Concepts lie at the core of social science theory and methodology. They provide substance to theories; they form the basis of measurement; they influence the selection of cases. Social Science ...Concepts: A Users Guide explores alternative means of concept construction and their impact on the role of concepts in measurement, case selection, and theories.
While there exists a plethora of books on measurement, scaling, and the like, there are virtually no books devoted to the construction and analysis of concepts and their role in the research enterprise. Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide provides detailed and practical advice on the construction and use of social science concepts; a Web site provides classroom exercises.
It uses a wide range of examples from political science and sociology such as revolution, welfare state, international disputes and war, and democracy to illustrate the theoretical and practical issues of concept construction and use. It explores the means of constructing complex, multilevel, and multidimensional concepts. In particular, it examines the classic necessary and sufficient condition approach to concept building and contrasts it with the family resemblance approach. The consequences of valid concept construction are explored in both qualitative and quantitative analyses.
Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide will prove an indispensable guide for graduate students and scholars in the social sciences. More broadly, it will appeal to scholars in any field who wish to think more carefully about the concepts used to create theories and research designs.
For Course Use:
Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide has been written with classroom use in mind. Many of the chapters have been successfully taught at the Annual Training Institute on Qualitative Research Methods which is sponsored by the Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods. Feedback from those experiences has been incorporated into the text. Each chapter provides useful, practical, and detailed advice on how to construct, evaluate, and use concepts. To make the volume more useful, an extensive set of classroom exercises is available from the author's Web page at http://www.u.arizona.edu/~ggoertz/social_science_concepts.html. These include questions about prominent published work on concepts, measures, and case selection; in addition there are logic exercises and questions regarding large-N applications.
The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics.Before Boasdelves deeper into issues concerning ...anthropology's academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnology and ethnography originated during the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, developing parallel to anthropology, or the "natural history of man."
Han F. Vermeulen explores primary and secondary sources from Russia, Germany, Austria, the United States, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, and Great Britain in tracing how "ethnography" was begun as field research by German-speaking historians and naturalists in Siberia (Russia) during the 1730s and 1740s, was generalized as "ethnology" by scholars in Göttingen (Germany) and Vienna (Austria) during the 1770s and 1780s, and was subsequently adopted by researchers in other countries.
Before Boasargues that anthropology and ethnology were separate sciences during the Age of Reason, studying racial and ethnic diversity, respectively. Ethnography and ethnology focused not on "other" cultures but on all peoples of all eras. Following G. W. Leibniz, researchers in these fields categorized peoples primarily according to their languages. Franz Boas professionalized the holistic study of anthropology from the 1880s into the twentieth century.
This book explores analytic induction, an approach to the analysis of cross-case evidence on qualitative outcomes that has deep roots in sociology. A popular research technique in the early decades ...of empirical sociology, analytic induction differs fundamentally as a method of social research from conventional variation-based approaches. In Analytic Induction for Social Research, Charles C. Ragin demonstrates that much is gained from systematizing analytic induction. The approach he introduces here offers a new template for conducting cross-case analysis and provides a new set of tools for answering common research questions that existing methods cannot address. “Breaks new ground in introducing analytic induction as an approach distinct from qualitative comparative analysis. Charles Ragin’s writing is among the clearest, most accessible, and engaging that I know.” — PEER C. FISS, Jill and Frank Fertitta Chair in Business Administration and Professor of Management and Organization, University of Southern California “At a time when methodological debates are becoming increasingly mathematical, this intervention is both refreshingly nontechnical and unusually helpful for qualitative researchers in sociology and political science. Because of its clarity, brevity, and usability, qualitative researchers in the social sciences are going to want a copy of this book.” — JAMES MAHONEY, Gordon Fulcher Professor in Decision-Making and Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Northwestern University
Data Feminism D'Ignazio, Catherine; Klein, Lauren F
03/2020
eBook
Open access
A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism.
The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from the ...MIT Libraries.
Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Feminism, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought.
Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.”
Data Feminism offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But Data Feminism is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn't, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed.
The Other Mirror Miguel Angel Centeno, Fernando López-Alves / Miguel Angel Centeno, Fernando López-Alves
2020, 2000, 2020-12-08
eBook
If social science's "cultural turn" has taught us anything, it is that knowledge is constrained by the time and place in which it is produced. In response, scholars have begun to reassess social ...theory from the standpoints of groups and places outside of the European context upon which most grand theory is based. Here a distinguished group of scholars reevaluates widely accepted theories of state, property, race, and economics against Latin American experiences with a two-fold purpose. They seek to deepen our understanding of Latin America and the problems it faces. And, by testing social science paradigms against a broader variety of cases, they pursue a better and truly generalizable map of the social world. Bringing universal theory into dialogue with specific history, the contributors consider what forms Latin American variations of classical themes might take and which theories are most useful in describing Latin America. For example, the Argentinian experience reveals the limitations of neoclassical descriptions of economic development, but Charles Tilly's emphasis on the importance of war and collective action to statemaking holds up well when thoughtfully adapted to Latin American situations. Marxist structural analysis is problematic in a region where political divisions do not fully expresses class cleavages, but aspects of Karl Polanyi's socioeconomic theory cross borders with relative ease. This fresh theoretical discussion expands the scope of Latin American studies and social theory, bringing the two into an unprecedented conversation that will benefit both. Contributors are, in addition to the editors, Jeremy Adelman, Jorge I. Domínguez, Paul Gootenberg, Alan Knight, Robert M. Levine, Claudio Lomnitz, John Markoff, Verónica Montecinos, Steven C. Topik, and J. Samuel Valenzuela.
Through a focused and systematic examination of late medieval scholastic writers - theologians, philosophers and jurists - Joseph Canning explores how ideas about power and legitimate authority were ...developed over the 'long fourteenth century'. The author provides a new model for understanding late medieval political thought, taking full account of the intensive engagement with political reality characteristic of writers in this period. He argues that they used Aristotelian and Augustinian ideas to develop radically new approaches to power and authority, especially in response to political and religious crises. The book examines the disputes between King Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII and draws upon the writings of Dante Alighieri, Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham, Bartolus, Baldus and John Wyclif to demonstrate the variety of forms of discourse used in the period. It focuses on the most fundamental problem in the history of political thought - where does legitimate authority lie?
This open access textbook offers a practical guide into research ethics for undergraduate students in the social sciences. A step-by-step approach of the most viable issues, in-depth discussions of ...case histories and a variety of didactical tools will aid the student to grasp the issues at hand and help him or her develop strategies to deal with them. This book addresses problems and questions that any bachelor student in the social sciences should be aware of, including plagiarism, data fabrication and other types of fraud, data augmentation, various forms of research bias, but also peer pressure, issues with confidentiality and questions regarding conflicts of interest. Cheating, ‘free riding’, and broader issues that relate to the place of the social sciences in society are also included. The book concludes with a step-by-step approach designed to coach a student through a research application process.
Theories of international relations, assumed to be universally applicable, have failed to explain the creation of states in Africa. There, the interaction of power and space is dramatically different ...from what occurred in Europe. In States and Power in Africa , Jeffrey Herbst places the African state-building process in a truly comparative perspective. Herbst’s bold contention—that the conditions now facing African state-builders existed long before European penetration of the continent—is sure to provoke controversy, for it runs counter to the prevailing assumption that colonialism changed everything.
This revised edition includes a new preface in which the author links the enormous changes that have taken place in Africa over the past fifteen years to long-term state consolidation. The final chapter on policy prescriptions has also been revised to reflect the evolution of African and international responses to state failure.
This Land Is Our Land Stepick, Alex; Grenier, Guillermo; Castro, Max ...
04/2003
eBook
For those opposed to immigration, Miami is a nightmare. Miami is the de facto capital of Latin America; it is a city where immigrants dominate, Spanish is ubiquitous, and Denny's is an ethnic ...restaurant. Are Miami's immigrants representative of a trend that is undermining American culture and identity? Drawing from in-depth fieldwork in the city and looking closely at recent events such as the Elián González case,This Land Is Our Landexamines interactions between immigrants and established Americans in Miami to address fundamental questions of American identity and multiculturalism. Rather than focusing on questions of assimilation, as many other studies have, this book concentrates on interethnic relations to provide an entirely new perspective on the changes wrought by immigration in the United States. A balanced analysis of Miami's evolution over the last forty years,This Land Is Our Landis also a powerful demonstration that immigration in America is not simply an "us versus them" phenomenon.
Numerous popular and scholarly accounts have exposed the deep impact of patrons on the production of scientific knowledge and its applications.Shaky Foundationsprovides the first extensive ...examination of a new patronage system for the social sciences that emerged in the early Cold War years and took more definite shape during the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of enormous expansion in American social science.
By focusing on the military, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, Mark Solovey shows how this patronage system presented social scientists and other interested parties, including natural scientists and politicians, with new opportunities to work out the scientific identity, social implications, and public policy uses of academic social research. Solovey also examines significant criticisms of the new patronage system, which contributed to widespread efforts to rethink and reshape the politics-patronage-social science nexus starting in the mid-1960s.
Based on extensive archival research,Shaky Foundationsaddresses fundamental questions about the intellectual foundations of the social sciences, their relationships with the natural sciences and the humanities, and the political and ideological import of academic social inquiry.
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