Exploring the many Facets of Failure in Academia
Most of the people working in academia who watched The Chair, which aired this summer, were probably filled with a bittersweet feeling; indeed, Netflix’s comedy-drama depicted quite vividly American academic life, with its downsides and...
Branding of cities: to whom is the city advertized and what fundamental idea lies behind it?
“Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief”, is one of the famous quotations of 20th century-advertisement and branding Guru, Leo Burnett. As a resident of the...
How Postmodernism Advanced Populism: An Inside Story From The Netherlands
There are many factors that explain the upheaval of populism. Postmodernism is one of them. In the Netherlands, certainly the columnist represented and helped to shape the postmodernist mood, a mood characterized by skepticism, subjectivism...
Why Does Fieldwork Matter? Reflections On Immersion, The Everyday & Knowledge Creation In Hong Kong
“If the RMB depreciates, Southbound trading goes through the roof!” A conversation overheard in Central Ideas about the borderless world have been around since the advent of modern information communication technologies in the late-1980s. The...
The Limits Of Survey Data: What Questionnaires Can’t Tell Us
All research methodologies have their limitations, as many authors have pointed before (see for example Visser, Krosnick and Lavrakas, 2000). From the generalisabilty of data to the nitty-gritty of bias and question wording, every method...
Intellectual monocultures, black swans & the failure of economics: lessons from the global financial crisis and austerity
One of the most pressing challenges to the global economy has been the global financial crisis of 2007 – 2009 which morphed into a prolonged recession and sovereign debt crises in many countries. Understanding...
Keeping Social Science Relevant: Society Needs Clear Prose
If somebody were to ask me what I do all day as a student of the social sciences, my answer would be plain: Most of the time, I work hard to decipher incomprehensible writing, and...
What Do Education Scholars Know?
Some time ago Martin Spiewak stated in the German quality-weekly Die Zeit that an awful lot of undisputed knowledge existed about the best ways to educate children, but that policy makers hardly ever make use...
Are There Too Many PhDs?
In all OECD countries, but in particular in Germany, there seems to be an enormous overproduction of PhDs – in case one sees a PhD as the starting point of an academic career or as...
Academic Conferences Should Be Outlawed
It’s conference season! Thousands and thousands of social scientists are flying around to visit conferences. The American Sociological Association gathers with more than 4000 participants in 600 sessions in Chicago. In 2014 the journey went...
Economists Looking For God
A science is not called a discipline by coincidence: its students are actively and deliberately disciplined to think and behave in the specific ways that define a discipline. They are trained to observe reality in...