Suchergebnisse

Argues that the pattern of growth in the social sciences has been considerably affected by over-exposure and integration into Anglo-Saxon social scientific tradition. This intellectual dependence provided intellectual sterility. The promotion of research has been encouraged more under military-bureaucratic regimes than under civilian administrations. (AFH)

The development of new approaches in recent times has brought about major changes in the study of social and political life. They reject almost everything that has been traditionally accepted, for which they have been severely criticized. But focusing on academic issues alone won't help much. We can understand the new approaches, their concerns, their rejection of science as model, their disdain for objectivity, universality, truth, relevance and so on, more adequately by relating them to the social conditions that obtain in the West. There are, however, major differences between these conditions and those that obtain in countries like India. And the kind of problems facing these countries can be addressed meaningfully by the more traditional approach than by the approaches developed recently. This is why, while it does not seem to have much future in the West, where it originated and continued for long, it may survive, even flourish, in countries like India.

In terms of the numbers of professional social scientists & social science publications, the social sciences are thriving in Japan because of the expansion of higher education & the high literacy rate of the Japanese public. Problems still exist; before these can be discussed, it is necessary to present a brief historical background of the social sciences in Japan from the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912) to the post-war period. The present institutional framework of social science education & research (mainly in the U's) is described. Some of the current issues with regard to the development of the social sciences in Japan are: (1) insufficiency of research funding, (2) excessive reliance on government sources (as opposed to nongovernmental foundations) for funding, (3) rigidity of the faculty system which prevents the establishment of some of the newer disciplines such as cultural anthropology & international relations, & (4) lack of knowledge outside Japan of the work of Japanese social scientists since their works are not published in English. Perspectives for the future are discussed. J. N. Mayer.

The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations (C of I) was not a book that I had any long-standing plans to write. The manuscript did, however, grow out of two related and long-standing frustrations that I had with discussions in Political Science in general and International Relations in particular about research design, causation, and the basic contours of knowledge-production. First of all, people seemed to invariably conflate questions of method or technique with questions of methodology or strategy of inquiry. Thus we had and continue to have rather problematic contrasts between "qualitative" and "quantitative" ways of doing social research as though the decision to use or not to use numbers had any determinate bearing whatsoever on the epistemic status of particular empirical claims. But whether or not one uses numbers is a question of technique, not a question of strategy, and as such cannot have any such profound impact; this means that in conducting these debates about how to do our work, we are working with impoverished and misleading terminology. Second, and related, people drew on extremely thin and partial conceptions of "science" as a way of warranting their positions; this was equally true of scholars contrasting "explaining" and "understanding" as ways of knowing, and of scholars reducing the entire panoply of the philosophy of science to the triumvirate Popper-Kuhn-Lakatos as though those were the only three people to have ever intervened in the de-bate about how science worked. When I taught my Ph.D. seminar on the production of valid empirical knowledge—entitled "The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations"—I tried to allay both of these frustrations by equipping my students with a broader set of conceptual tools for thinking about these fundamental issues and articulating a defensible position with which they felt comfortable. This book derives from that seminar and from the frustrations that animated my pedagogy in that seminar.