Shaping Human Science Disciplines Institutional Developments in Europe and Beyond Christian Fleck Full Chapter PDF
Shaping Human Science Disciplines Institutional Developments in Europe and Beyond Christian Fleck Full Chapter PDF
Shaping Human Science Disciplines Institutional Developments in Europe and Beyond Christian Fleck Full Chapter PDF
https://ebookmass.com/product/expertise-and-participation-
institutional-designs-for-policy-development-in-europe-1st-
edition-krick/
https://ebookmass.com/product/solidarity-in-europe-1st-ed-
edition-christian-lahusen/
https://ebookmass.com/product/public-discourses-about-
homosexuality-and-religion-in-europe-and-beyond-marco-derks/
https://ebookmass.com/product/developments-in-environmental-
regulation-risk-based-regulation-in-the-uk-and-europe-1st-
edition-jon-foreman-eds/
Genomic Politics: How the Revolution in Genomic Science
Is Shaping American Society Jennifer Hochschild
https://ebookmass.com/product/genomic-politics-how-the-
revolution-in-genomic-science-is-shaping-american-society-
jennifer-hochschild/
https://ebookmass.com/product/european-integration-beyond-
brussels-unity-in-east-and-west-europe-since-1945-matthew-broad/
https://ebookmass.com/product/current-developments-in-
biotechnology-and-bioengineering-human-and-animal-health-
applications-1st-edition-vanete-thomaz-soccol/
https://ebookmass.com/product/philosophy-beyond-spacetime-
implications-from-quantum-gravity-christian-wuthrich/
https://ebookmass.com/product/transnational-solidarity-in-times-
of-crises-citizen-organisations-and-collective-learning-in-
europe-1st-ed-edition-christian-lahusen/
Shaping Human
Science Disciplines
Institutional Developments
in Europe and Beyond
Christian Fleck,
EDITED BY
Matthias Duller and
Victor Karády
Series Editors
Christian Fleck
Department of Sociology
University of Graz
Graz, Austria
Johan Heilbron
Centre Européen de Sociologie et de
Science Politique (CESSP)
CNRS - EHESS - Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne
Paris, France
Marco Santoro
Department of the Arts
Università di Bologna
Bologna, Italy
Gisèle Sapiro
Centre Européen de Sociologie et de
Science Politique (CESSP)
CNRS-Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
Paris, France
This series is the first to focus on the historical development and cur-
rent practices of the social and human sciences. Rather than simply
privileging the internal analysis of ideas or external accounts of institu-
tional structures, it publishes high quality studies that use the tools of
the social sciences themselves to analyse the production, circulation and
uses of knowledge in these disciplines. In doing so, it aims to establish
Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences as a schol-
arly field in its own right, and to contribute to a more reflexive practice
of these disciplines.
Shaping Human
Science Disciplines
Institutional Developments
in Europe and Beyond
Editors
Christian Fleck Victor Karády
Department of Sociology Department of History
University of Graz Central European University
Graz, Austria Budapest, Hungary
Matthias Duller
Department of Sociology
University of Graz
Graz, Austria
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
v
Contents
vii
viii Contents
Index 385
Notes on Contributors
and Methods won the Dutch Sociological Association’s Prize for best
dissertation of 2015–2016. His research interests are in economic soci-
ology and the sociology of knowledge and science, in particular the
sociology of research methods.
List of Figures
xv
xvi List of Figures
The authors of this volume have collaborated for a period of four years
within a European Union funded research project called International
Cooperation in the Social Sciences and Humanities (INTERCO-SSH).
Interco-SSH was dedicated to investigating particularities of the disci
plines put together under the acronym SSH, and identifying past hin-
drances and future possibilities, to better the future collaborations
beyond disciplinary fences and national borders. This volume reports on
the results of one of the endeavors of our international collaboration;
studying patterns of institutionalization across Europe and beyond.
It analyzes the development of a sample of SSH disciplines in Argentina,
France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the
Disciplines
A widely used classification calls specialized parts of science and schol-
arship ‘disciplines,’ defined, or at least marked, by specific topical foci,
methodologies and intellectual approaches. Both ‘natives’ and observ-
ers see the overall field of science as consisting of an ensemble of disci-
plines. Some of these units are better-known and have a longer history
than others. Mathematics, philosophy, and physics, for example, are
longstanding while informatics or molecular genetics appeared only
recently. Although it is hard to derive an exhaustive, general definition
of what a discipline is, their functioning as building blocks of the larger
‘house’ called academia is generally accepted. They are, in the words of
Rudolf Stichweh, ‘the primary unit of internal differentiation of the
modern system of science’ (Stichweh 1992: 4).
The concept ‘discipline’ points immediately to at least three research
areas. First, we need to explain their emergence, including new entities,
second, we need to come to terms with the collaboration of scientists
and scholars across the boundaries of disciplines, and what is debated
under umbrella terms as inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinarity. Third,
in a closer examination we see that the boundaries of any given disci-
pline are anything but fixed and commonly agreed upon; disciplines can
expand or contract with regard to the range of their explanatory claims.
Since Thomas Gieryn (1999), debates about this problem are usually
labeled ‘boundary work,’ since disciplinary frontiers are guarded and
defended by ‘boundary workers’ and often redefined by those involved,
even if in different ways to state borders.
Stichweh (1992) argues that it was only in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries that the idea of scientific disciplines came to
structure the field of scholarly pursuits, replacing a formerly hierarchi-
cal system with one based on functionally differentiated, horizontally
coexisting units—each being concerned with different aspects of reality
(ibid.: 7). The oldest disciplines in this sense were, then, formed from
those scientific activities that were already well-established. Among
nineteenth-century SSH these were philosophy, history, descriptive
statistics, and early variants of geography, economics and political the-
ory. Around the turn of the twentieth century, research into social and
1 Introduction: Shaping Disciplines—Recent Institutional …
7
core disciplines, at least in the SSH, has occupied most of the scholarly
terrain in Europe and beyond. In fact, it is one of the peculiarities of
this era that particular scientific organizations (e.g. national funding
bodies for basic research) have been globally imitated more effec-
tively than ever before, a process label “isomorphism” by John Meyer
and his collaborators (Drori et al. 2003). Such organizations usually
strengthen established disciplinary differentiations but do not encour-
age new arrangements of the division and integration of the production
of social knowledge. Vastly different national traditions notwithstanding
(Lepenies 1988; Levine 1995), these traditions started to increasingly
interact and recognize each other across national borders, contributing
to international debate of how disciplines define themselves.
Without assuming that the disciplinary order of the post-war era is
in any sense ‘natural’ in the SSH, i.e. one that corresponds to the dif-
ferentiation of social realities themselves, the relative stability of the
core disciplines provides a justification of sorts for international com-
parative research design. At the same time, one has to keep in mind
that what hides behind a common disciplinary label can differ signifi-
cantly between different countries. The rationale with which disciplines
define themselves is anything but coherent. Abbott’s book title Chaos
of Disciplines (Abbott 2001) captures this insight well. While anthro-
pology is held together via a common method (ethnography), political
science follows the model of synthesizing knowledge of a common phe-
nomenon (politics) from other disciplines. Economics is, today at least,
unified by a theoretical assumption, famously put into one sentence
by Lionel (later Lord) Robbins: ‘Economics is a science which stud-
ies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means
which have alternative uses’ (Robbins 1932: 15) but yet followed com-
pletely different cognitive paths before this paradigmatic shift. Sociology
remains as vaguely defined as ever. In the first decades after WWII,
however, several attempts to unify or streamline the discipline received
significant attention (Celarent 2010; Calhoun and Van Antwerpen
2007; Pooley 2016; Steinmetz 2005).
This chaotic picture notwithstanding, it does appear to be established
that disciplines, once stabilized, are broadly accepted categories that also
form the basis for any inter-, trans-, or multidisciplinary endeavors. One
1 Introduction: Shaping Disciplines—Recent Institutional …
9
of the factors responsible for this large-scale continuity are national and
international institutions of research and science policy. The establishment
of the American ‘Social Science Research Council’ in 1923 (Worcester
2001) or of the ‘International Social Science Research Council’ in
1952 (Platt 2002) are proof of the process of fossilizing disciplines
by making instances of them members of such umbrella organizations.
Organized cooperation between representatives of particular branches
of science and scholarship has been practiced since the creation of the
Royal Society and its counterparts elsewhere (the regional or national
academies), but it is only recently that is has become a concern for
policy pundits when science policy started to be a specialized, state-
sponsored activity involving increasingly significant public funding.
As long as scholars did not challenge the social or religious order, they
could engage freely in the pursuit of their personal intellectual interests.
We find early instances of systematic interventions from outside aca-
demia in Napoleonic France—where higher education formed part of
the state bureaucracy—as well as in Wilhelminian Germany, where uni-
versities of the Humboldtian model were supposed to enjoy full intellec-
tual autonomy but had to accept that the state decided who was allowed
to occupy a chair. But worldwide science policy appeared worldwide
in the decades following WWII as a basic public function destined to
promote, frame and orientate the development of scholarly activities
(cf. Drori et al. 2003, 2006).
One precondition for any kind of policy seems to be the clustering
of those concerned in publicly recognizable social units. Politics is not
concerned with individuals, but with larger assemblies of clients, at
least if we follow the economic theory of democracy. Politicians exe-
cute policies, initiated only if a multitude of beneficiaries can be served,
and they always take into account the anticipated impact on their elec-
toral chances. With regard to science policy, ‘discipline’ functioned as
the unit deserving of benefits. More recently, assemblages of disciplines
occupy this place.
Very often a particular discipline was recognized as the provider
of remedies to rising social problems. After the Sputnik Shock of
1957, for example, Western democracies invested in space sciences.
When 20 years later unemployment rates did not recede, economics,
10 C. Fleck et al.
1See e.g., the list of stakeholders participating in the production of a document released in prepa-
ration of the post-2020 programme: LAB-FAB-APP: Investing in the European future we want.
Report of the independent High Level Group on maximizing the impact of EU Research & Innovation
Programmes, https://ec.europa.eu/research/evaluations/pdf/archive/other_reports_studies_and_
documents/hlg_2017_report.pdf, Annex 2, p. 24.
1 Introduction: Shaping Disciplines—Recent Institutional …
13
Institutionalization
In doing this we apply the language of institutionalization. Our per-
spective is to investigate the processes that contributed to the establish-
ment, and further expansion, of new fields of science and scholarship
via the emergence of institutional structures from common routines of
the given branches of learning. The process of establishing a particular
scholarly activity appears to have generally been the first step towards
institutionalization. However, the term ‘institution’ lacks a clear
meaning (Searle 2005). In economics it means something completely
different than it does in sociology, for example. Philosophers, mean-
while, developed their own interpretation. In German philosophy-
cum-sociology, the meaning has been elaborated in opposition to
Anglophone sociologies. Where economists call everything that is not
market-driven, self-interested rational behavior an institution, sociolo-
gists tend to reserve this term for relatively stable configurations that
secure the mutual understanding of the behavior of others and us, and
which thus shapes public conduct. Sociologists resort to a more diver-
sified set of criteria when they talk of institutions. In most cases, the
sociological terminology refers to particular instances of institutions
instead of the overall concept; the family, market, educational systems,
etc. are cases in point. The system of higher learning, the social organi-
zation of research and patterns of intellectual discourses are exemplary
examples of institutional arrangements. This is what we propose to
study in this book.
1 Introduction: Shaping Disciplines—Recent Institutional …
15
Our analytic tools are outlined below, but first one has to refer to a spe-
cific feature of the overall process. By speaking about institutionaliza-
tion, one could easily get the impression of an unidirectional process,
which would be incorrect. Stemming from the same cultural environ-
ment as the more prominent concept of modernization, one regularly
encounters a parallel understanding (Parsons and Platt 1973). Like the
notorious ‘take off’ terminology of W.W. Rostow, several scholars using
the institutionalization terminology hint at a single direction almost
in form of a teleological process; development is seen as starting at dif-
ferent points on the time-line but after this continuous growth is the
expected pattern.
Instead of this optimistic vision, we are aware of forces and develop-
ments acting against continuous processes of institutionalization, some
even conducive to what could be called de-institutionalization. This
might imply the disappearance or weakening of assets or resources neces-
sary for further institutionalization in terms of professional jobs, funding,
journals, curricula, public esteem or—in authoritarian regimes—freedom
to pursue scholarly work, all things which have been around for a while.
As far as the concept of institutionalization has been used to analyze the
trajectory of particular SSH disciplines, several prominent authors have
failed to discuss any mechanisms explaining what happened, very often
‘telling the story’ appeared to be enough (Bulmer 1984; Clark 1973;
Drori et al. 2003; Oberschall 1972; Turner and Turner 1990).
16 C. Fleck et al.
2Compare Jacobs (2013), Turner (2014, 2015) with regard to developments in the USA. Both
authors discuss downward turns but did not contribute much to conceptualize such events.
1 Introduction: Shaping Disciplines—Recent Institutional …
17
3http://interco-ssh.eu/short-histories-of-disciplines-in-the-world/.
22 C. Fleck et al.
In what follows, the reader will get comprehensive reports about the
development of a sample of seven SSH disciplines in eight countries,
all of them molded both by recent history and the European tradition
of scholarship. Those interested in a single country will find the appro-
priate parts more easily than those who want to know what happened
in and with a particular discipline. Our decision to ensemble the anal-
yses along the dimension of the nation state was deliberate, because of
our shared conviction that larger political, cultural and social conditions
heavily influence the institutional shape that a particular discipline takes.
References
Abbott, Andrew. 2001. Chaos of disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Becher, Tony. 1996 [1989]. Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry
and the cultures of disciplines. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Becher, Tony, and Paul R. Trowler. 2001. Academic tribes and territories:
Intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines, 2nd ed. Buckingham: The
Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.
Becker, Howard, and Harry E. Barnes. 1938/1961. Social thought from lore to
science. New York: Dover Publications.
Blaug, Mark. 1994. Not only an economist: Autobiographical reflections of a
historian of economic thought. The American Economist 38 (2): 12–27.
Bulmer, Martin. 1984. The Chicago school of sociology: Institutionalization, diver-
sity, and the rise of sociological research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Calhoun, Craig, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen. 2007. Orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and
hierarchy: “Mainstream” sociology and its challengers. In Sociology in America: A
history, ed. C. Calhoun, 367–410. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Camic, Charles, and Neil Gross. 2001. The new sociology of ideas. In The
blackwell companion to sociology, ed. Judith R. Blau, 236–249. Blackwell
companions to sociology 5. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Camic, Charles, Michèle Lamont, and Neil Gross (eds.). 2011. Social knowl-
edge in the making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Celarent, Barbara. 2010. Human behavior: An inventory of scientific findings,
by Bernard Berelson and Gary A. Steiner. American Journal of Sociology 115:
1345–1350.
Clark, Terry N. 1973. Prophets and patrons: The French university and the emer-
gence of the social sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (“privat”).
1 Introduction: Shaping Disciplines—Recent Institutional …
23
Drori, Gili S., John W. Meyer, and Hokyu Hwang. 2006. Globalization and
organization: World society and organizational change. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Drori, Gili S., John W. Meyer, Francisco Ramirez, and Evan Schofer. 2003.
Science in the modern world polity: Institutionalization and globalization.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Fleck, Christian, Johan Heilbron, Victor Karády, Gisèle Sapiro, et al. 2016.
Handbook of indicators of institutionalization of academic disciplines
in SSH. Serendipities: Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social
Sciences 1 (1): 1–30 (Material). http://serendipities.uni-graz.at/index.php/
serendipities/article/view/20/17.
Gibbons, Michael (ed.). 1994. The new production of knowledge: The dynamics
of science and research in contemporary societies. London: Sage.
Gieryn, Thomas F. 1999. Cultural boundaries of science: Credibility on the line.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heilbron, Johan. 2004. Toward a historical sociology of disciplinary knowl-
edge. In The dialogical turn: New roles for sociology in the postdisciplinary
age, ed. Charles Camic and Hans Joas, 23–42. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Jacobs, Jerry A. 2013. In defense of disciplines: Interdisciplinarity and specializa-
tion in the research university. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jencks, Christopher, and David Riesman. 2002 [1968]. The academic revolu-
tion, with a new introduction by Christopher Jencks. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction.
Lepenies, Wolf. 1988. Between literature and science: The rise of sociology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levine, Donald N. 1995. Visions of the sociological tradition. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Merton, Robert K. 1993 [1965]. On the shoulders of giants: A Shandean post-
script. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Merton, Robert K., and Elinor G. Barber. 2004. The travels and adventures
of serendipity: A study in sociological semantics and the sociology of science.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Müller, Albert (ed.). 2014. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften,
vol. 25.3, Die “Stämme” der Akademie – “Tribes” in Academe. Innsbruck:
Studien Verlag.
Nowotny, Helga, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons (eds.). 2001. Re-thinking
science: Knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
24 C. Fleck et al.
G. Sapiro (*)
Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique (CESSP),
Paris, France
e-mail: gisele.sapiro@ehess.fr
G. Sapiro
CNRS–École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris, France
E. Brun
University of Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France
C. Fordant
École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris, France
© The Author(s) 2019 25
C. Fleck et al. (eds.), Shaping Human Science Disciplines, Socio-Historical Studies
of the Social and Human Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92780-0_2
26 G. Sapiro et al.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside
the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to
the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying,
displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works
based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The
Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright
status of any work in any country other than the United States.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if
you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project
Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or
other format used in the official version posted on the official
Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at
no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a
means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project
Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.F.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.