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Society needs more from social sciences than they have delivered, and this book offers openings. To the society at large, quantitative social scientists presently seem no better at prediction than qualitative historians, philosophers, and journalists — they just look more boring. computers could be a boon to social sciences, but they have turned out a curse in disguise, by enabling people with insufficient understanding of scientific process to use canned computer programs and grind out reams of numbers parading as “results,” to be printed — and hardly ever used again. One may discard this book on the basis of errors of detail, but the problems it points out will still be there. Unless corrected, they will lead to a Ptolemaic dead end.

This is the first of four chapters offering a postempiricist methodology for policy inquiry based on the logic of practical discourse, and examines the problems of policy research from an epistemological perspective. Focusing on the empiricist and technocratic aspects of policy analysis, the discussion first offers a critique of the neopositivist premises that have shaped and guided the enterprise; then, drawing on the theories of social constructivism and practical discourse, it sets out the foundations of a value-critical postempiricist framework for policy inquiry, emphasizing the need to integrate empirical and normative inquiry. The analysis shows the way in which what is understood as ‘science’ is influenced by the socio-historical context in which in emerges, and that social meanings and value judgements are built into scientific practices otherwise described as ‘value neutral’. In particular, it shows that in a world of multiple realities there is no ‘objective’ reality in which a scientific social science can anchor itself, rather, social science –– like science generally Vis a social activity and its products are based more on consensus than proof in the traditional understanding of the term. Towards this end, postempiricism offers a craft-oriented discursive or deliberative approach to policy science, one that better explains what social scientists are already doing; in this view, the analyst functions as an interpretive mediator between the available analytical frameworks of social science and the competing local perspectives. The chapter closes with a discussion of the problem of relativism traditionally associated with intepretivist approaches.

Some aspects of social sciences can be made more predictive and, in this sense, more like natural sciences. Electoral studies have many variables with a natural zero (ratio variables), which makes them amenable to certain types of logical model building and sets them apart from other social sciences. Still, plenty of ratio variables occur in other social sciences too, and here electoral studies may offer valuable methodological tips. From temperature to political involvement, looser scales sometimes have a way to turn into ratio scales, if we dare to play with them.

This concluding chapter suggests that for the human sciences, there is nothing to fear in the rise to prominence of neurobiological attempt to understand and account for human behavior. It is important to point out the many weaknesses in the experimental setups and procedures, for example, in the uses of animal models and in the interpretations of brain imaging data generated in the highly artificial social situations of the laboratory. In the necessity for this criticism, there is also opportunity. There are many opportunities for a more positive role for the social and human sciences that engages directly with these truth claims, that seizes on the new openness provided by conceptions of the neuromolecular, plastic, and social brain to find some rapprochement.

This introductory chapter makes the point that public policy studies has been one of the fastest growing specializations in the social sciences, and has largely been an American phenomenon. It looks at what the field includes, and at the previously dominant practice of technocratic policy analysis. The problems that have emerged with the technocratic practice of policy-analytic research are then examined by looking at the policy orientation in its broader political context. The emphasis here is on the American story, which best illustrates the limitations of the practice as it has emerged. The last section of the chapter looks at the postempiricist alternative. Policy argumentation and discourse (participatory policy analysis).

This chapter traces the institutional rise of sociology within the academic social sciences in Great Britain during the 1960s. It shows that sociology was directly implicated in claims to modernity and novelty during this period, and that it can be considered as a social movement concerned to challenge traditional forms of knowing in the name of a new, rational mode of expertise which embraced science. The chapter considers the launch of New Society in the early 1960s and suggests that, during this period, the social scientists were not innocent observers of change, but imported it as an essential feature of their self-identity.

When a number of social scientists were given synthetic data that fitted the universal law of gravitation, they all missed the underlying pattern. Yet they found results satisfactory and complete by the current social science norms: high R ², degree of significance of input factors, and the direction of their impact. The design of this experiment can be criticized, but it still should give us pause. If some social phenomena existed that were of the form most prevalent in physics, then the quantitative methods currently dominant in social sciences might not suffice to discover them.

The conclusion draws together several of the main themes of the book, arguing that political arithmetic can only be understood properly from the manuscripts he circulated in his lifetime, and in the context of his lifelong engagement with natural philosophy and his Baconian interpretation of the methods and purposes of science. Petty's project to transform government through the systematic manipulation of populations in the interests of the state undermines any retrospective distinction between his contribution to social science and his interest in social engineering; the concept of ‘biopolitics', though equally anachronistic, is more appropriate. By the same token, however, the massive expansion (in real terms) of demographic manipulation after Petty's death suggests that political arithmetic's ambitions were not abandoned but merely concealed.

This chapter argues that the common social science focus on identifying a singular authentic meaning of social phenomena leads us to misunderstand the role of religion in contemporary life. Using data drawn from a national study of the American pro-life movement, it argues that the religious sphere frequently and easily overlaps with everyday domains such as politics and the family. In this overlap, events take on a polysemous character; they contain within them multiple, irreducible meanings that become available to both participants and outside observers. Ultimately, such polysemy is more than just an intellectual curiosity or problem of categorization; it is a key site of human agency in creating new possibilities for meaning and action.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about socio-cultural change in Britain between 1940 and 1970. It examines how social science sampling methods associated with letter writing, questionnaires, interviews, and surveys mined down to reveal mundane, ordinary life, in miniature, and how such research was implicated in a broader process of building a modern, rational, post-imperial nation. The chapter shows how the deployment of new research techniques involved the remaking of politics and culture, notably as the arts and the humanities were increasingly demarcated away from the everyday.

This chapter explores various trajectories of theoretical development that have helped to shape contemporary understandings of the context and role of accounting as social science. The chapter provides a set of sensitivities with which to engage the diverse analytical and empirical problems that are dealt with in the contributions that follow. Given the breadth and scope of the contributions to this collection, and still more the wider field, this should be understood as an attempt to sketch the contours of some intriguing points of cohesion rather than as an exhaustive mapping of the field overall.