Making Political Science Matter - Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method (Paperback)

aThis edited collection offers and up-to-date and very readable discussion of knowledge, research, and method in the political sciences and social studies more generally, suitable for academics and doctoral students alike.a
--Thomas Ahrens, University of Warwick

aArticulates and debates the idea that academic work should be primarily concerned with addressing the largest and most immediate challenges faced by societies.a--"Urban Studies"

aDevotees of the perestroika movement will find many of the chapters reinforce their views of the field. . . . Recommended.a--"Choice"

"A significant and thoughtful discussion of key issues in the philosophy of social science, one designed to encourage a richer variety of methodological work in political science."
--Kristen Renwick Monroe, editor of "Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science"

"A bold call to rethink political science. The authors imagine a discipline that challenges power, challenges society, and challenges the ways we think. Making Political Science Matter is a wise, erudite, broad-ranging, sometimes witty gauntlet tossed before contemporary scholarship. It is more than a book, it is a movement."
--James A. Morone, author of "Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History"

Making Political Science Matter brings together a number of prominent scholars to discuss the state of the field of Political Science. In particular, these scholars are interested in ways to reinvigorate the discipline by connecting it to present day political struggles. Uniformly well-written and steeped in a strong sense of history, the contributors consider suchimportant topics as: the usefulness of rational choice theory; the ethical limits of pluralism; the use (and misuse) of empirical research in political science; the present-day divorce between political theory and empirical science; the connection between political science scholarship and political struggles, and the future of the discipline. This volume builds on the debate in the discipline over the significance of the work of Bent Flyvbjerg, whose book Making Social Science Matter has been characterized as a manifesto for the Perestroika Movement that has roiled the field in recent years.

Contributors include: Brian Caterino, Stewart Clegg, Bent Flyvbjerg, Mary Hawkesworth, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Gregory J. Kasza, David Kettler, David D. Laitin, Timothy W. Luke, Theodore R. Schatzki, Sanford F. Schram, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, Corey S. Shdaimah, Roland W. Stahl, and Leslie Paul Thiele.