I just came across this abstract. I have no idea what it means. It’s not a ‘post-modernist’ journal from what I can see, but I still don’t know what it means. I’d like to write more about this, but don’t have the time right now, and am still pondering it all, but the abstractions deployed seem so general and broad that it’s not only hard to understand what it’s talking about, it’s also hard to believe it can lead to any beneficial insights, as opposed to generating citations for academics. But then I might be wrong.
Anyone wanting to do further research to discover the content in the article and whether it has any value can follow it up (for a limited time) here. It’s at the Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 71, No. 3, 2015, pp. 633--645
Broadening Perspectives on Achieving Social Change
Katherine Stroebe, University of Groningen, Katie Wang, Yale University, Stephen C. Wright, Simon Fraser University
The articles in this special issue challenge readers to reconsider the relationships among individual mobility, collective action, and social change. Taken together, they reveal an increasing and broadening interest in the concept of social change and raise important questions about its societal applications. In this commentary,we expand on this rich body of research by considering how surface indicators of(lack of) social change such as individual versus collective action may be related to a wider range of motives than has been assumed. Moreover, we consider more carefully what constitutes social change, and discuss different forms of equality asa means to conceptualizing social change. In doing so, we attempt to move beyond implied dichotomies between individual and collective strategies and actions to consider alternative perspectives on classifying and studying social change.
I’ve read worse. I think it means greedy thrill seekers can also have fun doing some thing constructive, like helping disabled kids at the park for a day, say.
I love the way some academics publish “commentary”. Is that what you do when your analysis reveals nothing?
http://www.museumofnonparticipation.org/
For a complete contrast, my favourite macroeconomic abstract is as follows:
Is GDP an ergodic time series and should we care?
Yes and no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_theory
It is disciplinese. The people who promulgate and understand the writing are going to be high IQ, logic dominant specialists.
The best the run of the mill person can hope for from this point is that interlocutors like Parish, Quiggin and Gruen or intelligent msm workers like Greg Jericho, say, remain willing to interpret and render to comprehensibility the aims and implications of intense abstract stuff, what is trying tobe solved and what various vested interests will make of such theorising, say in the context of Rudd’s fiscal stimulus programs in the real world of meltdowns, inefficiency and eventual, consequent, human life and suffering.
Thanks Paul,
But I have a radical theory – which Frank Hahn proposed a few decades ago – which is that the traditional methods of economic theory might have helped set economics up and given it a framework, but they don’t look like getting us very far in the future – he wrote this in 1990!
So I doubt if I’ll be translating what’s at the cutting edge of “intense, abstract stuff” produced, presumably, by academics. The writing of people like Clay Shirky or Tim O’Reilly offer as good an understandascope for looking at new phenomena of the internet age. Certainly they have much more insight to offer than anything in academic economics where things are of no theoretical interest if they can’t be packaged up into some formal model.
And here’s the thing. The writing of someone like Paul Krugman is invariably better on his blog or in his ‘wonkish’ blog posts and follow-up papers than it is in fully refereed journals – including Krugman’s papers in those journals, preoccupied as they are with the arcana of contemporary academic debates. Krugman’s peer reviewed papers are generally much less use than his more informal stuff.
With most of the things that we can make some progress on with disciplined thought, we’ll make progress on with an ad hoc mix of commonsense, careful but discursive analysis, aided, where appropriate with formal toy model building – though not beyond the standard that Krugman takes it in his recent papers – which are not, generally speaking quite up to ‘publishable standard’. There are lots of loose ends that would take ages to sort out. Then there would be all the delay and extra work in the lottery of peer review. And for what? It’s just a model. It could have been built somewhat differently and still make the same points.
Nicholas
What’s your take on “Science on the Verge ” ?
And in particular this:
John,
It’s not a rare phenomenon in policy economics. Indeed in consulting one’s clients insist on it. If you explain an effect and scope it’s magnitude it in some commonsensical way, they’ll be much more likely to think it’s ‘science’ if it has some equations in it. But at some simple level they may be right (at the cost of almost inevitable spurious precision, once the study with its caveats becomes history and the report exists as travelling factoid.)
But clients also love one putting some simple partial equilibrium result (predicting some change in one industry) into a general equilibrium model – this then produces a similar result but amplifies or reduces the partial equilibrium result usually to some small extent that should not be taken too seriously. But it’s amazing what people come to believe once you feed it into a black box and get out an answer.
The text looks interesting, but I’m afraid I’ve not read it at this stage.
Nicholas
I am only about one fifth of the way through it.
So far , it seems that policy based evidence making, is both a hot topic and far more widespread that I had realized .
I had previously thought of it as being a specialty of those who do ‘cultural policy’.
I’d translate that as “attempts at social change from the underclass have failed, let’s change the rules”. Optimistically that means achieving social change in new ways, but they seem to be leaning towards “let’s define what we do as ‘achieving social change’, shall we?” Very millenial-as-derogatory-term cliche.
I have definitely read worse, as part of a BA in what is now Gender Studies, and amusingly the explicitly post-modernist parts were not the worse of it. There were times when I did a word at time, or phrase at a time, translation in an attempt to puzzle it out. Some of it was nigh on newspeak, and at times the definitions would change in the course of the argument. For a while there was even a fad for long, incomprehensible titles to go with the even longer, less comprehensible abstracts. My contribution, such as it was, was more prosaic “Do bisexual feminists challenge a dominant ethos of lesbian queerness?” which sparked a lively discussion when published. One editor mentioned that the clear title possibly led to unusual willingness to discuss out of sheer relief :)
“Do bisexual feminists challenge a dominant ethos of lesbian queerness?”
Sounds rather brutally straightforward to me.
Are you telling me you did not de-centre any discourse with a view to re-centering notions of the dominant within the narrative?
No, I wrote ~1800 words in very simple terms specifically because I wanted to bring to the surface a fight that was happening in the wider community. There were some grossly unhelpful things being said, but you can’t really expect to have an academic journal publish “now, children, be nice to one another”.
Sorry, I meant to contrast my brutal engineer-speak with the “Towards a re-analysis of conventional inter-gender relation norms and expectations in physical world events where non-typical presentations of feminist dialectic regarding interrelationships between established body politic analysis of discourse and emergent reclassification of interpersonal understandings between less strongly gender-preferential sexualities”. I trust that is clearer?