Large representative surveys have become a valuable resource to inform public policy in an increasingly complex modern world. They provide authority to policy since they are considered objective, neutral and scientific. In contrast, this article conceives the production of knowledge as an interactive process. We argue that the conduct of large social surveys tends to reinforce existing world views, power relations and a narrow construction of social issues. To illustrate this, we draw on a small exploratory study which examined the experience of responding to selected survey questions of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia study (HILDA). We suggest that while more open approaches are required to capture the complexities of everyday life, these are unlikely to be implemented given the dominance of particular forms of knowledge.

Increasingly, social policies combine to intensify old risks and create new social risks with unequal consequences for men and women. These risks include those created by changing normative expectations and the resulting tensions between social policy, paid employment and family life. Policy reliance on highly aggregated standardised outcome data and generalised models of autonomous rational action result in policies that lack an understanding of the rationales that structure everyday life. Drawing on two Australian studies, we illustrate the importance of attending to the intersections and collisions of social change and normative policy frameworks from the perspective of individual ‘lived lives’.

Five texts on mathematical modeling in the social sciences which have appeared within the last five years are described and evaluated. The analysis of the texts proceeds by considering such issues as the mathematical background required, general readability, ability of the text to train the reader to develop his own models, consideration of important philosophical issues inherent in modeling, and the types—substantive and mathematical—of models covered. The goal of the review is to pinpoint those texts, or parts of texts, that are most useful to the researcher in international relations.

Lewis Frye Richardson's simple differential equations model of armaments races has been long criticized for its lack of incorporation of the goals of nations. Using the mathematics of optimal control theory, the authors formulate a model which incorporates national goals into an “arms balance” objective function. The goals used are based on the traditional concerns in the balance-of-power literature. From an objective function together with the Richardson model an optimal armaments policy is derived. The United States-Soviet, NATO-WTO, and Arab-Israeli arms races are used as empirical examples, and the parameters in the model are estimated by means of functional minimization techniques. The optimal control model is further examined for its equilibrium and stability properties. The equilibrium and stability conditions are assessed with respect to the empirical examples. The findings are that while the United States and the Soviet Union in direct confrontation pursue strategies that lead to a lack of equilibrium and stability, when taken as part of NATO and WTO, the major powers and their alliance partners do pursue stable and equilibrium strategies. The Israeli policy is found to lead to equilibrium and stability while the Arab policy does not.