Narrative ordering and explanation

This paper investigates the important role of narrative in social science case-based research. The focus is on the use of narrative in creating a productive ordering of the materials within such cases, and on how such ordering functions in relation to ‘narrative explanation’. It argues that narrative ordering based on juxtaposition - using an analogy to certain genres of visual representation - is associated with creating and resolving puzzles in the research field. Analysis of several examples shows how the use of conceptual or theoretical resources within the narrative ordering of ingredients enables the narrative explanation of the case to be resituated at other sites, demonstrating how such explanations can attain scope without implying full generality

Glass ceilings and sticky floors: drawing new ontologies

How did the ‘glass ceiling’ and related characteristics of female labour force experience become recognised as a proper object for social scientific study? Exploring interactions between the contexts of discovery and justification reveals how this phenomenon was recognised and established by combining different forms of expertise and experience that came from both within and without the social scientific fields. The resulting object of study might well be described as embedding a ‘civil or community ontology’, for the intersections of facts and values in these different knowledge communities was equally important in defining the content of that object of research

Exemplification and the use-values of cases and case studies

This paper provides an account of the 'use-value' of case-based research by showing how social scientists exploit cases, and case studies, in a variety of practices of inference and extension. The critical basis for making such extensions relies on the power of a case, or the account given of a case (the case-study account), to exemplify certain features of the social world in ways which prove valuable for further analysis: either of the same case, or in many domains beyond the original case study. Framing use-values in terms of exemplification compares favourably with understanding reasoning beyond the case either as a form of analogical reasoning or in taking cases as experimentable objects

‘If p? Then What?’ Thinking Within, With, and From Cases

The provocative paper by John Forrester: ‘If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases’ (1996) opened up the question of case thinking as a separate mode of reasoning in the sciences. Case-based reasoning is certainly endemic across a number of sciences, but it has looked different according to where it has been found. This paper investigates this mode of science - namely thinking in cases - by questioning the different interpretations of ‘If p?’ and exploring the different interpretative responses of what follows in ‘Then What?’. The aim is to characterise how ‘reasoning in, within, with, and from cases’ forms a mode of scientific investigation for single cases, for runs of cases, and for comparative cases, drawing on materials from a range of different fields in which case-based reasoning appears

Recovering Tinbergen

From the long viewpoint of history of economics, the two most important contributions that Jan Tinbergen made to economics are surely the development of the first macro-econometric model and a general theory of economic policy-making. This paper explores these two innovations to recover why they deserve such recognition, analyses their technical and conceptual depths, and shows how they relate to the economic history of the period and his personal history. In the process, it becomes clear that they are not separate innovations, but, as Tinbergen recognised, involved the same logic; and as we can recognise, were driven by the same ambition to make economics usable in the world

Increased GABA Contributes to Enhanced Control over Motor Excitability in Tourette Syndrome

Tourette syndrome (TS) is a developmental neurological disorder characterized by vocal and motor tics [1] and associated with cortical-striatal-thalamic-cortical circuit dysfunction [2, 3], hyperexcitability within cortical motor areas [4], and altered intracortical inhibition [4, 5, 6, 7]. TS often follows a developmental time course in which tics become increasingly more controlled during adolescence in many individuals [1], who exhibit enhanced control over their volitional movements [8, 9, 10, 11]. Importantly, control over motor outputs appears to be brought about by a reduction in the gain of motor excitability [6, 7, 12, 13]. Here we present a neurochemical basis for a localized gain control mechanism. We used ultra-high-field (7 T) magnetic resonance spectroscopy to investigate in vivo concentrations of γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) within primary and secondary motor areas of individuals with TS. We demonstrate that GABA concentrations within the supplementary motor area (SMA)—a region strongly associated with the genesis of motor tics in TS [14]—are paradoxically elevated in individuals with TS and inversely related to fMRI blood oxygen level-dependent activation. By contrast, GABA concentrations in control sites do not differ from those of a matched control group. Importantly, we also show that GABA concentrations within the SMA are inversely correlated with cortical excitability in primary motor cortex and are predicted by motor tic severity and white-matter microstructure (FA) within a region of the corpus callosum that projects to the SMA within each hemisphere. Based upon these findings, we propose that extrasynaptic GABA contributes to a form of control, based upon localized tonic inhibition within the SMA, that may lead to the suppression of tics

Measuring development - from the UN’s perspective

Recipes for creating development have changed radically since the international community first thought to intervene in such historical processes soon after WWII. During this time, views about how to measure development have also changed dramatically, moving from relatively simple to relatively complex measurement systems. This paper charts these changes using both the oral interview histories and retrospective book accounts given by those involved with the UNDP, and offers an analysis of their ‘political economy of numbers’. Their move from using GNP per head to the SDGs is analysed in terms of the potential performativity of those numbers in prompting development and for creating accountability