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 itsRead More
“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 residentRead More
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 byRead More
“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 theRead More
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,Read More
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 manyRead More
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 incomprehensibleRead More
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 everRead More
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 careerRead More
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 theRead More
