Social Science Practice Research Articles

Better Engaging Social Science Graduate Students in Introductory Research Methods Courses: A Class Activity

This paper outlines a classroom activity to help students engage in research methods and lessen anxiety and apprehension commonly associated with research methods courses. The described class activity offers students a shared research experience to promote the skills necessary to understand, conduct and translate research into ethical social science practice. The activity was conducted in a graduate social work programme but is applicable across the social sciences. Content covered includes sampling, research design, ethical considerations, brief evaluation and helping students think critically about ways to improve research methods in order to facilitate competencies necessary for evidence-based practice (EBP). An introduction to the activity, class discussion points including integration throughout the course, and implications for curricula and practice are discussed.

Web social science: concepts, data and tools for social scientists in the digital age

This book provides readers with a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of Web Social Science. It demonstrates how the Web is being used to collect social research data, such as online surveys and interviews, as well as digital trace data from social media environments, such as Facebook and Twitter. It also illuminates how the advent of the Web has led to traditional social science concepts and approaches being combined with those from other scientific disciplines, leading to new insights into social, political and economic behaviour. Situating social sciences in the Digital Age, this book gives you the opportunity to: - understanding of the fundamental changes to society, politics and the economy that have resulted from the advent of the web - choice of appropriate data, tools and research methods for conducting research using web data - learning how web data are providing new insights into long-standing social science research questions - appreciation of how social science can facilitate an understanding of life in the Digital Age Original and timely, this book will be of immense value for students and researchers throughout the social sciences. It will also be an important resource for students and researchers from information science, computer science and engineering who want to learn about how social scientists are thinking about and researching the Web.

Once were young: reflexive hindsight and the problem of teen parents

Adults are the ones who do the social science that takes young people as its object. In this paper, we draw on empirical research, social theory, our background in Youth Studies and, for one of us, experiential knowledge as a ‘former’ teenage parent to trouble the practice of social science, in general, and Youth Studies, in particular. Using teenage pregnancy and parenting as a lens, the paper explores what it might mean to work at/on the limits of reflexive hindsight. We suggest that reflexive hindsight offers a particular, limited intervention into the knowledge practices of social science; one that makes explicit and plays with the ambivalence and ambiguity, even irony, of adult social scientists – who once were young – taking the behaviours and dispositions, the hopes, the fears and aspirations, the past, present and futures of young people as their objects.

A Cosmopolitics of Energy: Diverging Materialities and Hesitating Practices

Numerous proposals, analyses, and strategies now exist for materializing energy in order to influence environmental participation and reduce energy use. This paper asks how specific materialities of energy are articulated across social science and creative practice projects, and how these distinct renderings of materiality perform environmental change. Drawing on work by Stengers, the paper moves to consider the diverging materialities and speculative practices that might emerge through more cosmopolitical approaches to energy. A range of creative practice projects that materialize energy and perform environmental change in different registers is discussed, with attention given to considering how what counts as materiality, participation, and environmental matters of concern shifts within these differently configured engagements. The paper asks how alternative materialities of energy might be articulated that work through experimental registers of environmental practice, and that may not always be clearly directed toward instrumental ends. How might environmental practices attend to the speculative qualities of performativity, which engage not just with energy as actuality but also with energy as potentiality?

Experience and Dalit Theory

Responding to Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai’s book The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory, Satyanarayana’s essay examines the significance of bringing Dalit experience into the public debate with reference to the practice of social sciences in particular and social theory in general. The Cracked Mirror, Satyanarayana argues, offers a critique of the commonsense view of experience and the limitations of social theory in India. It acknowledges the constitutive role of experience in the production of theory, redefines the task of theory, and calls on Dalits and other marginalized groups to play the role of a new generation of scholars committed not only to scholarship but also to social causes.

El poder y el contrapoder en el marco de la reflexión cosmopolita de la política

<p>Este artículo analiza la propuesta de Ulrich Beck en torno a la conformación de una estrategia metodológica cosmopolita, que impregne los ámbitos teórico y práctico de las ciencias sociales, para comprender el ejercicio del poder político en un contexto marcado por el proceso de globalización. De acuerdo con esta tesis, la “mirada cosmopolita” que debe guiar la reflexión política revitalizaría el viejo instrumental teórico-metodológico de las ciencias sociales.</p>

Jane Addams as a Resource for Developing a Reflexively Realist Social Science Practice

The last four decades have seen a reflexive turn in the qualitative social sciences, an increased self-consciousness about the culturally contingent nature of our methods of representing human experience. This has given rise to a wave of experimentation in social science writing. Scholars have sought to develop research that does not just describe the object of study but also deliberately transforms the subject of the reader. In recent years, however, there is a growing sentiment that the obduracy of social reality seems to have been underemphasized in much of this experimentation. This article examines the inquiry methods of turn-of-the-century social theorist and settlement house founder, Jane Addams. The paper identifies themes in Addams’s approach to inquiry that was ahead of her time and relevant to this contemporary discussion. The paper argues that Addams has much to offer as an effort to develop a reflexively realist approach to social science inquiry.

Researching sustainability: a guide to social science methods, practice and engagement

Researching sustainability: a guide to social science methods, practice and engagement

Children's experiences of participating in research: emotional moments together?

This paper reflects upon emotional moments in research with children and young people. In particular, we seek to contribute to the now-extensive literature on emotions in social scientific research practice by: (i) attempting to acknowledge the often-overlooked emotions experienced by children and young people whilst participating in research; (ii) highlighting the complex, multiperspectival nature of emotions in research. We suggest that these complexities can, simultaneously be problematic and an opportunity to celebrate the achievement of doing research together.

Discourse on wellbeing in research and practice

The aim of this article is to consider debates around the contested nature of concepts of wellbeing in health and social science research and practice, given that government policy discourse centres on the importance of wellbeing as a tool for making policy and evaluating outcomes. It draws attention to the work of McNaught (2011). He has developed a definitional framework of wellbeing, in which wellbeing is perceived to be a macro concept or area of study concerned with the objective and subjective assessment of wellbeing as a desirable human state. The framework broadens wellbeing to a range of different domains beyond individual subjectivity, which has been the traditional focus of concern, and extracts it from customary affiliations with health to incorporate the family, community and society as a whole. The framework reflects the conceptual complexity of 'wellbeing' and highlights its dependency upon a range of social, economic and environmental forces that provide the resources and the contexts for the generation and maintenance of wellbeing at all levels of society. The article argues that the framework provides a paradigm that facilitates further development and systemisation of research and knowledge in the field of wellbeing. Firstly, the framework has the capacity to bring some clarity, inclusiveness and holism to research and practice. Secondly, it is useful as a tool to enhance theoretical frameworks and to guide the design and development of both health and wellbeing interventions. Thirdly, it provides the philosophical underpinnings for wellbeing policy development.

Reverse logistics in the UK retail sector: A case study of the role of management accounting in driving organisational change

This paper illustrates how interventionist research can be helpful in providing managerially relevant solutions and furthers the debate about the relationship between social science research and practice. Through this use of interventionist methods, the paper contributes to knowledge by illustrating the way in which management accounting was used alongside other managerial disciplines in a UK retail organisation to promote change and influence outcomes. Specifically, the paper focuses on changes to the reverse logistics processes of the organisation and the important role that management accounting played. It also illustrates the use of management accounting in the pursuit of strategic and commercial advantage. As researchers, our work was grounded in action rather than being just observers.

Historical transformation and epistemological discontinuity

Starting from recent formulas of EU bureaucracy for subordinating scientific and educational apparatuses to the needs of the capital and to the requests of its political representatives, the article analyses the interconnection between the historical transformation of the ideological state apparatuses (universities, higher education institutions, research institutes etc.) and the epistemological discontinuity provoked by the triumph of technosciences. The hypothesis to be tested is the following: While the crisis of West European-North American capitalism requires an ever tighter submission of ideological state apparatuses, and especially of scientific and academic apparatuses to the needs of the capital, theoretical practices in the humanities and social sciences have come to the point where they entered into an open conflict with the domination of the capital and have, as a consequence, started to subvert their own institutional supports in the ideological apparatuses of the capitalist state. For this purpose, the article reconsiders social sciences as a compromise formation and, eventually, reassesses the historical materialism as a non-Cartesian modern science.

Why Marx still matters

This article explores why a deep understanding of Marx’s project is essential for developing an adequate science of society. Marx focused on two aspects of social reality that are critical to its understanding, but are absent from the contemporary practice of social science. First, he viewed humanity’s struggle to overcome nature’s scarcity as causally and dynamically related to social organisation and social consciousness. Second, he unfolded a theory of our self-creation, the manner in which products of our manual and intellectual labour act back upon us to create us socially and intellectually. To the extent that we lose consciousness of this authorship, our freedom is constrained. We are controlled by our own creations. Our freedom requires a social science with Marx’s breadth to enable us to recover awareness of our authorship of our social creations and thereby be empowered to control them, as opposed to being their victims.

Using Simulation to Study, Design and Invent Organizations

Over the past 50 years, computational modeling and simulation have had enormous impact on the advancement of knowledge in fields such as physics, chemistry, and subsequently, biology. After simulation models had been validated in these fields, they were rapidly adopted as powerful new tools to enhance and extend engineering practice. Might social science and management practice be following a similar trajectory? This article argues that progressively validated, calibrated, and refined computational simulation models of organizations are rapidly evolving into: (a) powerful new kinds of organizational analysis tools to support organization design by predicting the performance of specific organizational configurations for a given task and environment; (b) flexible new kinds of organizational theorem provers for validating extant organization theory and developing new theory; and (c) organizational test benches that can be used to explore the efficacy of hypothetical organizational configurations that can address the unprecedented demands of new and emerging work processes in the presence of high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Using Simulation to Study, Design and Invent Organizations

Over the past 50 years, computational modeling and simulation have had enormous impact on the advancement of knowledge in fields such as physics, chemistry, and subsequently, biology. After simulation models had been validated in these fields, they were rapidly adopted as powerful new tools to enhance and extend engineering practice. Might social science and management practice be following a similar trajectory? This article argues that progressively validated, calibrated, and refined computational simulation models of organizations are rapidly evolving into: (a) powerful new kinds of organizational analysis tools to support organization design by predicting the performance of specific organizational configurations for a given task and environment; (b) flexible new kinds of organizational theorem provers for validating extant organization theory and developing new theory; and (c) organizational test benches that can be used to explore the efficacy of hypothetical organizational configurations that can address the unprecedented demands of new and emerging work processes in the presence of high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Sorokin as Lifelong Russian Intellectual: The Enactment of an Historically Rooted Sensibility

Prior to his 1922 emigration to Europe and thence to the United States, Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin had an exceptional intellectual and political career in Russia and the Soviet Union (Sorokin 1924, 1963a; Johnston 1995; Krotov 2005). Indeed, he was among the early founders of the science of sociology in his native land, where, according to a relatively recent bibliography (Sorokin 2000), he produced 162 Russian-language publications between the ages of 21 and 33. This listing includes not only book reviews and journal articles, but also substantial monographs and a two-volume theoretical treatise. While still a relatively young man, Sorokin had thus gained widespread recognition as a scholar of the first rank. He was also the initial chairperson (from 1919 to 1922) of a fledgling department of sociology at the University of Petrograd (St. Petersburg), an elected member of the national Constituent Assembly and an appointed staff member of the 1917 Provisional Government, the first democratic regime in Russia. This much would have sufficed for an entry in a sociological encyclopedia, and Sorokin’s political career has few parallels in the history of the field, other than the involvement of Emile Durkheim in French educational policy and the participation of Max Weber in creating the Weimar Republic in Germany. Nevertheless sociologists in the United States and most western historians of the field have not yet appreciated the full influence of the formative period, especially from 1905 to 1922. Lacking familiarity with Russian culture of that era and knowing little about the larger Russian socio-historical milieu, its intellectual discourse and collective memory, they have not been able to comprehend Sorokin’s outlook, behavior and professional output in the United States in relation to these earlier contextual factors. This is arguably a fundamental reason why many U.S. sociologists have tended to see Sorokin, especially since 1937, as a marginal figure and to regard his works largely as deviations from accepted social scientific practice. This paper will argue that a more adequate appreciation of Sorokin’s background and early adult life illumines both stylistic features of his works in America and also places into proper perspective several of his substantive foci that did not accord with contemporary “normal science” (Kuhn 1962). In short, despite his overall assimilation into American society and higher education, including his appointment at Harvard University and his election as president of the American Sociological Association, Sorokin should be understood in large measure as a life-long Russian intellectual. His was a Russian-born sensibility and consciousness—indeed a “Russian soul”—so deeply ingrained that it stamped his entire professional career in the United States, including his published researches, his popular sociology and his university teaching.

Mind the Gap: Disciplinary Dissonance, Gender, and the Environment

This article investigates the treatment of gender issues in “research for development” natural resources management (NRM) projects. Through discussion of an NRM research project in the United Kingdom and India, the article explores how the use of inaccurate gender stereotypes results in projects being compromised. The article seeks to explain why this happens despite widespread appreciation of the centrality of gender issues to NRM and poverty. In explanation the article identifies the significance of difficulties in the partnerships between the natural and social science dimensions of these projects. The study demonstrates that instead of easy and equal partnership, the relationship between natural and social science practitioners and practices remains characterized by inequality and poor communication, with serious consequences for the understanding of, and response to, gender issues.

Book review: Ethnography in Social Science Practice

Book review: Ethnography in Social Science Practice

Provincialising IR? Deadlocks and Prospects in Post-Western IR Theory

In recent years, IR has been increasingly influenced by the critics of Eurocentric assumptions of the epistemologies of social science. The awareness of the perspectival nature of knowledge and the emphasis on aspects of colonialism previously unaccounted for, such as epistemological imperialism, led to the flourishing of approaches which, despite their differences, are connected by their common interest in subaltern voices and suppressed knowledges, their anti-hegemonic inclination, and their emphasis on the emancipation of the Other. Post-Western IR theory is largely the offspring of such theoretical investigations and shares the ethical concerns of this critical tradition. The article identifies three strands of post-Western engagement: pluralism, particularism and postcolonialism. It focuses on postcolonialism because of the radical promise it represents on the one hand, and of the disconcerting implications of its epistemology on the other. Through the engagement with one of the most significant post-Western epistemological projects, Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, the article demonstrates why the ‘post-Western’ question as dealt with by postcolonialism is a compelling conundrum for critical thinking. This is because the ultimately postsecular stance and singularising ethics adopted by such approaches are paralysing for the practice of social science and for a relational consideration of alterity, which can be served more efficiently by reference to a genuine universalism.

Researching Sustainability: A Guide to Social Science Methods, Practice and Engagement

Researching Sustainability: A Guide to Social Science Methods, Practice and Engagement