Daniel Little
Doug McAdam is hard at work shedding new light on the meso-dynamics of contention. What are the specific social and psychological mechanisms that bring people into social movements; what factors and processes make mobilization more feasible when social grievances arise? Recently he has done work on the impact of Teach for America on its participants, …
Continue reading "Doug McAdam on contentious politics and the social sciences"
The United States faces a huge dropout crisis. In some cities the high school graduation rate is less than 50% -- sometimes as low as 25%. And this means devastating poverty for the dropouts, as well as continuing social blight for their communities. We might say, though, that the graduation rate is only the symptom …
The redshirts in Thailand have moved onto the world stage in the past several months. Massive protests in Bangkok have stymied the Thai government and have held the army and police forces at bay for months. Demands from redshirt leaders and posters include removal of the military-backed government of Prime Minister Abhisit and a commitment …
We say that a statement is underdetermined by available facts when it and an alternative and different statement or theory are equally consistent with that body of facts. It may be that two physical theories have precisely the same empirical consequences -- perhaps wave theory and particle theory represent an example of this possibility. And …
How can general, high-level social theory help us to better understand particular historically situated social realities? Is it helpful or insightful to "bring Weber's theory of religion to bear on Islam in Java" or to "apply Marx's theory of capitalism to the U.S. factory system in the 1950s"? Is there any real knowledge to be …
Continue reading "Social theory and the empirical social world"
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, fire, and uncontrolled release of oil into the Gulf is a disaster of unprecedented magnitude. This disaster in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be more serious in objective terms than the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986 -- in terms both of immediate loss of life and in …
Continue reading "System safety engineering and the Deepwater Horizon"
Most American cities commonly look a lot like the poverty map of Cleveland above, when it comes to the spatial distribution of poverty and affluence. There is a high-poverty core, in which residents have low income, poor health, poor education, and poor quality of life; there are rings of moderate income; and there are outer …
What is involved in being prepared to understand what is going on around you? In a sense this is Kant's fundamental question in the Critique of Pure Reason: what intellectual resources (concepts, categories, frameworks) does a cognitive agent need in order to make sense of the contents of consciousness, the fleeting experiences and sensations that …
A city is a complex social agglomeration, and all too often it represents a concentration of social ills that are very difficult to eradicate. Poverty, violence, and poor public health are three social problems that seem to be almost synonymous with "urban." We might ask two rather different sorts of questions about these facts. One …
It is hard to think of an American city that is doing really well these days. Dense urban poverty in the core, super-high rates of unemployment, failing schools for many urban children, high rates of crime, chronic and overwhelming fiscal crises resulting from too little public revenue for needed public services, and health outcome discrepancies …
Understanding Society 