Intelligence and Policy-making in Foreign Affairs

1952 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Hilsman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Government Agencies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Office Of Strategic Services ◽  
The Many ◽  
Secret Agent

When he set out to form a secret intelligence agency for President Roosevelt in 1941, “Wild Bill” Donovan made little effort to curb his own characteristic receptivity to the new, the different, and even the unorthodox. Completely in character, he took up with quick enthusiasm the novel idea that scholars—those dreamy inhabitants of ivory towers—would be ideal for the job. He believed that by searching through the Library of Congress and through the files of the many government agencies these men could uncover much of the information for which secret agents risked their lives. In a sense, he dedicated the Research and Analysis Branch of the wartime Office of Strategic Services to the task of making the romantic secret agent obsolete. Since then, more and more people have come to believe that research—and the social sciences—have at last found a home within the formal structure of government.

scholarly journals Has the Credibility of the Social Sciences Been Credibly Destroyed? Reanalyzing the “Many Analysts, One Data Set” Project

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 237802312110244
Author(s):  
Katrin Auspurg ◽  
Josef Brüderl
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Skin Tone ◽  
Data Set ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
Definition Of

In 2018, Silberzahn, Uhlmann, Nosek, and colleagues published an article in which 29 teams analyzed the same research question with the same data: Are soccer referees more likely to give red cards to players with dark skin tone than light skin tone? The results obtained by the teams differed extensively. Many concluded from this widely noted exercise that the social sciences are not rigorous enough to provide definitive answers. In this article, we investigate why results diverged so much. We argue that the main reason was an unclear research question: Teams differed in their interpretation of the research question and therefore used diverse research designs and model specifications. We show by reanalyzing the data that with a clear research question, a precise definition of the parameter of interest, and theory-guided causal reasoning, results vary only within a narrow range. The broad conclusion of our reanalysis is that social science research needs to be more precise in its “estimands” to become credible.

Situating Tribes in History: Lessons from the Archives and the Social Sciences

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-476
Author(s):  
Nadav Samin
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Official Records

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.

America and Human Capital Formation in Communist Europe Aspirations, Reactions and Results

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-74
Author(s):  
Igor Czernecki
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Capital Formation ◽  
Exchange Program ◽  
East Bloc ◽  
The Social

Abstract: This paper analyses the Ford Foundation’s 1957 to 1961 intellectual exchange program in Poland. Emerging in the novel context of Washington’s emphasis on cultural diplomacy and Warsaw’s exceptional position in the East Bloc following October 1956, the Foundation’s program was the earliest complex scholarly initiative by a US organization aimed at Europeans under Communist rule. Consequently, for a brief window of time, the Foundation was able to operate an unprecedentedly open exchange under uniquely liberal terms. The program’s genesis and operations will be explained, as well as the reasons for its abrupt suspension and its long-term implications. In particular, I will argue that through the program, the Foundation played a significant role in rebuilding and shaping the social sciences in post-Stalinist Poland.

scholarly journals A Pragmatist's Guide to Prediction in the Social Sciences

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark D. Verhagen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Simple Technique ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Out Of Sample ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Many

Making out-of-sample predictions is an under-utilised tool in the social sciences, often for the wrong reasons. Many social scientists confuse prediction with unnecessarily complicated methods, or narrowly predicting the future. This is unfortunate, because prediction understood as the simple process of evaluating a model outside of the sample used for estimation is a much more general, and disarmingly simple technique that brings a host of benefits to our empirical workflow. One needn't use complicated methods or be solely concerned with predicting the future to use prediction, nor is it necessary to resolve the centuries-old philosophical debate between prediction and explanation to appreciate its benefits. Prediction can and should be used as a simple complement to the rich methodological tradition in the social sciences, and is equally applicable across a vast multitude of modelling approaches, owing to its simplicity and intuitive nature. For all its simplicity, the value of prediction should not be underestimated. Prediction can address some of the most enduring sources of criticism plaguing the social sciences, like lack of external validity and the use of overly simplistic models to capture social life. In this paper, I illustrate these benefits with a host of empirical examples that merely skim the surface of the many and varied ways in which prediction can be applied, staking the claim that prediction is one of those illustrious `free lunches' that can greatly benefit the empirical social sciences.

Racial reality and unreality1

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karim Murji
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Constructionist Approach ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the debates on what race is. For some time, the dominant social constructionist approach in the social sciences has insisted that the only proper way to regard race is by refuting any connection with biology. Attention to the many ways in which race is socially constructed has been important; but, while a construction is not ‘unreal’, there is a common further step in which race is thereby deemed to be not valid. The rejection of race tends to treat race as something that would be ‘real’ if it were located in science and biology. The chapter then shows how recent developments in the natural sciences and changing views on the relationship between the natural and social sciences problematise that view. Yet in opposition to post-race views, critical scholars can then be seen to draw on conventional categories of race to show that racialised inequality still matters.

scholarly journals Magical Realism in Aḥmad Sa‘dāwiy’s Frankenstein fī Bagdād

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 142
Author(s):  
Mahmudah Mahmudah
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Conflict ◽  
Magical Realism ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Magic Realism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship

This article discusses the use of magic realism as a literary device in the Iraqi novel Frankenstein fī Bagdād written by Aḥmad Sa‘dāwiy. The novel is set in the period of inter-ethnic conflict which arose after the American invasion of 2003. Hādī, the main character of the novel, ‘creates a monster’ namely Syismah from the corpses of the many bomb victims in Baghdad. The writer combines setting of the novel with belief of the Iraq people, horoscope practice, and magic, in mystical and illogical atmosphere. Given its magic realist qualities, the analysis draws on the approach of Wendy B. Faris. The article identifies five key elements from magic realism present in the novel, and discusses the relationship between these elements in order to better understand the social, ideological, and political context of the novel. The analysis shows that there are relationships between two worlds: death and life, human and ghost, physical and metaphysical, natural and supernatural.

World War II

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-64
Author(s):  
Michael C. Desch
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Office Of Strategic Services ◽  
Wartime Experience

This chapter discusses the role of social science in the war effort. As the Second World War demonstrated, sophisticated social science methods are certainly sometimes applicable to policy. In particular, economists demonstrated that they could employ these tools yet remain directly relevant in some realms. However, the failure of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to employ them successfully on noneconomic issues constitutes a cautionary tale for those who think that discipline ought to serve as a model for the rest of the social sciences. Strikingly, even social scientists themselves who served in government came to realize that disciplinary dynamics worked against policy relevance. Nevertheless, the social sciences' wartime experience had a positive impact on them. This wartime experience had effects across the social sciences, but it was particularly evident in the areas relevant to national security.

scholarly journals Debating How to Measure Media Exposure in Surveys

2019 ◽  
pp. 997-1015
Author(s):  
Seth K. Goldman ◽  
Stephen M. Warren
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Media Exposure ◽  
Observational Research ◽  
Considerable Effort ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Designs ◽  
Substantial Progress ◽  
The Many ◽  
Effects Of Media ◽  
Made In

To answer many of the most pressing questions in the social sciences, researchers need reliable and valid measures of media exposure that can be implemented in surveys. Despite considerable effort, however, substantial disagreement remains about how best to measure this key concept. This chapter critically reviews the debate surrounding traditional frequency measures of exposure to “news” and contemporary list-based measures of political media exposure. It also evaluates the related debate over how best to capture the effects of media exposure with different observational research designs. Overall, the chapter finds that although substantial progress has been made in measurement and research design, both issues require more attention if scholars are to understand the many and varied effects of media exposure.

Sociogenesis and Psychogenesis: Norbert Elias’s Historical Social Psychology as a Research Tradition in Comparative Sociology

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 548-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Mennell
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Comparative Sociology ◽  
Research Tradition ◽  
Norbert Elias ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
Process Sociology

What is widely known as ‘figurational sociology’, or alternatively ‘process sociology’, is the research tradition stemming from the writings of Norbert Elias. The tradition extends beyond sociology to historians and many other branches of the social sciences. Elias’s Collected Works run to 18 volumes, but the bedrock of his oeuvre is his early study On the Process of Civilisation, in which the interrelation of long-term sociogenetic processes like state-formation and equally long-term psychogenetic processes like conscience- and habitus-formation is first clearly elaborated. Of the many directions in which the theory has been subsequently developed, the most important is Elias’s sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences, which involves a radical rejection of central assumptions of Western philosophy.

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