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AbstractSocial science theory can strengthen the conceptualization and interpretation of program theory‐based evaluation.

Intro -- Contents -- Introduction: Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre -- Part One: From Figures of Inquiry -- Chapter 1: Returning Pluralism to Political Science: A Programmatic Manifesto for Rhetoric of Political Inquiry -- Origins -- Purposes -- Politics -- Problematics -- Ends -- Chapter 2: Returning History to Political Science: A Disciplinary Archaeology of Amnesia in Political Argument -- Disciplines -- Presentations -- Histories -- Traditions -- Chapter 3: Turning Underground into Approved Rhetorics: A Partial Confession from a Scientizing Discipline -- Approved versus Underground Rhetorics -- Confession -- Propriety -- Decorum -- Chapter 4: Overturning Argument in Political Science: An Apostate Meditation on Disappointments of Political Theory -- Detachment -- Skepticism -- Reflection -- Recognition -- Ascension -- Reconstruction -- Chapter 5: Returning Argument to Political Inquiry: A Mythic Narration of Models, Statistics, and Other Tropes -- How Political Science Lost Its Arguments -- The Behavior Vanishes -- The Regression of Political Science -- How Rational Choice Theory Got Its Paradoxes -- Tropes, Traps, Tokens, and Detours -- Part Two: To Myths of Action -- Chapter 6: Turning Politics into Words: A Rhetorical Invention of Evidence and Argument -- Words, Words Everywhere, and Many a Meaning to each -- Not Just Data but Reality -- The Center Cannot Hold -- The Play's the Thing -- Chapter 7: Turning Ideologies into Myths: A Postmodern Essay in Political and Rhetorical Analysis -- Analogy -- Ethos -- Logos -- Pathos -- Mythos -- Example -- Chapter 8: Turning Governments Every Which Way but Loose: A Poetic Experiment in Politics and Communication -- Female Metaphors -- Mything Words -- Immersing Myths -- Measuring Humans -- Dueling Myths -- Strange Attractors.

A new 'biopolitics' research program is gaining significant institutional momentum in the US. It accuses political science, absent biology, of being atheoretical. John R. Hibbing and his colleagues follow previous sociobiological political scientists in largely ignoring the rational choice work of Robert Axelrod. Yet Axelrod has done a significant amount of interdisciplinary work in political science and biology, and he collaborated for his most famous research, on the evolution of cooperation, with the influential insect ethologist, evolutionary theorist, and sociobiologist W.D. Hamilton. Why does Hibbing pay so little attention to Axelrod? I compare Hibbing and Axelrod as political theorists. Both are in the mainstream American tradition of positivist policy science, but they have very different ideas of what theory is, and of how to practice it. In the course of my comparison I briefly touch on three related themes: the nineteenth-century roots of contemporary conceptions of policy science, nature/culture, and character; developments in genomics and the diverse potentials of new naturalisms; and the peculiarly intertwined histories of postwar rational choice and neo-Darwinism. Adapted from the source document.

Many philosophers of science have maintained that science should be value-free; still others believe that such ideal is neither achievable nor desirable for science. Hugh Lacey is presently one of the main supporters of the idea of value-free science and his theory is probably the most debated today and attracts the most attention and criticism. Therefore, in this text, I will primarily analyze his theory of value-free science. After briefly defining the notion of value I highlight which strategy Lacey chooses to lay a firm foundation for the concept of science without value, with his starting point being the differentiation between cognitive and non-cognitive values. Then I describe three basic characteristics of Lacey's value-free science: impartiality, neutrality, and autonomy. However, the overall plan and design of his project, together with some concrete steps he takes, are not without problems in our view. I will try to point out some of these problematic issues and provide brief suggestions for alleviating them.

Talk is of central importance to politics of almost every kind-it's no accident that when the ancient Greeks first attempted to examine politics systematically, they developed the study of rhetoric. In Tropes of Politics, John Nelson applies rhetorical analysis first to political theory, and then to politics in practice. He offers a full and deep critical examination of political science and political theory as fields of study, and then undertakes a series of creative examinations of political rhetoric, including a deconstruction of deliberation and debate by the U.S. Senate prior to the Gulf War. Using the neglected arts of argument refined by the rhetoric of inquiry, Nelson traces how everyday words like consent and debate construct politics in much the same way that poets such as Mamet and Shakespeare construct plays, and he shows how we are remaking our politics even as we speak. Tropes of Politics explores how politicians take stands and political scientists probe representation, how experts become informed even as citizens become authorities, how students actually reinvent government while professors merely model politics, how senators wage war yet keep comity among themselves. The action, Nelson shows, is in the tropes: these figures of speech and images of deed can persuade us to turn from ideologies like liberalism toward spectacles about democracy or movements into environmentalism and feminism. His argument is that inventive attention to tropes can mean better participation in politics. And the argument is in the tropes-evidence itself as sights or citations, governments as machines or men, politics as hardball or softball, deliberations as freedoms or constraints, borders as fringes or friends.

This work is devoted to developing as well as expounding the theory of the cultural sciences of the philosopher Alfred Schutz (1899-1959). Drawing on all of Schutz's seven volumes in English, the book shows how his philosophical theory consists of the reflective clarifications of the disciplinary definitions, basic concepts, and distinctive methods of particular cultural sciences as well as their species and genus. The book first expounds Schutz's own theories of economics, jurisprudence, political science, sociology, and psychology. It then extends his approach to other disciplines, offering new theories of archaeology, ethnology, and psychotherapy in his spirit in order to stimulate the development of Schutzian theories in these and other disciplines. The second part of the book contains complementary philosophical chapters devoted to culture, groups, ideal types, interdisciplinarity, meaning, relevance, social tension, and verification.

This work, sequel to the author's Theories of Civil Violence, attacks questions that have long troubled social science and social scientists - questions of the cumulative nature of social inquiry. Does the knowledge generated by the study of social, political, and economic life grow more comprehensive over time? These questions go to the heart of social scientists' soul-searching as to whether they are indeed engaged in 'science'. The author pursues these questions through in-depth examination of various theoretical programs currently influential in social science, including feminist social science, rational choice theory, network analysis and others

This special issue originated with the 1996 Organization Science Winter Conference (OSWC), which set out to explore the implications of the science of complexity for the field of organization studies. Following the OSWC, a formal program organized by the Organization Science section of INFORMS took place in Atlanta. The vast potential for complexity theory to inform and transform research in organization studies became evident from the discussions of 22 papers that were presented at that meeting. In response to the call for papers issued after the Atlanta meeting, 56 papers were submitted to Organization Science, of which seven make up this issue. Interest in complexity has grown dramatically since the 1996 OSWC first explored this idea. The purpose of this special issue is not to declare that a new era in organization studies and strategic management is at hand, but to explore the boundaries and links between the science of complexity—with its origin in evolution and biology—and the field of strategy and organization. The issue explores the implications of complexity research for organization studies in the context of new ways of modeling dynamic, nonlinear complex systems for advancing theoretical and empirical research in organization studies (e.g., theorizing within coevolutionary frameworks, decomposition of nested phenomena, multidirectional causalities).

"In den USA gewinnt eine neue 'biopolitische' Wissenschaftsprogrammatik an institutioneller Wichtigkeit. Sie materialisiert sich zugleich als ein genereller Vorwurf an die Politikwissenschaft, die in ihrer Konzeption 'untheoretisch' sei. John R. Hibbing und seine KollegInnen bauen auf den früheren Arbeiten der soziobiologischen Politikwissenschaft auf, lassen dabei aber den Rational-Choice-Ansatz von Robert Axelrod vollkommen aus. Axelrod leistet jedoch eine bedeutende interdisziplinäre Arbeit in der Politikwissenschaft und Biologie und hatte besonders hinsichtlich seines Konzeptes der 'Evolution der Kooperation' mit einem der einflussreichsten Insekt-Ethologen, Evolutionstheoretiker und Soziobiologen W.D. Hamilton zusammengearbeitet. Warum interessiert sich dann Hibbing für Axelrod so wenig? Ausgehend von dieser Frage wird die jeweilige Praxis der Theorie von Hibbing und Axelrod verglichen. Beide sind Teil der Mainstream-Tradition der amerikanischen positivistischen Politikwissenschaft, sie fassen jedoch die 'Theorie' als solche unterschiedlich auf. Der Vergleich beinhaltet somit drei Aspekte: die auf das 19. Jahrhundert zurückgehenden Wurzel der aktuellen Konzeption der Politikwissenschaft, Natur/ Kultur und des 'Charakters'; die Entwicklungen der Genomik und das Potenzial eines neuen Naturalismus; und die in außergewöhnlicher Weise verflochtenen Entwicklungen des Nachkriegs-Rational-Choice-Ansatzes und des Neodarwinismus." (Autorenreferat)