Traditional Social Science Research Articles

From Mobile Phone Sensing to Human Geo‐Social Behavior Understanding

The study of geo‐social behaviors has long been a scientific problem. In contrast to traditional social science, which suffers from the problems such as high data collection cost and imported user subjectivity, a new approach is presented to study social behaviors based on mobile phone sensing data. Different from other similar studies on mobile social sensing, three different types of geo‐social behaviors, including online interaction, offline interaction, and mobility patterns, are characterized based on a newly released Nokia mobile phone data set. We further discuss the impact factors to these behaviors as well as the correlation among them. The findings in this article are crucial for many different fields, ranging from urban planning, location‐based services, to social recommendation.

This Could Be the Start of Something Big: Linking Early Managerial Choices with Subsequent Organizational Performance

This Could Be the Start of Something Big: Linking Early Managerial Choices with Subsequent Organizational Performance

The Role of Developmental Psychology to Understanding History, Culture and Social Change

Developmental psychology of the past generations has evidenced that the whole pre-modern humankind stood on pre-operational or concrete-operational stages. Only the modern humankind has also developed the fourth stage of human development, the adolescent stage of Lew Vygotski was 1933 one of the first to earmark convincingly the connection of socialisation (school education) and cognitive development as a precondition to reach the psychological processes, as the Russian school designated what the school of Geneva called formal operations. The essay documents that developmental psychology is necessary to reconstruct the history of magic, religion, philosophy, law, morals, politics, economy, population, arts, customs and mentality. It is impossible to understand human's history on earth and social change from Pleistocene up to modern times without developmental psychology. Moreover, the emergence of the operations during the early modern times caused the rise of modern, industrial society, including its main parts industrialism, sciences, Enlightenment, humanism and democracy. These five main phenomena of modernity manifest higher stages of psyche and cognition, having arisen in the same region and in the same era. Developmental psychology is able to explain their nature and their internal coherence, while traditional social sciences have no means available to deal with these phenomena, considering their common origination as an accidental phenomenon or misinterpreting it.

Mind the gap: why many geneticists and psychological scientists have discrepant views about gene-environment interaction (G×E) research.

As our field seeks to elucidate the biopsychosocial etiologies of mental health disorders, many traditional psychological and social science researchers have added, or plan to add, genetic components to their programs of research. An understanding of the history, methods, and perspectives of the psychiatric genetics community is useful in this pursuit. In this article we provide a brief overview of psychiatric genetic methods and findings. This overview lays the groundwork for a more thorough review of gene-environment interaction (G×E) research and the candidate gene approach to G×E research that remains popular among many psychologists and social scientists. We describe the differences in perspective between psychiatric geneticists and psychological scientists that have contributed to a growing divide between the research cited and conducted by these two related disciplines. Finally, we outline a strategy for the future of research on gene-environment interactions that capitalizes on the relative strengths of each discipline. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

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.

DEBATAI DĖL „GALIOS“ SOCIALINĖJE IR POLITINĖJE TEORIJOJE

Power is one of the basic, but at the same time one of the most disputed concepts in political science, as well as other social sciences contiguous to it. The dispute over the meaning of power is best instantiated by the ongoing debate between political scientists and sociologists which started around 1960s – the so-called “faces of power debate”. Although different conceptions of arguably the same phenomenon where termed “faces of power” relatively recently by the scientists taking part in this debate, these conceptions have their roots in various paradigmatic social and political theories, and methodological traditions (Weberian comparative historical sociology, structural functionalism, critical theory and Gramscian neomarxism, structuration theory, Foucaultian post-structuralism, etc.). Therefore, the first task of this theoretical endeavour is to overview the faces-of-power literature in the context of the long-established social scientific traditions in order to trace the intellectual roots of the four faces. A strong case can be made for associating the first face of power with behaviourism, the second – with structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons and structurationism of Anthony Giddens, the third – with critical social theory and Gramscian neomarxism, whereas the fourth face of power is exclusively inspired by the works of Michel Foucault. At the end, a modest “taxonomy” of power is proposed with relative weight of social conflict / social consensus, subjectivity / objectivity of interests, and the source of power serving as axes for differentiation among different conceptions (faces).The second section focuses on the conceptual limits of “power” and its discursive relation to “authority” and “coercion” (meaning “physical force”). Drawing on the theoretical insights of Talcott Parsons, Hannah Arendt and Anthony Giddens, authoritative power is associated with the full institutionalisation and legitimation of relations of autonomy and dependence between a position of authority and its subordinate; therefore, as an ideal type, authoritative power by definition involves voluntary acquiescence and faces virtually no opposition. In contrast, a relation (or rather an act) of coercion involves no active part of the subject (or rather object) over whom it is exercised. Along these lines, a strong argument can be made that physical coercion is not a form of power. It does not involve a minimum amount of dialectic of control associated with power relations. “Authority” and “coercion” are thus seen as conceptual markers, the former corresponding to the maximum of power and the latter – to a complete absence of power, which is replaced by a causal chain of sheer physical force and its consequence in a Newtonian sense.

Clustering Networks’ Heterogeneous Data in Defining a Comprehensive Closeness Centrality Index

One of the most important applications of network analysis is detecting community structure, or clustering. Nearly all algorithms that are used to identify these structures use information derived from the topology of these networks, such as adjacency and distance relationships, and assume that there is only one type of relation in the network. However, in reality, there are multilayer networks, with each layer representing a particular type of relationship that contains nodes with individual characteristics that may influence the behavior of networks. This paper introduces a new, efficient spectral approach for detecting the communities in multilayer networks using the concept of hybrid clustering, which integrates multiple data sources, particularly the structure of relations and individual characteristics of nodes in a network, to improve the comprehension of the network and the clustering accuracy. Furthermore, we develop a new algorithm to define the closeness centrality measure in complex networks based on a combination of two approaches: social network analysis and traditional social science approach. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method using four benchmark datasets and a real-world network: oil global trade network. The experimental results indicated that our hybrid method is sufficiently effective at clustering using the node attributes and network structure.

What is education based on scholarship?

According to the Swedish higher education act, higher education should provide courses and programmes based on scholarship - but what does this mean in practice? In this project the library and the Centre for higher education at Malmö University collaborate in order to explore how teachers, librarians and students interact in an education based on scholarship. The purpose of the project is to investigate how education can be designed in order to be "based on scholarship", and thus to improve quality in education, but also to develop the relations between the Centre for higher education and the library at Malmö University. In previous studies we have seen that one of the most common questions students ask in the library concern scholarly texts (Lundgren, 2011), and also how the idea of academisation differ between different departments within the university (Ek, Ideland, Jönsson & Malmberg, 2011). From courses in higher education for teachers at Malmö University we see that the idea of "based on scholarship" can be expressed in many different ways, e.g. by using scholarly literature or through teachers that are also researchers. Thus, students, teachers and librarians are interlinked through this complex question of "based on scholarship". In the project we ask the following questions: How is an education "based on scholarship" perceived? How is an education "based on scholarship" expressed in different educational activities? How (If) do teachers, librarians and students work together with these questions? Does an interdisciplinary environment influence the understanding of scholarship and the activities related to this? We have interviewed teachers (programme responsibles), students and librarians from five different programmes within Malmö University. Respondents were chosen to represent different types of programmes (new professional, semi-professional and traditional social sciences programme). When we have analyzed our interviews we see the following themes: how to integrate education and research, progression, the relationship between research and students' future careers, interdisciplinarity and the role of the library. Our results show that an education based on scholarship is managed differently within the librarian practice, the research practice and the education practice. Members of the different practices identify and participate in research in different ways. We also see that education based on scholarship is often described as reading and using research literature. Both students and teachers think that students develop their critical thinking skills. The students' degree projects are described as important when it comes to integrating research and education. How research can be used in students' future careers is quite unclear. From our results it is obvious that the research within the university departments is invisible for the students. Also students do not participate in research. Some of the most central questions that we see in our study relate to: How the research within the departments can become more visible for students How students, but also teachers and librarians, can be participants in a research community How the research can be fully integrated in education, not only in theory and methodology courses How research can be used and also be visible in students' future careers If the role and competence of the librarian need to change in order to be fully integrated in an education based on scholarship ReferencesEk, A-C., Ideland, M., Jönsson, S. & Malmberg, C. (2011). The tension between marketisation and academisation in higher education. Studies in Higher Education. doi:10.1080/03075079.2011.619656.Lundgren, I. (2011). The student and the information search process: library development using student voices. [PowerPoint-presentation]. Retrieved from http://www.mah.se/Om-Malmo-hogskola/Bibliotek-och-IT/Projekt/Hogskolebibliotekets-roll-i-en-inkluderande-larandemiljo/

Empire and Social Science: Shinmei Masamichi and the East Asian Community in Interwar Japan

In the early 1930s, a group of Japanese social scientists began producing theories of an East Asian community as a new order for Imperial Japan. Heavily influenced by the political climate of ‘Europe in crisis’ in the aftermath of the Great Depression as well as domestic situations that drove Japan to ultra-nationalism, these Japanese intellectuals grappled with the question of incorporating China and Japan’s colonies into a new multi-ethnic empire. This article pays special attention to Shinmei Masamichi, whose social scientific thinking was first nurtured under the progressive and liberal academic atmosphere of Taisho Japan, but came at the forefront of the rationalization of the Japanese empire in the 1930s and early 1940s. Rejecting both western democracy and the capitalist economy, Shinmei strove to theorize an empire based on anti-racism and multi-ethnicity. In doing so, he provided a strong ideological foundation for Japan’s wartime mobilization efforts in Asia. The intellectual trajectories of Shinmei’s social scientific thinking clearly show how the progressive and liberal social scientific tradition in prewar Japan resulted in an endorsement of imperialism and colonial violence during the wartime period.

Revisiting Dynamic Social Impact Theory: Extensions and Applications for Political Science

Traditional social science research tends to regard political attitudes as the product of individuals’ internal processes. This approach ignores the existence of external influences on individual attitudes, particularly that of social communication. We argue that political attitudes are neither confined to the individual, nor are they wholly social constructions. This study examines how political information is structured and communicated through a social medium. We employ multi-agent simulation to replicate and extend a previous simulation of attitude formation based on Latane’s (American Psychologist 36:343–356, 1981) theory of social impact. Specifically, our extension of the previous model incorporates motivated reasoning processes, attitude persuasiveness, and agent uncertainty in order to more accurately capture the pervasiveness of social communication. These changes allow us to model effects not previously possible, such as attitude polarization and information cascades. Results from this study show that realistic structures in the distributions of attitudes can be recreated using prevailing aggregate- and individual-level models of attitude formation. By formally modeling the dynamics of social impact, researchers gain insight into social influences on individuals’ attitudes and the consequences for public opinion.

“Brokering” Behavior in Collaborative Learning Systems

The meaning and the impact of social roles and their embeddedness in social systems have a long tradition in social sciences. Especially the identification of structural conditions of individuals is important for studying processes of innovation and diffusion. Prior research has shown that “mediating” actors acquire a special role in knowledge networks by forming dynamic chains of information flow in the process of knowledge transfer. Therefore, it is important to detect and describe the impact of these individuals in digital distance learning processes for a better understanding of the relationship between network structure and information flow. In a previous work five typical influential social roles of actors were extracted and examined in knowledge networks. This paper presents the special mediating role labeled as “Broker” in formal and informal online learning communities by using Social Network Analysis (SNA). In the research teachers and students in remote learning communities are examined by their embeddedness in different communication networks in macro and micro perspective via structural analysis. The data were collected from the most popular 120 discussion boards comprising834 users and 11030 articles in the distance learning system, called OPAL, that is actively used by 11 universities located in the state of Saxony, Germany. The social network data are represented as communication networks between individuals. Brokering behavior is characterized by examining role patterns and flow of information through the network of learners and educators in the distance learning system. The results of the study describe the impact of Brokers for the communication and collaboration process in digital knowledge communities.

A CASE OF CULTURAL MISUNDERSTANDING: French Anthropology in a Comparative Perspective

This paper offers a study of French anthropological tradition in a comparative perspective. It focuses on French anthropologists' writing practices and, in particular, on a strikingly recurrent phenomenon: that French ethnographers, in addition to their scholarly work, often write a ‘second book,’ a literary account of their experience in the field. The study of the divide between these two books allows for a comparison with other national anthropological traditions, particularly the American one. It sheds light on some difficulties in cultural and intellectual translation between national traditions in social sciences.

Actor-Network Theory, Methodology, and International Organization

Since its initial formulation in science and technology studies, actor-network theory (ANT) has spread like wildfire throughout the social sciences. Wildfires are fueled by dry and flammable vegetation as well as hot, gusting winds. ANT finds flammable vegetation among those frustrated with many of the conventions, dualisms, and dilemmas of the traditional social sciences. ANT promises to liberate scholars from strict dualisms such as the nature/society divide and the agency/structure dilemma. It claims to open up a reflexive discourse on what constitutes the practice of science. ANT's avant-garde spirit further fuels the fire. Others reject ANT. They (rightfully) lament the often-awkward terminology of ANT, its lack of appropriately defined models and concepts, its literary style of presentation, as well as the radical rhetoric that often comes along with it. For many, the question of what actually constitutes ANT remains mysterious, and it is often unclear whether it is more than a “new materialist” argument for taking objects, things, and technology seriously. I would like to begin by exploring why it is difficult to provide a clear-cut answer to the questions “What is ANT?” and “What can I use it for?” I then suggest that ANT is anything but radical. It shares many concerns with the pragmatist and practice theoretical ideas that have recently been introduced to IR. Ideas from ANT enrich our theoretical and methodological repertoire for understanding the international. I suggest that ANT offers a fruitful toolbox for research: It encourages the researcher to seek proximity to the practices studied, to build theory from empirical insights, and to rethink the character of representation. ANT-inspired studies promise to provide major insights for understanding the worlds of international relations. Actor-network theory is a loose and heterogeneous conglomerate of studies that, on the one hand, are very empirical, often examining seemingly “exotic” …

Two decades of disability research in Norway – 1990–2010

The aim of this article is to outline the main trends in Norwegian disability research over the last two decades. Prior to 1990, the research area was dominated by medical perspectives and was mainly research on impairments. Contributions addressing social problems, everyday life issues, equality and participation were few and sparse. This changed in the early 1990s and a social scientific research tradition emerged and grew into an institutionalized area of research. It is argued that the development was related to funding schemes, and also that two main attributes of Norwegian disability research were present from the early years: (1) evaluations of disability policy provisions, and (2) research intended to disclose social problems. The article discusses (1) the profile of Norwegian disability research, (2) its institutionalisation, and (3) the main topics and themes that have been raised.

Desperately seeking structures

Research grounded in a social science tradition tends to focus on people, while research grounded in an engineering tradition tends to focus on artifacts. However, as people and artifacts become increasingly intertwined in digitized processes and practices, these traditional disciplinary divisions sometimes seem a little outdated. So in this essay, I advocate an approach to research on information systems that focuses on actions, rather than people or artifacts. In particular, I examine the possibility of treating patterns of action as the object of inquiry. Grammatical models can be used to represent the space of possible action patterns in a given domain, and can be used to compare, and analyze the structural properties of action patterns. If so desired, these patterns can be tied back to traditional factors related to people (such as culture, habit, or learning?) or technology (such as features, constraints, or affordances?).

Citation content analysis (CCA): A framework for syntactic and semantic analysis of citation content

This study proposes a new framework for citation content analysis (CCA), for syntactic and semantic analysis of citation content that can be used to better analyze the rich sociocultural context of research behavior. This framework could be considered the next generation of citation analysis. The authors briefly review the history and features of content analysis in traditional social sciences and its previous application in library and information science (LIS). Based on critical discussion of the theoretical necessity of a new method as well as the limits of citation analysis, the nature and purposes of CCA are discussed, and potential procedures to conduct CCA, including principles to identify the reference scope, a two‐dimensional (citing and cited) and two‐module (syntactic and semantic) codebook, are provided and described. Future work and implications are also suggested.

Law, Property and Ambiguity: The Uses and Abuses of Legal Ambiguity in RemakingIstanbul's Informal Settlements

AbstractWhat is the role of legal ambiguity in the creation and institutionalization of private property regimes? In what ways does the (ab)use of legal ambiguities affect market‐making processes? I address these questions through a detailed analysis of two large‐scale urban renewal projects in Istanbul that impose a formal private property regime on informal settlements. My research reveals that without the strategic utilization of legal ambiguities and administrative arbitrariness by public and private actors, private property cannot be easily created and hence capitalist markets cannot function efficiently. My findings challenge the assumptions of several social science traditions such as neoclassical and neoinstitutionalist economics, as well as most works within the law and economics tradition regarding the relationship between law, property and economic development. These approaches to economic development are underpinned by the legal certainty that private property entails as the most important element for an efficient economic order. However, in their unconditional support for private ownership, they fail to realize the degree of legal ambiguity and administrative arbitrariness needed to create the private property regime in the first place. As such their arguments remain theoretically and empirically incomplete. A more complete analysis of the relationship between law and economic dynamics must focus on how private property is constructed, and the extent to which legal ambiguities and loopholes are utilized in this process.

The Hidden Dimensions of the Musical Field and the Potential of the New Social Data

This article seeks to highlight what might be thought of as the hidden dimensions of the musical field and explores the potential of digital by-product data for illuminating the aspects of musical taste and preference that are difficult to see with traditional social science methods. It suggests that the limitations of existing field analysis create what might be thought of as darkened areas of music consumption that may remain outside of the gaze of the interested social scientist. The paper briefly discusses some of the analytical problems associated with this lack of visibility. In response this article focuses upon the specific example of Last.fm and looks to make use of the by-product data that this particular website accumulates about individuals’ everyday music listening practices. From this specific example the article provides some substantive observations about the contemporary musical field and uses these to offer insights into the potentials and limitations of using by-product data in the analysis of (the musical) field. This article specifically questions the boundaries drawn around genre in the study of field, and looks at how these might be reported upon in alternative ways using new forms of data.

A novel framework in complex network analysis: Considering both structure of relations and individual characteristics in closeness centrality computation

A B S T R A C T In this paper, we develop a novel framework for defining radial measures of centrality in complex networks. This framework is based on the combination of two approaches: social network analysis and traditional social science approach by considering both structure of relations and individual characteristics. It is always an important issue to detect communities in complex networks as efficiently as possible to understand both the structure and function of the networks and to interpret radial centrality measures. Therefore, we propose spectral clustering by determining the best number of communities as a prerequisite stage before finding radial measures. Based on the proposed framework, an algorithm to compute the closeness centrality in complex networks is developed. We test the proposed algorithm on Zachary's karate club network, which is considerably used as a benchmark for community detection in a network. The preliminary results indicate that the new method is efficient at detecting both good inter-cluster closeness centrality and the appropriate number of clusters.

The Fate of Social Sciences in Soviet Russia: The Case of Isaak Il’Ich Rubin

Research within the history of economic thought has focused only little on the development of economics under dictatorship. This paper attempts to show how a country with a relatively large and internationally established community of social scientists in the 1920s, the Soviet Union, was subjected to repression. We tell this story through the case of Isaak Il’ich Rubin, a prominent Russian economist and historian of economic thought, who in the late 1920s was denounced by rival scholars and repressed by the political system. By focusing not only on his life and work, but also that of his opponents and institutional clashes, we show how the decline of a social science tradition in Russia and the USSR emerged as a process over time. We analyze the complex interplay of ideas, scholars and their institutional context, and conclude that subsequent repression was arbitrary, suggesting that no clear survival or career strategy existed in the Stalinist system due to a situation of fundamental uncertainty. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the Stalinization of Soviet social sciences occurred as a process over time.