List of Books for Review
Review copies of these books can be provided upon request (please e-mail csr@soc.cas.cz):
The Social Scientist’s Grant Guide: Funding Your Future in Research (e-book)
Keri K. Stephens & Kerk F. Kee
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026
416 pp. | ISBN 9798881858612 (e-book PDF)
It’s time for social scientists to thrive in the grant-getting world. Securing external funding has never been more important for social scientists, nor has it ever required so much creativity! The Social Scientist's Grant Guide answers the call to support researchers who are scrambling to navigate the rules, processes, and social dynamics of the funding world. This guide welcomes you into the funding landscape and gives you the strategic and cultural knowledge crucial for grant success. As you build a personalized funding action plan that aligns with your research interests and career stage, you’ll learn how to identify funding opportunities that genuinely align with your research strengths; position your work for maximum impact across different types of funders in the US and internationally; navigate political and social dynamics that shape reviewer decisions; develop the adaptive mindset needed to thrive as funding landscapes inevitably shift. Having secured more than $25 million from federal, state, industry, and foundational support while working with 5 different academic institutions and 7 different institutional support organizations, Keri K. Stephens and Kerk F. Kee know the keys to success and the pitfalls to avoid as you build your research future.
Famous but Misunderstood Three Essays on Maurice Duverger’s Political Science (e-book)
Miroslav Novák
Karolinum Press, 2026
162 pp. | ISBN 978-80-246-6212-1 (e-book PDF)
Widely cited but increasingly seldom read, Maurice Duverger (1917–2014) exemplifies the fate of many canonical thinkers not only in political science. This monograph revisits his legacy through an in-depth analysis of three interconnected pillars of his work: the formulation of Duverger’s laws concerning the relationship between electoral systems and party systems; his typology of pluralist party systems; and his empirical theories of democracy. Duverger’s ideas are examined in close comparison with the later and highly influential contributions of Giovanni Sartori (1924–2017) and Arend Lijphart (*1936). Authored by political scientist Miroslav Novák, recipient of the 2024 Czech Political Science Association Award for his contribution to the development of Czech political science, the book persuasively argues that contemporary scholarship has significantly misunderstood Duverger’s work. In doing so, it calls for a reassessment not only of Duverger’s theories but also of prevailing narratives about the evolution of political science in the second half of the twentieth century.
From Societas to World Society: Genealogy of a Concept (e-book)
Volker H. Schmidt
Brill, 2025
xviii, 383 pp. | ISBN 978-90-04-72731-1 (e-book PDF)
From Societas to World Society offers a genealogy of what is arguably sociology’s most important concept, that of “society.” The book covers this concept’s entire intellectual history from its first systematization in Roman law 2,500 years ago to its crystallization in what Schmidt calls today's default model, informing both empirical research and theoretical logic in the social sciences, which he shows to be highly problematic. As an alternative, Schmidt suggests a conceptualization building upon Niklas Luhmann’s theory of world society, which can be utilized for overcoming the former’s Eurocentrism and to lay the groundwork for a genuinely global social science.