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3 Geography and the Social Science Tradition
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Social science is the study of human society and activity; its member disciplines include economics, political science, and sociology. These social sciences expanded rapidly after 1945, using scientific methods to analyse problems and suggest how they may be solved. Before the 1970s few human geographers identified their discipline as a social science, but many now do. This shift was initially linked to the adoption of a positivist ontology and its associated ‘scientific method’, but many contemporary human geographers who identify as social scientists have challenged this orthodoxy, drawing on a diverse range of theories and approaches, including Marxism, feminism, postmodernism and post- structuralism, to create a very broad and diverse contemporary discipline.