INNOVATION POLICY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

This paper offers a rationale for expanding current efforts to support industrial innovation to encompass the important and unique contributions that the social sciences can make in this area. In order to provide a comprehensive overview of these contributions, the paper examines the role that social factors play in the process of technological innovations, the importance of social innovations, and the potential contributions of social science research to the diffusion of innovation as well as its importance in considering the broad social impacts of social innovations.     

COLLECTIVE DELUSION IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: PUBLISHING INCENTIVES FOR EMPIRICAL ABUSE

The implications o f the editorial bias of academic journals for the selection of articles with apparently statistically significant findings are widely recognized but largely ignored. Few worry about the incentives the publishing bias presents to researchers for empirical abuse that brings into question the basis of social science knowledge. One possible solution, desirable but probably impractical, is to review articles with statistical results and conclusions omitted. Another, more practical, approach is to guarantee journal space for replication of previously published research. Finally, editors should take greater care in warning readers about findings that implicitly make unfounded statistical claims.     

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS: REFLECTIONS ON SOCIAL DEMOCRACY & NATIONALISM IN THE COMMON EUROPEAN HOME

That Assembly, since the destruction of the orders, has no fundamental law, no strict convention, no respected usage to restrain it…'fools rush in where angels fear to tread'. In such a state of unbounded power for undefined and undefinable purposes, the evil of a moral and almost physical inaptitude of the man to the function must be the greatest we can conceive to happen in the management of human affairs. ²     

SOCIAL ADMINISTRATION IN AUSTRALIA: THE NEED FOR A PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATION

There appear to be two current, opposing misconceptions concerning the nature of social administration. On the one hand there is the belief that it constitutes "no special or definite study but a part of that general mass of things which every earnest young man or woman should know" and, on the other hand, it is "often assumed without question to be concerned with administrative practice"¹.
The domain of the subject of "social administration" is the social service industry in all its parts, its relationship with the industrial and commercial world, and its relationship with primary groups such as families, friends, and neighbours².
Narrowly defined, social administration is the study of the development structure and practices of the social services. Broadly defined, it is an attempt to apply the social sciences — including philosophy — to the analysis and solution of a changing range of social problems³.