Global Social Science Research Articles

Globalizing Local Knowledge: Social Science Research on Southeast Asia, 1970-2000

New knowledge is produced at great speed and fed into a global epistemic machinery of data banks, publications, and think tanks. In reverse, global knowledge is absorbed and used locally. Locally produced knowledge is on the increase as society moves towards a knowledge society. Social science research adds to knowledge of societies. If it is locally produced, it can be interpreted as reflexive modernization in so far as it provides paradigms for an interpretation of social processes and structures. This article traces the development of social science research on Southeast Asia and its increasing localization. A model is developed to summarize the output of interpretative schemes and published documents. Statistical data on the global absorption of locally produced knowledge are used to measure the extent of the move towards a knowledge society. Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines have relatively high local social science output, whereas Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Laos have low output rates. We diagnose four different paths from 1970 to 2000: Indonesia shows a stable high level of dependence, Malaysia and the Philippines are increasing local output but also increasing dependence, whereas Singapore is increasing output with decreasing dependence on global social science knowledge.

1859-1959 : de Walras à Debreu, un siècle d'équilibre général

De Walras a Debreu, l’histoire de l’equilibre general a connu trois episodes majeurs, associes chacun a un lieu specifique. A Lausanne, Walras enonce les equations de l’equilibre general comme un element devant contribuer a la construction de la science sociale. A Vienne, dans les annees 1930, l’existence de l’equilibre general souleve des questions auxquelles Wald est le premier a apporter des solutions mathematiques. Enfin, au debut des annees 1950, dans le cadre de la Cowles Commission, Arrow et Debreu donnent la premiere demonstration moderne de l’existence d’un equilibre. Cette genealogie se limite a l’une des dimensions du programme walrassien initial, l’existence de l’equilibre general.

Global public social science

Burawoy’s classification of the complementary aspects of the discipline of sociology is used to describe an emergent global public social science that will assist transnational social movements in the building of a democratic and collectively rational global commonwealth.

The Ethnicity of Anthropology in China

■ Chinese anthropologists have been attempting to locate anthropology in China, debating the legitimacy of its bentu hua, or `nativization'. However, a second careful look will take us to a more complicated landscape. While China, as one of the `mis-imagined' homogeneous world-level communities has to face the West, its minority groups, whether `imagined or not', have to confront both the Han world and the West. In connection to the hegemony of a market economy, which sidelined the minorities, the `ethnicity' of anthropologists reflects their respective upbringing or `habitus'. A sub-version of Sapir-Whorfian linguistic relativity bites here: anthropologists who master different languages tend to merge into linguistically demarcated separate interest groups. Looking at the underlying implications will lead our analysis metaphorically to a broader view of the extant dilemma global social sciences and humanities have been trapped in.

Making social science matter: why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again

ABSTRACT This book is a thoughtful antidote to the simple views that see social science as a science like any other-positivistic science. It begins with a well-grounded empirical case of the development and application of expert knowledge, then moves through consideration of context and values, the centrality of power, and a reconsideration of the Greek roots of modern knowledge. It concludes with some salient observations based on the author's own feedback and research practice. Making Science Matter: Why Inquiry Fails and How Can Succeed Again. Bent Flyvbjerg: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 205 Pages. INTRODUCTION is one of those phrases that, as an apprentice social scientist, I wished I had heard about 30 years ago. I was studying for a doctorate degree then, a process in which much musing was centered on some central issues in the philosophy of social science. In the texts that I read and the debates that I encountered there was a lot of about physics envy, that is. What was in short supply was much to make one feel confident as a social science researcher. Instead, rather like a character in a Beckett play, one was waiting for a character-the great deliverer of a truly social science-that never shows up. So I had to write a thesis regardless. Of course, there were various sightings that raised anticipations in different audiences, at different times: some barracked for Parsons, others for Marx, as a great unifier while others just got on with and didn't think too much about what it might mean. They just did it. How they did seemed to be based on an assumption that, while social science isn't physics, does have some formal similarities. It has hypotheses; contains propositions; and, maybe, some covering law-like explanations. (One colleague claims that the universal relationship between the size of organizations and their increasing need for centralization is such a relation.) If only Bent Flyvbjerg's book had been available then! BEYOND THE SCIENCE WARS The author begins with the hoax played by the physicist, Alan Sokal, one of the editors of the journal Text. Most people probably know about it. Sokal (1996) submitted an article that appeared to deconstruct physics and the editors accepted and published it. Thus was the latest salvo in the debate about the two cultures fired across the bows of the global social science community. The implications were clear: for bona fide-not to say macho-real scientists, social science is unreal and unnatural: simplistic in its assumptions, short on quality controls, and peopled by beings of lesser judgment, if not intelligence, than those to be found in the Natural Science Faculties. Flyvbjerg (page 3) is quite explicit about the implications of such warfare: Social science is locked in a fight that cannot hope to win, because has accepted terms that are self-defeating. What is to be done to change these terms and avoid defeat? Go back to Aristotle and start over again, says Flyvbjerg. Eschew Aristotle's path to knowledge that routes through the virtues of either techne or episteme and instead use Aristotle's account of a prudent and wise science-one founded on phonesis-and integrate with a Foucauldian conception of power. The route to Aristotle turns out to be quite contemporary-it works through the phenomenology of human learning in the light of the Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) model. This is the model that demonstrates that expert learning goes far beyond knowing and using the rules to accomplish an activity. Indeed, such explicit knowledge and referral is, in fact, counter to expertise that seems to rely on tacit knowledge and intuition embedded in context much more than does on explicit and disembedded knowledge. Physics envy is closely related to Cartesian anxiety-the fear of nihilism and relativism that lies outside the borders of a strict analytical and rational scientific tradition. …

Book Reviews: Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference, Who is My Neighbor? Social Affinity in a Modern World, Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina, The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV, beyond Management, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game, Realism and Social Science

Book Reviews: Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference, Who is My Neighbor? Social Affinity in a Modern World, Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina, The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV, beyond Management, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game, Realism and Social Science

ANTIQUITY, MODERNITY, AND SOCIAL THEORY

Wang Mang's Mingtang is one of the most firmly-dated and well-documented pieces of evidence concerning ancient Chinese cosmology. The present article uses this important archaeological discovery as a touchstone for an analysis of the current scholarly reconstruction of China's antiquity and the search for continuity in Chinese culture. Here one may remark a shift in responses to the problems of modernity and national identity. Chinese intellectuals today face the challenge of breaking out of the deadly cycle of stark opposition between the conservatives' egocentric insistence on cultural superiority and the Westerners' self-denying cultural nihilism. The means for creating a more nuanced discourse lies in the integration of Chinese history into the global social sciences - not by applying Western theories to Chinese material, but by revising and advancing current theories in the light of data and principles generated from Chinese history.

Editorial: four decades at the service of the global social sciences

Editorial: four decades at the service of the global social sciences