A Historical Account of Danish Sociology

A Troubled Sociology

Kristoffer Kropp

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349552382, 9781137403414
• eBook ISBN: 9781137403421
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides the first English-language account of the history of Danish sociology, examining it from the late 19th century to the present day. Focusing on the discipline's struggle for recognition in Denmark, it is a case study of how sociological knowledge has entered into ever-changing coalitions with welfare state bureaucracies.

1

Disciplines as Social Spaces

Abstract: This chapter presents a conceptual framework for studying scientific disciplines inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s field analytical approach. Focussing on the social sciences, it argues that recent discussions have under-theorised scientific disciplines focussing too strongly on apparently changing condition of scientific knowledge production conceptualised as Mode 2 knowledge production. Following Bourdieu’s field analytical approach, Kropp suggests an analytical approach containing three analytical movements: mental structures, institutional structures and relations to other fields and to the field of power.

Keywords: Bourdieu, Denmark, history of sociology, Mode 2, scientific disciplines

Kropp, Kristoffer. A Historical Account of Danish Sociology: A Troubled Sociology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137403421.0003.

On 1 January 1994 the University of Copenhagen appointed two new professors to the re-organised and re-opened Department of Sociology: Peter Gundelach and Margareta Bertilsson. In 1939, two academic generations before, the German émigré Theodor Geiger was appointed as the first chair solely devoted to sociology at the then newly opened Aarhus University. Between the appointments lies a history of national sociology containing intense struggles about the purpose and aim of sociology, struggles that eventually led to the closing of the sociological departments at the University of Copenhagen in the late 1980s. Thus, sociology as an institutionalised discipline was close to disappearing from the Danish social science landscape. Against this backdrop, the appointments of Professors Gundelach and Bertilsson could be read as a symbolic turning point in the history of Danish sociology, marking the ‘re-institutionalisation’ of the discipline into the Danish social sciences and the starting point for sociologists’ attempts to re-gain recognition of sociology as a legitimate social science by configuring sociological knowledge production in a manner appropriate to the institutional and cognitive condition of Danish higher education and social science research.

Throughout its history, Danish sociology has been fragmented or diverse in nature – with different points of view and normative ideals of sociological knowledge production. At no point in time has one paradigm, theoretical framework or methodological approach integrated Danish sociology into a coherent scientific endeavour and social space. From an international perspective on sociology this may not be surprising, since sociological knowledge production throughout the globe seems to possess this fragmented character (see e.g.: Abend 2006; Calhoun 2007; Denis and Kalekin-Fishman 2009; Patel 2010). The configuration of sociological knowledge varies between national setting and features such as the organisation of higher education, its relation to other disciples and the structure of the state. From the allocation and choice of scientific problems, through choices of empirical techniques and development of theoretical concepts, to the size and institutional organisation, national sociologies are embedded in national social configurations and are shaped by them (for a similar argument see Fourcade 2009).

The argument running through this book is rather straightforward and may not surprise scholars of the history of social science. Still, it is worth reflecting upon this history when discussing differences between and within national sociologies and in the ranking and evaluations of the scientific quality of sociological knowledge. What I show here is that Danish sociology and the knowledge it produces are intimately related to powerful social constituencies – especially the welfare state, its social problems, the policies to deal with them and the changing conception of them – not only as the ‘environment’ for knowledge production, but also as an influence on the way sociologists think about, empirically construct and evaluate their knowledge (Camic, Gross, and Lamont 2011). In other words, sociological knowledge is not only produced and legitimated in relation to academic and sociological ideas, agents and institutional claims, but it is also produced to an equal degree in different forms of collaboration with non-academic agents, ranging from welfare state bureaucrats of different kinds to private enterprise and civic society organisations. However, the story that follows is not a banal materialistic explanation claiming that sociological knowledge is a mere representation and symbolic justification of external forces. In my account, I show how sociologists have used changing institutional conditions in their pursuit of sociological knowledge, academic recognition and institutionalised positions. However, the simple fact that sociological knowledge is closely entangled with the social institutions and societal configuration in which it is produced is not widely accepted, and is often challenged as ‘radical constructivism’. This is perhaps because it challenges the cherished idea that sociologists – like other scientists – are rewarded and recognised purely on the basis of academic merit and their inestimable contributions to the pool of sociological knowledge, and not for their abilities to mobilise heterogeneous resources in the sociological struggles. In this way, the following account runs the risk of challenging the self-image of the dominating fraction of the field of sociology, and perhaps this could be the reason for the reluctance of insiders to embrace this form of sociological knowledge.

The book approaches the problem of relations between scientific knowledge and social organisation from a Bourdieusian field analytical perspective. In my analysis of Danish sociology, I thus look at three analytical elements in trying to understand both historical and contemporary configurations of Danish sociology as well as the historical processes shaping it in its particular way. The analysis sets out to understand the relation between the structure of mental or symbolic structures and categories – the theories, methods and other forms of assessment and evaluation criteria applied by sociologists, and their relations to the institutional structures – department, job markets, funding bodies, etc. In relation to these two interwoven structures, I analyse how sociological research is related to other fields – other academic disciplines as well as state bureaucracies – and how struggles in these fields are used by sociologists to position themselves within sociology, but in unforeseen ways fundamentally change the field of sociological research and knowledge produced in it.

Relations between social scientific knowledge and the state

In research into the history of the social sciences and their relations to non-academic and political institutions, the state has not, of course, been overlooked. The general history of the social sciences in the western countries tells us how ideas about positive knowledge of society based on empirical observation developed from the late 18th century onwards in line with the expanding state bureaucracy and the technological and scientific revolutions in Europe (Heilbron 1995). During the 19th century the social sciences diversified into a number of disciplines that were slowly institutionalised in the European and North American university systems and became the primary producers for knowledge about central social concerns from growth and unemployment to health, democracy and social cohesion (Ross 2003). In this process, the social science disciplines gained a monopoly on the production of legitimate knowledge about society for the state, private enterprises and civic society.

Peter Wagner has designated this alignment of social scientific knowledge and – primarily – state interest as ‘reform coalitions’ (Wagner 2001). Through historical analysis Wagner shows how social science developed in Europe and how it was institutionalised in state-sponsored institutions such as universities and various forms of governmental research institutions. The reform coalition was not only built on shared interests and ideas about social reforms and progressive modernisation, but was just as much built upon the increasing demand for empirical knowledge about the problems of the state. There was thus an increasing demand for various forms of knowledge, from empirical descriptions of economic and social problems to theoretical conceptions of society, its configurations, problems and possible futures.

As this book will show, this ‘general history’ has played out very differently in various national and local settings, and it is worth considering how the strong welfare state of the Nordic countries has influenced Danish sociology. In the Danish context, the social sciences – and especially sociology – were institutionalised in close connection with the Social Democratic conception and its ideas about a welfare state and organisation of society (for the Swedish case see Fridjonsdottir 1991). Throughout the last 50 or 60 years, the idea of a universalistic welfare state has been the dominant institutional ideal and ideology informing both criticism and analysis of the welfare state, its institutions and their outcome. These national research systems condition the institutions in which sociological knowledge has been, and is being, produced, but they are also contexts attributing profoundly different local meanings to ‘general’ sociological concepts. Let us just take the concept of ‘civic society’ as an example. The concept of civic society is in many ways very important, especially for post-war US sociology, designating the ‘slice’ of society or ‘the social’ left to sociology and leaving the market to the economists and the political to political science (Haney 2008). In this way, civic society was conceived as a social space outside the realm of the state and the market, and often seen as the source of genuine social relations not distorted by money from the market or the power of the state¹. We find this figure in many different forms serving many different interests. In the analysis of sociology, we find it in Burawoy’s ( 2005) call for a public sociology. In Burawoy’s conception, publically engaged reflexive sociology is to a large extent associated with the involvement of sociologists in civic society originations, from women’s groups through environmental activists to trade unions. However, in a Danish context, things look very different. The unions and counterparties in the employers’ organisations still constitute the nexus of power in Danish politics, and civic society organisations, from sports clubs to environmental organisations, are heavily supported by state funding and often written into legal frameworks. In other words, the meanings and the cultural worlds to which they are associated are inherently different from both the US-American experience and continental European. In this way, the book also works as a correction to or way of nuancing the ‘general story’ of sociology, showing how sociological knowledge and researchers have been configured in a small peripheral country.

A social space approach to scientific disciplines

As I stated above, this book tells the story of the historical constitution of sociological research in Denmark. Sociology is indeed – depending on one’s point of view – a diverse or fragmented discipline with weak intellectual integration and institutional boundaries. So how do we grasp in theoretical terms, and understand the relationships between, the many different forms of research practices designated as sociology? As I already suggested, I will interpret scientific disciplines as a social space or, in Bourdieu’s terms, a social field (Bourdieu 1996a).

Sociology is generally conceived as one of the classical social scientific disciplines constituted around 1900 alongside economics, anthropology, ethnology, human geography and political science. Classic disciplines of the social sciences are often seen as inherently different from younger trans-, post- or cross-disciplinary research fields like public health, different forms of area studies, gender studies or science and technology studies (STS). However, it seems that this dichotomy between older disciplines and younger non-disciplines and transformation in the institutional and mental organisation of the sciences (Barry and Born 2013; Gibbons et al. 1994; Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2003: 2) have attracted our attention away from the very basic question of ‘what is a scientific discipline’? I think that to a very large degree the problem arises from the simple fact that what we call disciplines has been the main organisational component of the modern mass-university (especially after the Americanisation of the social sciences following the Second World War) and thus disciplines act as un-reflected default units or categories for understanding and organising academic knowledge production. In other words, disciplines are ‘everyday’ categories of academic life, too often used without analytical specificity. Physics or biology are thus understood a classical disciplines despite their many internal differences and overlaps, whereas fields like STS, public health, etc., are understood and often understand themselves as trans- or interdisciplinary, mainly because they were constituted and institutionalised later than the aforementioned disciplines, even though they constitute relatively well-defined academic communities. Thus, the categories are more often used as political markers in struggles about boundaries, funding, labour markets, objects of study and students than to understand the institutional and mental transformation of academic knowledge production (Abbott 1988).

So how can we understand scientific disciplines? Disciplines are very important parts of the modern universities and the scientific system. They are important parts of the scientific organisational structures, structuring courses, departments, journals and careers both inside and outside academia (Turner 2000; Wittrock 2001). Following a more functionalistic approach, disciplines can be viewed as almost logical or natural divisions in the sciences (Stichweh 1992). But this functionalistic vision tends to overlook the fact that disciplines are also political institutions and as such sites of scientific struggle (Heilbron 2004). Following a Bourdieu-inspired approach, the American historian of science Timothy Lenoir sums up a working definition of scientific disciplines as fields as follows:

Disciplines are institutionalized formations for organizing schemes of perception, appreciation, and action, and for inculcating them as tools of cognition and communication. At the same time, as embodied practical operators, disciplines are political structures that mediate crucially between the political economy and production of knowledge. (Lenoir 1997: 47)

Following Lenoir’s adaption of Bourdieu’s general definitions of fields to the scientific realm, this analysis of Danish sociology will focus on three analytical movements. First of all, I analyse scientific disciplines as relatively autonomous parts of social space, i.e., a field in Bourdieu’s sense. Bourdieu defines a field as a relatively autonomous part of social space, with its own norms, laws and interests (Bourdieu 1996a). However, fields are not monolithic blocs, but rather social spaces of differences, and it is these differences that constitute them and define their social dynamics. First of all, fields are both understood as fields of power and fields of struggle. Fields are thus hierarchised social spaces, where the position of the agent in the hierarchy constitutes his or her actions and perceptions, but, simultaneously, fields are sites of struggles and conflicts, adding a dynamic aspect to the field analysis. Both aspects of the field analysis rest on a relational approach to the social, and in my analysis I understand the actions of the agents as embedded in specific historical structures and related to the actions of other agents in the field. Thus, in order to understand the importance of programmatic statements of the founders of the Department of Cultural Sociology in the 1960s that evoked a European continental theoretical tradition and expanded sociological studies to ‘developing countries’, we need to understand it as closely related and opposed to the theoretical and methodological constitution of the competing Department of Sociology constituted on the basis of ideas from post-war US sociology advocated by George Lundberg. I thus aim at understanding how the educational background, institutional position, research area and methodological habits of Danish sociologists position them in relation to agents inside and outside the field and co-constitute their actions in, and perceptions of, the field. In this way my analysis focuses on the multiple properties differentiating the agents and institutions rather than those uniting them. However, a field is also held together or integrated by a common belief in the struggle or illusio in Bourdieu’s terms (Bourdieu 1996a: 227ff.). A field is held together by a common belief that makes the agents participate and invest in the struggles of the field. This raises the question of boundaries and the inclusion and exclusion of scholars, subjects, theories, institutions and methods. In my analysis, I show how sociologists throughout the history of Danish sociology have constantly struggled over the definition of sociology, both in relation to the mental structures in discussions about which methods and theories should be regarded as sociological, and also in relation to institutional structures, and which institutions could be counted as sociological.

To understand the struggles, and not least the power which the agents mobilise, I use Bourdieu’s understanding of power based on the notion of capital. In Bourdieu’s terms, it is the amount and composition of capital which sets agents in the field apart. Here, capital is understood as a property effectively used and pursued by agents in the field in the struggle over its constitution (Bourdieu 1991a). In a study like this of a specific part of the social space, it is important to stress that what counts as capital is specific to the different fields and must be accumulated and used in accordance with the norms of the specific field. Thus, agents who participate in the struggles of the field (here the scientific or more specifically the sociological field) have to act in accordance to with the institutionalised rules or strategies of the struggle in order to be recognised as legitimate participants in the struggle. By doing so, the agents tend to confirm and (re)produce the rules and structures of the field. In the struggles, the actions of the agents are to a very large degree the products of the forms and the amount of capital possessed by the agent. A central thesis in field theory is, thus, that there tends be a homology between the position of the agent and his or her actions and perceptions (Bourdieu 1988; Bourdieu 2005). In Bourdieu’s analysis of academic or scientific fields, capital is conceptualised differently in accordance with the empirical and theoretical issues in focus, but throughout the conceptualisations there is a general distinction between temporal and specific scientific capital or between institutionalised and scientific prestige capital (Bourdieu 1975, 1988, 1991b, 1996b, 1998b, 2000, 2004), a distinction that is also found in the analysis of cultural and artistic fields (e.g. Bourdieu 1996a, 1997). The different forms of scientific capital also have different modes of accumulation and are thus tied to different strategies and trajectories of sociologists (Lamaison and Bourdieu 1986). To accumulate institutional capital, the first requirement is time: time to spend on committees, at board meetings and other collective activities where this specific form of social capital and power over institutions can be accumulated. In this way, to a large degree, institutional scientific capital is connected to the institutions of science and their management and production systems, and the process of handing the capital over is therefore closely connected to the bureaucracy of scientific institutions. On the other hand, specific prestige capital stems from recognised scientific work such as inventions, discoveries and recognised contributions to scientific areas. Significant scientific progress thus often contains a heresy, and in that way a revolt, against the established scientific institutions and cognitive orders. As such, prestige or symbolic capital is harder to control and institutionalise in order to pass it on (Bourd...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Disciplines as Social Spaces
• 2  From Pre-Disciplinary to Institutionalised Sociology
• 3  Expansion, Crises and Closures
• 4  Institutionalisation of Professional and Policy Sociology
• 5  Welfare-State Sociological Knowledge
• References
• Index