For the past fifty years anxiety over the problem of naturalism has driven debates in social theory. One side pursues the idea of social science as another kind of natural science, while the other radically rejects the possibility of objective and explanatory knowledge. All of the various developments in social scientific theory since then have reflected this dichotomy between naturalism and post-modernism. "Interpretation and Social Knowledge" suggests a third way, reframing this debate and offering a synthetic vision that sets out a new understanding of sociological interpretation. Analyzing the work of writers such as Theda Skocpol, Clifford Geertz, Leela Gandhi, Roy Bhaskar, Foucault, and Habermas, Isaac Ariail Reed delineates three epistemic modes of social research: realism, normativism, and interpretivism. Reed argues that the last mode provides a way forward for an anti-naturalist sociology that overcomes the opposition between interpretation and explanation and uses theory to build concrete, historically specific causal explanations of social phenomena. Both an examination of and a theoretical meditation on how social investigators do their work, "Interpretation and Social Knowledge" is an ingenious and fruitful exploration of what makes the human sciences uniquely capable of revealing and explaining our world.

Much of what humans know we cannot say. And much of what we do we cannot describe. For example, how do we know how to ride a bike when we can't explain how we do it? Abilities like this were called 'tacit knowledge' by physical chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, but here Harry Collins analyzes the term, and the behavior, in much greater detail, often departing from Polanyi's treatment. In "Tacit and Explicit Knowledge", Collins develops a common conceptual language to bridge the concept's disparate domains by explaining explicit knowledge and classifying tacit knowledge. Collins then teases apart the three very different meanings, which, until now, all fell under the umbrella of Polanyi's term: relational tacit knowledge (things we could describe in principle if someone put effort into describing them), somatic tacit knowledge (things our bodies can do but we cannot describe how, like balancing on a bike), and collective tacit knowledge (knowledge we draw that is the property of society, such as the rules for language). Thus, bicycle riding consists of some somatic tacit knowledge and some collective tacit knowledge, such as the knowledge that allows us to navigate in traffic. The intermixing of the three kinds of tacit knowledge has led to confusion in the past; Collins's book will at last unravel the complexities of the idea. Tacit knowledge drives everything from language, science, education, and management to sports, art, and our interaction with technology. In Collins' able hands, it also functions at last as a framework for understanding human behavior in a range of disciplines.

Social scientists seek to develop systematic ways to understand how people make meaning and how the meanings they make shape them and the world in which they live. But how do we measure such processes? Measuring Culture is an essential point of entry for both those new to the field and those who are deeply immersed in the measurement of meaning. Written collectively by a team of leading qualitative and quantitative sociologists of culture, the book considers three common subjects of measurement—people, objects, and relationships—and then discusses how to pivot effectively between subjects and methods. Measuring Culture takes the reader on a tour of the state of the art in measuring meaning, from discussions of neuroscience to computational social science. It provides both the definitive introduction to the sociological literature on culture as well as a critical set of case studies for methods courses across the social sciences.

Like many organizations and social movements, the Third Republic French labour movement exhibited a marked tendency to schism into competing sectarian organizations. During the roughly 50-year period from the fall of the Paris Commune to the creation of the powerful French Communist Party, the French labour movement shifted from schism to broad-based solidarity and back to schism. In this 2001 book, Ansell analyses the dynamic interplay between political mobilization, organization-building, and ideological articulation that produced these shifts between schism and solidarity. The aim is not only to shed light on the evolution of the Third Republic French labour movement, but also to develop a more generic understanding of schism and solidarity in organizations and social movements. To develop this broader understanding, the book builds on insights drawn from sociological analyses of Protestant sects and anthropological studies of segmentary societies, as well as from organization and social movement theory.

This book illustrates a set of tools - story grammars, relational data models, and network models - that can be profitably used for the collection, organization, and analysis of narrative data in socio-historical research. A story grammar, or Subject-Action-Object and their modifiers, is the linguistic tool the author uses to structure narrative for the purpose of collecting event data. Relational database models make such complex data collection schemes practically feasible in a computer environment. Finally, network models are a statistical tool best suited to analyze this type of data. Driven by the metaphors of the journal (from ...to) and the alchemy (words into numbers), the book leads the reader throughout a number of paths, from substantive to methodological issues, across time and disciplines: sociology, linguistics, literary criticism, history, statistics, computer science, philosophy, cognitive psychology, political science.

This book is an expanded and revised edition of the author's critically acclaimed volume Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. In twenty-six succinct chapters, Jon Elster provides an account of the nature of explanation in the social sciences. He offers an overview of key explanatory mechanisms in the social sciences, relying on hundreds of examples and drawing on a large variety of sources-psychology, behavioral economics, biology, political science, historical writings, philosophy and fiction. Written in accessible and jargon-free language, Elster aims at accuracy and clarity while eschewing formal models.

《弗洛伊德与哲学：论解释》脱胎于1961年耶鲁大学Terry讲座，从全新的解释学视角讨论了弗洛伊德的理论。保罗•利科并不是从心理学的角度来探讨弗洛伊德，他关注的是弗洛伊德理论的结构，以及弗洛伊德所引入的对人的理解，因此它是一个哲学的探讨。全书分为三部分，围绕三个问题展开，首先是认识论的问题，即心理分析是一个什么样的解释学问题，以及这个解释学问题如何看待人类的欲望与行为的关系。其次，是相对主义的哲学问题，解释学如何阐发一个新的自我理解的观点。最后，他探讨了一个辨证论的问题，即弗洛伊德的解释是否排除了其他文化？

An innovative and accessible guide to doing social research in the digital age
In just the past several years, we have witnessed the birth and rapid spread of social media, mobile phones, and numerous other digital marvels. In addition to changing how we live, these tools enable us to collect and process data about human behavior on a scale never before imaginable, offering entirely new approaches to core questions about social behavior. Bit by Bit is the key to unlocking these powerful methods―a landmark book that will fundamentally change how the next generation of social scientists and data scientists explores the world around us.
Bit by Bit is the essential guide to mastering the key principles of doing social research in this fast-evolving digital age. In this comprehensive yet accessible book, Matthew Salganik explains how the digital revolution is transforming how social scientists observe behavior, ask questions, run experiments, and engage in mass collaborations. He provides a wealth of real-world examples throughout, and also lays out a principles-based approach to handling ethical challenges in the era of social media.
Bit by Bit is an invaluable resource for social scientists who want to harness the research potential of big data and a must-read for data scientists interested in applying the lessons of social science to tomorrow’s technologies.
Illustrates important ideas with examples of outstanding research
Combines ideas from social science and data science in an accessible style and without jargon
Goes beyond the analysis of “found” data to discuss the collection of “designed” data such as surveys, experiments, and mass collaboration
Features an entire chapter on ethics
Includes extensive suggestions for further reading and activities for the classroom or self-study

Where and when have investigators aspired to study human culture with more trustworthy or 'objective' methods borrowed from the natural sciences? This book revisits the dominant scientific method, 'coding,' with which investigators from sociology to literary criticism have sampled texts and catalogued their cultural messages. By returning to the primary documents used in canonical examples of such research, the author demonstrates that the celebrated hard outputs rest on misleading samples and on unfeasible classifying of the texts' meanings. The problems are so consistent, they reveal why it is a contradiction in principle to try to create 'data' out of such complex texts. As an alternative, the author illustrates how a purely humanistic reliance on families of symptomatic exemplars sponsors research that is retraceable and more accurate and transparent in its conclusions. The book addresses scholars in the field of science studies as well as practitioners across the social sciences who investigate culture.

Advances in qualitative methods and recent developments in the philosophy of science have led to an emphasis on explanation via reference to causal mechanisms. This book argues that the method known as process tracing is particularly well suited to developing and assessing theories about such mechanisms. The editors begin by establishing a philosophical basis for process tracing - one that captures mainstream uses while simultaneously being open to applications by interpretive scholars. Equally important, they go on to establish best practices for individual process-tracing accounts - how micro to go, when to start (and stop), and how to deal with the problem of equifinality. The contributors then explore the application of process tracing across a range of subfields and theories in political science. This is an applied methods book which seeks to shrink the gap between the broad assertion that 'process tracing is good' and the precise claim 'this is an instance of good process tracing'.

"Constructing Social Theories" presents to the reader a range of strategies for constructing theories, and in a clear, rigorous, and imaginative manner, illustrates how they can be applied. Arthur L. Stinchcombe argues that theories should not be invented in the abstract--or applied "a priori" to a problem--but should be dictated by the nature of the data to be explained. This work was awarded the Sorokin prize by the American Sociological Association as the book that made an outstanding contribution to the progress of sociology in 1970.

Methods of Discovery is organized around strategies for deepening arguments in order to find the best ways to study social phenomena. This exciting book is not about the mechanics of doing social science research, but about habits of thinking that enable students to use those mechanics in new ways, by coming up with new ideas and combining them more effectively with old ones. Examples from throughout the social sciences help show how these moves can open new lines of thinking. Each chapter covers several moves and their reverses (if these exist), discussing particular examples of the move as well as its logical and theoretical structure. This book offers readers a new way of thinking about directions for their research and new ways to imagine information relevant to their research problems.

详细介绍支持向量机、Boosting、最大熵、条件随机场等十个统计学习方法。

Some of the most important questions of the social sciences in the twentieth century have been posed by scholars working at the intersections of social theory and history viewed on a grand scale. The core essays of this book focus on the careers and contributions of nine of these scholars: Marc Bloch, Karl Polanyi, S. N. Eisenstadt, Reinhard Bendix, Perry Anderson, E. P. Thompson, Charles Tilly, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Barrington Moore, Jr. The essays convey a vivid sense of the vision and values each of these major scholars brings (or bought) to his work and analyze and evaluate the research designs and methods each used in his most important works. The introduction and conclusion discuss the long-running tradition of historically grounded research in sociology, while the conclusion also provides a detailed discussion and comparison of three recurrent strategies for bringing historical evidence and theoretical ideas to bear upon one another. informative, thought-provoking, and unusually practical, the book offers fascinating and relevant reading to sociologists, social historians, historically oriented political economists, and anthropologists - and, indeed, to anyone who wants to learn more about the ideas and methods of some of the best-known scholars in the modern social sciences.

《社会科学中的研究设计》重点介绍了运用于政治科学领域的研究设计，以定性研究设计为主题，但同样适用于其他社会科学学科的学生，并且对定量取向的学者也有一定的启发意义。作者整合了定性研究和定量研究所采用方法的共性，目的是提供有效的描述性或因果性推论。作者还进一步指出，定量研究的科学推论原则和建模方法也能帮助定性研究者提供得出更有逻辑、更可靠的推论。

Philosophy of Social Science provides a tightly argued yet accessible introduction to the philosophical foundations of the human sciences, including economics, anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology, history, and the disciplines emerging at the intersections of these subjects with biology. Philosophy is unavoidable for social scientists because the choices they make in their disciplines force them to take sides on philosophical matters. Conversely, the philosophy of social science is equally necessary for philosophers since the social sciences must inform their understanding of human action, norms, and social institutions. The third edition retains an illuminating interpretation of the enduring relations between the conduct of inquiry in the social sciences and the fundamental problems of philosophy, with accessible considerations of positivism, European philosophy of history, causation, statistical laws, quantitative models, and postempiricist social science, and it reflects developments in social research over the past two decades that have informed debate in the philosophy of social science.

Citing the critical importance of empirical work to social movement research, the editors of this volume have put together the first systematic overview of the major methods used by social movement theorists. Original chapters cover the range of techniques: surveys, formal models, discourse analysis, in-depth interviews, participant observation, case studies, network analysis, historical methods, protest event analysis, macro-organizational analysis, and comparative politics. Each chapter includes a methodological discussion, examples of studies employing the method, an examination of its strengths and weaknesses, and practical guidelines for its application.

The book considers the past accomplishments and future agendas of comparative-historical research in the social sciences. It defines the distinctiveness of this type of research and explores its strengths in explaining important outcomes (e.g. revolutions, social provision, democracy) in the world. It includes sections on substantive research accomplishments, methodology, and theory, and features essays by some of the most important political scientists and sociologists currently working.
This review of the accomplishments and future agendas of comparative historical research in the social sciences explores its strengths in explaining important worldwide outcomes (e.g., revolutions, social provision, democracy). It includes sections on substantive research accomplishments, methodology, and theory, and features essays by some of the most important political scientists and sociologists currently working.