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Social sciences between knowledge and ideologies: need for philosophy -- Part I. Social and cognitive roots for reflexivity upon the research process -- Social sciences, what for? On the manifold directions of social research -- Vitenskapsteori-- - what, how and why? -- Culture or Biology? If this sounds interesting, you might be confused -- Conditional Objectivism: A Strategy for Connecting the Social Sciences and Practical Decision-Making -- Towards Reflexivity in Science: Anthropological Reflections on Science and Society -- Part II. Philosophies of explanation in the social sciences -- Explanation: guidance for social scientists -- From causality to catalysis in the social sciences -- How to identify and how to conduct research that is informative and reproducible -- Explaining social phenomena: Emergence and Levels of Explanation -- Part III. Social normativity in social sciences -- Normativity in psychology and the social sciences: Questions of universality -- The crisis in psychological science, and the need for a person-oriented approach -- Open access, a remedy to the crisis in scientific inquiry? -- Part IV. Social processes in particular sciences: challenges to interdisciplinarity -- Fragmented and Critical? Some challenges for a social organization of Norwegian sociology, and implications for innovation -- How do economists think? -- Part V.General Conclusion -- What can social science practitioners learn from philosophies of science? -- Index.

Exporting Japan examines the domestic origins of the Japanese government's policies to promote the emigration of approximately three hundred thousand native Japanese citizens to Latin America between the 1890s and the 1960s. This imperialist policy, spanning two world wars and encompassing both the pre-World War II authoritarian government and the postwar conservative regime, reveals strategic efforts by the Japanese state to control its populace while building an expansive nation beyond its territorial borders. Toake Endoh argues that Japan's emigration policy embodied the state's anxieties over domestic political stability and its intention to remove marginalized and radicalized social groups by relocating them abroad. Documenting the disproportionate focus of the southwest region of Japan as a source of emigrants, Endoh considers the state's motivations in formulating emigration policies that selected certain elements of the Japanese population for "export." She also recounts the situations migrants encountered once they reached Latin America, where they were often met with distrust and violence in the "yellow scare" of the pre-World War II period. --From publisher's description

Epigenetics has considerable potential to transform social science by embedding mutually regulative reciprocal connections between biological and social processes within the human activities it studies. This paper highlights common epigenetic methods and outlines practical considerations in the design of 'social epigenetics' research addressing the identification of biomolecular pathways, statistical inference of causality, conceptualization of the environment as a biochemical event, heritability of epigenetic alterations and intergenerational accountability, and concept of time implied by attempts to capture complex, non-linear gene-environment interactions. Finally, we reflect on the social epigenome as a conceptual space and try to identify barriers to translation, and practical and ethical issues raised by epigenetics research. In order for social epigenetics and social science to contribute to the emergence of this putative 'science of social science'' and to capture meaningful human experience they will both need to change significantly.