Social Work Sense and Sensibility: A Framework for Teaching an Integrated Perspective

The divisions between ‘micro practice’ and ‘macro practice’ are often traced to historical splits between the originating strands of the social work profession. These splits have been reified in social work education and in institutional settings that largely focus on particular aspects of practice. We argue that this split has been overly polarized and, more importantly, disregards the science and ethics of social work—what we call the sense and sensibility of the profession. Science requires that we recognize the complexity of human activity; ethics require that we alleviate individual suffering and work to attack its root causes. Social work sense and sensibility interweave expectations that practice, policy, theory and research understandings must all be informed by, and inform, ethical social work practice. This bridging framework can help educators respond to calls for connecting all levels and types of social work practice.     

Bringing Sociology into the Public Policy Process: a Relational Network Approach

How does evidence-based sociological research influence public policymaking either directly or indirectly? Based on an analysis of a 2014 NSF-funded public policy research workshop and written case studies by workshop participants, this article provides a conceptual roadmap and varied examples of the pathways through which social science research and social scientists can inform public policy decision-making. Pathways include networks and relationships among academics, social scientists employed in government, special interest groups and non-profits, and members of the media. Many sociologists are committed to using their evidence-based findings to inform solutions to societal problems, yet are often too narrowly trained to write only for scholarly communities and are often unaware of the relations, connections, and networks that can increase the use of sociological and other social science research in public discourse and in the public policy arena. The paper highlights lessons learned about effective networks, communication channels and dissemination strategies from the workshop and case studies in order to better equip those social scientists interested to bring their research into a public policy realm with the tools to do so. Given the current political climate, this resolve seems all the more important.     

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.     

Does Activism in Social Science Explain Conservatives’ Distrust of Scientists?

Data from the General Social Survey suggest that conservatives have become less trustful of scientists since the 1970s. Gauchat argues that this is because conservatives increasingly see scientific findings as threatening to their worldview. However, the General Social Survey data concern trust in scientists, not in science. We suggest that conservatives’ diminishing trust in scientists reflects the fact that scientists in certain fields, particularly social science, have increasingly adopted a liberal-activist stance, seeking to influence public policy in a liberal direction.     

When Do People Deploy Genetic Determinism? A Review Pointing to the Need for Multi‐factorial Theories of Public Utilization of Scientific Discourses

For over two decades, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have attended warily and thoughtfully to the growing influence of biological and especially genetics‐based explanations of human behavior. Concern about genetic determinism has formed a focal point of this attention, because it was presumed to provide a lynchpin for discriminatory effects arising from genetics technologies. Substantial empirical research has now demonstrated that genetic determinism is in fact linked to discriminatory attitudes including prejudice, Social Dominance Orientation, sexism, and racism. Fortunately, however, the research has also indicated that most lay people’s deployment of genetic determinism is both limited and strategic, primarily serving self‐interests such as protecting valued behaviors (which are not health conducive) or avoiding blame. The disjunction between predictions based on existing social theories of discourse and empirical research on individual‐level practices highlights the need for a theoretical integration of biological biases, individual actions, and social structures in future social theories, especially theories about health behaviors, science studies, and public understanding of science.     

Social scientists as technicians,advisors and meaning producers

In this paper, we are addressing three issues that are at the core of scholarly reflections about the societal role of social science knowledge: (1) Social scientists tend to follow – although this is not always a deliberate choice – one of three models that describe their role as the producers of practical knowledge. For the sake of simplicity we have called the three models the “model of the technician”, the “model of the advisor” and the “model of the meaning producer”. (2) Due to the need for social inquiry to adopt a particular, restrictive perspective of its domain, useful knowledge is a complicated matter. Hence the need to put into question a widely supported notion at least among social scientists: When asked about the reasons for the limited “power” of social science knowledge the response frequently is that the adequacy and practical usefulness of social science knowledge is a function of its capturing the full complexity of what indeed are complex social phenomena. (3) Social scientists often tend to lament the marginal impact their intellectual efforts have on society, and they look with great envy across the divide of the so-called two cultures, wondering how and when they will be able to achieve the same kind of success and prestige the natural sciences and technology appear to enjoy in most societies. However, this unhappy view systematically understates the actual power of social science knowledge, in particular its role as a mind maker or meaning producer.     

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.     

Beyond the body in a box: Visualizing contexts of children's action

Social scientists refer routinely to a range of social and cultural contexts in trying to understand children's lives, but this range may not include what children think or say about what they do. In this article, I examine how two girls thought about their efforts to mummify a Barbie Doll as part of a school project. Attending to what the girls said about their project led me to regard strings of related activities—as defined by kids—as an important but neglected context of children's action. After reviewing how the girls’ work cut across the contexts familiar to social scientists, I examine the implications of “activity series” for visualizing kids and their contexts, in theory and in photographs.     

Conservative Apostles of Objectivity and the Myth of a “Liberal Bias” in Science

An article recently published in The American Sociologist argued that social scientists are biased because of their liberal views, and that this social activism might in turn explain the growing distrust of conservatives in the scientific community observed in the General Social Survey. Although I do agree that social scientists in the United States are mostly liberal, which is hard to contest given the accumulated evidence, this does not necessarily mean that liberal scientists are biased. It is one thing to adopt liberal views, but it is quite another to let these views distort scientific productions to the point that they are not scientific anymore. Since no systematic evidence currently exists to support this claim, the “liberal bias” remains a myth. Moreover, the authors do not report any statistical correlation between the purported increase in social scientists’ activism and conservatives’ growing distrust in science, let alone a causal relationship. I hypothesize that the authors, as conservatives, are more concerned with liberalism than with the politicization of science per se, and that their critics are aimed at challenging liberals’ domination within academia by depicting liberal scholars as pseudo-scientists.     

A (Pragmatic) Defense of (Some) Science

In this commentary, a response to MacKendrick (2017), I examine the dilemma that recent science activism poses for sociologists of science. How can we maintain their critical integrity while condemning the anti‐science actions of the Trump administration? I propose that sociologists of science engage in two exercises to marshal a qualified defense of science. First, we should unpack what we might mean by the “science” we wish to defend. Then, we should begin to articulate grounds for defending that science commensurate with the urgency of the moment. I draw inspiration from American pragmatist philosophy to develop one such defense.     

Studying social capital in situ: A qualitative approach

In recent years, the concept of social capital – broadly defined as co-operative networks based on regular, personal contact and trust – has been widely applied within cross-disciplinary human science research, primarily by economists, political scientists and sociologists. In this article, I argue why and how fieldwork anthropologists should fill a gap in the social capital literature by highlighting how social capital is being built in situ. I suggest that the recent inventions of “bridging” and “bonding” social capital, e.g., inclusive and exclusive types of social capital, are fruitful concepts to apply in an anthropological fieldwork setting. Thus, my case study on the relationship between local people and newcomers in the rural Danish marginal municipality of Ravnsborg seeks to reveal processes of bridging/bonding social capital building. Such a case study at the micro level has general policy implications for a cultural clash between two different groups by demonstrating the complexity of a social capital mix where bonding social capital strongly prevails. This ultimately leads to a “social trap” (Rothstein 2005), implying widespread distrust and serious social and economic costs for a whole population. Gunnar Lind Haase Svendsen is Senior Researcher, at the Institute of Rural Research and Development, Southern University of Denmark. He is the co-author, with G. T. Svendsen, of The Creation and Destruction of Social Capital: Entrepreneurship, Co-operative Movements and Institutions (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2004, Paperback edition, October 2005); and author of Samarbejde og konfrontation. Opbygning og nedbrydning af social kapital i de danske landdistrikter 1864–2003 [Cooperation and Confrontation. The Creation and Destruction of Social Capital in Rural Denmark 1864–2003], Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sourthern Denmark, Esbjerg, 2004: http://www.humaniora.sdu.dk/phd/dokumenter/filer/Afhandlinger-30.pdfg. Gunnar Svendsen's scholarly interests include Bourdieusian Economics (new socioeconomics), capital theory, social capital, rural civic movements, and rural discourses. He has recently finished a research project for the Danish Ministry of the Interior about the role of intangible assets (culture, networks, and historical traditions) for differences in economic performance (DEP) among four Danish local communities.     

Conflating Apples and Oranges: Understanding Modern Forms of Racism

Social scientists generally agree that the post‐Civil Rights form of racism is different from that which existed in the Jim Crow‐era in the United States. However, beyond this agreement, what exactly modern racism is and “looks like” is debatable. With this in mind, a surprising and somewhat disturbing trend frequently occurs among social scientists that can have real consequences within academia and the general public: conflation. In naming a newly developed concept as “racism”, social scientists often conflate three interrelated concepts: racial prejudice, racial discrimination, and racism. This paper clarifies these three interrelated concepts and the problems with conflating them. Additionally, this paper describes many of the alternative conceptions of racism in the post‐Civil Rights era, identifying where conflation exists in each concept. In closing, the paper describes the implications of conflation for social science research and the American public.     

Translating Racial Genomics: Passages in and Beyond the Lab

While qualitative studies of science have traditionally focused on sciences as bounded cultures, or cohesive communities that operate in well-defined research settings, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) helps to envision the complex processual formation of scientific associations across a diverse array of social entities and sites. Using the case of race and health disparities research in genetic science, this article explores how ANT’s emphasis on agentic symmetry, and the translation of interests between humans and nonhumans, makes visible the multiplicity of agencies and research institutes that, guided by the US federal government’s Directive No. 15, marshaled genomics to construct race as a social problem. It also examines the multiplicity of methodological strategies such an analysis entails. Here, qualitative analysis of government regulations, policy councils, funding mechanisms, scientific practices, and statements from key scientists in elite biomedical positions is used to show how it came to be that racial governance became an “obligatory passage point” for scientists, and, in a second movement, that genomics became an obligatory passage point for conceiving large-scale analysis of racial stratification. Yet, going beyond current conceptions of ANT, I consider how tracing translation in and beyond the lab can expose a third multiplicity: the multiplicity of obligatory passage points in a given network. I argue that ANT, taken to its logical end, involves study of a plurality of mutually reinforcing actors that co-constitute one another and synergistically push collective agendas.     

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.     

Culture and national S&T performance: A framework for analysing socio‐institutional factors in RTD policy making

Since the 1970s, policy makers and researchers have attempted to understand what factors influence national S&T performance. Whereas researchers predominantly aimed at explaining disparate economic development paths by understanding the role of innovation and technological advance in the evolution of economic systems, policy makers hoped to discover those mechanism that would enhance national S&T performance. The work of Mary Douglas provides a framework for systematically comparing organizational and institutional cultures. Although Mary Douglas originally devised the approach to explain her African fieldwork data, successive social scientists, most notably Aaron Wildavsky, Michael Thompson, and Steve Rayner, have adapted the model to suit the needs of policy analysis.     

Prometheus bound: The limits of social science professionalization in the progressive period

Conclusions The problem with professionalization theory is that it stops where we think it should begin. In the case of the new social scientists, we have argued that their need for massive resources opened them to collaborative cooptation by resource controllers. The two central principles to be drawn from our analysis are that during a crisis of ideology intellectual workers seeking to create new roles must worry about resources, and align themselves accordingly, and that resource holders, for their part, will support intellectuals who deliver something of value to them. Table I outlines how those principles might be applied to three likely knowledge and power alliances that might have occurred during the post-Civil War ideology crisis. The traditional social scientist role shown there reflects our understanding of the model American one existing before the influence of the German Historical School. The radical-populist role represents one of several routes not taken. It is presented to make clearer that significant alternatives did exist.How does role complementarity sum up how the new social science aligned itself with corporate capital? The new social scientists rejected the role content and alliances established by the traditionals; instead, they saw themselves offering a competitive expertise to the public. When the new social scientists under AEA auspices entered a resource exchange relationship with the nascent, national corporate leadership supporting the Spanish American War and the trust as a form of economic organization, they chose to ally themselves with the same resource controllers the traditionals were explicitly opposing in their anti-war, anti-monopolist stance. Indeed, the domestic and foreign positions secured by the new social scientists in the wake of the war provided a significant and large scale opportunity for exercising their expert role. In choosing an alliance with national capital and its managers, the new social scientists clearly differentiated themselves from the traditionals. They identified the strategic value of the resource rich corporate center, eschewing, as AEA President E. R. A. Seligman put it, the extremes of laissez-faire and socialism. Their analysis of the opportunity structure presented by the war and the trust question proved correct, as their version of professionalization informs us today.Of course, some new social scientists had at first been willing to align themselves with left of center and populist groups. However, the early academic freedom cases seem to have offered a powerful lesson. In particular, the new social scientists seem to have learned that even mildly popular actions were severely sanctioned and academics engaging in such actions would have extreme difficulty practicing their profession. These cases also made clear that left of centerists did not have many resources to exchange for new social scientific role performance in their causes. Economic radicals did not usually control the jobs or funds required for academic careers and professional development. As a result, the new social scientists did not create roles that complemented the radical popular movements. The few that did were not leaders of the associations. Having rejected the traditional and the radical expert roles for lack of sufficient complementary resources, the leaders of the new social scientists sought instead the indirect influence of expert advisers to businessmen, public figures, the new federal agencies, and national policy forums. From their collective biography as expert advisers, we may identify four aspects of their roles that seem to complement those of the new, nationally based corporate leaders. We see in the complementarity of the roles of the new social science leaders and the new corporate elite a significant shaping of modern social science expertise.The four aspects of the expert adviser role are these of technician, policy adviser, legitimator, and independent policy maker. Technicians solved problems, especially data problems, set by others. They gained access, or an opportunity to show their competence to those higher in the role system. The corporate leaders gained an opportunity to look over, and socialize new boys. Policy advisers had the ear of decision makers in the corporate sectors and in government, and managed technicians. The advisers gained prestige and some influence, while decision makers gained reliable management in the policy and reform sectors of an emerging state capitalism. Legitimators were often recruited from the ranks of well-published policy managers. They lent their greater public prestige as well as their reputations for non-partisan impartiality to particular policies or reforms. The corporate leaders gained public approval for policies in their perceived interests. Finally, a few new social scientists achieved positions of independent policy making after long years of expert service. Corporate leaders gained policy making congruent with their needs, often developed without their active participation. In short, when the new social scientists looked outside of academics to find the resources required to institutionalize their new skills as social scientists, they found at least two groups willing to complement their role performances. The left of centerists did not have sufficient resources to help establish the new social scientists' role performances within academics. But the new corporate leaders did, and they had the resources to act as social and political sponsors for the new social scientists' roles as expert advisers. In return, the new social scientists accepted as socially necessary the task of rationalizing the turn of the century economy and defusing social unrest.Our analysis of these cases — the Spanish American War and the trust (the Chicago Conference, the ICC, the NCF) — raises almost as many questions as are answered. These queries fall into two sets. The first involves theoretical issues, particularly the utilitarian assumptions implicit in our exchange analysis, and methodological issues, especially concerning the limits of available data. The second set of problems is substantive. Were the new social scientists the creatures of corporate capital, collaborative partners, or social actors with some independence? If they were willing and able to act independently, what defined the parameters of their action — professional interests, their own class interests or a commitment to the truth? If they were forced to act opportunistically to meet some constellation of class and professional interests, was opportunism confined to establishing a firmer resource base for the new social science? Were they later able to use their then established fields and positions to assert independent views of what was in the best interests of the nation as a whole? And, finally, was the expert role established by economists and political scientists accepted fully by sociologists? Our use of an exchange framework to organize the data in this paper might be read as bordering on a radical utilitarianism that assumes both individual and collective actors have a fulsome sense of their objective situation and its exigencies. Accordingly, there is little possibility for symbolic mediation of perceptions and motivations to intervene between social science leaders and their environments. At the risk of being thought unfashionable, reductionistic, and even economistic, we take a utilitarian position. Indeed, we stop short of radical utilitarianism only since perfect knowledge and information are inherently unattainable, especially in a world of rapid social and economic transition such as that occupied by the new social scientists.Rather than radical utilitarianism, we take a position of reasonable utilitarianism, viewing the collective efforts of social scientists assembled in their associations as often compensating for all manner of informational and behavioral imperfections at the individual level. We take this position for several reasons rooted in the detail of the period. (1) Organizing occupations (like the new social scientists in the AEA) have the clear possibility and capability for creating more nearly rational plans for collective action than do their individual members. This occurs when occupational associations gather together experiences and analysis from all their members and then, through full, frank, and candid discussion discern the proper joint actions required for success in their common enterprise. This is precisely what the new social scientists did. They used the AEA as an occupational forum to define collectively the expert role required to procure professionalizing resources from the industralizing American political economy. Thus, Hadley's speech quoted in the Spanish American War study is not an isolated exercise in role exploration. Instead, it is part of twenty years' detailed discussion on the expert social scientist's role. (2) As a group, the new social scientists themselves subscribed to and articulated a utilitarian or pragmatic view of their role and their science. In this they upheld and, in turn, were supported by the dominant American business ideology which, although varying with economic development, and regional and industrial interest, espoused a materialistic approach to contemporary problems. Indeed, AEA leaders usually presented a pragmatic, materialistic interpretation of the growth of economics as a science. As E. R. A. Seligman said in a presidential address: Economic science is an outgrowth of economic conditions ... of social unrest... of an attempt to unravel the tangled skein of actual conditions, and an effort to solve the difficulties of existing industrial society. Although the new social scientists worked collectively to develop their occupation along rational lines, there were, of course, all manner of cognative informational and behavioral imperfections at the individual level. Thus, the young Carter Adams saw Marx as a Christ-like figure, J. R. Commons and R. T. Ely early worked with the social gospel movement, and AEA leader Jacob Hollander accepted an investment bank's commission of $100,000 for placing a Santa Domingan bond issue while on the island for imperial duty. But all eventually came to accept and act on the associations' collective definition of the expert adviser role, finally perceiving theoretical Communism, militant Christianity and ad hoc greed as hinderances to sustained resource procurement and career development. Thus, rather than a radical utilitarianism assuming perfect knowledge and information on objective situation and environment, we posit imperfect individual knowledge and action with the reasonable possibility of collective utilitarian action by occupational associations acting after considered discussion.If we accept in principle the possibility of a reasonably utilitarian exchange analysis, what data limits do we encounter when we consider the professionalizing new social scientists in their associations? Following the Bernards' methodological imperative of reading the associations' own texts fully and carefully, we find the AEA, APSA and ASS's dusty tomes filled with heat and light on the substantive questions before us: What is the proper role of the social science expert? Who and how should he serve? In contrast with the fullness of organizational tests, our principle data limit is the thinness of historical analysis both of the period and the central actors. For example, there is no schematic synthesis of social structure for the period; nothing like Jackson Turner Maine's work on pre-Revolutionary America or Sidney Aronsen's on the Age of Jackson. There is, of course, a richly contested historiography of the period with Hofstader, Weibe, Williams (and their followers and critics) providing insightful chronological commentaries from center and leftist positions. But these chronicles rest more on sound judgments and intuitive leaps rather than on the details of sufficient biographical and organizational analysis. For example, there is one solid, historical treatment of the ASSA, and Sanborn, its most important figure, has no full biography and only a half-done autobiography. The new social scientists' lives are better recorded, but the coverage is still incomplete. These data limits make difficult precise and comprehensive answers to questions about the exact social mechanism — such as class, mobility and occupational status — working to create social scientists' biographical intersection with their associations' rich records. For example, A. T. Hadley's father was a Yale Classics professor, the father of fellow Yale economist Henry Farnam was a railroad president, and E. R. A. Seligman's father was a German-born New York investment banker. Are these professors upper class by social origins or by occupation? What is the direction of their mobility in an expanding, industrializing society? And what of the many professors on whom there is less detailed information, whose fathers were merchants, or publicists? Since neither the social structure at the time of their birth nor their entry into career is clearly agreed upon by scholars, we must answer our substantive questions somewhat more provisionally than we prefer.First, what was the relationship between resource holders and intellectual workers, particularly between new social scientists and corporate capital? Was there much room for independent action? Comparison of old and new social scientists gives some indication of the latitude possible in the period. Both sets of social scientists provided hegemonic idea systems for different sets of capitalist elites. The old were linked by sponsorship to New England capital throughout the nineteenth century. Sharply regional in composition and social base, they opposed many of the other social alternatives available, most notably the Southern sociologies legitimating slavebased agrarian capitalism, and the protective-tariff economics produced in the more industrial mid-Atlantic states. Tied to regional resources and definitions of social and economic problems through well-established cohort, friendship, and kinship networks, the old social science was faced with crisis when its region was. The rise of the mid-Atlantic states, especially New York, as a center for emerging national industrial finance capital made ASSAers face the choice of supporting relatively immobile New England merchant industrial capital or forging a new extra-regional alliance. By maintaining their original networks, as did much of their region's business elite, ASSA leaders effectively cut themselves off from acting as intellectual guides and legitimators for those rising national industrial finance capitalists creating the present social order. While ASSA leaders were tied to their region's resources, they seem relatively independent when compared to discipline association leaders. Their social science required fewer resources; they seem, on the average, much less dependent on academically contained careers and the favor of university managers for their livelihood. Their generalist training and experience, combined with their familiarity with the material and cultural allocation apparatus of New England meant they were not confined to the academy for the exercise of specialized skills. Sanborn, for example, translated classics, wrote biographies, founded secondary schools, and taught at Boston University when not directly serving New England capital as ASSA secretary. In contrast, new social scientists were most often located permanently in the academy. Even after incurring the displeasure of university managers, they invariably sought other specialized positions, preferably in emerging graduate centers, although this sometimes meant holding their tongues and changing their location. In short, given their institutionally based, specialized social science, the newer, national academics seem to have had less room for independent action than the old.Yet, the new had some room to maneuver because they had something to exchange for resources: the technical capacity both to create a new corporate ideology justifying monopoly capital (witness the Jenks address and the Chicago conference) and the skill to organize production efficiently (recall Adams on railroad accounting procedures and new social scientists' participation in the ICC). The nascent industrial finance corporate sector well understood its objective need for these skills. Widespread popular agitation and unstable pooling arrangements had taught them — and indeed, the nation — the dangers of centralizing capital without specialized academic assistance. And if the rising elite's instruction in its need for social science was direct, the nation's was no less detailed. Beyond its own participation and observations of industrialization, a wide range of extra-academic cultural workers offered lessons. For example, Daniel DeLeon's The People offered a continuous commentary countering the new social scientists' ideological positions. And the readers of Frank Norris' The Octopus (1901) found Lyman Derrick, a representative of newer social arrangements, advising his father, an older agrarian capitalist, on the technical accounting problems of monopolistic integration.The man who, even after twenty years' training in the operation of railroads, can draw an equitable, smoothly working schedule of freight rates between shipping point and common point, is capable of governing the United States. What with main lines, and leased lines, and points of transfer, and the laws governing common carriers, and the rulings of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the whole matter has become so confused that Vanderbilt himself couldn't straighten it out.... Cut rates; yes... any fool can write one dollar instead of two, but if you cut too low by a fraction of one percent, and if the Railroad can get out an injunction, tie you up and show that your new rate prevents the road being operated at a profit, how are you better off?Clearly in the increasingly complex American situation, the new social scientists had important ideological and technical skills to exchange for the resources held within the rising monopoly capital center. And they had, thereby, some degree of freedom in their negotiations with its leading figures. Their latitude for independent action becomes clearer when we ask, given the emerging corporate center's need for intellectual support and their willingness to supply resources, why didn't they employ established New England practitioners? In part, as previously indicated, the ASSAers were unavailable, being integrated into their own region and tied to their own sustaining, if relatively immobile, elite. Further, the older social scientists offered a slightly different intellectual product. Although both new and old social scientists were ideologues of state intervention designed to conserve capitalism, they differed on where regulation should occur. In the main, ASSAers worked for government intervention at the state level, while AEAers called for state solutions at the national level out of their shared German Historical experience. Finally, even though old social scientists often possessed much the same technical skills and used the same rhetoric of science as the new, they usually lacked graduate degrees, the prestige of university employment, and the growing authority of specialization in a society where credentials were increasingly seen as critical to success. These differences between old and new — availability, product, and certification—in all probability expanded AEAers' capacity to drive a harder bargain with capital.Given the ASSA's reluctance to break sustaining regional ties, the unsuitability of populist and socialist intellectual workers, and their own certified technical and ideological skills, the new social scientists had some latitude in their negotiations with national corporate capital. Yet they chose to serve power, fundamentally since this maximized their own career and professional interests while meeting the objective demand for resources outlined above. In this, academics were probably no more greedy or selfish than lawyers in the ABA or doctors in the AMA, but neither were they less so. We see the new social scientists' decision to serve power most clearly in their careful and collective clarification of opportunity, identifying and seeking service in that sector of the economy most likely to deliver sustained resource support — national corporate capital's leadership. Thus, new social scientists generally accepted corporate capitalism per se as the framework indispensable to conditions of human progress. Then all other social issues (labor unrest, urban crowding, plutocracy) became technical problems defused of interestladen content, and they could perform latent ideological and legitimation functions while correctly claiming a manifest value neutrality. That they understood the implications of grounding social and economic theory on acceptance of modern monopoly capital is made clear in Hadley's presidential address following his Spanish American War speech; it focused on the relation between Economic Theory and Political Morality. The address and following debate stressed the inadvisability of economic theory's acknowledging questions of class if social scientists were to have a role in public affairs. Instead, the impartial pursuit of an empirically artificial construct, the common interest, was deliberately substituted for any consideration of specific class interests. Thus, disinterested objectivity, the cornerstone of professionalization theory, became an artifact of career.With fashioning the expert role in the AEA's forum, the new social science became a collaborative partner in creating monopoly capitalism in the Progressive period. In return for their work in ideology production and technical amelioration, the economists insured the continued procurement of the resources required to industrialize US social science. What happened afterwards? After acting opportunistically to meet their professional and career interests, did establishing a firm resource base liberate the new social science from future opportunistic behavior? And could the established social science in time become resource independent, enough so to act in its own right; for example, participating in counter-hegemonic ideological and technical enterprises? In order to address these questions, we must move beyond our available data, guiding our speculations by the outline of our exchange analysis and our incomplete reading of the years following the fashioning of the new social scientists' expert role. We think that once accepted into collaborative partnership, opportunism was curbed by an emerging strategy for enhancing the long term interests of the profession. Consider, for example, the foundations then being invented by corporate capital. Russell Sage was lauded at birth by social science leaders, some of whom sought its funding, as did the American Political Science Association's leadership for their work rationalizing urban police forces. The Rockefeller Foundation, however, failed to attract the new social scientist leaderships' participation when it set up offices to offset the ideological cost of its victory in the Colorado Coal Wars. Seeking resources to perfect urban social control was professionally acceptable; justifying the Ludlow Massacre was not. Resource procurement continued to be crucial, but the new social science was not simply for hire to any corporate capitalist offering a subsidy. The critical point of distinction was perhaps whether or not accepting resources and projects made a mockery of professional claims to serve the public good.If opportunism declined with the institutionalization of new social scientists' expert role and the stabilized exchanges it created, did the new social science find within its ranks the voices and actions of independent, even counter-hegemonic views, speakers and agitators against monopoly capitalism? In the Progessive period there were few, and they either left the academy out of a sense that active opposition was not permitted (as was the case with Daniel DeLeon) or were forced out (as was the case with Scott Nearing). We cannot answer this question exactly for the several decades since the expert's role was put in place, but we have listened hard for oppositional voices and have failed to hear them. As sociologists, we were somewhat surprised, in part since our sense of the radical timbre of our field was heightened by repeated and well-reported surveys of faculty opinion placing this specialty at the left margin of academic attitudes. We have no particular quarrel with the survey results and know that individual sociologists have on occasion spoken forcefully against the established center of the American political economy. Still, sociology as a profession seems to have fully accepted the expert role and exchanges created long ago by the new social scientists, if organized counter-hegemonic activity is accepted as a fair index. Even if we accept sociology's somewhat self-conscious claim to be the left wing of academia, it is difficult to hear much counter-hegemonic (as opposed to countercultural) flapping going on. Perhaps the matter will be clarified by a more detailed analysis of resources and role for this later period.We would like to re-emphasize that the burden of this paper is the inadequacy of professionalization theory as an explanation for the modern social scientist's role. Although using an exchange framework, one in which disinterested technical expertise is offered in return for a monopoly of knowledge, it fails to explore fully its own implications. The resource demands of intellectual workers dependent on institutions for occupation are not considered; neither is the intent, function, and location of resource suppliers. By pointing to the importance of role resources through locating abstract entities (the profession, the community-at-large) in concrete groups (the leadership of social science organizations, specific groups of resource holders contributing to institutionalizing knowledge), we hope to focus professional attention on the material conditions for role emergence and the way in which complementarity can be negotiated. By continuing this examination of resource transactions surrounding role development, perhaps we will more fully understand the possibilities and limitations of the career structures in which we labor.     

Copyright,digital sharing,and the liberal order: sociolegal constructions of intellectual property in the era of mass digitization

Intellectual property (IP) rights policy has long been driven by rights-holder interests, leading to IP regimes focused on protecting private property at the expense of broadening public access to cultural works. The rise of instant, low-cost digital sharing practices, however, forces the sociolegal construction of IP as ‘property’ into crisis by contradicting the conception of creative works as commodities that can be exclusively ‘owned’ and exchanged. This cuts into a classic social science debate over how best to balance individual rights against collective interests, which has played out in liberal society through tensions between contradictory principles seeking to uphold the sanctity of private property (the principle of ‘Individual Freedom’) while also correcting social inequality (the ‘Equal Means’ principle). While IP policy has historically developed largely in accordance with Individual Freedom, digital sharing of creative works is premised instead on Equal Means. As these forces collide, the question at stake is whether crisis in the status quo conception of property rights disrupts existing power relations, with implications for the logic of policy development in the digital age. To address this question, I test for continuity of the predominant trend in IP policy-making using recent legislative changes to the Canadian copyright regime. I find that, contrary to expectations, policy changes do not manifestly favor rights-holders. Rather, legislative outcomes are split between modest protections for rights-holders and clear gains for rights of open access. I take this as evidence of the increasing complexification of IP policy in response to mass digitization.     

Recognising and Enabling Social Workers to Promote Child Wellbeing and Protection

The paper explores the relevance of social enterprise to social work practice and policy development. Social enterprise refers to a broad set of approaches that use business acumen to address social goals. A marginal activity in social work for a long time, recently social enterprise has been thrust into the spotlight in debates about the future of social policy and community services. It is important that social workers understand the meaning and implications of social enterprise if they are to apply it critically and reflectively in practice and participate in contemporary debates about its relevance in promoting individual and community empowerment. The paper provides an overview of the meaning of social enterprise, outlines the reasons for the renewed focus on social enterprise and related concepts in social policy debates, particularly community economic development, and examines its underlying values. It concludes with a discussion of questions and concerns surrounding the implementation of social enterprise in Australia.