International Relations

In the past year or so I've been reading a handful of fascinating biographies and histories involving the evolution of early twentieth-century physics, paying attention to the individuals, the institutions, and the ideas that contributed to the making of post-classical physics. The primary focus is on the theory of the atom and the nucleus, and the emergence of the theory of quantum mechanics. The major figures who have come into this complex narrative include Dirac, Bohr, Heisenberg, von Neumann, Fermi, Rutherford, Blackett, Bethe, and Feynman, along with dozens of other mathematicians and physicists. Institutions and cities played a key role in this story -- Manchester, Copenhagen, Cambridge, G�ttingen, Budapest, Princeton, Berkeley, Ithaca, Chicago. And of course written throughout this story is the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the race for the atomic bomb. This is a crucially important period in the history of science, and the physics that was created between 1900 and 1960...

Organizations do things; they depend upon the coordinated efforts of numerous individuals; and they exist in environments that affect their ongoing success or failure. Moreover, organizations are to some extent plastic : the practices and rules that make them up can change over time. Sometimes these changes happen as the result of deliberate design choices by individuals inside or outside the organization; so a manager may alter the rules through which decisions are made about hiring new staff in order to improve the quality of work. And sometimes they happen through gradual processes over time that no one is specifically aware of. The question arises, then, whether organizations evolve toward higher functioning based on the signals from the environments in which they live; or on the contrary, whether organizational change is stochastic, without a gradient of change towards more effective functioning? Do changes within an organization add up over time to improved functioning? What ki...

Why is part of the American electoral system so susceptible to right-wing populist appeals, often highlighting themes of racism and intergroup hostility? Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos address the causes of the radical swing to the right of the Republican Party in Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America . Here is the key issue the book attempts to resolve: If the general public does not share the extreme partisan views of the political elites and party activists and, more to the point, is increasingly dismayed and disgusted by the resulting polarization and institutional paralysis that have followed from those views, how has the GOP managed to move so far to the right without being punished by the voters? Our answer � already telegraphed above � is that over the past half century social movements have increasingly challenged, and occasionally supplanted, parties as the dominant mobilizing logic and organizing vehicle of American politics. (Kindle location ...

What is involved in designing, implementing, coordinating, and managing the deployment of a large new technology system in a real social, political, and organizational environment? Here I am thinking of projects like the development of the SAGE early warning system, the Affordable Care Act, or the introduction of nuclear power into the civilian power industry. Tom Hughes described several such projects in Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World . Here is how he describes his focus in that book: Telling the story of this ongoing creation since 1945 carries us into a human-built world far more complex than that populated earlier by heroic inventors such as Thomas Edison and by firms such as the Ford Motor Company. Post-World War II cultural history of technology and science introduces us to system builders and the military-industrial-university complex. Our focus will be on massive research and development projects rather than on the invention and deve...

The approach to social and historical research that I favor is one that pays attention to the heterogeneity and contingency of social processes. It advises that social and historical researchers should disaggregate the large patterns they start with and try to identify the multiple underlying mechanisms, causes, motivations, movements, and contingencies that came together to create higher-level outcomes. Social research needs to focus on the micro- or meso-level processes that combined to create the macro world that interests us. The theory of assemblages fits this intellectual standpoint very well, since it emphasizes contingency and heterogeneity all the way down. The diagram above was chosen to give a visual impression of the complexity and interconnectedness of factors and causes that are associated with this approach to the social world. According to the premises of this approach, we are not well served by imagining that there are simple, largescale forces that drive the outcomes ...

SSHA CALL FOR PAPERS Macrohistorical Dynamics Network 42nd Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association Montr�al , Qu�bec Canada?   2-5 November 2017 Submission Deadline: 3 March 2017 " Changing Social Connections in Time and Space " Please consider participation in Macrohistorical Dynamics (MHD) panels of the 42nd annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, November 2-5, 2017 in Montr�al .    For more information on the meeting as well as the call for proposals, please refer to the SSHA website at www.ssha.org . Here is the SSHA call for proposals ( link ). The deadline for paper and/or panel submissions is   March 3, 2017 . In recognition of Canada�s policy of official bilingualism,   SSHA   will accept paper presentations in either English or French for our meeting in Montreal. Sessions may be monolingual English, monolingual French, or bilingual English/French. Session organizers must clearly indicate which language(s) will be...