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 disciplines put together under the acronym SSH, and identifying past hindrances 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 United Kingdom. Two further volumes to be published in the same series will disseminate findings of other parts of Interco-SSH, one will be on internationalization and one on the transfer of paradigms, theories, key thinkers and methodologies across national fields of learning.
The primary focus of every chapter in this book concerns the institutional development of seven preselected disciplines from the social sciences and humanities in eight countries. They deviate from conventional routines, narrating the histories of the sciences, including the humanities and other ‘softer’ branches of scholarship. Most narratives of any scholarly past are presented as a succession of ‘ideas,’ research results and theories. Or, to say it in a more ‘highfalutin’ way, they try to offer explanations of how past scholars found the ‘truth,’ exemplified in a widely used history of sociology book’s title: From Lore to Science (Barnes and Becker 1938/1961). Even if spokespeople for a so-called symmetry-perspective argue for that study of the causes of false propositions in the same way as one studies the causes for true ones, they follow paths ingeniously paved by intellectual historians. While not questioning the value of this approach, we have chosen to pursue a different one. ‘Ideas’ are certainly an essential part of what constitutes the field of scholarship. Nevertheless, this field is structured by other forces, most notably institutional, which also deserve to be taken seriously. This introduction outlines the main issues of the institutional perspective shared by the individual chapters of this book. In doing this we hope to make clear the meaning of institutions and why they are of crucial importance for a better understanding of the world of scholarship.
The bulk of the historiography of the social sciences and humanities (here, and throughout the book, SSH) has been written by proponents of the discipline under study, primarily for their disciplinary peers. Sociologists write histories of sociology for sociologists; anthropologists do the same for their tribe’s fellows, and so on. The functions of these histories as disciplinary subfields range from identity-building, canonization of particular authors, to commentary on current debates on specific theoretical or empirical programs. In other words, the past fulfills services for the present, which was labeled ‘presentism’ by one of the leading exponents of the history of anthropology George W. Stocking (1965). Historicist versions of disciplinary histories, by which we mean scholarship interested in the historical genesis of the SSH as an object of investigation on its own right, have emerged comparatively later (see revealing autobiographical remarks by Blaug 1994). With the exception of the historiography of economic thought, and psychology/psychiatry, this approach to most other SSH disciplines has not developed into specialized fields of scholarship of a larger size and have not been united into a specialization of the history of the SSH thus far. What ‘presentist,’ as well as ‘historicist,’ streams in the historiography of the SSH have in common is their predominant focus on authors and their scholarly output as the stuff out of which disciplines arise. Such narratives shimmer from the contents to the thinkers or vice versa. The standard version of histories of the SSH is thus modeled along the lines of intellectual history and very often, therefore slide into neighboring subfields like sociological/psychological theory, among others.
In contrast, the sociology of science, though it has been predominantly concerned with the natural sciences and latterly with technology, has at times taken the SSH into account. Robert K. Merton’s detours into what he labeled ‘sociological semantics’ (Merton 1993 [1965]; Merton and Barber 2004) are promising examples. Recently, Charles Camic et al. (2011) proposed the transfer research modes that focus on scholars’ daily practices in their work in the study of the SSH, continuing what two of the authors had called ‘New Sociology of Ideas’ some ten years earlier (Camic and Gross 2001). As revealed by the label, this approach differs from those already mentioned not so much with regard to the object of investigation as methodologically. Research practices—especially close attention to the environments in which scholars find themselves after their daily research, teaching, and writing—emphasize the sociological lens prevalent here for the explanans. The explanandum remains the ideational content and most often these studies focus on very particular (micro-) instances of SSH, i.e. individual researchers, concepts, mechanisms, practices, routines, etc. The importance of larger (macro-) contexts is generally admitted, but micro-contextualization—just as in the ‘constructivist’ sociology of scientific knowledge—is the explicitly favored perspective.
Our focus on the institutional analysis of the SSH does not deny the value of either perspective, but implies that they omit or sideline other aspects. Ours is thus a complimentary view that highlights structural shifts in the systems of higher education, as well as institutions of research and innovation (beyond the universities) within which the SSH make headway. As far as developments since 1945 are concerned, the structural conditions of the entire intellectual infrastructure of scholarly production, including the universities, underwent more profound change than ever before, by which we mean primarily its expansion and the immediate and indirect consequences of this growth. Science policy emerged only during and after WWII, and along with this emergence came debates about the best allocation of scarce resources. Until just before WWII, which was fought partly using science and scholarship resources, the world of learning was the privileged preserve of a tiny minority of upcoming generations. The ‘republic of scholars’ had been an enclave of sorts within society, communicating with ordinary people only in one direction, yet claiming to counsel the political class and guide the nation state spiritually. The quintessential locus of their reasoning was universities that, in most countries, only began to enjoy a level of autonomy from governmental interference from late nineteenth century onwards. Their intellectual practices, however, remained grounded in classical habits and areas until well into the twentieth century, often without much contact with new, extra-mural forms of knowledge production, notably within the emerging SSH. The expansion and transformation of the universities in order to make them respond to all kinds of societal demands from outside academe started, in most European countries, in the late 1950s and intensified in the 1960s. This led both to the multiplication of academic personnel to serve exploding numbers of students—initially because the universities became open to women—and to the decisive opening of academia to a set of new disciplines and branches of study. In times of quick expansion such as these, job opportunities for academics rocketed and it is safe to hypothesize that such conditions might affect the scholarly content cultivated by new entrants. If this assumption holds some truth, we need to know the institutional environment in which particular new approaches, methodologies, and research fields were proposed.
Innovation, it seems, is more likely to take place in an environment with an abundance of competitive positions than in situations of penury in the positional market. Outlining changing institutional conditions of intellectual pursuits thus offers a view of changing opportunity structures that, in some instances at least, can contribute to explaining changes in disciplines’ intellectual landscapes. In this way, the institutionalization perspective can and does inform traditional representations of the source of scholarly options and individual creativity.
Probably the most productive aspect of the institutional perspective is its openness to systematic comparisons between developments in various disciplines and countries. Comparisons of this kind are significantly more difficult in ideas-centered approaches and absent in studies narrating an individual’s performance. The expansion of the universities mentioned above gives rise to different responses if one analyses the chain of ideas or the birth and change of scientific paradigms. Although the post-war expansion affected all disciplines throughout Europe and beyond, it did so to different degrees. Indeed, the chapters that follow reveal remarkably different dynamics of disciplinary growth between countries as well as important interdisciplinary differences within countries. In addition, instances of institutional contractions and downturns can be observed, veritable breaks of continuity under authoritarian political regimes, as in the case of sovietized Hungary and the military dictatorship in Argentina. These are almost totally absent from narratives of individual disciplinary histories.
A perspective favoring the social structure instead of the expressions of the people observed does not detract from the utterances of those investigated, but claims that by considering the base that makes cloudy systems of ideas possible, we can better understand the ideas. Since there is no way to turn this claim on its head, one can thus argue that the institutionalization perspective is superior to its competitors.
In order to clarify the common perspective of this book’s chapters, in the remainder of this introduction we will focus on two notions that are in need of further exposition: disciplines as the basic units on which our analyses rest; and the notion of institution, whose meaning has seen very diverse usage in different contexts.
Disciplines
A widely used classification calls specialized parts of science and scholarship ‘disciplines,’ defined, or at least marked, by specific topical foci, methodologies and intellectual approaches. Both ‘natives’ and observers see the overall field of science as consisting of an ensemble of disciplines. 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 discipline 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 hierarchical 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 theory. Around the turn of the twentieth century, research into social and administrative problems was gradually imported into the universities. In some countries this formed the basis of new academic entities that were consolidated into special branches of study (with chairs, lectureships, study programs and occasionally university degrees) during the 1920s and 1930s. The post-1945 era also saw the internationalization and professionalization of SSH disciplines often following the American model (Wittrock 2001). If something becomes a model, it needs more detailed elaboration and more explicit reasoning. If this same entity is exported a higher degree of uniformity is desirable.
Heilbron (2004) argues that differentiation is only one of at least three mechanisms leading to the birth of disciplines. Economics might well be a case of differentiation, increasingly narrowing its scientific concerns from broad questions of social organization to market mechanisms. In German-speaking countries, business accounting thus split from Volkswirtschaftslehre (national economics) to form a new specialty initially called Privatwirtschaftslehre (private economics). The basis of sociology, on the other hand, is rather a ...