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Building on multisited ethnographic case studies, this paper seeks to contrastively compare the demonstration and articulation formats of two social science expert cultures-- economics and anthropology--enrolled 'in the wild' of transnational environmental politics. How, the paper asks, do different social sciences come to be configured within, and do performative work upon, heterogeneous assemblages of global natures? In the first case US economists translate carbon markets into a world of Indian ecoprofessionals, across serious North-South conflicts in climate politics. In the second case a group of anthropologists, mobilized by Japanese bureaucratic elites, deploy their methods to assemble whaling cultures, as part of global biodiversity conflicts. Whereas the first case builds on existing arguments on the 'performativity of economics' (Callón), the second case expands this agenda, noting how the noneconomic social sciences (eg, anthropology) may also be consequential in enacting particular nature-cultures. Theoretically, the paper situates these inquiries at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and political anthropology, in addressing the question--important to environmental expertise and politics--of how 'local' (particular) and 'global' (universal) claims are linked in efficacious ways in 'other-than-Western' contexts? Here, the argument will be that, despite their differences, economic and anthropological performances of global natures share certain formal (aesthetic) similarities, related to credible expert demonstrations in transnational environmental contexts. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this claim for STS self-reflection on its politics of methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between globalisation and institutional change is an issue frequently debated in economic geography and the social sciences. Some see firms, whatever their national culture or heritage, as facing common market forces that undermine self-determination and predict convergence towards a global best practice. Others are sceptical, arguing that different country-specific 'varieties of capitalism' have market-distorting effects, resulting in path dependence that limits the strength of global incentives to converge at the firm level. Others still are unconvinced by both these arguments. As such, this paper seeks to better understand globalisation's impact on institutions and firms by documenting the effect of global finance and its affiliated agents on institutions and firms. Specifically, I examine the experiences of firms in both Japan and the US that sponsor pension funds to see if they have had similar experiences and behaviours in both jurisdictions. I find that American and Japanese pension sponsors, despite clear manifestations of societal differences, have in fact had very similar experiences. So, some of the predictions held by path dependence and the varieties of capitalism are not confirmed in this case. However, because convergence towards a 'best practice' corporate pension offering is also rejected, the paper concludes that new research that focuses on the impact of financial markets on institutions and firms offers important insights for explaining the outcomes in both places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that mechanisms are crucially important to differentiate between genuine and spurious causal relations is ubiquitous both in the philosophical and in the social scientific literature. Yet philosophers of the social sciences have seldom attempted to spell out systematically the way in which mechanistic reasoning or evidence are concretely used to deal with spurious association and the problem of confounders in the social sciences. In this paper, we analyze two recent such accounts, proposed by Harold Kincaid and Daniel Steel. We show how these two accounts radically differ in their notion of mechanism (a process account, and a complex system account, respectively), and how this ultimately impacts in the way in which they understand the inferential role of mechanisms in the social sciences. We then confront both accounts with the details of a well-known controversy around the purportedly causal association between the legalization of abortion and the subsequent fall in criminality in the United States. We show the limitations of both accounts in representing accurately the role of mechanistic evidence and hypotheses in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an extraordinary burden placed upon the healthcare system and people as a result of health disparities that exist within the United States. If there is going to be a concerted effort to develop innovative strategies to reduce health disparities, input from the community and behavioral scientists can and should be included in this approach and narrative. Grant writing provides one vehicle to express the narrative and to provide a means to fund research and programs within clinic-based and community settings. This paper describes a four-step inquiry process to guide healthcare professionals with varying degrees of clinical and scholarship interests through the grant writing process. They include: (1) Why write grants (motivations), (2) what is the area of focus? (Interests), (3) whom should be on the project? (partnerships), and (4) what needs to happen next to move the idea forward? (actions) The complexity of psychosocial issues means that behavioral science is well suited to develop both hypotheses-driven and phenomenological research to understand bio-psycho-social health issues. Grant writing does not need to be mysterious or daunting. It can provide a means to an end, not only to fund research but also as a means to an end of health disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides views of the author on Cheryl Cole's paper on feminism, published in the August 1993 issue of the periodical "Journal of Sport and Social Issues." There is now a movement to reconstitute sociology and social theory through a focus on the body which not surprisingly has spilled over into debates about what should comprise the sociology of sport. Cole suggests that feminist cultural studies provides a framework with which to examine the gendered body, specifically women's bodies in the United States, in a time of increasing state intervention, surveillance, and control over both social and individual bodies. However, before she gets to these important issues, Cole takes the reader through a discussion of socialist-feminism to ideas about the body. She concludes by reiterating her plea that we need to reconsider how the knowledges, discourses, and technologies produced by sport are deployed in everyday lives, and how they can be opposed and resisted. should comprise the sociology of sport.

This paper critically scrutinizes the thesis put forward by Jennifer Platt in a recent article in The Sociological Review about the general relation between theory and method, based on her investigation of the specific example of functionalism and survey research in post-war US sociology. The present paper questions the extent to which Platt's analysis and general conclusions mask important levels of connectedness between theory and method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second of two linked papers examining the interactions of psychiatry and the social sciences since World War II examines the role of NIMH on these disciplines. It analyses the effects of the prominence and the decline of psychoanalysis, and the impact of the psychotropic drugs revolution and the associated rise of biological psychiatry on relations between psychiatry and clinical psychology; and it explores the changing relationships between psychiatry and sociology, from collaboration to conflict to mutual disdain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Organizational life and research regularly involve having to explain specific events. This paper considers how such explanations might be evaluated. We outline a theory of causal explanations as answers to why-questions and introduce criteria to assess such explanations. The criteria are illustrated via an analysis of different explanations proposed for the remarkable success of Honda's entry into the US motorcycle market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In moving health and social service programs from planning into action, it is essential to understand the extent to which the knowledge gained from research should influence the actions taken by organizations and agencies that provide services (e.g., government, nongovernment organizations [NGOs]). The complexity of the challenges in translating lessons learned from science into different service settings, as well as into public policy, requires a multifaceted approach to accelerate the integration of research with practice. In this paper, the relationship between science and service is examined within the contexts of the scientific, health practice, and policy communities largely from a public sector perspective within the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is a thriving industry of classical sociology within the discipline of sociology, not much attention has been focused on the early American sociologists. This paper offers a six-fold typology of the uses of the classics within sociology, and argues that the neglect of early American sociology among contemporary sociologists requires correction. For reasons delineated, Lester F. Ward is the overlooked early American sociologist most deserving of renewed attention and study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of a social (or general) mind was prevalent in early American sociology from the 1880s through about the 1910s. As a concept, the social mind served as a proxy for what would later be defined and understood as culture and other collective phenomena such as social movements, crowd behavior, organizational behavior (e.g. ‘corporate actors’), and so forth. In the early stages of the development of sociology in America, sociologists such as Lester F. Ward and Franklin H. Giddings (1855-1931) were struggling to establish sociology as a legitimate science, and they needed to ground this new science of society in an object or reality that existed above the level of the individual members of society (for not doing so would bring the charge that sociology was nothing more than a watered-down version of psychology). In this paper I examine specifically Giddings' writings on the social mind, for they illustrate how subjectivist or idealist elements can be incorporated into an overtly positivistic or naturalistic theoretical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the staples of American politics is the theory that party competition is a function of constituency diversity. In Federalist #10 (see Rae and Taylor 1970: 7; Fiorina 1974: 89-119; Sullivan 1973) Madison emphasizes that increased constituency diversity facilitates factional dispute. As diversity increases, it weakens the ability of any single faction to represent the multifarious demands of people in a geographic area (The Federalist Papers 1961: 77-83). Despite this relatively simple and normatively pleasing explanatory perspective, and despite this theory's broad acceptance in political science, the study of the relationship between constituency diversity and party competition has been one of the more elusive and sometimes contradictory research topics of the past 30 years. This article analyzes county level data from the 1970s and 1980s—the period that forms the basis of much of this literature to assess the theoretical and empirical purchase of three of the dominant operational definitions for constituency diversity and then compares these county level findings with parallel state level analyses. I find that reformulated Lieberson/Sullivan social diversity indexes and Koetzle's political diversity index produce similar results at the state and county levels of analysis. Moreover, these results are consistent with the theory that constituency diversity has a strong influence on the level of party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comments on the capstone course. Reform of the college curriculum acquired social movement status in the mid to late 1980. Although most of the attention focused on changing general education, some critics also noted the need to revise the major. Foremost among these was the Association of American Colleges (AAC). According to the AAC Sociology Task Force Report, the capstone course should be a regular required seminar course focusing on synthesizing information and emphasize pulling the disparate pieces of the sociology major together. Students' work should bring all their preparation in the major to bear on the topic at hand and should write a senior paper or thesis or complete some other kind of professional product. The type of capstone course developed depends on how one responds to different mandates and how one views the major and the purpose of a college education. Identifying the goals of the capstone experience is the easy part. Designing and teaching the course is a continual challenge. Writing assignments are one of the most important components of the capstone course. The major writing task is compiling an intellectual autobiography. In this assignment students must assemble a portfolio of their work and must write an essay discussing their intellectual development.

The study of social indicators is valuable for understanding the role that the social sciences play in the political arena. One common pattern is for a particular social indicator to become frozen in place once it takes on political significance, and this can result in ironic consequences. This study traces out the case of indicators of aggregate productivity trends in the United States. These measures were initially developed as part of an underconsumptionist argument that was linked to the political left, but there was considerable debate over different measurement schemes. Over time, one particular measure of trends in aggregate productivity became central for wage negotiations and for government policy. This created a context in which the slower rates of growth of this measure of productivity in the 1970s helped to validate the views of those on the political right who saw the need for greater restrictions on wage gains and government civilian spending. The paper raises questions about the value of this particular measure and ends by emphasizing the problems of locking in place an "objective" social indicator when the reality being measured is in continua! flux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the works of Emile Durkheim, a number of scholars have claimed that, for a given society over time and in the absence of major societal upheavals, the proportion of people subjected to punishment by the state closely approximates a constant. In this paper, we address the "Stability of Punishment Hypothesis" with data from California for the period from the opening of the prison system in 1851 to 1970. The Stability of Punishment Hypothesis is formulated through recent modeling developments in macroeconomics, with which the presence of equilibrating tendencies can be explicitly represented, and for the first time direct tests are undertaken. No evidence for the hypothesis is found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of multivariate event history data with both observed and unobserved covariates usually requires strong parametric assumptions about the distribution of unobserved covariates affecting the process and the nature of the functions describing the time dependency of the transition rates. In social science applications, there is frequently inadequate theory to specify the parametric form of either the mixing distribution or the hazard fund ion. In this paper, we present an analytic strategy to describe such processes in very general terms, without having to make either type of parametric specification. The use of "fuzzy set" logic to describe the complex multivariate state for individuals enables us to make estimates without such specification. The illustrate the model, we analyze data on the use of long-term care and residential services from a large California study population followed for 4.5 years. The analysis illustrates the model`s basic structure, its ability to describe very general types of multivariate discrete-state/discrete time stochastic processes, and its ability to deal with analytic problems like dependent competing risks, missing data, and the confounding of experimental conditions in a nonrandomized selection of cases and controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many sociology departments express concern about teaching and a desire to improve services to their undergraduate students, most find that the constraints of traditional reward systems stand in the way of maximizing such efforts. The Department of Sociology at the University of Kentucky has committed a full time, tenure track position to teaching and related duties. This paper describes this position, its responsibilities, and some of the benefits which have come from creating the position. By creating this position, the likelihood that the teaching program will work with the research program, rather than against it, is enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many writers hold that research method is necessarily determined by theory, and it is common to suggest the relationship between functionalism and survey method in post-war US sociology as an example of this. This paper questions the extent to which that method and that theory were in reality meaningfully associated, and argues against the position that theory and method are in general invariably connected in the way suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioral political science has not utilized observational methods and lacks the field research tradition found in other behavioral sciences. This paper explores the potential contribution of observational methods to behavioral studies in political science and illustrates their application with data developed around oral argument in the United States Supreme Court and the first Reagan-Mondale television debate in 1984. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse around the bridging the gap debate is seen to a unique sub-set of the social sciences in the United States as applied to a unique American approach to security. This article looks beyond US National Security and the practices of the discipline of political science at US universities to address, and expand on, some specific ideas in Michael Desch's volume The Cult of the Irrelevant. We offer that an integrative assessment of how scholarly work can best inform security policies and practices requires more critical examination in four domains: consideration of how different disciplines frame key issues and speak to each other; understanding the dynamics of the policy marketplace; assessments to alternate ways to frame security and national security; and requirements to critical challenge the privilege academics have awarded themselves as the purveyors (and gatekeepers) of 'knowledge' and the 'truth'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The personality trait of openness has been shown to contribute to a person's ability to function effectively. Additionally, scholars have suggested that openness to experience and foreign language experience were related to music preference. Extending from earlier scholarship, this study examined the relationship between openness to experience and the various types of musical and language experiences reported by undergraduate music majors in Turkey and the United States. Participants (N = 380) were surveyed using the Openness to Experience domain of the NEO-PI-R and an author-designed survey with questions about participants' musical backgrounds and interests, foreign language abilities, age, and sex. Results showed that U.S. students rated significantly higher in four of the five dimensions of the Openness domain than their Turkish counterparts (Wilks'λ =.57; F (5, 374) = 55.37, p <.001). Factor analysis results showed that (a) experiences in foreign languages, (b) listening to Turkish traditional, pop, and folk music, and (c) listening to American (pop and folk) and Western classical music cumulatively explained 68.49% of the variance in openness. Correlation analyses suggested that listening to Western classical, American folk, and American pop music was associated with higher openness scores, and listening to Turkish traditional, folk, and pop music was associated with lower openness scores. Additionally, the number of foreign languages participants studied correlated with four of the dimensions. Results suggest that both groups could benefit from increased, broader, and deeper exposure to different musical genres from diverse cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citing their students' low levels of empathy, medical educators have scrambled to implement curricula with the hopes of buffering against the corrosive effects of biomedical and clinical experiences in medical school. The assumption undergirding these studies by social scientists and medical educators alike is that immersion in biomedical education and clinical experience erodes students' empathic capacities, and that exposure to humanities and social sciences content will amend these losses. But we do not know if this assumption is correct. In this project, we empirically assess this assumption by utilizing a unique data set constructed from student applicant and survey data from the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). We test whether medical school students (N = 8255) from the United States (U.S.) with different academic backgrounds represented by their college major have different levels of empathy, net of demographic control variables. We report two findings. First, we find that students who majored in humanities or interpretive social sciences disciplines have higher empathy scores than their peers who majored in the positivistic social sciences and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines. Second, we find that the relationship between empathy and time in medical school is more nuanced than we would expect from the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to find echoes of an innovatory moment in the past, or a discipline’s cutting edge in another’s worn down tool, or people in different fields quite unknown to one another following a similar intellectual trajectory over the same three or four years? A short case study of what looks uncannily like ‘independent invention’ is prefaced by reflections on replicatory practice in the social sciences. Some US sociological theorizing on the workings of fractal distinctions within disciplines, specifically across many foundational arguments in social science, finds a counterpart in UK anthropological theorizing on scale and replication in social phenomena at large. The conjunction is amusing; it could well be instructive. In any event, there is a challenge here to comparisons across disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The notion of 'government failure' is central to theories of neoliberal normativity. Rather than focusing on 'market failures' and their correctives, neoliberalism aims to demonstrate ways that government `incompetence', 'inefficiency', and 'graft' pollute or completely block the provision of adequate public services. Little work has been done, however, to determine the extent to which this notion has been accepted within the political mainstream, or the ways in which examples have been deployed to highlight or solve 'government failure'. This study considers the way that one such example, the organization Habitat for Humanity, has been deployed as a challenge to interventionist government and, as such, as an alternative to 'government failure' A qualitative and quantitative content analysis of 1427 news articles that included 'Habitat for Humanity' from six North American newspapers was conducted to determine the extent to which the organization has become normalized as a viable alternative to state-delivered housing in particular, and Keynesian welfarism in general. The paper adds to the argument that neoliberal assumptions, once the purview of a small cadre of right-wing political economists, have permeated mainstream assumptions about the role of government in the provision of public goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: In the last several decades, a college education, in particular the bachelor's degree, has become the key to higher earnings, and overall, to a middle-class lifestyle in the United States. In an increasingly globalized economy, privileging information and communication technologies, it is more than likely that this emphasis on higher education in the American labor market will continue in the future. While we know much about the increasing link between a college education and social mobility, writ large, we know considerably less about who actually makes the transition to college, how this occurs, and why. Despite the strides made, large numbers of individuals are not making the transition to college. Among those who are, there are important differences in the kinds of postsecondary institutions they are attending, and in completion rates, with attendant implications for social mobility. Purpose: This article has two purposes: (1) to synthesize the key facets of our knowledge base of how to expand the college pipeline and relatedly, to outline particular areas that have been under-examined across the disciplines; (2) to provide future directions that will allow us to better address this important inquiry along substantive and methodological lines. Research Design: This article draws on disciplinary papers commissioned by the Social Science Research Council's Transitions to College Committee. The discussion of preparation is framed around the contributions from the fields of anthropology, and political science; access vis-à-vis history, sociology, and demography; paying for college vis-à-vis economics; and completion vis-à-vis the field of higher education. Conclusions/Recommendations: The article calls for an overall integrative model, e.g., K-16 and interdisciplinary, improved coverage in large-scale datasets, and a more refined mixed methods approach to attend to notable gaps in our understandings of the transition to college. Across disciplines, a key substantive gap is variation along the lines of race, ethnicity, immigrant status, gender, and age across domains, which needs to be illuminated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the use of performance assessment in the social studies classroom in the U.S. Improvement of the learning process of students; Elements of classroom performance; Definition of learning.

Presents news on Web sites related to social sciences as of February 2002. Portals for anthropology; Site for the project called Debt to Society: The Real Price of Prisons sponsored by the Foundation for National Progress; Web pages on public administration in the U.S.

An underdeveloped aspect of Organizational Development literature is the need for understanding individual organizational consultants and their styles, which influence their interventions. It is through understanding styles that one can begin to appreciate and understand the process of application of behavioral science knowledge to the development of organizations. In this paper an attempt is made to provide insights into consulting styles through a summary of results of research on 21 leading organizational consultants, 11 in the U.S.A. and 10 in India. Three "approach-related" and three "person-related" elements of styles are elaborated upon, using data from in-depth "client-centered" interviews with the consultants. Two distinct styles of organizational consulting emerge from the data and their relation to values, approaches, and consulting experience are discussed, as are their interrelations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary research and theory on voluntary action-both focus on individual participation and on voluntary associations as organizations-generally ignore religion and religious institutions, at least in the United States and usually elsewhere as well. The causes of this situation are to be found in historical tendencies for social science research on the sacred and the secular to be very clearly separated and in contemporary tendencies for social science research to maintain strong disciplinary and topical specialization boundaries. The negative consequences are both intellectual and practical. Intellectually, both religious research and voluntary action research suffer from and are stunted in their growth by their mutual lack of cross-fertilization of concepts and generalizations. Practically, religious institutions, their participants, and their leaders suffer by not being able to utilize voluntary action research knowledge and its practical application as fully as would be optimal in their everyday activities. Similarly, other types of voluntary associations are deprived of practically useful techniques and knowledge accumulated by religious researchers and practitioners/leaders of the religious community. Ecumenism is needed not only among religions but also between related research areas such as religious research and voluntary action research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses doctoral dissertations dealing with Italian immigrants and their acculturation in the United States. Of the 156 Dissertations 43 have been published, most of the others are available in microfilm or in Xerox copies from Dissertation Abstracts. Thirty-nine were written by halo-Americans. Fifteen different disciplines are represented, ranging from Anthropology to Theatre, although the majority are in History, Sociology, and Education. During the period 1908-1924 only 6 dissertations were written, the first at Yale in 1908 and the second at Harvard in 1909. The information given for each dissertation is: author's name, title of dissertation, university and date of degree, volume and page of Dissertation Abstracts where the abstract of the dissertation is found and the order number of the dissertation. Some of the research papers discussed are "The Ethnic Factor in American Catholicism: An Analysis of Inter-Ethnic Marriage and Religious Involvement"; "The Missionary, An Agent of Cultural Diffusion"; "A Comparative Study of the Mental Capacity of Children of Foreign Parentage."

Introduces the articles published in the July 2002 issue of the periodical 'American Behavioral Scientist,' focusing on key issues relevant to the study of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector in the U.S. Contribution of the social and behavioral sciences to philanthropy and the nonprofit sector; Research possibilities for the study of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector.

Based on a population-representation approach using census data we explored the breadth of research in the Journal of Latinx Psychology (N = 154) and Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences (N = 94) with respect to distribution across states and nationality background of the Latinx' samples. Over 90% of the empirical studies are based on Latinx samples within the US. Out of those, only 60% provided information specific enough to identify the ethnic background of the sample beyond Hispanic/Latinx or other vague descriptors (e.g., "multiethnic"). With 80% of the samples, Mexicans are overrepresented compared to the population statistics of (documented) Latinx in the US. Findings also reveal an overrepresentation of the Southwest region compared to the overall distribution of Latinx across the US. It is suggested that Latinx journals take a more active role in fostering publications of Latinx subpopulations which are often clustered in regions other than the Southwest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the skills of graduate education that is most central to the evaluation of students is their ability to read and report on complex disciplinary texts. The display of comprehension is central to the judgment of competence, creating a status hierarchy. Demonstrating reading prowess is taken as a transparent indication of intelligence. Based on thirty-six ethnographic interviews with graduate students in sociology, history, and economics, we examine how informants think about the establishment of their scholarly reputations through self-presentational skills in discussing reading in seminars, articles, and eventually in the dissertation itself. The ability to read disciplinary texts and to situate those texts within disciplinary contexts is crucial for a validated selfhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual assault is a major concern on the U.S. college campus. Engaging students as pro-social bystanders has become more common as a potentially effective mechanism for reducing the incidence of sexual assault and mitigating the harm of assaults that have already occurred. Understanding the influences of pro-social bystander behavior is imperative to developing effective programs, and the use of an evidence-based theoretical framework can help identify the differences between students who intervene and those who do not when presented with the opportunity. A sample of 815 undergraduate university students completed the Sexual Assault Bystander Behavior Questionnaire, a survey based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) that investigates students’ perceived behavioral control to intervene, subjective norms that support intervening, attitudes toward intervening, and intent to intervene in the future. Two-tailed t tests revealed interveners reported significantly greater perceived behavioral control than non-interveners for eight of the 12 intervention behaviors, more supportive subjective norms than non-interveners for seven of the 12 intervention behaviors, more positive attitudes than non-interveners for only one of the 12 intervention behaviors, and greater intent to intervene in the future for six of the 12 intervention behaviors. Differences in the four TPB variables were not consistent for the 12 intervention behaviors. The use of a theoretical framework found to be effective in explaining—and changing—other health-related behaviors, and the inquiry into students’ opportunities to intervene to compare against their reported intervention behaviors, is new to this body of literature and contributes to the understanding of the influences of pro-social bystander behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors investigate how far the U.S. has come when it comes to race. Topics discussed include the election of Barack Obama as the first African American president, racial violence and civil rights revolution. Also discussed are the book "Slavery by Another Name" by Douglas A. Blackmon and the state-sanctioned white profit/black loss.

The article discusses the social sciences, neo-liberalism, and salvaging the public university in Europe and the U.S. It states that the initiative to reduce educational costs and increase bureaucratization do not serve any other purpose that increasing the influence of the administration of universities. It mentions that the predicaments of higher education could be addressed by re-discovering people's role in the society and re-conceptualizing the disciplinary boundaries of academic fields.

This article focuses on the implementation of a required capstone course for sociology majors. The question of whether to implement a required capstone course for sociology majors has, no doubt, been discussed in sociology departments in the U.S. Another reason some consider initiating a capstone course is out of recognition that many students do not have a clue about how the sociological pieces come together. Instead of an integrated whole, they experience a sequence of distinct components like methods, theory, deviance, gender, and stratification. Both good and bad reasons exist for initiating capstone courses. While it is true that capstone courses can be a valuable part of a formative approach to education, they often appear in response to call for curricular reform and student assessment from outside the department and the university. Capstone courses help students to reexamine critically what they previously learned in courses that comprise the major. Second, they push students to apply and integrate sociological skills and knowledge in their lives. Third, the capstone course typically is taught as a seminar. The desire to include a capstone course in a department's curriculum is one thing, but the reality of doing so is another.

Although various emphases have been taken over the years, the dominant preference of administrative reformers in the United States beginning with the early Progressive Era reform movement has been to build a strong, executive-centered, and social science-informed state. Proponents’ “search for order” has consistently been predicated on the idea that the Madisonian system cannot deal with the national domestic and international challenges facing America. This essay argues that reformers’ persistent search for “public” order through federal administrative reform has bequeathed a more private-than public-sector-dominated administrative order because of its focus on bureaucratic rather than democratic administration. This has occurred because of an emergent nexus between progressives, corporate interests, and the social sciences and their professional associations. Moreover, and quite paradoxically, the amplifying and constitutive effects of this business–social science–progressive nexus has made it more difficult to mobilize the citizen support that is critical for building the federal agency expertise that the early progressives and their heirs have deemed essential for effective governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research explores the possibility of psychological reactance, or “backlash,” against political candidates who use social pressure to mobilize voters. There is a compelling theoretical argument and solid empirical evidence suggesting social pressure substantially increases voter turnout. There is, however, equally noteworthy evidence suggesting social pressure frequently stimulates a negative reaction in targets. This research uses a lab-in-the-field experimental design that employs a hypothetical social pressure message to evaluate whether a candidate’s use of social pressure to turnout voters may increase anger and hostility toward that candidate, possibly to the point it increases the likelihood a citizen will actually vote against that candidate. Our findings indicate social pressure mobilization techniques evoke consequential psychological reactance against their sponsor. Until future research can further assess these effects, we suggest social pressure mobilization techniques should be used by campaigns only after careful consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article aims to update the processes of the existing school curricula by the utilization of differentiated and challenging techniques particularly on the evolution of history and social science subjects to a more engaging, dynamic and challenging stories of facts based on multiple perspectives. It discusses the collaborative writing project of the author together with a specialist in gifted education, expert in U.S. history, and educators on aligning curriculum, frameworks and assessments.

The study of Chinese legal history has undergone a tremendous change in the United States since the 1990s. Antiquated views and biased opinions of past decades have been rethought and criticized to a considerable extent. At the cutting edge of this new academic trend is the UCLA research group of Chinese legal history. Their scholarship as a whole exemplifies the features of what this article calls a “new Chinese legal history”—namely, conjoining the empirical (the extensive use of judicial archives in China) with the theoretical (drawing upon and dialoguing with well-established theories in social sciences), with the intention of formulating new and illuminating middle-level concepts. Moreover, their keen “historical sense” helps us understand the historical roots of contemporary problems, thus overcoming the epistemological problem of Chinese legal history studies often being regarded as useless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines science-policy conversations mediated by social science in attempts to govern, or set up terms for, scientific research. The production of social science research accounts about science faces challenges in the domains of emerging technosciences, such as nano. Constructing notions of success and failure, participants in science actively engage in the interpretation of policy notions, such as the societal relevance of their research. Industrial engagement is one of the prominent themes both in policy renditions of governable science, and in the participants’ attempts to achieve societally relevant research, often oriented into the future. How do we, as researchers, go about collecting, recording, and analyzing such future stories? I examine a series of recent interviews conducted in a number of US universities, and in particular at a university campus on the West Coast of the United States. The research engages participants through interviews, which can be understood as occasions for testing the interpretive flexibility of nano as “good” scientific practice and of what counts as societal relevance, under what circumstances and in view of what kind of audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To introduce an archival protocol of a ‘Debate about methods in the social sciences, especially the conception of social science method represented by the Institute’, held on 17 January 1941 at the Institute of Social Research in New York, the article focuses on certain conflicts in substance and terms of discourse among members of the Institute, with special emphasis on Franz Neumann’s distinctive approaches, notwithstanding his professed loyalty to Max Horkheimer’s theory. These are seen to arise not only from Neumann’s assignment as bargaining agent for the Institute and his distinctive relations with American colleagues, but also from their different orientations to the conflicted legacies of Weimar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on the disaster readiness of community-based organizations in the U.S. The study utilizes factor analysis to expand Sutton and Tierney's literature review with empirical data gathered from ninety-three eommunity-based organizations (CBOs). It reveals that the dimensions of preparedness do not form unique clusters. It also identifies seven new preparedness clusters, which can serve important purposes in advancing the disaster preparedness of community-based organizations. The seven preparedness clusters include hazard knowledge, supportive resources, and property protection.

The effects of multicultural education on the racial attitudes of students in prekindergarten through twelfth grade are examined in this meta-analysis. Multicultural education was operationalized for this study as programs and curricula dealing with racial and cultural diversity. The effect sizes of curricular intervention and reinforcement dimensions of multicultural education in suburban and urban settings among age groups 3-8 and 9-16 were compared to see the relative effectiveness of multicultural education on students’ racial attitudes. The mean effect size of 0.488 from a total of 60 effect sizes calculated using 30 studies shows that exposure to multicultural education led to a reduction in students’ racial attitudes. However, the mean effect size of 0.645 from curricular intervention studies was higher than the mean effect size of the reinforcement studies at 0.08, indicating that the curricular intervention dimension of multicultural education was more effective in reducing students’ racial attitudes. Multicultural education was more effective in reducing racial attitudes in urban areas with a mean effect size of 0.72, than in suburban areas with a mean effect size of 0.587. Multicultural education was also more effective in reducing racial attitudes among the 9-16 age group with a mean effect size of 0.751, than among the 3-8 age group with a mean effect size of 0.208. Implications for research and for practice with emphasis on closing the achievement gap that exists among the various student subgroups primarily in under achieving inner-city public schools are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Corporate political activity (CPA) has increased rapidly in the United States; however, research findings are spread across several social science fields. The authors use meta-analysis to aggregate findings involving two sets of research questions: (1) what factors and to what extent do these factors influence firms to engage in CPA, and (2) does CPA, in turn, affect firm performance and, if so, to what extent? Two important contributions are made. First, the evidence suggests that, although many factors shape CPA, very few affect CPA to a large extent. Second, the results suggest that CPA is positively related to firm performance and is an important determinant of firm performance. The authors build on this evidence to suggest several future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade has seen an explosion of work on the history of the human sciences during the Cold War. This work, however, does not engage with one of the leading human sciences of the period: linguistics. This article begins to rectify this knowledge gap by investigating the influence of linguistics and its concept of study, language, on American public, political and intellectual life during the postwar and early Cold War years. I show that language emerged in three frameworks in this period: language as tool, language as weapon, and language as knowledge. As America stepped onto the international stage, language and linguistics were at the forefront: the military poured millions of dollars into machine translation, American diplomats were required to master scores of foreign languages, and schoolchildren were exposed to language-learning on a scale never before seen in the United States. Together, I argue, language and linguistics formed a critical part of the rise of American leadership in the new world order — one that provided communities as dispersed as the military, the diplomatic corps, scientists and language teachers with a powerful way of tackling the problems they faced. To date, linguistics has not been integrated into the broader framework of Cold War human sciences. In this article, I aim to bring both language, as concept, and linguistics, as discipline, into this framework. In doing so, I pave the way for future work on the history of linguistics as a human science. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on examples from the history and politics of Social Security in the United States, this article assesses early and more recent contributions to the policy feedback literature to clarify the meaning of this concept before sketching a new research agenda on policy feedback. As argued, three new streams of policy feedback scholarship have emerged since the late 1990s. Because these new research streams have seldom been discussed together, this article makes a direct contribution to the ongoing social science debate about the nature and the role of policy feedback in advanced industrial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers a critical review of the historical literature on the National Education Association's (NEA) 1916 Committee on Social Studies (CSS) report, the document generally believed to have launched the social studies movement in American secondary schools. The review begins with a critical analysis of the four most pervasive interpretations of the report. Drawing upon these interpretations, the author suggests that there are three central issues at the heart of these disputes. The first is over the ideological origins of the report; the second, its institutional origins; and the third, its epistemological position. It is argued that the influence of John Dewey is the key to overcoming these disagreements by suggesting that the members of the Committee agreed upon a core of shared beliefs that reflected his philosophical ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]