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This article employs an interpretive approach, and in the light of contributions to this symposium by Butler and McAllister, and McLean et al., holds that metrics of research 'quality' are socially constructed and hence are as 'subjective' as peer review. Thus it rejects the use of stand-alone metrics as an 'objective' basis to inform funding allocations. Rather, the optimum method of 'quality' assessment is a panel-based exercise with expert judgement informed by a range of discipline-sensitive metrics and peer review of publications. The article maintains that the politics of metrics of political science conceals interests about the foundations of social scientific knowledge, and so the dispute over metrics and peer review is a metaphor for the conflicting epistemological preferences of UK political scientists. It is also argued that metrics-led assessment subjects political science to 'Gradgrinding' on two fronts: that political science departments amount to less than the sum of their parts, and the audit culture strips the discipline of its humanism.

Abstract
A biophysical chemist and a political scientist team up to explore striking parallels between the requisites of "stability" and the causes of instability within both the cellular/molecular world of biophysical chemistry and the world of social and political organization of self-assembled, societal structures, such as sovereign states and institutions. The structure, function, and organizational similarities of such parallelisms are particularly noteworthy, given that human agency introduces greater contingency in the sociopolitical world than do the "laws of Nature" in the natural-scientific world. In this perspective piece, we critically identify and analyze these parallels between the natural and the social realms through the prism of the shared concept of stability, including causal factors that embrace the full "stability spectrum" from instability to stability. This spectrum includes the crucial bridging, time-dependent, intermediate, kinetic state of "metastability." Our analyses reveal that, in the microscopic/molecular world of the physical sciences, the thermodynamic and kinetic characterizations of the stabilities and transformations between physiochemical "states" exhibit cognate properties and features in the macroscopic world of sociopolitical arenas in ways that reflect a greater than traditionally assumed continuity between Nature and society. Select examples from the natural and social realms are presented and elaborated on to illustrate these parallelisms, while underscoring the striking similarities in their functional consequences.

The contemporary estrangement of political theory from political science is in large measure the product of a quarrel that originated in the challenge to the values of U.S. political science initiated by émigré scholars during the 1940s. The behavioral revolution was in an important respect a conservative rebellion in defense of the values of liberalism and related notions of science, relativism, and historical progress that had traditionally informed the discipline. This controversy in the context of political science fundamentally structured the discourse of academic political theory and the contemporary constitution of the field both as a division of political science and as a wider interdisciplinary enterprise.

Introduction : towards a global history of sexual science : movements, networks, and deployments / Veronika Fuechtner, Douglas E. Haynes, and Ryan Jones -- Global modernity and sexual science : the case of male homosexuality and female prostitution, 1880-1950 / Pablo Ben -- "Let us leave the hospital; let us go on a journey around the world" : British and German sexual science and the global search for sexual variation / Kate Fisher and Jana Funke -- Westermarck's Morocco : sexology & the epistemic politics of cultural anthropology / Ralph Leck -- Monogamy's nature : global sexual science and the secularization of Christian marriage / Angie Willey -- The "Hottentot Apron" in the history of sexual science / Rebecca Hodes -- Sexology in the Southwest : law, medicine and sexuality in Germany and its colonies / Robert Deam Tobin -- Explaining R.D. Karve's philosophy of sexual science : women's reform, anti-Brahminism and debates over male sexuality in western India, 1925-1940 / Shrikant Botre and Douglas E. Haynes -- The "Ellis Effect" : translating sexual science in Republican China, 1911-1949 / Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu -- Takahashi Tetsu and popular sexology in early postwar Japan, 1945-1970 / Mark McLelland -- Mexican sexology and male homosexuality : genealogies and global contexts, 1860-1957 / Ryan Jones -- The science of sexual difference : Ogura Seizaburō, Hiratsuka Raichō, and the intersection of sexology and feminism in early twentieth-century Japan / Michiko Suzuki -- Time for sex : the education of desire and the conduct of childhood in global/Hindu sexology / Ishita Pande -- Latin eugenics and sexual knowledge in Italy, Spain and Argentina : international networks across the Atlantic / Chiara Beccalossi -- "Forms so attentuated that they merge into normality itself" : Alexander Lipschutz, Gregorio Marañón, and theories of intersexuality in Chile, c.1930 / Kurt MacMillan -- "Tyranny of orgasm" : global governance of sexuality from Bombay, 1930s-1950s / Sanjam Ahluwalia -- Magnus Hirschfeld's Onnagata / Rainer Herrn -- Agnes Smedley between Berlin, Bombay and Beijing : sexology, Communism and national independence / Veronika Fuechtner -- The limits of transnationalism : the case of Max Marcuse / Kristen Leng -- Afterword / Howard Chiang