In the middle of researching for my thesis, I read that sentence and was not satisfied.
"What? Why? How? You can just say something like that. Give me some examples where corporations changed their practices without coercion from the law!" I thought.
And social science was in that moment heralded as a worthwhile endeavor.
No seriously.
I used to dismiss social science. Like, what, you think culture and societies and peoples and movements can be made into variables and controlled or compared into conclusions? Watch while you get invalidated because it's all chaos and patterns are of your own invention and can you just speak English please.
And it's not that I'm going to like reading social science articles now (much less write them - earlier this semester I felt so deflated when I realized, too late, that political science writing was entirely different from humanities writing).
But the thought process of social science. How culturally accepted perceptions and practices are examined, questioned, investigated. Okay, so everybody does this. Why. It is not "just because". Don't take things for granted. Set up an experiment (if not a social experiment, a thought experiment) and prove it.
And I like this because I've always placed a high premium on things I've taught myself, i.e. I don't trust knowledge that is doled out. What I learn in lecture < what I read for homework < what I reflect on in between readings. I internalize things only after I've taken facts apart and connected bits and pieces to what I already know.
I don't get told.