the limitations of both accounts in representing accurately the role of mechanistic evidence and hypotheses in practice.

Partisans and Nationalists

2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-196
Author(s):  
Patrick Hossay
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Popular Appeal ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Political Scene

The author provides a critical response to the social scientific literature that cast political interest and cleavages as the projection of sociocultural dynamics onto the political scene. Sociopolitical cleavages in general, and nationalism in particular, are thus viewed as having taken form outside the partisan arena, and only subsequent to their societal formation do they take on political importance. Through a comparison of the development of political nationalism in interwar Scotland and Flanders, the author argues for the importance of political forces in defining and shaping the political and social meaning and significance of nationalism. In Scotland, despite the potential popular appeal of nationalism, it does not emerge as a significant and autonomous political cleavage, principally due to configurations of partisan programs and alliances, and a politically unfavorable “demographic geometry.” In Flanders, on the other hand, markedly different political conditions fostered the development and societal significance of nationalism. Hence, political nationalism did not emerge as a necessary concomitant to societal and cultural change; it was in part the result of political conditions and institutions that could foster or constrain the sociopolitical significance and meaning of nationalism.

scholarly journals Roads Less Taken

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (10) ◽  
pp. 1275-1310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pearl A. Dykstra ◽  
Gunhild O. Hagestad
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Social Integration ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Over Time

This article provides the rationale for doing research on childlessness and parenthood in late life. Childless older adults have been rendered invisible in the social scientific literature. A central goal of this issue is to make them visible and to expose unstated assumptions about normal adult life. Parenthood emerges as a key organizer of the life course and a major factor in social integration. Because the childless tend to be conceptualized as “the other,” focusing on them teaches lessons about the dangers of dichotomous thinking, that is, overlooking diversity and assuming deficiency. Studying older adults without children reveals the necessity of considering life pathways over time and of putting lives in a historical context.

scholarly journals Social Research about Online Crime: Global Range of Topics and a Systematic Analysis of Research in Lithuania

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 8-46
Author(s):  
Maryja Šupa
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Social ◽  
Disciplinary Field ◽  
Crime Types ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Topic Map

 Social research about online crime is a multi-disciplinary field addressing a wide array of topics since its inception in the 1980s. Based on a broad review of state-of-the-art literature and gaps identified in review publications (Holt, Bossler 2014; Stratton, Powell, Cameron 2017; Maimon, Louderback 2019, and others), in this paper I outline 41 key topic in social research about online crime, classified into four broad categories: 1) research focusing on specific types of online crime, 2) research about perpetrators, victims, and law enforcement, 3) research about online crime discourses and public perceptions, 4) research putting the local and global specifics of online crime into perspective. Based on the topic map, I undertook a systematic review of literature on research about online crime published in Lithuania from the empirical social scientific perspective. The results show that very few such studies are carried out in Lithuania. From 2004 to 2020, 26 publications have been found in total. 10 of them were theoretical briefs, while 16 were based on empirical data. Out of the 41 key topic, 14 were covered in the publications, while 29 or roughly two thirds remained unaddressed. The dominant contributors were legal scholars writing about the social aspects of online crime across a variety of topics, and mostly focusing on specific crime types. The most developed topic was cyberbullying, with contributions by scholars mostly from the fields of psychology and education. To fill in these glaring gaps, it is vital to develop this field of research with an emphasis on both wider and deeper research agendas, complex, valid and reliable research data and critical theoretical approaches, inviting systematic contributions from criminology, sociology, communication and media studies, and political science.

Reading the Social Sciences Theologically (Part 2): Engaging and Appropriating Models of Human Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 476-494
Author(s):  
John David Trentham
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Science Models ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Inverse Consistency

Part 2 of 2. This series of articles seeks to present a viable hermeneutical framework according to which Christian scholars and educators may read social scientific literature with theological clarity. Part 1 established how Christians may approach and qualify social science models of human development, and introduced the “principle of inverse consistency.” Part 2 develops and applies that principle by establishing the manner in which Christians may engage and appropriate social science models of human development. To that end, this article concludes by proffering a four-step hermeneutical protocol.

scholarly journals What Constitutes Authorship in the Social Sciences?

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gernot Pruschak
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Research Team ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Journal Editors ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Task ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
To Receive

Authorship represents a highly discussed topic in nowadays academia. The share of co-authored papers has increased substantially in recent years allowing scientists to specialize and focus on specific tasks. Arising from this, social scientific literature has especially discussed author orders and the distribution of publication and citation credits among co-authors in depth. Yet only a small fraction of the authorship literature has also addressed the actual underlying question of what actually constitutes authorship. To identify social scientists' motives for assigning authorship, we conduct an empirical study surveying researchers around the globe. We find that social scientists tend to distribute research tasks among (individual) research team members. Nevertheless, they generally adhere to the universally applicable Vancouver criteria when distributing authorship. More specifically, participation in every research task with the exceptions of data work as well as reviewing and remarking increases scholars' chances to receive authorship. Based on our results, we advise journal editors to introduce authorship guidelines that incorporate the Vancouver criteria as they seem applicable to the social sciences. We further call upon research institutions to emphasize data skills in hiring and promotion processes as publication counts might not always depict these characteristics.

Reading the Social Sciences Theologically (Part 1): Approaching and Qualifying Models of Human Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 458-475
Author(s):  
John David Trentham
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Developmental Models ◽  
Science Models ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Inverse Consistency

Part 1 of 2. This series of articles seeks to present a viable hermeneutical framework according to which Christian scholars and educators may read social scientific literature with theological clarity. Part 1 establishes the manner in which Christians may profitably approach and qualify social science models of human development. The “principle of inverse consistency,” introduced at the conclusion of this article, is put forth as a conceptual tool for interpreting developmental models with confessional and intellectual virtue.

Narrating Society: Enacting ‘Immigrant’ Characters through Negotiating, Naturalization, and Forgetting

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanne Boersma
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Work ◽  
Immigrant Integration ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Global Perspectives ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Media And Communication

This article scrutinizes how ‘immigrant’ characters of perpetual arrival are enacted in the social scientific work of immigrant integration monitoring. Immigrant integration research produces narratives in which characters—classified in highly specific, contingent ways as ‘immigrants’—are portrayed as arriving and never as having arrived. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork at social scientific institutions and networks in four Western European countries, this article analyzes three practices that enact the characters of arrival narratives: negotiating, naturalizing, and forgetting. First, it shows how negotiating constitutes objects of research while at the same time a process of hybridization is observed among negotiating scientific and governmental actors. Second, a naturalization process is analyzed in which slippery categories become fixed and self-evident. Third, the practice of forgetting involves the fading away of contingent and historical circumstances of the research and specifically a dispensation of ‘native’ or ‘autochthonous’ populations. Consequently, the article states how some people are considered rightful occupants of ‘society’ and others are enacted to travel an infinite road toward an occupied societal space. Moreover, it shows how enactments of arriving ‘immigrant’ characters have performative effects in racially differentiating national populations and hence in narrating society. This article is part of the Global Perspectives, Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

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