Blog 1 - Book Report/Review Example

There is one important caveat in any social science that is worth remembering: Though many studies would assign a number to substitute people, the way that statistics puts a number on for example, population, it never does well to treat a person just as a number. Their life and their way of life, the culture that is the “software” of many societies as Ballantine and Roberts puts it, though indivisible and cannot be put into numbers per se, is not only worth studying, but saving as well.Schumpeter asserts that statistics is only one of the four requirements for a good economic analysis, but it is useful in that it provides a common language and basis for theorizing (Lebret).

Of course we know concepts like happiness, creativity, fulfillment and even welfare can never be analyzed with figures alone. A good social scientist should be aware that the real world may always be more complex than the models presented in our textbooks.As stated in “Our Social World”, in a study of postmodern communities sociologist Richard Florida links creativity to the local cultural climate and to economic prosperity. Corollary to this is that society is not in itself a stationary entity but is an ongoing association of ever-changing individuals.

Therefore, the society is not to be seen as an abstraction to be contained in numbers but as a complex and creative actor as well. This is personally why sociology for me is not one-dimensional but is ideally a multidisciplinary field of study, sometimes deriving what is useful from other fields to best fulfills its objective. Finally, assigning numbers to people is not forcing a purely material or numerical standpoint where it no longer fits nor is it an assertion that everything can be measured, but is a motivation, at the very least, for more precision in thinking.

And that is how we should consider the critical and scientific way of conducting our experiments in sociology. In other words, the changes in values and recognitions over time must be directly connected to man’s thoughts, conditions and decisions as well. BibliographyLebret, Herve. Prophet of Innovation – Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. 31 March 2012. 23 May 2012 .