Understanding Society

This month marks the tenth anniversary of Understanding Society . The blog now includes 1,176 posts on topics in the philosophy of soc...

One of the important reasons that we value scientific knowledge is the possibility that it will allow us to intervene in the world to sol...

Agriculture remains the primary source of income for India's population, and the majority of India's farmers subsist on sma...

What is involved in having a national or racial or sexual identity? What do we mean when we say that a person has a Canadian or a Haitia...

A crucial part of social cohesion is the prospect of social mobility across generations. A social order in which individuals are stuck in t...

Critical realism proposes an approach to the social world that pays particular attention to objective and material features of the soci...

We know what is meant by saying that a physical system is resilient : for a given range of shocks, the system has the ability to recover it...

Robert Merton is one of the most sophisticated exponents of a qualified functionalism in sociology ( Social Theory and Social Structure ). ...

The European Network for Philosophy of Social Science (ENPOSS) completed its annual conference in Krakow last week. It was a stimulat...

When we think we know about an historical event -- the French Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Jim Crow years in America -- generally...