Government, Social Welfare and NGOs
A Failure of Governance The phenomenon of the NGOs or the Non Governmental Organizations entering the field of social welfare accelerated in the 1990s. In earlier decades, though there were several charitable trusts and organizations like Red Cross, Medicine Sans Frontiers, and Doctors without Borders, the explosion in the number of NGOs and the concomitant […]
Role of HRD in Risk Management
These days, the importance of Human Resource Management can not be neglected especially when companies are operating in such a volatile and unstable environment. The department plays a vital role in risk management. Needless to say, handling people is one of the most difficult tasks in the world and human resource department of any company […]
How to Practice Effective Time Management at Workplace
Time Management refers to assigning specific time slots to activities as per their importance and urgency in order to make the best possible use of time. In a layman’s language Time Management is nothing but to manage time well and doing things when they actually need to be done. Every organization works on deadlines. An […]
Overcoming Barriers to Change
Research has shown that the best way to get the senior managers at all levels interested in the change initiatives is by engaging them and seeking their buy-in for the change management process. Studies have proved that the managers in the upper echelons buy into the change from a strategic perspective where the accent is […]
Creating Sustainable Change – How to create and sustain change?
Who doesn’t like change and who doesn’t want to change? These are certainly truisms in the 21st century landscape where businesses proclaim their commitment to change and exhort their employees to “Be the change you want to see”. However, having a vision and mission statement that commits to change is different from actualizing the change. […]
As mentioned in the introductory article in this module, political science is the systematic study of the state and the workings of the political economy. The study of political science gives people the ability to influence and persuade the authorities to conform to broad developmental thrusts and to steer the direction in which the government is headed. Since political science is concerned with the study of the global political economy, it has links to other social sciences like history, sociology, philosophy, and psychology.
It needs to be mentioned that political science is that branch of the social sciences that is concerned with the workings of the global political economy and hence, shares a symbiotic relationship with the other social sciences that study the other parts of the global political economy.
We have chosen history, sociology, philosophy and psychology in this article as these are the disciplines that have a bearing on how political scientists go about their work.
Political science is intimately linked to history as the patterns of the past provide clues to the future. There can be no better guide to understanding the present and to predict the future than by studying the events in the past and extrapolating them to the future.
For instance, when political scientists try to predict the likely direction, which the global political economy takes, they would be relying on history to predict political behavior.
Next, political science is closely intertwined with sociology as both branches attempt to study human behavior in groups. Whereas sociology studies the entire societies, political science is concerned with the political systems that are part of the larger society.
The study of the interactions between the people and the state is something that both sociology and political science aim to do and hence, there is a symbiotic relationship between sociology and political science.
The next aspect is to do with philosophy. Since political behavior and governance are studied in terms of political philosophy which deals with abstract notions of the role of the state and the relationship of people and the state with an emphasis on understanding the concepts of public welfare and larger social good, both political science and philosophy have common grounds in these aspects.
The final social science discipline chosen is psychology and as this discipline studies human behavior in society, there are meeting points between political science and psychology as they both are concerned with the examination of why people in the larger political economy behave the way they do.
Finally, political science cannot be a standalone or isolated field as all branches of the social sciences purport to explain the larger questions concerning people and the state.
Hence, there are symbiotic relationships between political science and other sub-disciplines of social sciences as they have common ground in their quest to understand how political systems work and how politics and governance play themselves out.
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
What is Compassionate Capitalism and Why We Need it in These Times of Planetary Crisis ?
February 12, 2025
