I would like to make a number of statements about social science on the

basis of the chapters that have gone before. Prominent among these
statements will be a summary of the distinctive nature of each of the social
sciences. That involves some consideration of their strengths and
weaknesses, and how they relate to each other. There is a logic to the way
investigators have carved up the field into five distinct specialisms. We will
take a c10se look at why we have five specialisms, and not four, or six.
Practitioners in the social sciences have certain shared skins and
information. The scientific study of society from any perspective involves a
common objective. The test of success or failure is the same when we go to
a high enough level of generality. Closer to the ground, there are different
skins and techniques. This is almost inevitable. If there was only one set of
skins, there would only be one kind of social scientist, apart from
specialisms in subject matter. As much as anthropologists differ one from
another, and the same for economists, we can broadly identify different
things one needs to know in order to do anthropology, or to do economics.
So much for the inputs. What about the output? What can we expect
from each of the five social sciences? When social psychologists and

We should be a little systematic in addressing the question of whether
chapters five through ten give a usable picture of how the social sciences
operate. A basic premise is that the leading professional journals in each
subject publish the best work in their fields. The challenges to this
proposition tend to come from scholars who have not had great success with
the journals. An extreme position is to denigrate publication in any form.
This is nonsense, if for no other reason than that science is a coIlective
endeavour. No one is obliged to take part. But if you want to do science,
the work must be made public and subject to criticism from other
practitioners.
Of course print is not the only way of going public. For example, one
cannot be sure how the World Wide Web will evolve. At the present time
material is 'published' there, but much of this material is not subject to peer
review. There is no editing. No test is applied as to whether the material
warrants a place in the structure of science. This point has been made
before, and we need not dweIl on it. In contrast, a journal available on the
web is still a journal. That is another matter. What about other means of
publication than journals

When it comes to the other social sciences, I am both less sure of my
ground, and have some reason to feel that book publication plays a bigger
role in advancing the subjects than it does in economics. From the point of
view of the purpose of this book, the important consideration, or better, the
niggling worry, is that the inadvertently excluded material might change the
picture of social science which is present in the material I have included.
That is the central consideration. Hopefully, in all disciplines, the journals
are representative.
There are journals which are subject matter based rather than discipline
based. Among the topics I have taken up, these journals figure prominently
in housing, crime and religion. I have paid some attention to these sources,
but by no means have I given them a thorough screening. Most of the
articles in these journals use ideas from the discipline based journals. The
test of originality, or contribution to the subject, is less forcefully applied.
Rather, if an article is of potential interest to people with an interest in
housing, for example, it goes in. The sociology, or economics, or whatever,
used in that article may be rather familiar to specialists. The contribution to
science may be small.