Oliver Cromwell Cox's Marxism

Oliver Cromwell Cox insisted on dealing with the crucial issues of his time and on telling the truth as he saw it, regardless of whose toes may have been stepped on or whose sensibilities may have been injured. He has aided in preventing the complete stultification of academic social science and in the long run exercised an immense influence on American life.

American Catholic Social Thought in the Twentieth Century

This chapter argues that the best early twentieth-century Catholic social thinkers engaged the broader culture but were never assimilated by it. Their sacramental imaginations and openness to supernatural intervention represented a sign of contradiction against the faith-free academic social science in rapid ascent at the time. This prophetic option was especially appealing to converts, anti-modernists, and ex-radicals, but in the 1930s and 1940s it slowly found favor among a cohort of young ethnic Catholics, particularly those exposed to the Catholic Worker movement. The chapter further argues that sporadic attempts by prophetic Catholics to influence secular culture undermined the movement's spiritual foundation.

The Scientific Strategists Follow the Economists to an Intellectual Dead End

This chapter assesses whether academic social science had any influence on nuclear strategy. Social science did have important effects on strategy. At times this was direct. More often it was indirect, working not through the formulation of doctrine or the drafting of operational plans, but rather by providing the intellectual frameworks and mental road maps that shaped senior policymakers' and presidents' thinking about the utility of nuclear weapons during confrontations with other nuclear states. Academic strategists such as Thomas Schelling reputedly exercised such influence that the period between 1945 and 1961 is regarded as the “golden age” of academic national security studies. However, scientific strategists reached a dead end by privileging internal disciplinary concerns like logical rigor and the use of sophisticated methods over addressing concrete policy problems.

Emotions in community research

This chapter argues that emotions help people with ‘meaning making’, and offer different experiences of the world through a different lens. It does so in the context of women's writing, as writing connects ordinary women and gives them the opportunity to articulate feelings not expressed or shared before. In academic social science, emotions have historically been associated with the irrational and quite opposed to the objective scientific search for knowledge. However, in the last decade or so, sociologists have recognised that ethnographic research cannot be clinical and detached from human emotions. We can say ‘emotions do things’ — they move us but also connect us with others.

Wisselgren: Social Science in Sweden

Book Review of: Per Wisselgren, The Social Scientific Gaze: The Social Question and the Rise of Academic Social Science in SwedenSurrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2015ISBN: 9781472447593Price: $121,20

Implementation of CATI Techniques in an Academic Social Science Research Setting

Implementation of CATI Techniques in an Academic Social Science Research Setting