This book offers new perspectives on global phenomena that play a major role in today’s society and deeply shape the actions of individuals, organizations and nations. In a complex and rapidly changing environment, decision-makers need to gain a better understanding of global phenomena to adapt and to anticipate the evolution of the global context. The authors—ten renowned international scholars of anthropology, economics, law, management and political science—propose an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to social sciences. They analyse how international phenomena, such as globalisation or transnationalisation, transform the disciplines of social sciences from an epistemological standpoint. Explaining what ‘global' means in difference disciplines, the authors analyse several global phenomena that characterise today’s international environment such as the circulation of norms and ideas, the linkages between war and globalization, corporate governance, and the impact of multinational enterprises on sustainable development and poverty reduction. Providing examples of analytical disciplinary approaches and guidelines for decision-makers in a fast-changing global context this book will be useful to scholars and students of anthropology, economics, law, management and political science as well as practitioners in the private and public sectors.
This book focuses on the new possibilities and approaches to social modeling currently being made possible by an unprecedented variety of datasets generated by our interactions with modern technologies. This area has witnessed a veritable explosion of activity over the last few years, yielding many interesting and useful results. Our aim is to provide an overview of the state of the art in this area of research, merging an extremely heterogeneous array of datasets and models. Social Phenomena: From Data Analysis to Models is divided into two parts. Part I deals with modeling social behavior under normal conditions: How we live, travel, collaborate and interact with each other in our daily lives. Part II deals with societal behavior under exceptional conditions: Protests, armed insurgencies, terrorist attacks, and reactions to infectious diseases. This book offers an overview of one of the most fertile emerging fields bringing together practitioners from scientific communities as diverse as social sciences, physics and computer science. We hope to not only provide an unifying framework to understand and characterize social phenomena, but also to help foster the dialogue between researchers working on similar problems from different fields and perspectives.
This book is designed to introduce doctoral and graduate students to the process of conducting scientific research in the social sciences, business, education, public health, and related disciplines. It is a one-stop, comprehensive, and compact source for foundational concepts in behavioral research, and can serve as a stand-alone text or as a supplement to research readings in any doctoral seminar or research methods class. This book is currently used as a research text at universities on six continents and will shortly be available in nine different languages.
As a result of the world class university rankings, many governments adopt public incentives and sanctions to push universities to excel. Above all, the better faculty research publication in SSCI and SCI journals, the more resources and social prestige universities will obtain. This timely book attempts to relate these dilemmas in Taiwan to many non-English speaking counterparts which also struggle with the worldwide SSCI syndrome. As Taiwan’s higher education system, similar to that of some other countries, has been recently devastated by the SSCI-based quantitative evaluations of academic performance in terms of its adverse impacts on the balances between teaching vs. research; qualitative vs. quantitative evaluations; globally oriented, English vs. locally oriented, non-English publications; and publications in academic journals vs. books, The SSCI Syndrome in Higher Education is a long overdue study that offers a systematic, comprehensive coverage of the above-mentioned SSCI syndrome on the dynamics of Taiwan’s academe. This book definitely helps fill an important gap in the literature on Taiwan’s higher education system. Tsung Chi Professor of Politics, Occidental College, USA Prudence Chou’s book addresses an academy on crisis caused by the ceaseless hype over university rankings. It further confirms that who comes out on top depends on who is doing the ranking. To save the heart and soul out of the Taiwanese academy, this book makes a cogent argument for culturally-responsive research in the social sciences and humanities. Gerard A. Postiglione Professor and Head, Division of Policy, Administration and Social Sciences Director, Wah Ching Center of Research on Education in China, The University of Hong Kong A spectre is haunting almost all universities in the world, including Taiwan — the spectre of “indexization.” Academics, particularly social scientists are panting from the pressure of globally spread neoliberal ideology and market-based principles. Collegiality on campus in the good old days has declined, and managerialism gained power instead. Competitive funding and university rankings are excessively emphasized, and research results are required to be internationalized, i.e., published in English. Although this book is a case study of so-called SSCI syndrome in Taiwan, the problems and challenges as well as prescription contained here are common to all academics, especially those in the non-English speaking countries positioned as “peripheral.” Yutaka Otsuka Professor of Hiroshima University, President of Japan Comparative Education Society The danger with SSCI syndrome is that it encourages social studies in nonwestern societies to dissociate themselves from local contexts, reflecting a particular view of what is claimed to be ‘universal’ that is informed only by the Western (especially English-speaking) world. It raises the question of what counts as ‘scholarship’ and defines what knowledge is and who may claim competence in it. This volume serves us well as a timely reminder of such a great danger. Rui Yang Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong
This is an open access book. CISOC’2022 – The 2022 International Conference on International Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities, invites the entire scientific, academic and professional community to present their contributions, which can be written in French, English, Spanish or Portuguese. All papers (full articles) will be submitted to a “double-blind review” by at least two members of the Scientific Committee, based on relevance, originality, importance and clarity. The papers presented must bring discussions on actual theoretical, or methodological, or empirical workshop proposals around Social Sciences and Humanities. The topics proposed for the Conference are related to: Psychology, Education, History, Linguistics and language, Political science, Religious studies, Philosophy, Globalization, Humanities, Archaeology, Anthropology, Inter-cultural studies, Development, Geography, Library and Information Sciences.
"This book arose out of a "rant" by Ed Schein in 2020 arguing that Social Scientists need to address global crises. That is, social scientists develop knowledge that is directly pertinent to global challenges and crises, and need to be included in initiatives taken to address them. They must present our knowledge in in public forums and our voices need to be heard by others. This book is a step towards such presentation and involvement. Social scientists understand ways global crises are crucially intertwined with our relationships, groups, organizations, communities, institutions, how they collaborate with each other, how they compete with each other, and the dynamics intermingled with these. These dimensions are inadequately addressed by scientists and insufficiently recognized by other stakeholders. The social scientists whose work is included in this book are associated with management, and have foundational training in all the social science disciplines. They are highly respected internationally. Their work highlighted here contributes to deep understandings of social phenomena associated with global crises. It also demonstrates skilled ways of intervening among those dealing with challenges and crises first-hand. Finally, it also shows the ongoing personal development required to address global crises in productive ways. This book will be of interest to social scientists, researchers, academics and students in the fields of management, especially those focusing on global challenges and crises. It will also be a useful resource for practitioners and policy makers"--
This book probes the complex methodological choices facing social researchers and students who are applying or learning the methods of social research. The author shows how an understanding of social research requires close consideration of the underlying conceptual frameworks - from neopositivism to structuralism, hermeneutics and anti-foundationalism - that shape how one studies society. Baranov introduces each philosophical tradition and shows how decisions about research design and methodology are affected by them. He also explains the practical and ethical consequences that follow from methodological choices. The book's approach is non-doctrinaire and the prose style is accessible, concrete, and jargon-free.
One of the common frustrations for students trying to make sense of the various debates and concepts that inform contemporary educational and social science research methods such as structuralism, postpositivism, hermeneutics, and postmodernism is that most books introducing these topics are written at a level that assumes the reader comes to this material with a basic grasp of the underlying ideas. Too often, fundamental concepts and theories are presented without adequate preparation and without providing practical examples to illustrate key elements. When the first edition of "Conceptual Foundations of Social Research Methods" was published, it represented a sharp contrast with these other approaches and received much praise. In this revised and expanded second edition, David Baronov further develops his critically acclaimed treatment of the core conceptual tools of social research informing education and the social sciences, updating his discussion of the current literature, and adding a new chapter that explores the role of pragmatism. Features of the Second Edition"
Charles Darwin changed the course of scientific thinking by showing how evolution accounts for the stunning diversity and biological complexity of life on earth. Recently, there has also been increased interest in the social sciences in how Darwinian theory can explain human culture. Covering a wide range of topics, including fads, public policy, the spread of religion, and herd behavior in markets, Alex Mesoudi shows that human culture is itself an evolutionary process that exhibits the key Darwinian mechanisms of variation, competition, and inheritance. This cross-disciplinary volume focuses on the ways cultural phenomena can be studied scientifically—from theoretical modeling to lab experiments, archaeological fieldwork to ethnographic studies—and shows how apparently disparate methods can complement one another to the mutual benefit of the various social science disciplines. Along the way, the book reveals how new insights arise from looking at culture from an evolutionary angle. Cultural Evolution provides a thought-provoking argument that Darwinian evolutionary theory can both unify different branches of inquiry and enhance understanding of human behavior.
