Epistemological practice and the social sciences

The object of this article is to examine the proposals for a new sociology of education set out in the work of M. F. D. Young. In particular it examines his discussion of 'knowledge', 'radicalism' and 'politics' and demonstrates that his project for a sociology of the politics of educational knowledge based on the 'phenomenological' sociology of Alfred Schutz is unsuccessful. It is argued that the 'radical' attack on the political character of contemporary education cannot be sustained. It is demonstrated that the concepts in the work of Freire, Illich, Schutz and others to which Young refers do not provide the guidelines for any theoretical advance in the sociology of education, and further, that this 'new' sociology can provide no rigorous theoretical basis for education policy formulation.     

Are the social sciences really inferior?

Fritz Machlup, at the time of his death in 1983, was emeritus professor of economics at Princeton University and professor of economics at New York University. A former president of the American Economic Association and the International Economic Association, his many influential publications included A History of Thought on Economic Integration, Methodology of Economics and Other Social Sciences,and The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States.This article, which was a favorite of Machlup’s, is reprinted from The Southern Economic Journalof January 1961, with the permission of that journal.     

高校哲学社会科学研究咨政服务能力提升研究

咨政服务是哲学社会科学研究价值的重要体现,也是高等学校哲学社会科学健康发展的重要途径。咨政服务既要为经济和社会发展提供理论引导和理论创新,通过思想库的建设为部门决策提供专业技术支持,还要国计民生的政策制定提供咨询服务。目前需要建立起专业的咨政服务平台,加强决策咨询专业智库的建设,建立面向现实问题的快速决策咨询反应机制,还要完善现有评价体系等途径提高咨政服务能力。     

The quantitative methods component in social sciences curricula in view of journal content

What level of quantitative methods (or applied statistical analysis) should graduate students in the social sciences be prepared to master, if they are to be competitive in the job market? In the age of information technology, more data, in survey or other form, about any imaginable topic exist than ever before. Empirical analysis on the basis of more advanced quantitative methods becomes more common. This study takes the perspective that graduate students in the social sciences must be prepared to read a literature that makes extensive use of quantitative methods. To quantify this dimension of the literature, top journals in economics, political science, public administration, and sociology are examined for their quantitative complexity.     

哲学社会科学创新体系建设对甘肃发展的作用

哲学社会科学是建设文化强省的重要组成部分,是推动历史发展、社会进步和人类文明的巨大精神力量,是国家和各地区文化软实力的核心内容。加快推进甘肃省哲学社会科学创新体系建设是实现甘肃经济社会可持续发展的必由之路,是助推甘肃文化强省建设的关键所在。     

Democracy and the policy sciences: A progress report

Editorial

Democracy and the policy sciences: A progress report     

Politics and the life sciences: an unfinished revolution

Politics and the life sciences--also referred to as biopolitics--is a field of study that seeks to advance knowledge of politics and promote better policymaking through multidisciplinary analysis that draws on the life sciences. While the intellectual origins of the field may be traced at least into the 1960s, a broadly organized movement appeared only with the founding of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS) in 1980 and the establishment of its journal, Politics and the Life Sciences ( PLS ), in 1982. This essay--contributed by a past journal editor and association executive director--concludes a celebration of the association's thirtieth anniversary. It reviews the founding of the field and the association, as well as the contributions of the founders. It also discusses the nature of the empirical work that will advance the field, makes recommendations regarding the identity and future of the association, and assesses the status of the revolution of which the association is a part. It argues that there is progress to celebrate, but that this revolution--the last of three great scientific revolutions--is still in its early stages. The revolution is well-started, but remains unfinished.     

Epistemology of the human sciences

The entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and Route 128 - America’s leading centers of technological innovation - organized politically in the late 1970s. This paper seeks to explain why high tech business associations in these two regions have adopted widely divergent political stances and behavior. It argues that business interests are defined through the process of organization, and that the attitudes of these groups of industrialists were shaped by distinctive political environments, in turn a result of the different industrial and social histories of the two regions. While much scholarly interest has been devoted to the ways in which business affects political outcomes, the paper suggests that the reciprocal causation is equally important: the political environment is an important determinant of business interests.     

Policy sciences and the market

The most recent response of our universities to the challenge presented by the urban crisis—the domestic problems that show their dramatic symptoms in our cities—has taken the form of new graduate programs in the policy sciences. They are widely diverse in course content, teaching methods, measures to assure experiential inputs and devices for survival in the standard discipline-oriented university climate, but all have the common purpose of improving the quality and enlarging the quantity of both public policy practitioners and analysts.These pioneering activities are growing in an atmosphere of intense intellectual debate and self-examination. How best to design and conduct them with respect to these input parameters, appropriate overall roles for universities in policy science training, the nature of more rational decisionmaking as a process, and the roles of policy science-trained analysts and practitioners in it and in promoting it, are all under lively examination and discussion.What has thus far received relatively little attention is the nature of the decision universe in which the products of these programs, the graduates, will need to perform if they are to have impact. In this paper that universe and the relationship of the university to it are characterized in simple market terms. Doing so suggests that the most pressing problems for policy science lie on the demand, not the supply, side of the market. It will take the best efforts of policy scientists to address them successfully.     

Reinventing the policy sciences: Three steps back to the future

This article examines the contemporary condition of the policy sciences in terms of its shortcomings, which can largely be attributed to an over reliance on instrumental rationality; the complexity of the problem contexts; and an increasingly technocratic orientation. These have combined to distance the policy sciences from their original multidisciplinary character and goals of human dignity and democratic governance. The essay argues that a return to these first principles requires three inter-related steps: a revision of the present policy sciences paradigm; the development of more democratic or participatory procedures; and a focus on problem definition. The article concludes by proposing means by which these steps could be operationalized.

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