Do you know who
this
is? He is (was) Adam Smith (1723 - 1790), the grandfather of economics
and political science, author of An Enquiry into the Nature and
Causes
of the Wealth of Nations (1776, the year of American
Independence),
which coincided with the death of feudal Europe and the birth of the
industrial
age, and provided a rationale for the associated revolution of economic
(and social) order with which we still live. He was known, first, as a
moral philosopher, and later and more widely as a political economist
(a
tribe or species which is now endangered, if not actually extinct,
though
may be about to make a comeback).
Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) is largely a theory of sympathy, from which he derives a trinity of principles which govern virtue and virtuous behaviour: Propriety - proper government and direction of all our affections; Prudence - judicious pursuit of our own private interest; Benevolence - the exercise of only those affections which aim at the happiness of others. In the Wealth of Nations, Smith spells out the market theory of the invisible hand, and brought his contemporaries and their descendants (including us) to see and appreciate the modern economic system for the first time, overthrowing the previous ideologies and practices of mercantilism and feudalism. Despite omissions and over-simplifications, this work remains a model of both observation and systematisation in the social sciences. However, it does not obviously include much of his thinking about sympathy. Just possibly this was because his great work preceded Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) by exactly 100 years, and Max Weber (1864 - 1920), a founding father of sociology, by 200 years.
We are all learning how to be applied social scientists. Your staff are, too! Presumably, one of the major reasons we try to do applied social science research is to better understand the way the world works. And one of the major reasons we seek to do this is to be able to manage in it and with it better. There are, of course, a lot of other reasons for doing social science research - but the major reason why we are (or can expect to be) paid to do it, rather than pursuing it as a hobby, is this utilitarian reason. The other major reason is curiosity, which appears to be a natural, hard-wired instinct among higher animals, especially homo sapiens.
Not, notice, to manage it (the world) better, which seems likely to sufficiently over-ambitious as to be self-defeating. Because, however much research we do into the way the world works, we are extremely unlikely to stumble on a simplification and abstraction which appeals to everyone more than their own ideas of the way the world works. So, if we seek to manage the world according to our own ideas, other people will ignore us or, worse, try and subvert or convert us. So we need to manage in and with it.
Social science is always going to be very difficult. We cannot adopt the pure, classical scientific method - conjecture a theory or story about the way the world works, then set up a controlled experiment to test our theory or story. We cannot do this, even if we were allowed by our fellows and peers to set up experiments, because we cannot be independent of our own experiments, so they will never by properly controlled. [In fact, the quantum mechanics and particle physicists are apparently discovering that they cannot get themselves independent of their experiments either, but that is another story.]
So, how do we do applied social science research? What, before that, is social science? You might have thought that these questions had been around long enough to have some pretty well-established and trustworthy answers by now. But no, there is no well-established and commonly understood concept of social science - other than the trivially general 'study of humans and human behaviour', or of the right and proper way to do social science. Rather, there is a large number of different notions of what social science is, and how to do research in it or with it. Roughly speaking, these different notions correspond to the different disciplines engaged in social science - the major ones being anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, economics. But within each of these disciplines, there is a number of competing alternative views about the nature of social science and thus about how to do research in it.
But we are all engaged in management of some sort (of either private businesses or of public enterprises and policies), which does not appear in my list of major social sciences. This is because management science - if there is to be such a discipline - must ultimately rest on the foundations of the fundamental social sciences, and be an integrated and coherent mixture of all these disciplines. So where is an account of the integration and coherence of the fundamental disciplines? It does not yet exist. At least I have not found it - so let me know if you think you have.
I have been wrestling with this fundamental problem of social science for sometime. You are exposed to the problems and issues in more detail in the Research Methods and Approaches session. But this is not necessarily a useful place to start a course like this - it just makes life more difficult, not easier. We will come back to this fundamental issue later.
So, in this first session, we will concentrate on what good research looks like.
[Class discussion - what do you think good, professional research should look like? Think about this and come prepared to talk about it!]
I will distribute examples of recent MSc. dissertations which have been judged by the examiners to be good and less good. You are asked to organise yourselves into groups of three or four people and read these two examples and come to your own conclusions about the quality of each and the reasons for your judgments.
We will discuss your conclusions, in the light of the examiners' conclusions, during the third session of this class. This exercise should give you some idea of the present standards and judgments on social science research, which you will need, at the very least, during the preparation of your own dissertations.
If you are just visiting this site as an MPhil or PhD student, then take some advice - read a few previous PhD theses to see what sort of stuff you are expected to produce. At the very least, it will give you some comfort and support when you hit the intellectual equivalent of the marathon runner's 'wall', as you inevitably will. If these people can win their doctorates with this sort of stuff, then surely you can!
Finally, since the whole project is so fraught with difficulty and subjectivity - let's try and have some (constructive) fun while we do it. Good luck - we are going to need it.
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