Clik here to view.
Kelkar on Performativity and Realism
STS graduate student Shreeharsh Kelkar has an excellent post at Dimensions of Knowledge revisiting the OrgTheory debates about performativity sparked by lengthy posts by Kieran Healy and Ezra...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Making Up Numbers About Money: An Up-Goer Five Study
Some of you have likely seen the amazing comic where former NASA employee Randall Munroe explains the Saturn V rocket using only the one thousand most common English words: Up-Goer Five.* This turned...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Left’s (Non-) War on Science: Anti-Nuclear and Anti-Hydroelectric are not...
This week, Scientific American has an interesting, but I think flawed, article about the anti-science attitudes on the left. More specifically, Michael Shermer argues that: Whereas conservatives obsess...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fiscal Sociology Opportunities for Graduate Students
Isaac Martin sent around the following announcement advertising two opportunities for graduate students interested in “Fiscal Sociology,” meaning anything to do with government financing, taxes, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
RIP Michael Cohen, UM Org Theorist
University of Michigan Professor Michael Cohen passed away this weekend. Cohen’s best known paper was the famous A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice. Along with Jerry Davis, Cohen was one of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Ironies of Data, Big and Small
David Brooks has a new op-ed about “the philosophy of data.”* The examples he uses are interesting in their own right – the lack of streaks or hot hands in professional sports, the relatively small...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Gelman’s Problems with P-Values
Andrew Gelman is a seemingly tireless crusader against the sloppy use of p-values. Today he posted a very short (4 page) new article that explains some of the problems with p-values, and gives some...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Specific Generalities: Historical vs. Sociological Generalization
What counts as a “general” story? What determines what findings are bigger or more important than others? I think historical research and sociological research tend to answer this question in two very...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ranking Programs in Sociology
If you like quantitative rankings of sociology departments, today is like some sort of holiday.* Over at Scatterplot, Neal Caren has an analysis of top 20 placements within Sociology. As he’s careful...
View ArticleClik here to view.
IRB QOTD: Schrag, “How Talking Became Human Subjects Research”
For better or for worse, social science research is now governed by an institutional review board system that seems to have the problems and promises of medical research, and not social science, as its...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Visualizing Inequality in the US, 1947-2011
How can we best understand trends in postwar income inequality in the United States? What data are available for understanding these trends? What is the best way to represent these trends visually? In...
View ArticleClik here to view.
ArXiv for the Social Sciences?
In a comment thread on Scatterplot, Neal Caren pines “I wish there was an arxiv.org for the social sciences.” I wish this as well! I am still shocked that economics is light years ahead of sociology on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Debating the Wrong Reinhart + Rogoff
On April 15, three UMass Amherst economists (a graduate student Thomas Herndon, and his advisors Ash and Pollin) published a critique of an influential paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” written by...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Regnerus: Not Just for the Supreme Court Anymore!
Right now, the Minnesota State House is debating a same-sex marriage bill. According to this liveblog coverage from Minnesota Public Radio, one opponent of marriage equality invoked Mark Regnerus’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Charisma, a New Network for Consumer Market Studies
I’m not quite sure when it launched, but the new(ish) Charisma Network for scholars of consumer markets has a website chock full of interesting tidbits – from job postings to CFPs to links to blog...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Retrospective Economic Voting in the 19th Century?
A quick blog request as I listen to Larry Bartels give a summary talk on economic voting and the recent recession*: does anyone know of any studies on economic voting / retrospective voting in the 19th...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“I am a philosopher of the particular case”: An Interview with Ian Hacking
I absolutely love Ian Hacking’s work. He takes the best parts of Michel Foucault and the best parts of analytical philosophy and mashes it up into something truly brilliant, clarifying, and wise. For...
View ArticleClik here to view.
ASA Blogger Party 2013! Now With More Steampunk
Scatterplot has the news; this year’s ASA Blogger Party will be held on Sunday, August 11 at 5pm, at Lillie’s Victorian Establishment, 249 W 49th St. Given the venue, I suggest costumes: goggles, top...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What is Sociological Theory?
What is Sociological Theory? That’s a really hard question and one that admits multiple answers (see, e.g. Abend 2008). Let’s try a much easier question: What is Sociological Theory? That is, what do...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Sociology of the Door-Closer Redux
In 1988, Jim Johnson of the Columbus Ohio School of Mines published an article in Social Problems titled Mixing Humans and Non-Humans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer. The article is a classic...
View Article
