I've posed the question of organizational learning several times in recent months: are there forces that push organizations towards changes leading to improvements in performance over time? Is there a process of organizational evolution in the social world? So where do we stand on this question? There are only two general theories that would lead …
Social change and leadership
Historians pay a lot of attention to important periods of social change -- the emergence of new political movements, the development of a great city, the end of Jim Crow segregation. There is an inclination to give a lot of weight to the importance of leaders, visionaries, and change-makers in driving these processes to successful …
Proliferation of hate and intolerance
Paul Brass provides a wealth of ethnographic and historical evidence on the causes of Hindu-Muslim violence in India in The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. His analysis here centers on the city of Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh, and he believes that his findings have broad relevance in many parts of India. His key conclusion …
Democracy and the politics of intolerance
A democracy allows government to reflect the will of the people. Or does it? Here I would like to understand a bit better the dynamics through which radical right populism has come to have influence, even dominance, in a number of western democracies -- even when the percentage of citizens with radical right populist attitudes …
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Is there a new capitalism?
An earlier post considered Dave Elder-Vass’s very interesting treatment of the contemporary digital economy. In Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy Elder-Vass argues that the vast economic significance of companies like Google, FaceBook, and Amazon in today's economy is difficult to assimilate within the conceptual framework of Marx’s foundational ideas about capitalism, constructed as they were around …
Brian Epstein’s radical metaphysics
Brian Epstein is adamant that the social sciences need to think very differently about the nature of the social world. In The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences he sets out to blow up our conventional thinking about the relation between individuals and social facts. In particular, he is fundamentally skeptical about any conception …
Generativism
youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1JapoKF5bM There is a seductive appeal to the idea of a "generative social science". Joshua Epstein is one of the main proponents of the idea, most especially in his book, Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling. The central tool of generative social science is the construction of an agent-based model (link). The …
Snippets from the Roman world
image: Arch of Septimius Severus, Forum (203 CE) The history of Rome has a particular fascination for twenty-first century readers, especially in the West. Roman law, Roman philosophy, Roman legions, and Roman roads all have a powerful resonance for our imaginations today. Mary Beard's recent SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome is an interesting recent synthesis of …
Strategies for resisting right-wing populism
Social Europe is a vibrant publisher of current progressive thought in Europe. Readers can find data, opinion, and policy analysis on the site, highly relevant to the core priorities of progressives across the continent and Britain -- social opportunity, inequalities, work, the threat of right-wing populism, the refugee crisis, and the future of the European Union. …
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Perspectives on transport history
I view transport as a crucial structuring condition in society that is perhaps under-appreciated and under-studied. The extension of the Red Line from Harvard Square (its terminus when I was a graduate student) to Davis Square in Somerville a decade later illustrated the transformative power of a change in the availability of urban transportation; residential …
Understanding Society 