The most unfamiliar aspects of last week’s readings were the style, structure, and language in the articles. I am far more familiar with narrative writing and using local examples to illustrate characteristics of macro discussions and theories. This genre of writing was overtly structured, formulaic, and distant, and therefore was more difficult for me to follow the arguments. Grouped together as they were, the three articles provide examples of how, over time (2006, 2012, 2017), critiques of the formulas and systems expanded as other social, cultural, and political qualities were taken into consideration.
Because quantitative sociology is not my expertise, I gave great flexibility to the terminology with which I was unfamiliar. As example, words like “decision-making,” “development,” and conflating ideas of gender/sex, seemed to go undefined and/or unchallenged in the pieces we read. My assumption is that these ideas and concepts have been or are continuing to be contested in other arenas of quantitative sociological discourse. While reading, I tried to consider the audience for whom these pieces were written – policy makers at the UN, fellow practitioners, or students – and what the contributions and interventions being made were – conceptual, theoretical, or methodological?
As I mentioned in class, I had most difficulty reading these because, although they discuss societies and how to measure them, there were very few people in the articles’ discussions. I felt most comfortable reading Weber’s piece, Politics of ‘Leaving No One Behind,’ because readers saw a glimpse of what the neo-liberal Sustainable Development Goals and other polices look like on the ground. Providing the example of the Bolivian ‘water wars’ and the “more than 70,000 people who took to the streets in protests [of the policy to privatize water],” Weber illustrates the local implementation of such broad policies.[1] What other examples could highlight the impact of programs like the United Nations Development Programme, Millennium Development Goals, and Sustainable Development Goals?
Large-scale quantitative studies like those discussed in the articles could aid other social scientists and researchers in the humanities when identifying points of interests for further study. One my ask, for example, why a certain country has a higher or lower gender empowerment and equality ratio and develop projects to address the inconsistencies.
[1] Weber, 403