Organizations do things; they depend upon the coordinated efforts of numerous individuals; and they exist in environments that affect their ongoing success or failure. Moreover, organizations are to some extent plastic: the practices and rules that make them up can change over time. Sometimes these changes happen as the result of deliberate design choices by individuals inside or …
Divided …
Why is part of the American electoral system so susceptible to right-wing populist appeals, often highlighting themes of racism and intergroup hostility? Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos address the causes of the radical swing to the right of the Republican Party in Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America. Here is the key …
Designing and managing large technologies
What is involved in designing, implementing, coordinating, and managing the deployment of a large new technology system in a real social, political, and organizational environment? Here I am thinking of projects like the development of the SAGE early warning system, the Affordable Care Act, or the introduction of nuclear power into the civilian power industry. …
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Ideologies, policies, and social complexity
The approach to social and historical research that I favor is one that pays attention to the heterogeneity and contingency of social processes. It advises that social and historical researchers should disaggregate the large patterns they start with and try to identify the multiple underlying mechanisms, causes, motivations, movements, and contingencies that came together to …
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SSHA 2017 Call for Papers
SSHA CALL FOR PAPERS Macrohistorical Dynamics Network 42nd Annual Meeting of the Social Science History AssociationMontréal, Québec Canada 2-5 November 2017Submission Deadline: 3 March 2017 Changing Social Connections in Time and Space" Please consider participation in Macrohistorical Dynamics (MHD) panels of the 42nd annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, November 2-5, 2017 in …
Trumpism
What kind of political movement does Donald Trump represent? How did we get here? And what will be needed to defeat this divisive and anti-democratic political agenda? There is a tendency to see Trump as a bolt out of the blue, an anomaly -- an extraordinary showman who somehow conned just enough voters to gain …
Survey research on the extreme right in Europe
Earlier posts have addressed the issue of the rise of extreme-right parties and ideologies in many parts of the world, including Western Europe and the United States. A valuable multi-country research project now seeks to shed light on these phenomena based on large-scale surveys of attitudes among young people. MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Public Legacy and …
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Path dependency in formation of academic disciplines
The topic of the historicity of academic disciplines has come up numerous times in this forum. It is a conviction of mine that disciplines demonstrate a great deal of path dependency over time in their evolution. We can think of a discipline as being constituted at a time by some or all of these elements: …
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Making of a Black Panther
Rahman as keynote speaker at "Black Men in Unions" Institute, UM-Dearborn, 2012 Rahman with Huey Newton, Norman “Mudada” McGee, Connie Matthews Tabor, and Elbert "Big Man" Howard at Detroit Metro Airport, Nov. 16, 1970 In an earlier post I discussed the path through which an African-American intellectual, Phil Richards, came to have the intellectual profile …
Making of a black intellectual
Becoming an intellectual in any society is a chancy thing, and this is especially true for young people coming from backgrounds of disadvantage and discrimination. What were the influences that gave the child and young adult the curiosity and other intellectual qualities that led him or her to seek out new knowledge and new questions …
Understanding Society 