Empirical Commitments Research Articles

Before Sociology and Strategy Parted Ways

Peace and War is a forgotten book by a nearly forgotten sociologist, one of the greatest of the twentieth century. Kudos to Transaction Publishers for reissuing it in its impressive series of classics. Raymond Aron should be a symbol of common sense, having resisted the kind of ideological fads that swept over Jean-Paul Sartre (and thus over many other French intellectuals) in the middle of the twentieth century. He should also symbolize sociology's ability to keep its feet on the ground, thanks to its empirical commitments, compared to philosophy but also to more deductive social sciences such as economics and-increasingly-political science. The book's 800 pages are divided into four parts. The first, called Theory, addresses the field of international relations, especially realism. Here Aron famously elaborates the motives that drive humans, showing that security, power, glory, idea are essentially heterogeneous objectives which can be reduced to a single term only by distorting the human meaning of diplomatic-strategic action (p. 91). In the second part, Sociology, Aron reviews a number of grand deterministic visions that trace the unfolding of history to such notions as geography, resources, folkish essences, or Progress, pulling some more precise influences from several factors (especially population and resources) by distinguishing between variables and constants in history. Part three, History, is just that, a history and analysis of the early, nuclear years of the Cold War that is no less interesting for its now dated feeling, since it provides a neat window-as does the entire book-into a cultural world rapidly receding into the past. Aron finally

Deconstructing the Diversity Principle

This article presents an examination of the diversity principle in communications policy. Given the Federal Communication Commission's recent emphasis on diversity as a policy objective, diversity assessments must return to the forefront of communications policy analysis. To provide an analytical framework for such research, the diversity principle is broken into three distinct components (source, content, and exposure diversity), and multiple subcomponents. In the spirit of the FCC's empirical commitment to the diversity principle, this analysis focuses on diversity as a measurable concept, with potentially interacting dimensions and numerous means of assessment.