Social Science Information

This editorial addresses the current public-health emergency and assesses its potential to become an event in the sense of a structure-transforming occurrence. This emergency is briefly compared with climate change and the current challenges to democracy, arguing that all these phenomena point to similar deficiencies in societal self-understanding and socio-political organization.

The notion of ‘rationality’ has always been one of the more controversial social-scientific ideas. Today there exist many conceptual varieties of rationality which are often less than clearly distinguished and the precise intellectual import of which likewise tends to be opaque. In this article I draw on classical and contemporary examples from sociology, political science and economics in the effort to clarify the many meanings of the notion and to demonstrate that it is more useful as well as more legitimate for explanatory purposes than some canonical critiques suggest. As the behavioral economics revolution has made clear, many varieties of rationality are both empirically and theoretically limited or outright falsified. However, although it is now certain that rationality cannot be the singular basis of a universal, general theory of social behavior, I argue it can and should form one important part of a larger conceptual toolbox upon which a social theorist can draw when devising tractable theoretical explanations of social phenomena.

The claim that rationality is ‘limited, falsified and unhelpful’ for explaining norms is false, for it does not apply to rationality as conceptualized by rational choice theory. Rationality as conceptualized by rational choice theory is not limited: it can be used to develop explanations of any observed human behavior. Rationality as conceptualized by rational choice theory has not been falsified: indeed, it is not falsifiable. Rationality as conceptualized by rational choice theory is not unhelpful for explaining norms: it is often used to develop explanations of observed norms, including norms that seem most puzzling. Rationality as conceptualized by rational choice theory provides a universal framework for developing explanations of human behavior.

Various versions of rational choice theories exist. In the face of common misconceptions of the approach, this comment aims to make two contributions. First, it informs about different variants and emphasizes the essential component of strategic uncertainty in game theory. Second, this article highlights the role of bridge assumptions when applying rational choice theories in practice. Hence, the rational choice approach is not a theory which can be directly applied in practice without further assumptions. Instead the rational choice approach is an analytical framework which leads to theories of middle range by combining a theoretical core with additional auxiliary assumptions which are tailor-made for a specific explanatory problem.

Peter T. Leeson and Tobias Wolbring agree with me that rationality, properly clarified, should continue to assume an important theoretical role in modern social science. We disagree, however, about the precise extent of its role. In my reply to the debate I focus on two related issues that have emerged. First, can and should the concepts of rationality, or rational choice theory (RCT) more generally, be employed as something more than just one tool among many? Second, can all cases of norm-following be satisfactorily subsumed by rationality and RCT analysis?

Discussions of the relations between the social sciences and the cognitive sciences have proliferated in recent years. Our article contributes to the philosophical and methodological foundations of the cognitive social sciences by proposing a framework based on contemporary mechanistic approaches to the philosophy of science to analyze the epistemological, ontological and methodological aspects of research programs at the intersection of the social sciences and the cognitive sciences. We apply this framework to three case studies which address the phenomena of social coordination, transactive memory, and ethnicity. We also assess how successful these research programs have been in providing mechanistic explanations for these phenomena, and where more work remains to be done.

Methodological narrative\institutional dualism was developed as an epistemological strategy to facilitate an approach to the study of political discourse that incorporates figures of disorder into the construction of order. The symmetrization of various theories of narration and argumentation and related analytical research approaches enables an examination of how discursive world-making engages syncretically narrative and argumentative repertoires of rhetoric and hermeneutics to ensure interconnected discursive and organizational interventions. Actors strive to occupy a strategically important position in discourse-worlds as the prelude to their occupation of influential power positions in organizational fields. Such a two-fold – textual and pragma-dialectical – interventionism can be uncovered by a ‘perspective interplay’ between complementary research strategies, one based on a narrative\routine duality (focused on communicability by studying the textualized sequencing of speech acts), the other on a duality of the pragmatic use of plot\argument (focused on the pragmatic implications of speech acts by studying the political claim-making accompanying strategic maneuvering). Our efforts at theory-building are illustrated by an empirical probe into a moment in a Czech election campaign (a three-day media dialogical network) in which the metaphor of dinosaurs was deployed as a powerful trope by candidates, opponents and journalists in credibility and consistency tests with respect to qualification for political office.

Empathy is the ability to experience affective and cognitive states of another person, whilst maintaining a distinct self, in order to understand the other. It is a multidimensional phenomenon, ranging from vicarious distress to near complete understanding, with many shades in between. As an almost universal and integral human construct, empathy has been considered in many disciplines and contexts, from evolution to gender, politics, economics, ethics, human rights and neuroscience. Each of these disciplines offers a range of definitions of empathy, and provides unique insights into the role of empathy in achieving different types of social outcomes, including those with both prosocial and antisocial intentions. The conceptualization generated from interdisciplinary perspectives is important because it allows us to identify commonalities that could be mobilized synergistically to achieve greater social benefit through prosocial empathy. This review discusses the benevolent and malevolent manifestations of empathy from the perspective of social, legal and psychological sciences in order to lay the foundation for a theoretical discussion on the potential of harnessing prosocial empathy to advance equality and non-discrimination.

Self-tracking is becoming a prominent and ubiquitous feature in contemporary practices of health and wellness management. Over the last few years, we have witnessed a rapid development in digital tracking devices, apps and platforms, together with the emergence of health movements such as the Quantified Self. As the world is becoming increasingly ruled by metrics and data, we are becoming ever more reliant on technologies of tracking and measurement to manage and evaluate various spheres of our lives including work, leisure, performance, and health. In this article, I begin by briefly outlining some of the key theoretical approaches that have been informing the scholarly debates on the rise of self-tracking. I then move on to discuss at length the findings of an international survey study I conducted with users of self-tracking technologies to discuss the ways in which they perceive and experience these practices, and the various rationales behind their adoption of self-tracking in the first place. The article also addresses participants’ attitudes towards issues of privacy and data sharing and protection. These attitudes seem to be dominated by a lack of concern regarding the use and sharing of self-tracking data with third parties. Some of the overarching sentiments vis-à-vis these issues can be roughly categorized according to feelings of ‘trust’ towards companies and how they handle data, a sense of ‘resignation’ in the face of what is perceived as an all-encompassing and ubiquitous data use, feelings of ‘self-insignificance’ which translates into the belief that one’s data is of no value to others, and the familiar expression of ‘the innocent have nothing to hide’. Overall, this article highlights the benefits and risks of self-tracking practices as experienced and articulated by the participants, while providing a critical reflection on the rise of personal metrics and the culture of measurement and quantification.

The last 20 years have been characterized by very different dynamics: massive reduction of milk and, to a lesser extent, dairy consumption; fewer positive attitudes towards milk; no reclaims for affordable, public dairy production; the development of a large conversation about the presumed risks associated with the intake of lactose; and semantic battles on non-dairy ‘milk’ alternatives. These new attitudes haven’t been systematically studied. We explore here the links between milk/dairy consumption, health concerns, and trust in medical expertise. Through an online survey of highly educated youth in Italy (N=378) we have investigated: milk and dairy consumption; attitudes towards items carried out by vegan movements; attitudes towards medical expertise and trust in counseling by general practitioners. Results show that anti-speciesist and vegan movements are very little known among consumers. Data display very limited impact of the ideas and concepts of anti-milk movements within our sample. The results highlight that milk consumption shrinking is due to health concern and an unfavorable perception of dangerous consequences in lactose intake, and additionally to a general distrust towards medical expertise and evidence-based arguments. Indeed, we observe a tendency to self-diagnose intolerance/allergies, questioning the role of physicians and medical knowledge in advising for dietary choices among highly educated youth. The analysis of the patterns of consumption and motives clearly shows that health considerations, not politics, are behind the Italian youth’s dairy restrictions. Healthy consumerism emerges as a concept fitting better than political consumerism for interpreting our results.

Job insecurity, defined as a perceived loss of continuity in a job situation that can span from the loss of some subjectively important job features to the permanent loss of the job itself, has been associated with a number of adverse outcomes at organizational as well as individual levels. However, how it affects employees’ family life has gained relatively less attention. To examine this, based on role stress theory and boundary theory, this study answers how job insecurity affects parent–child attachment; so far, an ignored phenomenon. Besides, this study also investigates how segmentation preference mitigates the adverse effects of job insecurity. Based on time-lagged, 318 dyadic (including 318 parents and 318 kids) data collected from Chinese individuals, we found support for all the proposed relationships, i.e. job insecurity weakens the parent–child attachment through mediating effect of work–family conflict. The findings also conclude that employees’ segmentation preference restricts the adverse effects of job insecurity and weakens its effect on the family domain. In yielding these findings, this study not only highlights the effect of perceived job insecurity on the family domain, the mechanism through which it occurs, and the moderating effect of a given factor but also provides insights to organizations so they could improve employees’ family life. The broader contribution to theory, practical implications, and suggestions for future research are discussed.

In this article we analyze two popular films, one from Brazil and another from the United States. Specifically, we examine and compare Bruno Barreto’s Dona Flor and her Two Husbands (Brazil, 1976) and Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (USA, 1939). Both films have as a central plot a love triangle in which a woman, Flor and Scarlett respectively, is torn between two very different romantic interests. However, Flor’s decision to commit to two men contrasts with Scarlett’s solitary end. We demonstrate that the films express distinct ways of reconciling values associated to ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ through the heroines’ romantic relationships and, above all, their opposite endings.