For twenty years, universities and research have been the target of reforms and evaluations. Clémentine Gozlan examines the making of these mechanisms, which are central to the new system of academic governance—in which academics often participate.
Randomized controlled experiments hold out the promise of heightened scientificity and new forms of social action. In this essay, Agnès Labrousse points out some of the practical limits of these experiments and situates them within a longer history of social experimentation and governing by evidence.
Environmental economics, the economics of natural resources, sustainable development, green economics, sustainability science, bioeconomics, ecodevelopment: the disciplines and concepts situated at the crossroads of environmentalism and economics are many. This article examines “ecological economics,” a field that has achieved academic recognition and launched numerous debates.
Randomized evaluation has become very fashionable. Initially developed in the field of development economics, it has now spread to many public policy areas. Yannick L’Horty and Pascale Petit here discuss the advantages and the limits of this relatively recent tool for evaluating social policies.
Basing his discussion on a reading of recognized classics in social science, Howard Becker offers a critique of the new ways in which sociological work is to be funded in the United States and calls for the respect of the fundamentally inductive nature of qualitative research.
How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers? Gloria Origgi claims that Internet is a giant network of ranking and rating systems in which information is valued as long as it has been already filtered by other people. The Information Age is being replaced by a Reputation Age.
