100 books like The Production of Knowledge

Though this book focuses on psychology, it has lessons for all social sciences.

Chambers, like me, is critical of certain practices and yet deeply respectful of what has been accomplished. He devotes much of his attention to the problem of confirmation bias. We as humans are more likely to accept results that conform to prior beliefs.

Journals are also more likely to publish such results. Scholars play with their findings, adding or removing data points to achieve a target level of statistical significance. The result is that we are often more confident in scholarly consensus than we should be. Chambers explains complex ideas clearly, and is passionate about the need for reform.

I really liked Williams’ writing style. He is very clear, provides good examples, and is very careful in his argumentation.

I very much liked – and indeed borrowed – his strategy of summarizing the main arguments of each chapter. This is especially important since his book addresses a wide range of challenges in social science. I especially liked his discussion of how the variables we measure are never perfect proxies for the phenomena that we hope to understand.

I also liked his careful discussion of how social scientists need to be more reflective in their work. And I found his discussion of the nature of causation in social science deeply insightful.

There are far fewer works in the humanities than in social science that suggest a path toward a more productive scholarly enterprise.

Martinelli is by far my favorite book about reforming humanities scholarship. He and I disagree about the main purpose of the humanities – I stress the role that art plays in human societies, while he urges an appreciation of the great thinkers of the past, and also appreciating such values as beauty and human dignity.

Yet he makes recommendations that I applaud regarding integration, appreciating diverse theories and methods, being reflective, and pursuing clear and logical argumentation.

This book is a bit older than the others I recommend. Yet it provides a very clear critique of how the emphasis on novelty in social science – every publication is supposed to say something new – actually detracts from the pursuit of increased understanding.

Smith urges cumulative research programs that alternate between theory and empirics. He notes that natural scientists define novelty differently than social scientists and are thus able to publish in a way that advances cumulative research. He makes important recommendations for theorizing about small systems of phenomena (but appreciating connections to other phenomena) and employing mixed methods in investigating such theories.

This is a philosopher's take on many similar issues, exploring how our social world is made through imagination and fictions which we then choose, collectively to believe in. 

He is a very clear and crisp writer which helps.  He looks at the constructed reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets, and cocktail parties and the paradox that these only exist because we think they exist, yet they then have an objective existence.

This handbook, edited by three well-known Smith scholars, follows on from a conference organised for the 250th anniversary of the publication of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments although it is not a proceedings volume.

The book has seven parts, each part featuring four chapters. These 28 chapters cover all bases, from an introductory outline of life, times, and legacy, over the importance of Smith’s unpublished work, the importance to Smith of rhetoric, ethics, aesthetics, theatre, and fashion, to Smith’s view on commerce and morality, his view on religion, and Smith’s legacy and influence, among many other topics.

This book challenges the notion that we should rely on the ideal as a guidepost. Set aside whether we could decide on an ideal; Gaus, a philosopher, makes a four-part argument against pursuing it. First, how could we contemplate the incomprehensible number of possible institutional, legal, and organizational configurations? We couldn’t. Second, the components of those configurations interact, resulting in a rugged landscape: the path to the ideal would not be entirely uphill, that is, it would require sacrifices. Hence, the book’s title. Third, owing to the interactions among choices, we cannot evaluate collective well-being in alternative configurations with any accuracy. What hubris to assume that we could. And finally, the landscape responds to our positioning, as we adapt our physical, organizational, and institutional (both formal and invisible) environments, we alter what we can achieve and what we desire.

I love this book because it captures the experience of coffee tasting as it really happens and explores it from a social science perspective. What I love most about the book, though, is how much I disagree with some of its content; it is wonderful to love someone’s perspective and effort without always seeing eye to eye. Reader beware: the first part of the book is heavily academic, but it clears out and eventually becomes easy reading.

Qin is the former president of China Foreign Affairs University and China’s foremost thinker on international relationships. This book is not an easy read, but it is worth the effort because Qin presents an original perspective on world affairs that is rooted in Chinese intellectual traditions. In contrast to current theories of international relations, Qin emphasizes the importance of relationships over transactions—attention to managing long-term, particular connections rather than “the art of the deal.” In addition, he describes a dialectic based on the mutual transformation of opposites—a yin-yang relationship—rather than the usual Western assumption of separate categories. Qin is a hard read because he is presenting a new way of thinking.

First published in 1958, this is one of Hannah Arendt’s most influential books and in it she attempts to define the human condition in the aftermath of World War II, developing her concept “natality.” 

It’s a challenging book that I’ve wrestled with and argued with and never forgotten. It includes some of her most powerful and frequently cited passages about birth. Lately, I’ve been returning to its opening pages, in which she discusses the launch of Sputnik into space. 

She saw this launch not as an exciting technological breakthrough, but as a fateful repudiation of our earthly existence, an existence that was defined by birth with possibilities and limitations.