Social scientists

Bureaucratic dry rot It has been emphasized by a number of social scientists that in the past decades there has been expressed serious concern over what they call bureaucratic dry rot. We all pay a heavy price, they note, for the large, bureaucratic, nonadaptive organizations that are insensitive to employees needs, ignore consumers ... 

So far operations research has utilized the talents of individuals from a wide spectrum of fields ranging from chess players and physical and social scientists to mathematicians, pure and applied. Imagination and a good background in technical excellence are the basic elements in this choice of individuals. A significant consequence of all this is an opportunity for broad intellectual contacts and cross-fertilization of ideas in many diverse fields. 

SAS Programming for Researchers and Social Scientists, Second Edition by Paul E. Spector... 

Energy is an importantfactor affecting economic and political stability. The efforts of scientists, economists, social scientists and public figures involved in the solution of current and future energy problems must be combined in order to secure the stability on the global and regional levels. 

John Dupre Or you d explain human behaviour in terms of the interactions of brain cells. The opposite, downward causation, would be, for example, to say that the behaviour of a person causes their brain cells to move in a certain way. Lisa s example today, I take to be, as she just summarised it, precisely a claim to downward causation. That is to say that the social phenomena actually act causally on the individual, and, of course, to deny what is a very common thesis in the philosophy of social phenomena, which is methodological individualism, which says, and many people, social scientists and philosophers have said - you have to be able to explain social phenomena by looking at the behaviour of individuals. And that s the reductionist view as opposed to the downward causation view, which is an anti-reductionist view. And I think that s certainly one of the standard ways philosophers have understood the debate. 

Dorothy Nelkin Well, first of all as a social scientist I feel that humour is serious. It is also a pedagogical device to get people to listen at the end of a long meeting. Studies of the sociology and psychology of humour suggests that it s serious, as social commentary and an indication of public attitudes. 

Strauss A.L., 1987. Qualitative analysis for social scientists, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 

Because archaeologists study the past, they are unable to observe human behaviour directly. Unlike historians, they also lack access to verbally encoded records of the past. Instead they must attempt to infer human behaviour and beliefs from the surviving remains of what people made and used before they can begin, like other social scientists, to explain phenomena. ... 

Cohen, S., Kessler, R. C., Gordon, L. U. (1995). Measuring stress A guide for health and.social scientists. New York Oxford University Press. 

Carey McWilliams, an architect of the nation of nations tradition in American social thought, stands out for his refusal to ldse sight of the overall complexity of the American mosaic and for his refusal to make race identical with the Negro in American political life. Unlike Gun-nar Myrdal and other social scientists, who would effectively expel from consideration those pegged neither as white nor as black, McWilliams demonstrated a keen sensitivity to the complex racial tableau in... 

Most published studies of the role of religion in the lives of scientists are limited to whites. The major exceptions are studies by Pearson (1985) and Pearson and Ellis (1988) which included samples of African American and white doctoral natural and social scientists. These studies confirmed the findings of previous studies of white scientists regarding the prevalence of Protestants. According to Pearson (1985), African Americans were considerably more likely than their white peers to be Protestant, equally likely to be Catholic and less likely to Jewish. 

Incorporating discussions of the social dimensions of science into science courses broadens students understanding of current theory, tools, analytical techniques, and how different disciplines investigate and interpret the natural world. Exposure to science-and-technology studies would give non-scientists the perspective they need to participate in such debates. Instead of indoctrinating more students into the current scientihc culture, scientists should work with social scientists and scholars of education to make science more welcoming to those who were formerly excluded from STEM holds. 

The many footnotes serve several funrtions, Mainly, they are reminders that things are more complicated than (he main text might suggest. They point to links between chapters that might otherwise not be noticed. Or they discuss paradoxes and curiosa of the sort that social scientists love, often to excess. 

Scholars disagree on the relative importance of preferences and opportunities in explaining behavior. Some economists argue that all people have essentially the same preferences and desires only opportunities differ. Although usually staunch defenders of rational-choice theory, they are led, paradoxically, to argue that choice almost doesn t matter because any variations in behavior must be explained by variations in opportunities. Most social scientists, however, believe that people differ in their desires as well as in their opportunities, and this view seems to me so obviously right as not to require further defense. 

Opportunities are more basic than desires in one respea they are easier to observe, not just by the social scientist but also by other individuals in society. In military strategy a basic dinum is that one should make one s plans on the basis of the opponent s (verifiable capabilities, not on his (unverihable) intentions. Often, this amounts to planning on a worst-case assumption the opponent will hurt us if he can do so. If each side plans on the basis of the capabilities of the other side, and knows the other side to be doing the same, their actual preferences may not matter much. 

Another line of argument is to stipulate rational expectations. In essence, this means that persons living in a society use the same models and the same information as the social scientist studying them. If he can anticipate what will happen, so can they. To achieve equilibrium, farmers do not have to go through a long sequence of cycles and learning. Using the cobweb model, they... 

In reference to human nature, Jerome Delli Priscoli, a social scientist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, stated, The thirst for water may be more persuasive than the impulse toward conflict. Do you agree or disagree with his statement Might our universal need for water be our salvation or our demise ... 

Social scientists have begun serious research in this vital area and only recently has the subject been covered openly. To measure your knowledge in this subject, answer the questions on the following pretest. Correct answers follow the questions. 

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