Towards more confidence: about the roles of social scientists in participatory policy making

From June 26 to 27, the workshop “Ironists, Reformers, or Rebels? The Role of the Social Sciences in Participatory Policy Making” took place at the Collegium Helveticum of the UZH/ETH in Zurich. The organisers’ motivation was the apparently missing involvement of social scientists in public engagement processes. This impression persists because, while social scientists often observe public debates or develop participatory methods for public policy-making, they rarely take part in those processes themselves. A closer look at ethics commissions, expert committees or public hearings concerned with science and technology issues shows natural scientists, physicians, lawyers and the occasional philosopher. Sociologists, anthropologists and other social scientists, on the other hand, are often not involved. Because of this imbalance, the organisers’ aim was to bring together scholars and researchers from different areas of the social sciences to consider the role of their disciplines in public policy making. This article will focus on some of the ideas about specific roles of social scientists in participatory policy-making, discussed at the workshop, and their implications and give a commentary on some future prospects of the social sciences.     

Social desire paths: a new theoretical concept to increase the usability of social science research in society

Social scientists are well-trained to observe and chart social trends, but less experienced at presenting scientific findings in formats that can inform social change work. In this article, I propose a new theoretical concept that provides a mechanism by which social science research can be more effectively applied for proactive policy, organizational, and program development. The approach is to use the metaphor of “desire paths” from landscape architecture to show how social scientists can identify and analyze social desire paths that appear on the social structural landscape. Social desire paths usually emerge because existing formal structures do not meet individual or group needs. Such paths are generally started at the individual level, followed by others through individual actions, and ultimately leave an (usually informal) imprint on the social structure, even though the motivations behind those actions are not usually social change. Using what we know about the sociology of interests and what we have learned from trying to apply social science findings to policy, I propose seven criteria for phenomena to be defined as social desire paths. I then apply the criteria to two case studies related to housing, and discuss social desire paths usefulness to social scientists involved in any research that captures interests, deviance, or innovation; and that also has the potential to inform formal structures such as policy, organizations, program development, and participatory democracy.     

Race scholarship “with,by, and for” children: How critical youth studies can inform research on race

Children's perspectives on race and their own racialized experiences are often overlooked in traditional social scientific race scholarship. From psychological and child development studies of racial identity formation, to social psychological survey research on children's racial attitudes, to sociological research conducted on children in order to quantify racially disproportionate child outcomes, the unique perspectives of young people are often marginalized. I explore some of the key themes in existing sociological and psychological research involving race and young people and demonstrate the important contributions of this expansive body of scholarship but also highlight limitations. I argue that when it comes specifically to the sociological study of young people and race, much can be learned from an emerging field known as “critical youth studies.” Further, I argue that more research on race that, as Kate Telleczek (2014, p. 16) describes, is “with, by, and for” young people, grounded in the epistemological and methodological tenants of critical youth studies, can lead to new sociological understandings of race and childhood, serve to inform public policies and practices intended to improve children's lives, and provide a platform for young people to express their own concerns and ideas about the racialized society in which they live.     

Methodological troubles as problems and phenomena: ethnomethodology and the question of ‘method’ in the social sciences

Across the disciplinary frontiers of the social sciences, studies by social scientists treating their own investigative practices as sites of empirical inquiry have proliferated. Most of these studies have been retrospective, historical, after‐the‐fact reconstructions of social scientific studies mixing interview data with the (predominantly textual) traces that investigations leave behind. Observational studies of in situ work in social science research are, however, relatively scarce. Ethnomethodology was an early and prominent attempt to treat social science methodology as a topic for sociological investigations and, in this paper, we draw out what we see as its distinctive contribution: namely, a focus on troubles as features of the in situ, practical accomplishment of method, in particular, the way that research outcomes are shaped by the local practices of investigators in response to the troubles they encounter along the way. Based on two case studies, we distinguish methodological troubles as problems and methodological troubles as phenomena to be studied, and suggest the latter orientation provides an alternate starting point for addressing social scientists' investigative practices.     

The future of the social sciences and humanities in the science of complex systems

The modern world is characterized by problems that involve systems with social and physical subsystems. They are entangled systems of system of systems with multilevel dynamics. There is no methodology able to combine the partial micro-, meso- and macrotheories that focus on subsystems into a coherent representation of the dynamics of the whole. Policy requires prediction, but the traditional definitions of prediction are not appropriate for multilevel socio-complex systems. Heterogeneous multilevel systems have subsystems that may behave with great regularity over long periods of time, and then suddenly change their behavior due to weak coupling with other subsystems. Thus systems that are usually highly predictable may be subject to rare but extreme events, and this is highly relevant to policy-makers. New ways of thinking are needed that transcend the confines of the traditional humanities, social and physical sciences. Of necessity, this science will be embedded in the design, implementation and management of systems, and therefore the new science will be entwined with policy. Much policy is interventionist experiment. By themselves scientists cannot conduct experiments on socio-complex systems because they have neither the mandate nor the money to design and instrument experiments on the large scale. Policy-makers – elected politicians and their officers – design the future, making it as they believe it ought to be. New kinds of scientific predictions can inform policy but can only be instrumented and tested if there is goodwill between policy-makers and scientists, where scientists are junior partners. Scientists offer policy-makers theories and predictions of social systems based on logical-deductive methods. Policy is generally made on the basis of rhetoric, with the best possible arguments being deployed to support favored conclusions. To convince policy-makers that a particular scientific theory should be used, scientists move from the logical-deductive to the rhetorical. Thus the full theory of a science of complex systems has to provide a logical-deductive metatheory of the rhetorical and logical-deductive systems that make decisions and implement them. Traditional natural and physical science has avoided rhetoric, which is much better understood in the humanities and social sciences. Thus it is concluded that the science of complex systems must embrace the humanities and social sciences not just because their domains of study are relevant but also because their methods are necessary to understand how science and policy work together in complex social systems.     

When Is Research Good Evidence? Issues in Reading Research

Although using published research is only one part of the evidence-based practice process, clinical social workers more often doubt their abilities in this area than in client assessment or in the individualizing of treatment approaches to fit client preferences, values and resources. This article reviews the nature of research and the reason it is often a preferred source of information; common flaws to watch for in published research; types of research studies and how different kinds of studies are viewed by those interested in treatment outcome research; and the elements of a published research report that must be considered when deciding on its usefulness for decision-making about practice. It will also include discussion of the controversies that surround these topics, which are significant. While readers will have been introduced to these topics in their professional education, when knowledge is not used it is often not well-remembered. Few clinicians find that reading, assessing, or conducting research is part of their daily work, which is one reason why the discussion of evidence-based practice and other approaches to the use of research in clinical practice can be anxiety-provoking. This “refresher” emphasizes that critical thinking skills, which clinicians often have in abundance, are the single most important element in using research to inform practice.     

Family Policy: Becoming a Field of Inquiry and Subfield of Social Policy

This decade review centers on 2 disconnects between rhetoric and reality. First, public investments in families continue to grow, yet family policy is still not a term widely used by policymakers or the public. Second, social science studies increased in number and sophistication, with some family sensitive and others policy relevant. Few focus on both, which is what is most needed if research is to inform family policy. In exploring these disconnects, we summarize recent trends in family policies and the influence of research on family policymaking. We suggest a rationale for family policy and illustrate its value using the examples of early childhood, welfare reform, and parent education policies. We conclude with suggested next steps.     

A Case Study Using Photovoice to Explore Racial and Social Identity Among Young Black Men: Implications for Social Work Research and Practice

This article describes an exploratory qualitative case study using a research method novel to social work known as Photovoice. This case study of the Photovoice process assesses its value as a community-based participatory research (CBPR) method with marginalized communities within social work research. Photovoice was used to engage young Black men as researchers into their own lived experience. Through a photographic and group participatory project, participants discussed how intersections of race, gender, and sexuality affect their lives and health. While this methodology has proliferated within public health literature, little research exists within social work. Photovoice represents a research well-aligned with core social work values of empowerment and social justice. This method offers our profession a participatory, action-oriented tool to inform practice and policy and does so in the voices of communities who often go unheard.     

The rising importance of local government in the United States: Recent research and challenges for sociology

Local governments have gained increasing responsibilities for public well‐being according to a variety of social science literatures. The rise of the local state is often seen as a part of a broader process of state‐rescaling or downward shift in national governance under neoliberal development. Yet attention to local government lags in political sociology, which conventionally elevates the national federal state as its object of interest. I summarize four recent bodies of literature that address the new role of local governments. Taken together, these literatures speak to different sides of the debate about whether the rise of local government is detrimental to citizens' well‐being. I explain how greater sociological attention to the local state can contribute to this debate as well as inform political sociologists' understanding of the U.S. nation‐state itself and provide directions for future research.     

The Sociologies of Knowledge,Science, and Intellectuals: Distinctive Traditions and Overlapping Perspectives

This article reviews sociological approaches to the production, evaluation, and diffusion of knowledge in the arena of scholarly production – the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. At first glance, sociological approaches to scholarly knowledge production seem to congeal around the hard sciences, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other. I eschew this polarization and construct an analytic frame of reference for analyzing the sociological dimensions of scholarly production more generally. This article maps successive phases of sociological approaches to scholarly production, by overlaying and distinguishing among theories in the sociology of knowledge, sociology of science, and sociology of intellectuals. I analyze classical theorists’ emphases on class analysis and the social function of intellectuals; mid-century adaptations of functionalism, social structure theory, and institutional theory to analyze intellectual and academic life; critical and reflexive theories, including feminist critiques of science and knowledge; recent emphases on how social movement politics and social networks influence intellectual change; theories of the university as a professional arena and a field of culture production; and studies of knowledge-making practices in group research situations. In addition to arguing for more theoretical and methodological precision in analyses of scholarly and scientific knowledge-making, I conclude with cautionary tales and future prospects for sociological studies of modern academic life.     

The contribution of social science research to health policy: the Royal Commission on the National Health Service

This article adopts a case study approach to examine the contribution of social science research to health policy. It concentrates exclusively on the recent Royal Commission on the National Health Service. After describing its background and modus operandi the paper goes on to assess the Report's utilization of social science research, both in its diagnosis and recommendations. This assessment suggests that while the Commissioners made relatively little use of research-based evidence in their diagnosis, their recommendations provide the basis for a substantial increase in the contribution of social scientists, particularly in the field of health services evaluation.     

Scientific autonomy and planned research: the case of space science

Scientific research that requires space flight has always been subject to comparatively strong external control. Its agenda has often had to be adapted to vacillating political target specifications. Can space scientists appeal to one or the other form of the widely acknowledged principle of freedom of research in order to claim more autonomy? In this paper, the difficult question of autonomy within planned research is approached by examining three arguments that support the principle of freedom of research in differing ways. Each argument has its particular strengths and limitations. Together they serve to demonstrate particular advantages of scientific autonomy, but in the case of space science, their force ultimately remains limited. However, as the arguments highlight the interrelations between scientific autonomy, the democratic process and the collective interest in scientific knowledge, they suggest that a coherent and sustained space science agenda might best be ensured by increasing the transparency of science policy decisions and involving the democratic public.     

How scientists and engineers use cultural resources to make controversies and selves meaningful

In this essay, I provide an overview of recent sociological studies of science, technology, religion, and spirituality; the ways they contribute to sociological theorizing; and make some recommendations for future research. There are two major themes in these studies. One of them analyzes religious and spiritual discourse as controversy practice, suggesting how religion and spirituality are used as cultural discourses to understand controversy, who the actors are or should be, how to act in a controversy, and how popular discourses inform, and are informed by, science and technology discourses. This theme contributes to theorizing by describing how forms of cultural talk organize understandings of controversies, interactions, and action. The second theme explores scientific and religious identities, and how they are made compatible with each other. This theme points sociological theory toward considering science and religion relations as intertextual relations.     

Knowledge,boundaries, and bodies: Social construction between medical sociology and science and technology studies

Medical sociology and science and technology studies (STS) emerged from different positions, but often closely related concerns, within the broad discipline of sociology. Their interface and areas of overlap have mostly been shaped by theoretical positions broadly considered “social constructionist.” Taken together, these perspectives provide empirical and theoretical tools to analyze important questions about how social inequalities, forms of scientific knowledge, and patterns of human health come to be produced and feedback into one another. Examining their intersection enables sociological questions such as: How is medical and public health scientific knowledge produced, stabilized, and taken as fact? How are scientific facts about health and illness used, experienced, and challenged? What is the relationship between health inequalities and public health or medical knowledge? This article seeks to briefly trace the important contributions that social constructionist research has made at the interstices of medical sociology and STS, further clarifying the history, points of intersection, and areas of diversion between them. The current COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled the political struggles that constitute public health scientific knowledge and circulation. The interface between STS and medical sociology can help us to make sense of the interrelationships between politics, power inequalities, and public health scientific knowledge.     

Power Mapping: Enhancing Sociological Knowledge by Developing Generalizable Analytical Public Tools

In this article, I argue for and illustrate ‘power mapping’ as a concrete research approach that can benefit specific publics while enhancing professional sociological knowledge and theory. I present power mapping as an example of a more broad approach to public sociology which seeks to harness sociological theory and knowledge in order to create generalizable analytical tools that social movements, policy makers, concerned citizens, voluntary associations, and community organizations can use to develop their own strategic assessments of the sociological contexts in which they act. One of the ironies of the current discussion of public sociology is that it has been conducted in an abstract, hyper-theoretical discourse which is precisely one of the factors that has disconnected so much sociology from general publics. In this article, I instead turn towards presenting a specific concrete research strategy which could engender mutually beneficial research collaboration and dialogue between sociologists and specific publics.     

THE STORIES TOLD IN SCIENCE FICTION AND SOCIAL SCIENCE: Reading The Thing and Other Remakes From Two Eras

We re-examine science fiction films of the 1950s (made during the cold war), and their remakes in the 1970s and 1980s (made in the post-sixties, after Vietnam and Watergate) in conjunction with stories told by social scientists during the same eras. In this light. we provide a subversive reading of social scientific data sets and science fiction films, and pay special attention to both versions of The Thing (1951, 1982) as relevant examples of cold war and post-sixties statements. Social scientific and film productions of the 1950s correlate with optimistic public sentiments of the cold war era in regard to the abilities of the military, government, and medicine to solve social problems. The more recent reproductions conjure images of a much more pessimistic view of institutions. We suggest by way of a conclusion that readings of social scientific products, science fiction films, and their remakes can inform social theories in general and postmodern social theories in particular.     

Sociological contributions to the study of social innovation: A critical review

Sociology has long been interested in innovating solutions to social problems. However, this desire has also been a source of controversy as it can conflict with the discipline's ambition also to be recognized as a hard science. This paper critically reviews sociological contributions to the study of social innovation. It first contextualizes these contributions by discussing the origins of sociology's interest in transforming society, the growing tension between that interest and sociology's other aspiration to create objective knowledge about the social world, and how more sociologists have relocated to business schools where most research on social innovation is now being conducted. Next, it summarizes sociologists' contributions, which emphasize how social innovation is organized by institutions, networks, social movements, and organizations themselves. It then discusses criticisms of this work and responses to these critiques. It concludes by asking whether sociologists' research on social innovation has advanced their discipline's dual mission of reforming and explaining society and what additional studies are needed.     

Professions and Powerlessness: Female marginality in the learned occupations

This paper argues that the existing sociological literature on the learned professions and on scientific occupations has developed in ways that are now theoretically unproductive. One sympton of this dead-end is the failure of sociologists of the professions to include research on scientists in their discussions and vice versa. A second symptom is the lack of attention to the implications of the work of Jamous, Peloille. and Bourdieu in both the sociology of scientists and of professions. The third symptom of the malaise is the failure to generate sociologically plausible explanations for the marginalisation of female entrants to science and the professions. The paper argues that a novel direction for sociological argument can be derived by remedying the three symptoms simultaneously.     

The Potentials and Limitations of Civil Society Research: Getting Undone Science Done

The term "undone science" refers to absences of scientific research that social movement and other civil society organizations find when attempting to make epistemic claims in the political field. The existing literature has identified various pathways for addressing the knowledge needs of civil society organizations, including asking elected and appointed political leaders to shift funding priorities and directly seeking support and partnerships with scientists. Here, a third pathway is identified and explored: civil society organizations that have the resources to fund their own research. A sample of such "civil society research" from large, mainstream, U.S. environmental organizations demonstrates that although the large organizations do engage in such research, most of it is not published in peer-reviewed journals. The peer-reviewed research is found almost exclusively in large preservation and conservation organizations that have staffs of scientists. Most of the other research reports are oriented toward documenting environmental problems and providing policy and management solutions. The research is highly applied and does not represent fundamental contributions to large mainstream scientific fields. Comparisons with civil society research in the author's previous research projects on religion, health, and economic development are discussed to assess applicability of the concept for other sociological subfields.     

INFORMATIZATION AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: A POLITICAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE

In recent years, both academic and policy making circles in the UK have shown a growing interest in the potential uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the delivery of government services. Much of the academic literature has been centred around the concept of 'informatization', and it has been suggested that the new technologies are transforming public services. Key theorists in the field of Public Administration have argued that informatization is one of a number of major trends likely to shape public services in the twenty-first century. However, the dominant theoretical approaches within public administration- those rooted in political sciencesuggest that inertia and stability are the norm in the public sector; clearly there is something of a contradiction between these two broad approaches. This paper outlines three political science perspectives that might be used in analysing informatization: the policy networks approach, rational choice and the new institutionalism. Evidence is then drawn from the social security, health care and social care sectors of the British public sector and related to the political science frameworks in order to examine their utility. Not only do these frameworks rightly highlight the incremental nature of change, but they also help to explain important variations in ICT use across the three policy sectors. It is concluded that combining the study of informatization and political science offers a fruitful avenue for future research.