Usable Social Science - Hardcover

Smelser, Neil J.; Reed, John S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520273567 ISBN 13: 9780520273566

Verlag: University of California Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

This volume is a one-of-a-kind contribution to applied social science and the product of a long collaboration between an established, interdisciplinary sociologist and a successful banking executive. Together, Neil Smelser and John Reed use a straightforward approach to presenting substantive social science knowledge and indicate its relevance and applicability to decision-making, problem-solving and policy-making. Among the areas presented are space-and-time coordinates of social life; cognition and bias; group and network effects; the role of sanctions; organizational dynamics; and macro-changes associated with economic development. Finally, the authors look at the big picture of why society at large demands and needs social-science knowledge, and how the academy actually supplies relevant knowledge.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Neil J. Smelser is a senior scholar and University Professor at the University of California and author of several UC Press books, most recently The Odyssey Experience and Reflections on the University of California.

John Reed is currently Chairman of the Corporation of MIT and former Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange and former Chairman and CEO of Citicorp, Citibank and Citigroup.

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"Usable Social Science represents a remarkable collaboration between Neil J. Smelser, one of America’s most distinguished sociologists, and John Reed, a highly successful member of corporate America. Together, they accomplish an even more remarkable feat of making accumulated social science knowledge accessible to non-academics while, at the same time, making an academic contribution to the social sciences by reviewing the history, accumulated findings, and conceptual approaches in key areas of specialization in sociology and elsewhere in the social sciences."—Jonathan H. Turner, University Professor & Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California, Riverside.

“This book is an ambitious project to provide the public with a review of the available and practicable knowledge for decision-making people (and who is not that today?) that the social sciences have produced over the last 250 years or so. Typically, such efforts are bound to fail. But this project is a full success, keeping its promise to present knowledge in an understandable and exciting way. The language is charming and the elegant prose is the product of a fluent, transparent style. In short: a must read!”—Hans-Peter Mueller, Professor of sociology, Humboldt-University of Berlin.

Aus dem Klappentext

"Usable Social Science represents a remarkable collaboration between Neil J. Smelser, one of America s most distinguished sociologists, and John Reed, a highly successful member of corporate America. Together, they accomplish an even more remarkable feat of making accumulated social science knowledge accessible to non-academics while, at the same time, making an academic contribution to the social sciences by reviewing the history, accumulated findings, and conceptual approaches in key areas of specialization in sociology and elsewhere in the social sciences." Jonathan H. Turner, University Professor & Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California, Riverside.

This book is an ambitious project to provide the public with a review of the available and practicable knowledge for decision-making people (and who is not that today?) that the social sciences have produced over the last 250 years or so. Typically, such efforts are bound to fail. But this project is a full success, keeping its promise to present knowledge in an understandable and exciting way. The language is charming and the elegant prose is the product of a fluent, transparent style. In short: a must read! Hans-Peter Mueller, Professor of sociology, Humboldt-University of Berlin.

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Usable Social Science

By Neil J. Smelser, John S. Reed

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-27356-6

Contents

Preface, vii, 
Introduction: The Problem and Our Take on It, 1, 
PART ONE. ARENAS OF USABILITY, 
1. Space and Time: Constraints and Opportunities, 15, 
2. Some Dynamics of Cognition, Judgment, and Bias, 53, 
3. Sanctions in Organizational and Social life, 90, 
4. Groups, Teams, Networks, Trust, and Social Capital, 121, 
5. How Decisions Are Made, 151, 
6. Organizations and Organizational Change, 185, 
7. Economic Development and Social Change, 229, 
8. Methods of Research and Their Usability, 254, 
PART TWO. THE BIG PICTURE OF USABILITY, 
9. Social Change, Social Problems, and Demands for Knowledge, 293, 
10. The Production of Knowledge in the Social Sciences, 315, 
References, 355, 
Index, 411, 

CHAPTER 1

Space and Time

Constraints and Opportunities

We focus first on two omnipresent dimensions of human life: space and time. Their very pervasiveness, however, sometimes renders their precise influence elusive. It is not common to find them as chapter headings in books such as this one. Therefore, our gathering of knowledge under these headings as organizing principles for usable knowledge is unorthodox and sometimes speculative, but also, we hope, novel at times.

PECULIAR FEATURES OF SPACE AND TIME

We notice initially an apparent paradox. Time and space can be regarded as both universal and unyielding but at the same time manipulable by humans and therefore culturally and socially variable. They are universal in that both have to be confronted as existential conditions of life. All actions occur in space, and space is forever an obstacle to complete freedom of movement. The same can be said of time. Furthermore, the rhythms of nature (diurnal, seasonal, annual) and body processes (e.g., menstruation, reproduction, generations, life-cycle regularities, and death) impose themselves (Silverman, 2001). Yet there is enormous personal, social, and cultural variation in representing both space and time, as anthropologists and others have demonstrated (Levinson, 2001; Gell, 1992). Both are also objects of endless symbolization, as revealed in expressions such as social time, political time, ritual time, geographic space, social space, personal space, and symbolic space. It is essential to keep this double aspect of universality and variability in mind.

Space and time are represented differently in the social-science disciplines. Geography is most explicit in its incorporation of space; place arrangements, distribution of populations, and movement in and constraints of space have been at the center of that discipline (e.g., Pred, 1973). Urban studies, planning, architecture, and design deal explicitly with spatial arrangements, as does social ecology. Even though much of neoclassical equilibrium theory is presented as "timeless" (Vickers, 1994), economists explicitly refer to time in discussing topics such as interest, investment, inventory cycles, business cycles, and economic growth, and consider space in the analysis of markets and location theory. Sociologists acknowledge a sociology of time, and a few write about it (Sorokin, 1943; Gurvitch, 1964; Zerubavel, 1981). Anthropologists have analyzed the centrality of time in political contestation and the exercise of power (Rutz, 1992), as well as the apparently universal relationship between space and a sense of belonging (Lovell, 1998). Psychologists write on how individuals organize their own sense of space (Eliot, 1987), on neuropsychological mechanisms involved in temporal processing (Pastor and Artieda, 1996), and on ways of experiencing time over the life cycle (Levin and Zakay, 1989). Demographers take time and space into consideration in analyzing trends, generational and cohort effects, migration patterns, and the aging of populations. At the same time, these two variables have limited visibility in these disciplines. If one examines the list of "sections" of their professional associations, there are no subdisciplines or sections with the names "psychology of time," "sociology of time," or "anthropology of time" among their dozens of subspecializations, and there is a similar lack of explicit reference to space as a category.

Despite this semihidden status, social scientists have recognized the power of these fundamental dimensions of human existence, incorporated them directly into their research, and produced relevant and usable research findings. In this chapter, we draw together a sample of their results.

TWO CLASSICAL STUDIES ON THE SPACE-TIME AXIS

Friendships in a Housing Project

More than six decades ago, three psychologists, all later to become very distinguished, published a study (Festinger, Schachter, and Back, 1950) of social dynamics in a housing project for married veteran graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They focused on small friendship groups and cliques, norms, conformity, and deviance. They employed a method (sociometric analysis) favored at the time and since reborn and employed under different names in network analysis (see chapter 4, pp. 130–39). Using that method, the investigators simply asked respondents about whom they saw socially and whom they liked and disliked. Then they proceeded to construct sociometric maps of friends, "stars," and isolates.

Earlier Stouffer (1940) had written about the importance of space in social life in general: "Whether one is seeking to explain 'why' persons go to a particular place to get jobs, 'why' they go to trade at a particular store, 'why' they go to a particular neighborhood to commit a crime, or 'why' they marry the particular spouse they choose, the factor of spatial distance is of obvious significance" (845). The authors of the MIT study were especially interested in the principle, well established in the literature, of residential propinquity in marriage—an inverse relationship between the residential distance between potential marriage partners and frequency of marriages. In a word, space appears to play a central role in the opportunity structures people face. Some economists and economic geographers incorporate spatial barriers into notions of transaction costs--e.g., how much does it cost to move people and commodities from point A to B?

Each building of the housing project was spatially arranged as a number of apartments on two floors, with exits from the second floor available only by stairwells leading to the first floor at each end of the building. These arrangements alone dictated in large part the "passive contacts" among residents: that is, meetings that occurred in the daily rounds of coming and going. The investigators assumed further that frequency of passive contacts would facilitate speaking relationships, acquaintances, and friendships.

The findings were striking. Mere physical distance between apartments proved to be a predictor of friendships. Those living in the same building had more friendships with one another than with those living in different buildings. Those living on the same floor had more social relationships with one another than with those living on different floors. Those on the first floor who exited onto the courtyard frequently ran into others while entering and leaving their residences, and friendships clustered among them as well. Those who lived at the ends of houses with exits directly facing...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520273567
• ISBN 13: 9780520273566
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 434
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland