Where are We Going? Reflections on Social Science Research in the 2020s

This paper, based on the valedictory address delivered by Professor John Harriss in the SSER conference “Exploring New Research Frontiers in Social Sciences”, talks about the importance of historical and contextually grounded studies of social processes.

Considering trends in political science, sociology, and economics, in the United States especially — because of the sheer numbers of social scientists in that country, and the resources they have available — but with some comparative reference to work going on in India, this paper shows the continuing dominance of quantitative modeling, and the influence of rational choice theoretics. Gatekeepers, those in senior positions in leading departments and journals, clearly `discipline’ their fields according to the standards of these approaches. Recurrent pleas for greater pluralism, and for addressing critical social issues – such as those recently expressed by a new editorial team of the American Political Science Review — have evidently been ineffectual. But with reference to `poverty knowledge’ in the United States and India, and to cross-disciplinary research regarding economic institutions, the paper points to the strengths of approaches that emphasise the study of social processes, historically and with respect to context dependency. Such studies can be no less rigorous than quantitative modeling.