User:Uclqesm/sandbox

What are social sciences
Social sciences began with the need to understand human behaviour throughout multiple aspects in society; how humans interact with each other and how they make decisions. Social sciences are a broad discipline that includes anthropology, sociology, social psychology, political science and economics.

Social sciences go back to Ancient Greece and their willingness to understand human nature, their morality and the social construction around a state of politics.

The term ‘social sciences’ was first brought by William Thompson in 1824 when he wrote his book An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied to newly proposed system of voluntary equality of wealth.

From then, the discipline grew, mainly with the organisation of philosophers, the enlightenment philosopher that consisted of Denis Diderot, Baruch Spinoza, John Lock and Montesquieu.

Slowly social sciences entered universities, at first with research and then with it being taught for master students at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The end of World War II mark the increase in demand to study social sciences and especially political thinking to better understand the world.

History of Economics
Economics can be defined as the understanding human behaviour when it comes to wanting unlimited goods in a world where there is limited supply. Economics probably began in the Ancient Greece when the poet Hesiod wrote economics precepts in his poem. During the Medieval Age, thinkers like Thomas Aquinas talked about the importance of private property. However, economics weren’t a real discipline or even a subject to talk about before the 18th century.

At the time, we talked about ‘political economy’ to understand how production and consumption were linked to the making of policies. The term ‘political economy’ changed for ‘economy’ thanks to the textbook Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall with the rise of mathematical thinking to understand economics better.

The first time economics was studied dates back to the 19th century with the School of Salamanca in Spain.

Why is economics considered a social science?
Economics is considered to be the most scientific of social sciences. Indeed, the tools used to understand human behaviour in economics are mainly scientific, with the use of formulas, models, theories and hypothesis to prove their points. Likewise, studying economics in University and school, require, most of the time, a strong background in mathematics.

However, economics is considered a social science because its main purpose is to analyse, thanks to quantitative methods, human behaviour when it comes to having unlimited wants in a world where there is limited supply. Economics is at the limit between social sciences and hard sciences has it uses hard science to prove human behaviour.

What is sociology?
Sociology is part of social sciences and has a purpose of understanding the relationships between humans and the understanding they have on the society they live in. It also includes the studying of human societies and their challenges and movements throughout the centuries.

The beginning of sociology is marked, just like economics, at the beginning of the 19th century with the development of the enlightenment ideas that put humans at the centre of the thinking system.

Quantitative thinking in sociology
We do social research to understand how humans interact with each other in the world today but also because of the need to understand how people feel about the world they live in.

It's very hard to be partial in sociology and sociology research because the study is around the human thinking and therefore can easily be biased.

The research in sociology can be divided into the primary and secondary data and into the qualitative and quantitative data. The quantitative data takes the form of numbers and statistics. The qualitative data is the information gathered during interviews or transcripts. The primary data is the work that researchers do around a subject, while using surveys, interviews, statistics and the secondary data is the data made by the government mainly, it uses statistics and quantitative data.

The evolution of scientific data and how we use it changed with time. Indeed, before the Second World War, the qualitative data and theories were widely used, trusted and were found legitimate to prove a point. After the Second World War, with the development of quantitative data and statistics, it became the most predominant way of understanding knowledge in sociology.

Therefore, evidence in sociology is hard do grasp as it is using quantitative data to understand knowledge that cannot always be fully understood using numbers. it's harder to develop evidence in sociology than in other scientific disciplines because there is no rules to understand the data that is being recovered. According to Stanley Lieberson in his review Einstein, Renoir and Greeley: Some Thoughts about evidence in sociology in 1992, the real difficulty is not to produce data but to use it in a way that will prove a sociological theory the way we want.

Religious studies
Religious studies emerged in the 19th century as an attempt to understand the impact and relationship between humans and religions. It was brought up at about the same time as sociology, economics, anthropology during the enlightenment age where one of the most important ideas of the time was to put the man at the centre of the knowledge. The study of religion was very talked about as everyone wanted to study it in a different way and most disagreed on the methods and topics that needed to be covered.

This discipline was first brought up to try and understand beliefs but also to interpret and compare different religions. When studying religions, history and philosophy are two disciplines that cross religious studies.

Can be have truth in religious studies? How do we study a discipline can isn’t founded on evidence?
Religion is a very complicated subject to treat because it is not based solely on evidence. A religion cannot be verified through books and most of the time, to have truth we need evidence. There is truth in the historical side of most of religion because they are based on events that people were able to prove.

Talking about truth and religion is a very difficult task because according to the professor Dewi Zephaniah Phillips to understand religion you need to have a religious understanding rather than a criteria of truth. He is not saying that truth cannot be put into religion and used, but more than it’s a personal truth that changes with people. To him, the understanding of religion is not about the correct knowledge that we have and the truth we have learned from it but rather the ‘personal’ kind of truth.

Truth in religion is more about the truth that you understand with yourself. The more you try and find a scientifically truth or proof of religion beliefs, the personal belief diminishes because religion is founded on the fact that we don’t know everything. The truth in religion can therefore be perceived either as relative or subjective.

However, religious studies are still taught which means that they still have some truth in them or that we can at least use them to understand something else. The paradox about religion is that sometimes we don’t need to know why but just to believe and build from there. Indeed, if it was made clear that religions and Gods did not exist no one would believe in them, but it has been one of the most persistent forces in the history of humanity.

Historical ecology
Historical ecology is a sub discipline in ecology that studies the past and future of the relationship between humans and the environment. It takes into account other disciplines like geography, politics and even sociology to try and understand how this relationship between humans and the environment is shaping the world that we live in. It's a pluridisciplinarity project research that aims to gather decisions and outcomes from the past and put them at use for the future.

This discipline was first brought up after the World War II because scholars were more and more interested in grasping concepts from different points of view which meant bringing together different discipline around a subject.

Evidence in History of Art
the evidence of omission in history of art. indeed, the author is stating that sometimes we look to much on what we can extract from a work of art and we could also focus on the interpretation that people make out of it and how we usually follow someone's interpretation that might not even be true.

Rumours as truth in China's social media
China is known to be a country were 'fake news' and 'rumours' are constantly being censored in the social media platform 'Weibo', the biggest social media blog in the country. The company, jointly with the government is removing 'inappropriate' content, or what they call 'rumours' which can be defined as informations that haven't been authorised by the government when reliable information isn't available. In China, finding truth in social media but also from what the government says is incredibly difficult because the only source of information doesn't reflect the reality and therefore the truth. In the social media 'Weibo', reliable information that isn't approved by the government is removed from the platform or either discredited even if the 'rumour' is true.

Power of Social media in politics
Technology and the social media changed the game in politics and diplomacy. It is probably the one discipline that was the most challenged because of technology and the way we use social medias to do politics. Indeed, now politicians are faced with a public that has access to information like no one could before and they have to adapt to deliver content on those platforms. Nowadays, social medias are the centre of political campaign. We can also see for example that Twitter is at the centre of the political stage with politicians and presidents using it every day to easily pass on messages. The most famous example of that is probably former president of the US, Donald Trump that uses its Twitter account daily to talk about everything.

Social media changes 2 things in politics, the first one being the number of information, communications and news changes the way people have information and how they perceive it and second, politicians now have the power to shape their program and ideas to reach a wider audience and especially the younger ones. Social media had the power to influence people and have a wider audience for politicians.

The power of social medias in politics is from the change of dynamics from the traditional politics to the ‘technological politics’ where the lines between the cultural, the political and the popular’ are blurred. Social media offer a way to express emotions and to challenge the conventional ways politics are being made and who can participate.

Politicians are not the only one to pass on political messages because social media are platforms where even simple citizen with no background in politics can become activists. Indeed, it’s now very easy to make petitions reach a wider audience than just a city but also sometimes a whole country.

Social media give power to everyone and not just the politicians like before which means that the power is shifting from a small number of people to a much larger number of people that can bring new ideas and ways of thinking.

Facebook - Cambridge Analytica Scandal
The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal is one of the most famous scandal of social media being intrusive of politics. The scandal involved Facebook that sold more than 87 million people’s data to advertise election and influence candidates. The data was collected by Cambridge Analytica and then processed to build a psychological profile on users. The firm sought to sell these data to political campaign that now had the ability to target the right audience.

This leak is one of the greatest in the history of social media that involved politics and it shows that it is easy for people to have power of others because of information that they though were private and only on their social media platforms.

Power in children literature

Even tough children read less and less, the power of literature and the stories written can influence children a lot. For example, according to Evelyn Arizpe and Vivienne Smith in Children as Readers in Children's Literature, children shouldn't read fictions and fantasy books too soon because they need to understand that it will not become true. Because children learn a lot through books and stories and they are more likely to believe to what the books are talking about than adults that already have a critical sense. Therefore, the power of literature and the stories told are more extensive than with adults.

Greenwashing
Greenwashing is the action of falsely advertising content that is made to look ‘environmentally friendly. It’s a misleading action by large companies to respond to recent consumer demand for more eco-friendly goods and services. It has been defined as “the intersection of two firm behaviours: poor environmental performance and positive communication about environmental performance”. This demand stemmed from the growth of science-backed environmental consciousness in the past few decades but has been capitalised upon in recent years as a quick way to turn a profit out of a customer’s good intentions, especially by large fast fashion companies. H&M is a notable one, given its global market, the affordability of its range, and its “Conscious” line of products. From an environmental perspective and based on scientific data than can be seen as positive truth, the eco-friendliest course of action would be to lower rates of manufacture, however this has been unsuccessful because of clever marketing tactics using strong statements to advertise a relativist truth that allow profitability to continue while allowing them to look past how their products really came to be.

Greenwashing is an issue that encompasses different disciplines including environmental studies and marketing. The ‘truth’ is that these two disciplines cannot work together at the moment while both being effective, which creates a tension in the world a world of over consumption.

Greenwashing and the environment
Fast fashion represents the fashion products that are readily available, inexpensive and made very quickly. Each year, around 80 billion pieces of clothing are purchased with the majority going to the United States, which brings about 1.2 trillion dollars for the fashion business.

The purpose of fast fashion is to push the consumers to buy more and more every day. The making of fast fashion is very dangerous for the environment.

First the localisation of the production is mainly in developing countries with the majority being produced in China and Bangladesh. These developing countries don’t always have the same ideals about the environment and sustainability which means that they won’t be as careful as other countries.

Second, the production is based at 90% of cotton and polyester that can be dangerous for the health of the people that are working with it. Cotton needs a lot of water to produce and polyester is derived from oil which doesn’t sound very environmentally friendly.

Lastly, the business of fast fashion and the power it’s gaining every year is its ability to change clothes very quickly and therefore throwing away what you won’t wear. One of the biggest downsides of greenwashing is therefore the waste produced from people throwing away their clothes. The majority of the waste goes to landfills.

The case of H&M in trying to be eco-friendlier whilst remaining one of the most important players in the fast fashion industry.
In 2010, the Financial Time Deutschland reported that some cotton that was certified as ‘organic cotton’ from India was actually not. The scandal involved the firm H&M, among others, which seriously impacted the reputation of the brand. Since 2004, H&M is one of the first brands to introduce ‘organic cotton’ into their clothes and since 2007, it’s possible to find clothes that are made 100% from cotton. This powerful statement of making clothes from 100% organic cotton allowed H&M to be seen as a green firm that was trying to help the environment.

H&M are presenting themselves as supporting the environment with the use of organic cotton into their clothes but, as we saw, the verification and the whole process of commercialising this king of clothing line is still very blurry and needs more verification. The truth that this brand is basing their statements on is more of a normative truth which is a phenomenon where humans declare something as good or bad or even acceptable or not. H&M is trying to make it look like what they are selling is eco-friendly while actually the objective truth, which is based on scientific facts, show that this sustainable brand isn’t actually helping the environment.

H&M is using truth as a means of power and authority to push people to consume their products, but this truth is actually not the only one, and can be very opaque.

Greenwashing in marketing
Greenwashing is a prevalent practice mainly because of the potential financial gains that it brings, as well as related benefits, such as improved brand’s image. Possibility of increasing purchase intention (and, what follows, income) is the reason for why many companies decide to greenwash.

Hence, when seeing marketing’s goal as increasing financial gains then the objective truth about advertised products becomes irrelevant. Truth becomes constructivist - advertisers create the truth about products, and this truth is later being sold to the consumers.

However, research proves that the greenwashing brings desirable financial effects only when unacknowledged. Consumers, after learning about products being greenwashed significantly lose trust in a certain brand and do not want to buy their products anymore.

It is then safe to say that the successful greenwashing marketing campaign’s goal is to deceive the customers and this deception is the essential condition of acquiring expected financial gains. This approach is in direct opposition to the environmental point of view, where scientific, positivist truth is paramount.

Acknowledgment of greenwashing, however, does not influence only the company that was turned out to greenwash. It can influence the perception of all the products previously deemed to be eco-friendly, even the ones that truly are. It negatively affects person’s trust in ‘green’ products, effectively lowering purchase intention. Greenwashing can then create and consolidate misconceptions in society.

The societal results of greenwashing are visible even today, researchers show that it has already impacted the consumers, making them more suspicious towards not only eco-friendly products.

It is a common practice for brands to construct truths about their products, but these practices do not affect only this brand’s products, as they contribute towards creating truth about other products as well.

Conclusion:
Greenwashing is a practice that becomes more and more known to the public. It involves the marketing of firms and their claims that are supposed to be true but can be considered as half-truth because they only talk about the elements, they identify as helpful to maximise profit. However, in today’s society, more and more people are trying to go to the source of what brands are declaring and are using scientific resources to do so. It appears, then, that the truth consumers are looking for is based on science and the effect it has on the environment. The conflict seen here is present in many other modern issues, but the consumption of fast fashion relates to over-consumption as a whole. The reduction of relativist truth within a constant need to buy more items could posit an overall societal shift, especially when consumers become more aware of the impact on the planet. We can definitely see a different use of claims from different consumers and producers that have different objectives and therefore are using and distorting truth to their advantages.

Finally, it is difficult for these two disciplines to be working together at this moment while both being effective; to maximise profit and being ethical.

Notes