The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals its Secrets by Michael Blastland

Author:Michael Blastland [Blastland, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2019-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

Incoherence

The issue we are looking at is how well principle or theory gives us usable knowledge. The complaint that social science in particular fails to do this too often is not new. There is a large body of scepticism about the utility of the social science knowledge base, often from people working within its various disciplines. Insults include one from an economist that economics ‘positively extols esoteric irrelevance’, another that management theory is bedevilled by ‘obfuscation, jargon and faddishness’, or that marketing’s knowledge base is ‘more marsh than bedrock’. One book belittles social science as ‘sorcery’, another says ‘in the social sciences, little is known or predictable that is deeper than triviality or different from common sense knowledge’, another that ‘the ruling emperor of social sciences has no clothes’. And on it goes. A recurrent complaint especially relevant to us is that there’s a paucity of empirical generalizations – ‘an empirical literature consisting almost entirely of unverified, fragile results whose role in the development of cumulative knowledge is of the shakiest kind’.6

That’s a flavour of the bad press. On the acclaimed side – and it deserves to be – you could, for example, place a host of Victorian social reformers – pioneers of social science in their observational studies of living and working conditions, such as Charles Booth, Edwin Chadwick and Joseph Rowntree – who chronicled poverty, poor housing and other social conditions, and contributed to an epoch of social reform.

Duncan Watts, a social scientist, formerly an academic now principal researcher for Microsoft, has heard it all before, but wonders if it’s time the complaints were taken more seriously. On one hand, he defends social science from detractors who expect it simply to solve society’s deepest problems. The questions it tackles are immensely tough, he says, and it’s not through laziness or stupidity that answers are hard to come by. On the other hand, as he wrote in an influential article, social science could be a lot more ‘visibly useful to the world’.7

In an interview with me he offered an example of how social science fails: the story of his current boss, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. When Satya Nadella decided on a corporate reorganization, Duncan said, he would have found that social science had an immense amount to say, but almost none of it was useful.

We have a very extensive literature on management science and organisation science that goes back maybe a hundred years. And there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of papers that are published in these disciplines. And you might think that if you were going to do something like that [restructure Microsoft], you would want to go and read a discipline called ‘Organisation Science’. Surely, organisation science would tell you how to make your organisation more efficient.

But you would be wrong about that. And if Satya Nadella had gone and read a hundred papers in this field, he probably would have learned nothing that would have helped him answer his question and he probably would have just gotten really, really confused and, you know, possibly incapacitated.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.