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Attitudes towards the replication crisis seem to me to vary between researchers in any given social science discipline. Those (careless?) empirical researchers

by pmyteh 6y ago

Attitudes towards the replication crisis seem to me to vary between researchers in any given social science discipline. Those (careless?) empirical researchers whose careers are being retrospectively ripped apart are inevitably horrified (and coming up with a huge range of arguments both reasonable and unreasonable as to why they shouldn't) while theorists are mostly happy and younger empiricists are taking up the reproducability/better science challenge with some enthusiasm. Likewise, attitudes to perfect citation vary wildly. I don't care as long as it's vaguely consistent, which is a common (but not universal) position in my sub-discipline. I'm not sure how much of your experiences are specifically a feature of management research rather than the social sciences in general. I spent a bit of time studying management (and being a manager, in pre-academic times), though now I'm a computational political communication academic. Management research is seen by the rest of us as a bit weird - a bit of an outsider discipline, with different attitudes and surprisingly little scholarly overlap. I wouldn't expect that many political scientists or sociologists to be Taylorists, for example. Publish or perish, boring papers, and problematic academic management on the other hand - that is very familiar.

NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
Interesting, thank you for commenting! Popular management research does seem like an extra easy target... I have had exposure to several social science departments across continents, not just management, and those members that could be described as "mainstream" are somewhat lacking in reflexivity, with some exceptions. (When they are critical, they stand out extra bright, like Alvesson, Wilmott, Rowlinson) But about management research. When a leading critical figure in the field summarizes it as follows: "Whilst there are plenty of theories in management, there are no laws" [P.Griseri,as quoted by P. Morris in "Reconstructing project management" ], one could wonder if that state of affairs could perhaps be explained by deeply ingrained subservience of management research to industry [ as described by Alvesson and other Critical Management Studies (CMS) practitioners]. As far as Taylorism, there may not be self-identification in the field per se, but whether taylorism, puritanism or any other -ism linked to a fundamental desire for subservience, control and performance measurement as sound management practice could be described as to run deep. ( A gem of a paper is "The impact of Puritan ideology on aspects of project management" by Whitty & Schultz ) I have been doing some preliminary experiments with applying CMS to recruitment - a short summary could be "treating developers with respect by providing necessary information and establishing transparency in the job announcement increases responses dramatically. Who knew!" Another interest of mine lies in sociophysics, which I have a huge reading list to catch up on. Did you have any sociophysics topics that attracted your interest in relation to political communication?
- pmyteh 6y ago
  I had to look up the word 'sociophysics', which isn't used in my part of the discipline, so probably not! There are a lot of physics-derived tools that are coming into increasing use, though. Half of social network analysis seems to come from sociology, and the other half (the highly computational part, in the main) from physics. I've done bits of network analysis (one of my better-recieved recent papers was applying network partitioning to the problem of identifying the edges of news 'stories' in sets of articles) but I do most of my stuff in the text analysis space where NLP/topic modelling/matrix factorisation stuff is making most of the running, and that's mostly drawing from CS rather than physics.
  - NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
    Sociophysics has not been met with a wide welcome in management studies, perhaps due to its approach to proof. It requires a lot more work than popular hand-waving. It will be interesting to see whether physics-derived tools and approaches will lead to improvement in social studies in regards to current critical concerns. It is unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) a far-away in the future area for me, as just applying viewpoints outside of the mainstream to experimental research in management has a lot of low-hanging fruit with potentially significant impact. That could be one of the benefits of the humanities aspect of management studies, it is well justified (though not popular) to take a humanitarian (and thus biased) stance towards improving the well-being of employees.

by pmyteh 6y ago

NotPavlovsDog 6y ago

Interesting, thank you for commenting! Popular management research does seem like an extra easy target... I have had exposure to several social science departments across continents, not just management, and those members that could be described as "mainstream" are somewhat lacking in reflexivity, with some exceptions. (When they are critical, they stand out extra bright, like Alvesson, Wilmott, Rowlinson) But about management research. When a leading critical figure in the field summarizes it as follows: "Whilst there are plenty of theories in management, there are no laws" [P.Griseri,as quoted by P. Morris in "Reconstructing project management" ], one could wonder if that state of affairs could perhaps be explained by deeply ingrained subservience of management research to industry [ as described by Alvesson and other Critical Management Studies (CMS) practitioners]. As far as Taylorism, there may not be self-identification in the field per se, but whether taylorism, puritanism or any other -ism linked to a fundamental desire for subservience, control and performance measurement as sound management practice could be described as to run deep. ( A gem of a paper is "The impact of Puritan ideology on aspects of project management" by Whitty & Schultz ) I have been doing some preliminary experiments with applying CMS to recruitment - a short summary could be "treating developers with respect by providing necessary information and establishing transparency in the job announcement increases responses dramatically. Who knew!" Another interest of mine lies in sociophysics, which I have a huge reading list to catch up on. Did you have any sociophysics topics that attracted your interest in relation to political communication?

pmyteh 6y ago
I had to look up the word 'sociophysics', which isn't used in my part of the discipline, so probably not! There are a lot of physics-derived tools that are coming into increasing use, though. Half of social network analysis seems to come from sociology, and the other half (the highly computational part, in the main) from physics. I've done bits of network analysis (one of my better-recieved recent papers was applying network partitioning to the problem of identifying the edges of news 'stories' in sets of articles) but I do most of my stuff in the text analysis space where NLP/topic modelling/matrix factorisation stuff is making most of the running, and that's mostly drawing from CS rather than physics.
- NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
  Sociophysics has not been met with a wide welcome in management studies, perhaps due to its approach to proof. It requires a lot more work than popular hand-waving. It will be interesting to see whether physics-derived tools and approaches will lead to improvement in social studies in regards to current critical concerns. It is unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) a far-away in the future area for me, as just applying viewpoints outside of the mainstream to experimental research in management has a lot of low-hanging fruit with potentially significant impact. That could be one of the benefits of the humanities aspect of management studies, it is well justified (though not popular) to take a humanitarian (and thus biased) stance towards improving the well-being of employees.