Cover of Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences

Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences

Concerned about the worldwide state of the social sciences—the relations among the disciplines, and their relationship with both the humanities and the natural sciences—the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, based in Lisbon, established in 1993 the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. It comprised a distinguished international group of scholars—six from the social sciences, two from the natural sciences, and two from the humanities.

Read more

The report first explores how social science was historically constructed as a form of knowledge and why it was divided into a specific set of relatively standard disciplines in a process that went on between the late eighteenth century and 1945. It then reveals the ways in which world developments since 1945 have raised questions about this intellectual division of labor and have therefore reopened the issues of organizational structuring that had been put into place in the previous period. The report goes on to elucidate a series of basic intellectual questions about which there has been much recent debate. Finally, it discusses in what ways the social sciences can be intelligently restructured in the light of this history and the recent debates.

Audience
adult
Length
short · 124 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. If You Tell Shares sociology
  2. Durkheim Is Dead!: Sherlock Holmes Is Introduced to Social Theory: Sherlock Holmes Is Introduced to Social Theory Shares sociology
  3. How to Not Die Alone Shares sociology
  4. Surrounded by Idiots Shares sociology

“If you want more of the same (sociology), start with these.”

  1. The Oxford Handbook of Criminology
  2. Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences
  3. Crime and criminology
  4. النظرية الإجتماعية : من بارسونز إلى هابرماس

“If it was the politics that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts
  2. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology
  3. The Sociological Imagination
  4. Sociological Insights: An Introduction to Nonobvious Sociology

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The Social Construction of What?
  2. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault
  3. The Hedgehog, the Fox & the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science & the Humanities
  4. Philosophy of Social Science