This article analyses the content and processes of reforms in the university sector in Denmark. It reveals radical reforms combining governance reforms, research policy reforms and educational policy reforms anchored in New Public Management ideas. The reforms introduce values that are alien to prevailing university values. They change decision-making processes and may have problematic constitutive effects on academic practice. The challenge to political science lies in the difficulty of documenting accountability, while still meeting the demand for economic value.

Western lecturers visiting social science departments in the former Soviet Union find themselves immersed in a social micro-system that often functions differently from comparable departments in the West. Having been isolated from international developments and abused as instruments of indoctrination for decades, post-Soviet social sciences are plagued by a number of pathologies in administration, teaching, and studying. While posing considerable challenges for visiting professors, these defects make the continued presence of Western visiting lecturer programmes in the former USSR all the more necessary.

In Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide, Frederic Charles Schaffer makes the case for an interpretivist approach to social science and the concepts used by social scientists. Schaffer adopts an approach to concepts that he calls ‘elucidation’, and the approach involves relating social science concepts to their everyday use by laypersons. The reviewers in this Book Review Symposium – Joe Soss, Douglas C. Dow and Ahmed Khanani – are all sympathetic to the interpretivist approach to social science concepts, but challenge Schaffer on important points. Above all, they focus on three broad questions: how does the researcher gain a critical distance from what she studies, and what does this mean for the concepts she is using? What is the nature of concepts, that is, what is the concept of ‘concept’ we use? And, what is the relationship between concepts and visual signs such as paintings?

Open Access in the humanities and social sciences in the United States faces challenges in developing sustainable funding models. Begun in part to disseminate scholarship more widely and in part to solve an immediate budget problem faced by academic librarians, Open Access has evolved to include several ‘flavours’ that involve different funding schemes. Because the humanities and social sciences emphasize books more than STEM disciplines and because publication funding in humanities and social sciences is problematic, it will be necessary for publishers, librarians, faculty, and university administrators to cooperate to find sustainable solutions. This includes consideration of whether open access is always the model that best serves the audiences sought.

This Symposium brings together the academic and publishing industry in two key countries (the UK and the US) to analyse and assess the implications of Open Access (OA) journal publishing in the social and political sciences, as well as its different formats and developments to date. With articles by three academics (all involved in academic associations) and three publishers, the Symposium represents an exchange of views that help each of the two sectors understand better the perspectives of the other. More generally, the Symposium aims to raise the visibility of OA among the academic community whose general awareness and knowledge of OA – compared with publishers – has been rather limited to date.

This paper outlines the UK publishing landscape for the social and political sciences, with particular reference to academic journals. The changes and challenges being brought to this environment by open access (OA) are described and the response of UK publishers examined. While some of the initial caution among publishers towards OA in the social and political sciences is beginning to recede, the pressures of funding, perception and engagement remain considerable. Despite scepticism from some quarters about the future role of so-called ‘legacy’ publishers, it is argued that their skills, knowledge and innovation will make them a valuable part of the evolving, and ever more varied, scholarly communications arena.

Academic associations are a vital part of the academic community, facilitating the interaction of researchers and production of knowledge, yet the impact of Open Access on their future has been too often regarded as marginal to the main discussion. Open Access presents an evident threat to those associations, which have become dependent upon a sizeable proportion of their income coming from owned journals published in conjunction with publishers. Yet, Open Access also presents opportunities, and academic associations should be bold in using a combination of their expertise, prestige and experience in publishing to ensure their futures in a newly emerging market.

Political science has for some time been afflicted with an existential and empirical angst concerning impact and relevance. This is by no means a new or unique disciplinary pathology, but it is one that has intensified in recent years. The reasons for this intensification have been explored in a burgeoning literature on ‘the tyranny of impact’. The central argument of this article is that a focus on the ‘relevance gap’ within political science, and vis-à-vis the social sciences more generally, risks failing to comprehend the emergence of a far broader and multifaceted ‘expectations gap’. The core argument and contribution of this article is that the future of political science will depend on the politics and management of the ‘expectations gap’ that has emerged. Put slightly differently, the study of politics needs to have a sharper grasp of the politics of its own discipline and the importance of framing, positioning, connecting vis-à-vis the broader social context.

Societal “crises” are periods of turmoil and destabilization in sociocultural, political, economic, and other systems, often accompanied by violent power struggles, and sometimes significant changes in social structure. The extensive literature analyzing societal crises has concentrated on a relatively small sample of well-known cases (such as the fall of the Roman Empire), emphasizing separate aspects of these events as potential causes or consistent effects. To investigate crises in an even-handed fashion, and to avoid the potential small-sample-size bias present in several previous studies, we have created the Crisis Database (CrisisDB). CrisisDB uniformly characterizes a sample of 168 historical cases spanning millennia — from the prehistoric to the post-industrial — and varying polity complexities in diverse global regions. It features data on factors that are identified as relevant to explaining societal crises and significant “consequences” (such as warfare or epidemics), including institutional and cultural reforms (such as constitutional changes) that might occur during and immediately following the crisis period. Here, we study some examples from the CrisisDB and demonstrate our analyses, which show that the consequences of crisis experienced in each society are highly variable. The outcomes are uncorrelated with one another and, overall, the set of consequences is largely unpredictable, leading us to conclude that there is no “typical” societal crisis of the past. We offer some alternative suggestions about the forces that might propel, or mitigate, these varying consequences, highlighting areas that would benefit from future exploration, and the need for collaborative and interdisciplinary work on the study of crises.

Evaluation supports the translation of knowledge into practice by systematically assessing what works, for whom, and under what conditions. It generates evidence to guide improvements, inform decision-making, and identify how programs, research studies, or interventions should be scaled. Within a Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) hub, evaluation is typically focused on internal evaluation and administrative functions. However, expanding evaluation to also support efforts based outside of a CTSA hub (i.e., to the larger institution and community), akin to other CTSA cores and services, can support overarching translational goals. This paper outlines the process and benefits of institutionalizing a partnership between clinical and translational science and social science to provide expertise, resulting in evaluation as a translational resource. Herein, we describe developing the Duke Office of Evaluation and Applied Research Partnership, an organizational unit that, by bridging a university’s CTSA hub and interdisciplinary social science institute, expanded the scope and capacity of evaluation to advance clinical and translational science. We outline the specific activities supported by this initiative, facilitators involved in its establishment, and barriers to implementation and success. This model and lessons learned can inform broader opportunities to leverage multidisciplinary evaluation expertise to support clinical and translational science.

This article clarifies two choices at two different levels of analysis—that theologians make (often implicitly) in employing social science to clarify how social structures affect moral agency. The first is the choice of a general causal account of how all social structures “work,” where this article endorses the view provided by critical realist sociology. The second is the choice of some particular causal account of the functioning of a specific kind of social structure. It proposes a new definition that applies to all, not simply the most egregious sinful social structures that accounts for both the oppression of the marginalized and the complicity of the privileged. To illustrate the analysis, we end by examining three features important in the transformation of sinful social structures that have received inadequate attention in the literature of theological ethics: nonmoral cognitive categories, bodily practices, and the penalties for noncompliance.

Understanding causality is crucial for social scientific research to develop strong theories and inform practice. However, explicit discussion of causality is often lacking in social science literature due to ambiguous causal language. This paper introduces a text mining model fine-tuned to extract causal sentences from full-text social science papers. A dataset of 529 causal and 529 non-causal sentences manually annotated from the Cooperation Databank (CoDa) was curated to train and evaluate the model. Several pre-trained language models (BERT, SciBERT, RoBERTa, LLAMA, and Mistral) were fine-tuned on this dataset and general-purpose causality datasets. Model performance was evaluated on held-out social science and general-purpose test sets. Results showed that fine-tuning transformer models on the social science dataset significantly improved causal sentence extraction, even with limited data, compared to the models fine-tuned only on the general-purpose data. Results indicate the importance of domain-specific fine-tuning and data for accurately capturing causal language in academic writing. This automated causal sentence extraction method enables comprehensive, large-scale analysis of causal claims across the social sciences. By systematically cataloging existing causal statements, this work lays the foundation for further research to uncover the mechanisms underlying social phenomena, inform theory development, and strengthen the methodological rigor of the field.

In recent years, there has been a global trend among governments to provide free and open access to data collected by Earth-observing satellites with the purpose of maximizing the use of this data for a broad array of research and applications. Yet, there are still significant challenges facing non-remote sensing specialists who wish to make use of satellite data. This commentary explores an illustrative case study to provide concrete examples of these challenges and barriers. We then discuss how the specific challenges faced within the case study illuminate some of the broader issues in data accessibility and utility that could be addressed by policymakers that aim to improve the reach of their data, increase the range of research and applications that it enables, and improve equity in data access and use.

Changing human behaviours is a key facet of addressing global environmental issues. There are many factors (i.e. determinants) that could influence whether an individual engages in pro-environmental behaviour, and understanding these determinants can improve efforts to protect and restore the natural environment. However, despite published criticism of poor survey design, there is little practical guidance on how to capture these determinants accurately in closed-answer surveys (those with predefined answer options). A recent literature review summarized behavioural determinants of pro-environmental behaviour. We build on this by providing practical insights into how 17 key pro-environmental behavioural determinants can be measured through closed-answer surveys. We reviewed 177 papers published during 2013–2023 that met the criteria for inclusion. These papers captured 624 measurements of the 17 determinants. We found seven types of question formats used, including scales (Likert scales, semantic scales and a pictorial scale), multiple-choice questions (where respondents could select either one or more answer options), binary questions and ranking questions. We then synthesized design considerations both specifically for each format and more broadly across surveys. These considerations included using validated measures, reducing cognitive burden and biases (e.g. social desirability bias, order effects, recall bias), selecting the question format (e.g. different formats of multiple-choice or binary questions) and using best practices for scale questions. The insights collected through this review provide practical advice for developing closed-answer surveys that robustly and usefully measure key determinants of pro-environmental behaviour.