Social Science Bites

Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 4: A Social Science Bites Retrospective Social Science Bites
LISTEN TO WHO INFLUENCED WHO!

Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 4: A Social Science Bites Retrospective

May 10, 2021 5288
influence schematic
LISTEN TO WHO INFLUENCED WHO!

“That’s such a hard question,” Gina Neff, a sociologist at the Oxford Internet Institute, responds when asked what social science research or thinker most influenced her. “It’s like a busman’s holiday for an academic, because so many things have influenced my thinking.” Her answer, by the way, was Ulrich Beck’s concept of the risk society, as explained in this 1986 book.

In this montage drawn from the last two years of Social Science Bites podcasts, interviewer David Edmonds poses the same question to 25 other notable social scientists.

For many of the guests, the answer proves difficult to pin down to just one person or work (“That’s like asking who’s your favorite kid,” was David Halpern’s first response). For a few guests, the response is instant.

“A simple answer, really,” replies Rupert Brown, naming a fellow social psychologist, Turkish-American Muzafer Sherif, and his work in the 1950s. And sociologist Les Back, too, answers instantly: “Don’t even have to think about it: WEB DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk. DuBois is the writer who captures both the heat and the passion of life and also the cool historical perspective and analysis in the most extraordinary compound of literary expression.”

Back, in turn, was mentioned by one scholar: Kayleigh Garthwaite as her great influencer.

A number of the guests cited titans from the early days of social science – Max Weber, Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu, Emile Durkheim, while others named modern-era titans like Stephen Pinker, Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Haidt or Jean Piaget. And many named creators of the new canon – Jim Scott cited A.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, Alondra Nelson picked Troy Duster’s Backdoor to Eugenics, and Gurminder  Bhambra tabbed Danielle S. Allen’s Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education.

And no such list would be complete without a wild card, and for that we turn to Michelle Gelfand, who turned to Herodotus’ The Histories and the lessons a 2,500-year-old post-mortem of an ancient war can teach us today: “He was a brilliant cross-cultural psychologist … he also had a really interesting observation — that all humans are ethnocentric. They don’t just think that their culture is different, they think it’s better.”

This is the fourth collection in this series (and the 100th Social Science Bites podcast). Links to the other montages appear below.

To download this latest montage, right click HERE and ‘save.’ 

Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective, Part 3

Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective, Part 2

Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective, Part 1

***

Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE Publishing. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.

Welcome to the blog for the Social Science Bites podcast: a series of interviews with leading social scientists. Each episode explores an aspect of our social world. You can access all audio and the transcripts from each interview here. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @socialscibites.

View all posts by Social Science Bites

Related Articles

Julia Ebner on Violent Extremism
Insights
November 4, 2024

Julia Ebner on Violent Extremism

Read Now
Nick Camp on Trust in the Criminal Justice System
Social Science Bites
October 1, 2024

Nick Camp on Trust in the Criminal Justice System

Read Now
Daron Acemoglu on Artificial Intelligence
Social Science Bites
September 3, 2024

Daron Acemoglu on Artificial Intelligence

Read Now
Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature
Social Science Bites
August 1, 2024

Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature

Read Now
Megan Stevenson on Why Interventions in the Criminal Justice System Don’t Work

Megan Stevenson on Why Interventions in the Criminal Justice System Don’t Work

Megan Stevenson’s work finds little success in applying reforms derived from certain types of social science research on criminal justice.

Read Now
Rob Ford on Immigration

Rob Ford on Immigration

Opinions on immigration are not set in stone, suggests Rob Ford – but they may be set in generations. Zeroing in on the experience of the United Kingdom since the end of World War II, Ford – a political scientist at the University of Manchester – explains how this generation’s ‘other’ becomes the next generation’s ‘neighbor.’

Read Now
Tavneet Suri on Universal Basic Income

Tavneet Suri on Universal Basic Income

Economist Tavneet Suri discusses fieldwork she’s done in handing our cash directly to Kenyans in poor and rural parts of Kenya, and what the generally good news from that work may herald more broadly.

Read Now
4 3 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Newest
Oldest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments