Essays
-
The Impact of Learning Technologies on Higher Education - Pentoney, Christopher S.
Demand for higher education has created a need for learning technologies that can accommodate the individualized needs of an increasing number of students. Thinking, learning, and memory have been studied extensively in their own right, but additional research on these topics in conjunction with advanced learning technologies is needed. Developers of computerized tutoring systems, massive online courses, and educational games will benefit from forward‐thinking studies. Limitations are constantly being lifted, and research must increase in pace to ensure the integrity of upcoming learning technologies. -
The Public Nature of Private Property - Becher, Debbie
American legal academics describe private property as a set of private rights. However, liberal ideas of private control poorly describe legal practices, and thus the bundle of rights is a misleading metaphor for private property. Indeed, social theorists have long understood that property is not the ownership of a thing or a set of individual rights, but a set of social agreements about what ownership entails. In the late twentieth and early twenty‐first century, constituents have expected governments to protect the value in their properties, not just their control over the resources. Property rules involve government intimately not only in creating value but also in determining who deserves which valuable resources. -
The Social Science of Sustainability - Urpelainen, Johannes
The sustainability of socioeconomic systems is widely recognized as a key global challenge, and a social science of sustainable societies is now emerging. Social scientists have made commendable progress in quantifying the cost‐effectiveness of different environmental policy instruments, explaining their diffusion across nations, and documenting the phenomenon of historical and ongoing sustainability transitions. However, social scientists should pay much more attention to the political economy of environmental policy formulation, the challenge of building coalitions that support more ambitious policies to promote sustainability, and the development of analytical models and testable hypotheses about sustainability transitions. Owing to the inherently problem‐oriented nature of sustainability, the social science of sustainability must be strongly interdisciplinary, both among social sciences and with respect to the natural sciences. For the social science of sustainability to survive and thrive over time, academic researchers must both maintain the highest analytical standards and focus on research questions and answers that contribute to the solution of problems that practitioners face. -
Theorizing the Death of Cities - Eisinger, Peter
Although ancient cities often followed a trajectory of birth, prosperity, decline, and death, modern cities have more commonly exhibited a high degree of resilience. Yet some contemporary cities—notably some of the old industrial cities of the American Midwest—seem on an inexorable course toward death. Our understanding of urban dying and death, however, lacks theoretical elaboration. This essay suggests that an assessment of a city's morbidity can be accomplished by examining the condition of a city's three principal vital urban functions: its governance capacity, its economic stewardship, and its cultural production and preservation. By assessing these we can make a judgment about the course of urban dying, though urban death—the endstate—still eludes theoretical understanding. -
Transnational Social Practices: A Quantitative Perspective - Teney, Céline
Transnational social practices (TSP) can be defined as sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges between individuals across national borders. Over the last decades, TSP have not only become more common, but they have also developed into an increasingly salient subject of quantitative sociological research. After highlighting seminal foundational research, we introduce a set of salient topics in this emerging strand of research, including the social stratification of TSP, the link between TSP and cosmopolitan attitudes, and the issue of classifying TSP into meaningful subdimensions. We conclude with a discussion of several avenues for future research, including the relation between TSP and the increasing societal polarization between “locals” and “globals,” the need to go beyond the field's current Eurocentrism to study TSP comparatively in all parts of the world, and the prospects of methodological and technical advances in research on TSP, including network‐analytic approaches and geo‐tagged digital‐trace data. -
Trends in the Analysis of Interstate Rivalries - Thompson, William R.
The analysis of interstate rivalries is still a relatively new approach to studying conflict in world politics. The basic idea is that a disproportionate amount of interstate conflict is traceable to a very small number of state pairs that engage in recidivistic hostilities. Why not focus more on the recidivists? The question is what should we focus on? Six analytical categories are reviewed. It is argued that we have good foundations in terms of rivalry origins, maintenance/escalation, and termination/de‐escalation. We can certainly improve on the foundations but we also need to expand our understanding of rivalry “complexities,” rivalry effects, and domestic rivalries. -
Urban Data Science - Law, Tina
Data on urban life are more accessible today than ever before. New sources of “big data” such as 311 requests, recorded police activity, digitized student records, and social media capture urban life on an unprecedented temporal and geographical scale. Combined with new and improved computational social science methods for harnessing data, they promise to change urban research in important ways. In this essay, we outline urban data science—an emerging, interdisciplinary approach to studying urban life using big data and computational social science methods. We discuss three key innovations that this approach offers for urban research: (i) a broader and more multifaceted definition of neighborhood activity, (ii) greater knowledge on the role of socio‐spatial interdependencies in urban life, and (iii) more dynamic understandings of urban issues and policies. We conclude by highlighting some challenges that urban scholars must collaboratively address as they engage in this new urban data science. -
Visualizing Globalization - Mahutga, Matthew C.
This essay reviews current approaches to visualizing globalization. We give special attention to relational data‐analytic approaches that implement social network analysis and geographic information systems, and emphasize the social structure of globalization as revealed in cross‐national and city‐to‐city relations. Cross‐national relations include international trade, comemberships in international governmental organization (IGO) and international nongovernmental organization (INGO), and other kinds of cross‐national relations. City‐to‐city relations include air‐passenger flows, transnational corporation (TNC) headquarter–subsidiary relations, among others. We conclude by discussing future directions in visualizing globalization. The analytical frontier in visualizing globalization lies squarely in statistical/model‐based approaches to spatial and social network analysis. While these analytical approaches hold much promise for visualizing globalization, the dearth of geocoded subnational relational data and the complexity inherent to modeling them create significant obstacles. -
Why do States Pursue Nuclear Weapons (or Not) - Wan, Wilfred
This essay traces the evolution of the literature on the rationale behind states' pursuit of nuclear weapons, from classical neorealist explanations focusing on relative power to neoliberal institutionalist ones underlining the deterrent power of institutions and constructivist work on the impact of norms, status, and identities. We call attention to their contributions as well as their conceptual and empirical deficiencies and introduce an approach that links both nuclear ambition and nuclear restraint to models of domestic political survival. The inclusion of this previously overlooked independent variable harnesses the utility of extant approaches, allowing more effective weighing of the impact of other causal variables, while accounting for variation over time, across and within states. We take stock of more recent work employing quantitative and qualitative approaches and identify an agenda for advancing causal theories explaining why some states pursue nuclear weapons whereas others do not. -
Why Do States Sign Alliances? - Leeds, Brett Ashley
Despite the fact that policy‐makers and scholars of international politics have often expressed skepticism about the efficacy of international agreements, formal military alliances have been an important feature of international politics for centuries. This essay first introduces the dominant explanation for why states sign alliance treaties: state leaders use formal alliances to convey credible information about their future intentions to partners and adversaries. It then considers empirical evidence in support of this perspective, particularly with regard to deterrence and compliance. Following this summary, I raise five puzzles that contemporary researchers are working to resolve, but which leave room for further analysis and development. First, I discuss the challenges faced by large n empirical studies of alliance formation. Next, I ask why strong states ally with weak states and consider some of the most compelling recent explanations. Third, I consider the complicated relationships between alliances and war. Fourth, I examine how alliances affect cooperation among member states. Finally, I encourage scholars to continue a recent focus on how alliances are designed. While we have seen significant progress in understanding military alliances over the last 20 years, primarily because of the development of game‐theoretic models that capture strategic interaction and the collection of new data that allow for nuanced tests of the hypothesized relationships, there is good reason to believe that we will continue to see significant innovation over the next decade. -
World Trade Organization and Judicial Enforcement of International Trade Law - Pelc, Krzysztof J.
The Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international court of unprecedented ambition. This essay examines why countries agreed to delegate as much power as they did to this international legal body, by looking to the rise of US unilateralism during the 1970s. I then offer an overview of the DSU's functioning, which concludes that its effectiveness derives more from the way it forces countries to negotiate in the shadow of the law than from the threat of material sanctions following noncompliance. Finally, I assess some widespread concerns about how developing countries fare in the system. I show that while there does exist a cleavage between rich and poor countries in dispute settlement, it does not lie where conventional wisdom often has it.