Monday, July 3, 2017

The rise of 'nuance' in the Social Sciences

About two years ago, we put a link to Kieran Healy's work titled "Fuck nuance". His study has now been published as a paper in Sociological Theory (ungated version here). One of his main arguments is that the search for more nuanced understandings of social phenomena often end up obstructing the development of robust social theories. This is certainly open for debate.

Although Kieran's paper focuses on studies in Sociology, he has recently expanded some his analysis to other fields of the social sciences, showing how the the percentage of articles mentioning the words ‘nuance’ or ‘nuanced’ has sharply risen since the 1990s in pretty much every field.



credit: Kieran Healy