The purpose of this book is to examine how ideology operates--in the sense of influencing the conduct of inquiry--in the policy sciences, defined as economics, political science, and sociology. The author seeks to identify the main ideologies and show how each ideology produces a preference for certain problems, methods, and hypotheses; how it sensitizes scientists to certain phenomena and suggests certain interpretations of those phenomena; and how it closes off other phenomena and concepts from investigation and testing, or at least distorts that investigation. In this book, Diesing critically examines all the major schools of policy-related social thought from 1930 to 1975. He deals with Neoclassical Economics and its various applications, the Keynesians, the Systems Approach, the Schumpeter perspective, the Critical Intellectuals, the Pluralists, the J. K. Galbraith School, New Left Marxism, and the Ecological Paradigm of Schumacher and others. The world looks different if your perspective is that of a rational small businessman working in a society of hypothetical perfect competition, as opposed to that of a proletarian, looking up at your oppressors. Part One is descriptive and evaluative, considering each ideology in turn; Part Two considers the policy implications. "In 1982, Diesing published a remarkable book entitled Science and Ideology in the Policy Sciences. When I interviewed Diesing in Buffalo in the summer of 1984, he told me that to date, the publication had been reviewed in only two professional journals. I was astounded. Science & Ideology...was the best book I had read in a decade, and it related directly to all the policy sciences. The lack of professional response may partially reflect Diesing's disinterest in self-promotion, but beyond this is the 'community' problem. Scholars are recognized within disciplines, but there is only a tiny 'community of social science'. I consider this to be the most brilliant of Diesing's books. Like all of Diesing's works, it remains highly relevant today."--from the introduction by Richard Hartwig.

Does science work best in a democracy? Were 'Soviet' or 'Nazi' science fundamentally different from science in the USA? These questions have been passionately debated in the recent past. Particular developments in science took place under particular political regimes, but they may or may not have been directly determined by them. Science and Ideology brings together a number of comparative case studies to examine the relationship between science and the dominant ideology of a state. Cybernetics in the USA is compared to France and the Soviet Union. Postwar Allied science policy in occupied Germany is juxtaposed to that in Japan. The essays are narrowly focussed, yet cover a wide range of countries and ideologies. The collection provides a unique comparative history of scientific policies and practices in the 20th century.

This text takes a set of central topics from ancient Greek medicine and biology - relating especially to beliefs about animals, women and drugs - and studies first the interaction between scientific theorising and folklore, and second the ideological character of ancient scientific inquiry. Within this framework the author looks at the development of zoological taxonomy, the repercussions of prevailing Greek assumptions concerning the inferiority of the female sex on medical practice, pharmacology and anatomy. Anthropology is used to provide a comparative dimension to the discussion of ancent Greek popular beliefs.

It seems like most of what we read about the academic social sciences in the mainstream media is negative. The field is facing mounting criticism, as canonical studies fail to replicate, questionable research practices abound, and researcher social and political biases come under fire. In response to these criticisms, Matt Grossmann, in How Social Science Got Better, provides a robust defense of the current state of the social sciences. Applying insights from the philosophy, history, and sociology of science and providing new data on research trends and scholarly views, he argues that, far from crisis, social science is undergoing an unparalleled renaissance of ever-broader understanding and application. According to Grossmann, social science research today has never been more relevant, rigorous, or self-reflective because scholars have a much better idea of their blind spots and biases. He highlights how scholars now closely analyze the impact of racial, gender, geographic, methodological, political, and ideological differences on research questions; how the incentives of academia influence our research practices; and how universal human desires to avoid uncomfortable truths and easily solve problems affect our conclusions. Though misaligned incentive structures of course remain, a messy, collective deliberation across the research community has shifted us into an unprecedented age of theoretical diversity, open and connected data, and public scholarship. Grossmann's wide-ranging account of current trends will necessarily force the academy's many critics to rethink their lazy critiques and instead acknowledge the path-breaking advances occurring in the social sciences today.

In Science and Ethics, Bernard Rollin examines the ideology that denies the relevance of ethics to science. Providing an introduction to basic ethical concepts, he discusses a variety of ethical issues that are relevant to science and how they are ignored, to the detriment of both science and society. These include research on human subjects, animal research, genetic engineering, biotechnology, cloning, xenotransplantation, and stem cell research. Rollin also explores the ideological agnosticism that scientists have displayed regarding subjective experience in humans and animals, and its pernicious effect on pain management. Finally, he articulates the implications of the ideological denial of ethics for the practice of science itself in terms of fraud, plagiarism, and data falsification. In engaging prose and with philosophical sophistication, Rollin cogently argues in favor of making education in ethics part and parcel of scientific training.

Designing Social Inquiry focuses on improving qualitative research, where numerical measurement is either impossible or undesirable. What are the right questions to ask? How should you define and make inferences about causal effects? How can you avoid bias? How many cases do you need, and how should they be selected? What are the consequences of unavoidable problems in qualitative research, such as measurement error, incomplete information, or omitted variables? What are proper ways to estimate and report the uncertainty of your conclusions?