I thought this message (which I've abridged from the daily digest of the
social-policy list https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/social-policy) could be of interest
across sociolinguistics. I for one have been pushing Amartya Sen's work in language
policy for some time!
And I've snipped out the responses below which are interesting too.
Happy reading!
Dave
--
Dr. Dave Sayers
Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University | www.shu.ac.uk
Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk
[log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
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Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 14:46:30 +0000
From: Paul Spicker <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: The most cited works in social policy
I already have a section of recommended readings on my website, and I
had it mind to add to it some further material, identifying the most
cited works in Social Policy. I've been looking for the most plausible
contenders. This is what I've come up with so far. These are all the
pieces I've identified so far that have more than 5000 citations on
Google Scholar. I'd appreciate any pointers as to what I've missed.
Google Scholar citations
Paolo Freire, The pedagogy of the oppressed, Penguin 1970 51179
M Foucault Discipline and punish (surveiller et punir), 1975 50195
R Puttnam Bowling alone, Simon and Schuster 2001 35667
J Coleman, Social capital in the formation of human capital, American
Journal of Sociology 1988 31530
G Hardin, The tragedy of the commons, Science 1968 28073
A Sen, Development as freedom, Oxford 1999 23973
G Esping-Andersen The three worlds of welfare capitalism, Polity 1990
23146
W Wilson The truly disadvantaged, Chicago 1987 14825
M Friedman, Capitalism and freedom, Chicago 1962 14674
J Coleman, Equality of educational opportunity
<http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED012275.pdf>, 1966 13006
WHO, International classification of functioning, disability and
health 9371
E Goffman, Asylums, Penguin 1961 9133
A Sen Poverty and famines
<http://staging.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1981/81B09_608_engl.pdf>,
Oxford 1983 8922
M Foucault, Madness and civilisation, (Historie de la folie) 1961 8357
R Herrnstein, C Murray, The bell curve, Simon and Schuster 1994 7681
A Hollingshead, F Redlich, Social class and mental illness, Wiley 1958
7549
A Sen Commodities and capabilities, 1999 6286
WHO, World Health Report 2002 6046
R Thaler, C Sunstein Nudge, Penguin 2009 5842
S Bowles, H Gintis, Schooling in capitalist America, Basic Books 1976 5448
C Jencks, Inequality, Basic Books 1972 5434
Using a count of citations biases the list towards inter-disciplinary
stuff (such as Freire) and American sources (such as Coleman or
Hollingshead and Redlich.) By comparison, well-known works in the UK
like /Poverty in the United Kingdom /or /The Gift Relationship/ only
weigh in at about 3500 each.
It's difficult to know what to include, and what not. If you believe
that everything about society or politics is also about social policy,
there's no basis to leave out anything written in the social sciences.
I left out things that seemed to me to be mainstream social theory (such
as History of Sexuality), political theory (A Theory of Justice),
econometrics (the FGT index) or about other subjects (The Limits to
Growth). I couldn't quite decide about Risk Society (27754) but on
balance I don't think there's enough policy in it to be included; I also
dropped Goffman's Stigma (23066) on the same basis.
It probably shouldn't pass comment, too, that some of the pieces that do
get included are pretty dreadful. Hardin doesn't understand there's a
distinction between communal grazing of land and robbing a bank.
Foucault was clueless about mental illness (try Kay Jones' /Asylums and
After/ for a corrective). The Bell Curve is transparently racist.
That's not a reason for not owning up to them. If we're going to cite
these things, we should make sure that students know what's in them.
--
Paul Spicker
website: http://www.spicker.uk/
blog: http://blog.spicker.uk/
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 16:46:46 +0000
From: Paul Ashton <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: The most cited works in social policy
None of Townsend's?Good to see three of Amartya Sen' publications
there.Whenever I see Sen's name come up I think of that exchange
(battle, even) between him and Townsend in the OEP in the mid-80s.For
those not familiar with it, here's a particularly telling part:
"I am grateful to Professor Peter Townsend for writing such a
forcefulrejoinder to my paper, "Poor, Relatively Speaking."...Peter
Townsend clearly is a truly "complete" sociologist. Not only does he
examine my reasoning, which he finds "very confused" and "theoretically
naive", he also provides a sociological explanation of my taking on a
task in which I have evidently failed so badly...while I have, it
appears, tried "gradually" to extend my work "to include comparisons
with highly industrialized societies", I have been" stung by different
theoretical approaches developed in other work published at about the
same time" (p. 663). Thus it is that I have had to enter"the fray more
openly"—the hard world of "theoretical approaches", andseem to have
produced all this "very confused stuff'. Townsend combines
hisexplanation of my predicament, related to my third-worldly roots,
with anoffer of assistance, and I must acknowledge that there is
something of thekindness of the U.K. Immigrants Advisory Service in his
generous offer to"help to clear up this fundamental confusion about the
nature of poverty madeby Professor Sen" (p. 661)....
....I have to confess that trying to make sense of Townsend's critical
rejoinder (especially his remarks on capabilities, and on absoluteness and
relativity of needs) is almost as exacting as walking on treacle tart (or on
liquid molasses, as we would tend to say with our experience "rooted in
third world economies, especially that of India")."
I don't remember actually enjoying any other OEP papers as much as this one!
Paul Ashton
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Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 20:48:19 +0000
From: John Veit-Wilson <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: The most cited works in social policy
A propos Sen and Townsend: a more constructive approach which avoids this knockabout missing the point stuff is to recognise that Sen was trying to theorise in a very abstract universal way what people ought to be able to do in any society in order to be recognised as included, and what they could do – and so was Townsend, but in the more concrete context of [mainly] specific European societies. It’s a good example of what happens when people don’t listen to each other to understand what aspects they may agree on, but try to score points by finding differences. Perhaps that’s how academic reputations are made, but it doesn’t always advance understanding, evidently.
What Townsend took for granted was that the capabilities should be available to all in society, an egalitarian approach which is not shared by the current UK government in implementing its policies. It’s not clear, to me at least, if Sen was as egalitarian as Townsend in answering the question, whose standards of minimal adequate inclusion are to be applied, egalitarian or stratified. That may be because many societies’ governments do not implement egalitarian values and so the overall theoretical statement can’t take them for granted if it is to respect the locally-specific societal values and not some imposed set of sociocultural norms from elsewhere. What is an acceptable minimum adequate level of capability for inclusive life in India when its UK equivalent isn’t even agreed by government in the UK? For whom? Where? When? Who says? Attempts I’ve seen [no names here] are usually ideologically and culture-specific to the commentator’s own normative values, not to the ethnographic answers to these essential questions. Which do you prefer to adopt and why? We need to talk about normative standards before empirical measures.
https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/j.veit-wilson/documents/jspvizard07.pdf
John VW.
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