Aim and Scope

Journal of Social Science and Economics (JOSSE) publishes original research that advances the understanding of socioeconomic and educational phenomena through innovative theoretical, conceptual, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches. The journal places strong emphasis on contextual depth, policy relevance, and transformative impact, particularly in developing and emerging economies, where education, economy, and society are deeply intertwined.

Journal of Social Science and Economics deliberately positions itself outside the dominant quantitative-only paradigm by prioritizing studies that:

• Develop or refine middle-range and grounded theories of social, economic, and educational behavior rooted in real-world institutional, cultural, political, and historical contexts;

• Employ rigorous qualitative, interpretive, historical-comparative, ethnographic, and mixed-methods designs to examine economic and educational processes, especially those underrepresented in mainstream economics, education, and social science journals;

• Explore the interplay between economic structures, educational systems, and social stratification (class, gender, ethnicity, religion, power, and institutions) in shaping inequality, social mobility, development trajectories, and human well-being;

• Offer critical, heterodox, postcolonial, feminist, ecological, or institutional perspectives on education as a socio-economic institution, including its role in labor markets, state formation, citizenship, and knowledge production;

• Bridge academic rigor with explicit education and socio-economic policy implications, practitioner insights, and social justice orientations, particularly in the Global South and emerging economies.

Special attention is given to manuscripts that:

• Challenge mainstream economic and education policy assumptions using empirical evidence from non-Western, marginalized, or peripheral contexts;

• Revisit classical and contemporary social, economic, and educational theories (e.g., Marx, Polanyi, Weber, Bourdieu, Sen, Freire, North, Ostrom) and demonstrate their continued or renewed explanatory power in analyzing education–economy–society relations;

• Present longitudinal qualitative studies, process-tracing analyses, ethnographies, or comparative case studies that reveal mechanisms linking education, labor, inequality, and development that are often invisible to large-N statistical approaches;

• Integrate insights from education studies, anthropology, sociology, political economy, geography, and history into analyses of economic development and social change;

• Address pressing contemporary challenges such as education inequality, skill formation, informal learning, platform-based education and labor, digital divides, education financialization, climate-induced educational disruption, land dispossession, and post-pandemic socio-educational reconfiguration.

Journal of Social Science and Economics welcomes bold theoretical contributions, empirically rich field-based studies, and methodologically innovative research on education, economy, and society that may not fit the conventional “quantitative hypothesis-testing” mold but significantly enrich the intellectual landscape of social science, economics, and education.