Tag: theory

Getting Your Theory Paper Published

As someone who works on theory myself and would love to have my own articles published, I was excited to read a recent Twitter thread by a journal reviewer who tells us how to correct common faults. Cite previous publications, help build theory, add only one or two new things, and include the empirical evidence that your ideas explain – these are some of the big do’s. This advice is practical, straight forward, and shows us how to give journal editors what they are looking for. So, maybe, all we have to do is follow the rules. But strangely, it seems that authors of papers keep repeating the errors; they start afresh, ignore past theory, are too complicated, and don’t include empirical evidence. Something strange is clearly bedeviling sociological theory.

Could the persistent failures of theory authors be telling us that educated sociologists cannot keep it simple? Why can’t they build on past sociologists? Is there a deeper problem here? Are sociologists wrongly trained or is it just that existing theory is impossible to build on? To me, this situation looks like it needs a ‘reverse hermeneutic’ analysis.

‘Building on past work,’ I twist the ideas of Habermas (1970) and Giddens (1982) around and run the hermeneutic in the opposite direction. Sociologists should not assume that the clients of any institution, in this case the publisher of a journal, are simply stubborn and resistant to learning. ‘Using the empirical evidence’ that writers get things wrong, we can draw a reverse inference. Perhaps theorists, and sociologists generally, cannot get from current theory what they really need. Maybe popular ‘ignorance’ is telling us that current theory, even when added to bit by bit, isn’t delivering for them? Isn’t the real problem that aspiring sociologists need practical explanations of society and how its people connect with it? If adding ‘itty bitty’ to theory is itself the problem, because it doesn’t weave society together conceptually, this may explain why every new article attempts to create, de novo, what is currently absent from theory.

I sympathize with these struggling theorists. I too want to work in a discipline that can define its main macro concept, society. I’m working on the answer myself but I would love to discover that someone else has done the hard work and put together a connected theory. What I am sure of is that this won’t happen by adding a few bite-sized concepts to existing theorists. So, while the reviewer offers us practical advice for getting published, my bet is that authors will continue to submit awkward, complex and non-incremental theory manuscripts. Sociologists evidently want something better from their theory; let’s hope we can soon explain society’s big questions in a conceptually connected way. On that day, authors, journal editors, reviewers, and practical sociologists will all be happier.

How good are the social science disciplines? – 3 Psychology

My overview of social sciences concludes with academic psychology.

Lay people suppose that psychologists study human motivation. If they did, we would know a lot more about modern people. Lay people want to know how their future-orientated outlook will take them through their lifetime. Unfortunately for them and for social science, decades ago academic psychology turned instead to studying lab rats, then fruit flies and, currently, brain scans. Confining itself to short term effects, psychology has been criticized for small sample sizes, statistically non-significant findings and non-replicability. Its switch to natural science might be okay if psychologists had given up trying to explain society. But they still try to. Developmental psychology inexplicably stops studying children when they reach some unspecified ‘adulthood.’ Modern people assume that we all grow and continue to learn throughout life. But psychologists can’t study this because they are averse to ‘roles’ because those things are created by society. This leads to the absurdity that children and youth are studied without society but then, suddenly and inexplicably, it’s okay for adults to relate to the people and associations of society! The public, like other social scientists, aren’t going to learn from psychology where lifelong motivations come from. Academic psychology isn’t ready to recognize social time either biographically for individuals or historically as societies change.

In clinical psychology, doctors and therapists have to categorize people’s problems under the current version of the DSM. This handbook’s distinctions don’t inspire confidence when former mental disorders vanish from newer editions of the DSM. Were older diagnoses wrong, or did society change and turn formerly abnormal mindsets into useful features of society? Over the decades we have lost the neurasthenic, the neurotic and the narcissistic. Psychology cannot tell us why its own concepts later become obsolete. Here is an academic study that fails when it faces the problem of time. Professional clinicians have to change historically and healthy human beings continue to grow over their lifetimes. Clearly psychology is unable to explain aspects of its own subject. For social scientists it’s no surprise that human beings cannot be understood simply by natural science; they are actually and irretrievably part of society!

Envy of this discipline is unlikely for anyone who wants to explain our collective social life.

Overall, my review of three disciplines shows none of them to be better than sociology. Political science, economics and psychology are all baffled by some aspect of their own subject. Practitioners in their fields work with concepts that are unknown to their academic counterparts.

So overall nothing in these social sciences looks impressively good. There are no grounds for complacency here. I want a sociology that is able to define ‘society’ and no doubt the other social sciences should improve theirs. The work will be hard but isn’t isn’t trying to really understand the world the most important thing we can do?