Functionalist Construction Work in Social Science: The Lost Heritage

Schwartz, Howard

The use of mathematical models to support decision-making is proliferating in both the public and private sectors. Advances in computer technology and greater opportunities to learn the appropriate techniques are extending modelling capabilities to more and more people. As powerful decision aids, models can be both beneficial or harmful. At present, few safeguards exist to prevent model builders or users from deliberately, carelessly, or recklessly manipulating data to further their own ends. Perhaps more importantly, few people understand or appreciate that harm can be caused when builders or users fail to recognise the values and assumptions on which a model is based or fail to take into account all the groups who would be affected by a model's results. This volume provides a setting for a dialogue about ethics and shows the need to continue and define a vocabulary for exploring ethical concerns. It will become increasingly important for model builders and users to have a clear and strong code of ethics to guide them in making the ethical decisions they surely will have to face.

Na, Na

Dey, Ian

This volume brings together scholarship from different disciplines on the theme of<br>neoliberalism. Contemporary neoliberal economic policy, it argues has increased<br>inequalities and exclusions while providing opportunities to the upper sections of<br>the society. In turn it has also creating new risks and challenges to everyday lives<br>of the lower and middle classes of the country. While the focus of the volume is<br>on the way urbanization and lower-class aspirations have been harnessed for the<br>neoliberal project, there are also essays on the way social media has impacted<br>democracy and as well on the impact of gendered demographic dividend on the<br>economy. The volume also includes a set of papers that analyses the implications<br>of neoliberalism on the State of Uttar Pradesh. The authors in this volume<br>argue that the changes inaugurated by neoliberalism challenge them to re-think<br>old perspectives on development popular among social scientists with most<br>asserting a need to construct new interdisciplinary perspectives to narrate analytically these contemporary changes.

Van Den Hoonaard