The Vital Role of Social Sciences in Understanding and Shaping Societal Dynamics

If put in a simple language or in simple meaning, the matters of social sciences are prime and prominent due to their creation of better institutions and advanced systems that affects people's lives in their everyday routine & lives. The elements of the society where creation of frameworks for understanding the various origins & studying the effects of regime type, identifying the purpose of political parties, understanding the reasons for polarization, adapting the structure of social networks, measuring the structures and goals of government agencies, accepting the challenges and grabbing the opportunities faced by service providers and non-profits and many more are there all of which are attempts that are made to make a general sense of all these structures that have real world and profound impacts in the real world (Alvesson et al. 2017). Thus, it can be said that social science helps people in understanding how to interact with the social world out there, how to influence the policies, have developed networks, increasing the government accountability and especially to promote democracy in their own way.

The question often arises that why only social science, and the answer comes in a ways that only social science helps people of the society to understand and makes them engage with the key political and social institutions in their daily lives, thus ultimately benefiting the individuals along with the society as a whole. Hall (2019) revealed that the studying of social sciences gives students a detailed and brief understanding of the real-time world around them which they have to face in these real world scenarios. In social science, students learn about places, cultures, and events around the world, what will conspire them to make the way they are, and can make inferences about how the rest of the world will work in future. The aim or purpose of social science is to make young people informed and reasoned about decisions to be taken for the public as good decisions being citizens of a culturally diverse & democratic society in today’s interdependent world. The study of social science is more necessary than just the study of the individual social sciences. This subject is a group of academic disciplines dedicated to examining the society with open glasses to get a clear conception about how to deal with issues and challenges, how to behave and cooperate with people, hoe to take part in societal decisions being an active citizen and have full engagement among the society (NJAS - Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences, 2019). In today’s complex and rapidly changing world, the social science study gives power to examine that how can an individual produce things, communicate with others, govern ourselves, understand our surrounding environments, and especially how to solve the challenges & problems that an individual have to face being present in the organisation of social relations and processes. The need of social science is there since it contains deeply embedded societal cultural assumptions and significantly outlines the important relationship between philosophical thinking and the practical research methods in social sciences.

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The two real world examples are presented explaining the need of social science to have better understanding of the lives of people in the society.

Example 1:

The recent Covid-19 crisis, where this pandemic has transformed the entire meaning and aspects of life than people could have imagined in a real world scenario. As all the prepared plans fell to pieces before the eyes of society, people just had a few days to suddenly figure out how to maintain teaching, learning, reading, writing, and even doing “fieldwork” from home maintain the social distancing rule for the betterment of the society. According to Winch (2020) although, this sudden societal crisis has created an impeccable opportunity to rethink about all the fundamentals characteristics of the society objects that people studies and deals in their regular life which consists of goods, services, monies, markets, corporations, work, finances & economies also where all of these went into crisis too during the pandemic. When discussed more deeply & fundamentally, there is the need for the policymakers to examine and listen to all those social and natural scientists all of who has been underscored by the crisis and its handling them by the government authorities. This could ultimately provide some of the reasons for giving hope which will be regarding the standing of academic investigation in the real world, but this of course is a crisis to that extent where it will impact all the universities and hence the work for upcoming years to come. This sudden pandemic COVID-19 has have suddenly revived the relevance of facts by giving scientific experienced knowledge of an unexpected opportunity for the rematch against all the governmental and non-governmental organisations which have been tried to delegitimise it in the past recent years. In terms of this topic, the importance of social science in this regard has clearly been remained as relevant as before the crisis was. Reiter (2017) stated that many people have argued that this COVID-19 situation have demonstrated the need for sudden & urgent change in the way in which people previously organised our societies and economies. This topic for our panels have clearly is at the heart of the rethinking that needs to take place after the crisis is over.

Example 2:

The knowledge and information that social science provides have their impact on the success of younger and new students. In relation to this, the demographics of the population are continuously brining change in itself. All the educational institutes are becoming more and more wide and diverse, while the ethnocentrism here is not as dominant as it was for the previous generations. Technology always continues to get advanced and improved, linking people from one part to other parts of the world round the globe. Some major educational associations across the country now introduced an international department to accommodate all the students with diverse backgrounds, desires and needs included in this society. Kwan (2018) advised that social science educators now use their expertise and analytical skills to provide a wide and brief global perspective on how to keep up in all the societal fields so that one day the individuals can be able to survive in the society with the help of social science knowledge. This social science knowledge gives a diverse set of all type of skills that people need to be able to apply to whatever career path they choose and wherever when participate. Social science basically teaches individuals fundamental concepts of cultural, economic and political skills that will groom into an educated and a productive citizen. Social studies centres surround the understanding how the world works on a social level. As an example, in the early level conversation about neighbourhood relationships, the social science responsibility is in terms of helping the others and then understanding that how an individual impacts the groups or society. A good understanding of how the history influences the recent modern world which gives people the knowledge to apply on each and every other subjects, matters and everyday life (Energy Research & Social Science, 2018).

This whole essay reviewed that how the elements and knowledge of social science can be helpful and how its subject matters are closely and inter-related and inter-connected with the daily lives of people and the individuals to handle and manage all the social life matters. It helps to maintain the matters of society including teaching, learning, reading, writing, and even doing any kind of fieldwork also. Social science offers to help an individual to improve his/her personal and social life too & also identifies some of the relations of an individual with their personal life matters and its influence in daily life surviving in the struggle of society. Social science gives demonstration of an understanding that different people might manage and describe the same event or situation in various diverse ways by citing different reasons for their differences in thoughts & views.

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References

Alvesson, M., Gabriel, Y. and Paulsen, R., 2017. Return to meaning: A social science with something to say. Oxford University Press.

Energy Research & Social Science, 2018. Promoting novelty, rigor, and style in energy social science: Towards codes of practice for appropriate methods and research design, available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629618307230

Hall, J.A., 2019. 2. Ideas and the Social Sciences. In Ideas and Foreign Policy (pp. 31-54). Cornell University Press.

Kwan, M.P., 2018. The limits of the neighborhood effect: Contextual uncertainties in geographic, environmental health, and social science research. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108(6), pp.1482-1490.

NJAS - Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences, 2019. A review of social science on digital agriculture, smart farming and agriculture 4.0: New contributions and a future research agenda, available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1573521419301769

Reiter, B., 2017. Theory and methodology of exploratory social science research.

Winch, P., 2020. Understanding a primitive society. In Arguing About Knowledge (pp. 530-552). Routledge.