Towards a Formal Analysis of “Vested Interests” as an Intrinsic Part of Social Science Research Techniques: Another Crucial Component of Social and Cultural Progress

We begin this paper by examining what vested are, both in specialized and generalized contexts and seek to examine why the entire concept has not been adequately studied both in sociology, and in other relevant and allied fields of the social sciences. The history of the usage of the term “vested interests” is also carefully traced along with other related concepts such as ideologies, lobbies, cabals, and conflicts of interest. The possible types of ideologies and vested interests are also probed, and these are interfaced with the points of view of both stakeholders and non-stakeholders of any given paradigm. We also then attempt to define what hard vested interests and soft vested interests are by means of suitable examples. We also propose tools and techniques to analyze vested interests using both direct and indirect techniques, and proposed methodologies to execute formal impact analyses as well. We also liberally pepper this paper with a large number of case studies, and hope that this will furnish and provide a valuable heuristic tool for social science research. These concepts are also then traced to and synchronized with our other previously published as well for the benefit of readers, so that a healthy correlation among all these papers is logically brought about. The crux and quintessence of this paper is that we emphasize the need to use valid