The rise of 'nuance' in the Social Sciences

About two years ago, we put a link to Kieran Healy's work titled "Fuck nuance". His study has now been published as a paper in Sociological Theory (ungated version here). One of his main arguments is that the search for more nuanced understandings of social phenomena often end up obstructing the development of robust social theories. This is certainly open for debate.

Although Kieran's paper focuses on studies in Sociology, he has recently expanded some his analysis to other fields of the social sciences, showing how the the percentage of articles mentioning the words ‘nuance’ or ‘nuanced’ has sharply risen since the 1990s in pretty much every field.

credit: Kieran Healy

Assorted Links

1. Taking Data Visualization From Eye Candy to Efficiency
   
   
2. Fuck Nuance, a manifesto for more bold social theories, by Kieran Healy (via Analise Real)
   
   
3. Machine Learning Classes at Oxford (videos, presentation and code)
   
   
4. 2015 Ig Nobel prizes: a study shows that nearly all mammals take the same amount of time to urinate (about 21 seconds)
   
   
5. There is a Space Syntax Toolkit for QGIS (ht Renato Saboya, who runs a great blog about urbanism written in Portuguese: Urbanidades)
   
   
6. 10 things you need to know about the Magna Carta
   
   
7. Slum tourism and its discontents. Not exactly a new article but a good summary of arguments (ht Fabiana Freitas, my lovely partner)
   
   
8. The Value of Democracy: Evidence from Road Building in Kenya [unagated paper]
   
   
9. The Human Mortality Explorer. Visualizing Death across Time and Space via (Bernardo Queiroz)
   
   

Quote of the Day

"Economics is all about how people make choices. Sociology is all about why they don't have any choices to make" (James Duesenberry commenting a paper by Gary Becker) ht Leo Monasterio

Listen to Durkheim delivering a talk

Kieran Healy (Duke Uni) and Marion Fourcade (Berkeley) found this recording of Émile Durkheim delivering a talk in 1911 (ht Pedro Souza). This is an amazing piece of history as Durkheim is one the the founding fathers of Sociology. He is also my favourite author of the three little pigs of Sociology, Durkheim, Weber and Marx.

In his blog, Kieran Healy writes:

"It’s a fragment of a piece titled Jugements de valeur et jugements de réalité, which you can read in French here. It was recorded in 1911 at a meeting in Bologna, which I think is one of only quite few times that Durkheim left France in order to attend a conference. Here it is. (There’s a short bit of dead silence at the beginning.)"

If you don’t see the player, download the clip directly from here. Unfortunately, Durkheim's power point presentation is not available :(

Related Links:

• How old is the stuff sociologists cite?
• Key Works in Sociology
• The rise and fall of Urban Sociology (?)
• The Suicide Paradox
• The Social Network Effect Behind Obesity

The Social Network Effect Behind Obesity

This is a nice talk by Nicholas Christakis on Sociology and Social Networks. It is very concise and well presented covering a quite broad range of topics such as suicide, social capital, collective behavior and social networks.

What attracted my attention though was the part on the Social Network Effect Behind Obesity, where Christakis talks about this paper he and James H. Fowler have published in The New England Journal of Medicine (in the video, skip to 19:06). Quite impressive!

The most cited authors in Sociology

Inspired by this, I've decided to ask: Who is the most cited author in Sociology of all time? I'll give you a hint. It is not E. Durkheim, nor K. Marx. It is not P. Bourdieu either, although he is close to the top of the list.

This ranking is based on Google Scholar Citations page. Of course there are unregistered authors, what makes this ranking very inaccurate (although I believe the two first positions are correct).**

Anyway, the real purpose of this post is to encourage you to register at Google Scholar Citations. This is one of the best ways for academics to compute citation metrics and track them over time.

You only need a gmail account and Google does the rest for you. And anyone can register!

**A few authors missing from the ranking because they are not in Google Scholar Citations.

• Anthony Giddens
• Norbert Elias
• Manuel Castells
• David Harvey
• Robert Castel
• Saskia Sassen
• Loic Wacquant
• Ulrich Beck
• Zygmunt Bauman
• Jürgen Habermas
• Bruno Latour
• Mark Gottdiener
• This could go on and on...

How old is the stuff sociologists cite?

These figures don't consider non-US journals. It got me surprised anyway.

The median publication year in the top 100 was 1992. Of the top 100, only one piece was published in the last five years.

[Image Credit: Scatter]

Related Lik: 

• Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics

The Naked City public lecture

Renowned sociologist Sharon Zukin discussed her latest book at LSE "The Naked City: the death and life of authentic urban places"

Lectureship in urban sociology at the LSE

Some of you might be interested in this opportunity:

Lecturer position in Urban Sociology at LSE. 

(Salary: from £40,634 to £47,047 p.a. incl.)

Or maybe in this one: studentships within the field of urban and regional studies from FURS (Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies) -  applications must be received by 31 January each year... so hurry up!

Key Works in Sociology

Key Works in Sociology infographic . (via Graphic Sociology)

[Click here to enlarge the image - image credit: Norton]

I have told you that one of my favorite books in sociology is "Suicide: a study in Sociology" by Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). 

My second favorite author is Erving Goffman with his microsociology approach in "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life".

soundtrack: Chico e Caetano

off-topic: Suicide Paradox

"There are twice as many suicides in the US each year than murders."

I heard this startling stantement at the Freakonomics Radio. So I decided to write this post for two reasons. First, to recommend this podcast: The Suicide Paradox. It's really informative and  depressive  funny .

Freakonomics Radio: The Suicide Paradox.

Second, I woud like to recommend a book that I believe to be a masterpiece in Sociology. "Suicide: a study in Sociology" by Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). If you want to understand what Sociology is about and don't have anything else better to do , than you should read this book.

My favorite quote from this book is this one on suicide rate:

It "[...] express the suicidal tendency with which each society is collectively afflicted.... Every society is predisposed to produce a certain number of voluntary deaths." It sounds even better in Portuguese. "Cada sociedade está predisposta a fornecer um contingente determinado de mortes voluntárias"

in time: Greece sees suicide rates on the rise. Durkheim Would Have Predicted That One (by The Global Sociology Blog).

[Image Credit]

soundtrack for this post: Titãs.

Assorted links

1. Following an entire cohort (via Marginal Revolution)
   
   
2. On Libya migration and the future of North Africa (via Demography Matters)
   
   
3. The eternal sociology crisis (via The Global Sociology Blog). If you're a student in the middle of this crisis I would recommend you to read Peter Berger. Now, if you are already a professional and you still face this existencial problem, just don't panic. You will have to learn how to get along with this.
   
   
4. The Interactive Singles Map

The rise and fall of Urban Sociology (?)

Google has scanned 15 million books originally published from 1800 on. And they have also developed the Google Books Ngram Viewer. It's a tool that charts the usage of any word over time in literature and other books (Google books database). One could irresponsibly use it as a proxy for the popularity of words in literature. And I did!

This chart above shows how often "Urban Sociology" has appeared in the literature (Google database - english literature only) since 1800. It looks to me that the Chicago School have had played an important role in the rising 'popularity' of Urban Sociology*. And it looks that Urban Sociology is not as 'popular' as it used to be....

*obviously, it would be necessary to scrutinize other keywords to conclude this (such as the major researchers in the first Chicago School)

And here are some queries of other keywords of interest:

• Aging Population; Demographic Transition; Demography related words; urban mobility, housing bubble, 'Great Cities' as urban hierarchy (?), Space Syntax, GIS, urban, regional and environmental studies, urban and rural, etc.

And my favorites:

Traffic Jam:

Urban sprawl, compact city, smart city, smart growth, compact growth, New Urbanism.

Thanks Vinicius Netto for the tip!