Rindzevičiūtė: The Power of Systems

Book revie

From Utopian One-worldism to Geopolitical Intergovernmentalism: UNESCO’s Department of Social Sciences as an International Boundary Organization, 1946-1955

As a new coordinating organization in the rapidly expanding international field of post-World War II social science, UNESCO’s Department of Social Sciences (SSD), set up in 1946, played a central role. This article explores the formation of the SSD during its first decade with a special focus on its organizational aspects. By conceptualizing the SSD as an “international boundary organization”, the article analyzes the organizational structuration of agency spaces on different levels – within SSD, in relation to UNESCO and to the UN system at large – as well as over time. As a result, the article discerns four phases, distinguished by organizational changes, under which the SSD was successively transformed from a relatively independent transnational organization, which shared the utopian vision of one-worldism, to an intergovernmental organization considerably more vulnerable to external geopolitical pressures

(Post-) Soviet Sociologies

book revie

Hess: Tocqueville and Beaumont

This is a review of Andreas Hess's intellectual joint biography of the French writers, politicians and early sociologists Alexis deTocqueville (1805-59) and Gustave de Beaumont (1802-66)

Interview: On Being the Editor of AJS

Andrew Abbott, editor of the American Journal of Sociology from 2000 to 2016, explains in this interview the role of an editor, discusses criticisms against flagship journals, relativizes the influence of editors, praises colleagues participating in the peer review process and offers a look at the back- stage of academic publishing.  

Indicators of the Internationalization of the Social Sciences and Humanities

This contribution, which is part of the collaborative European research project INTERCO-SSH, presents indicators for studying the internationalization of the social and human sciences. Five dimensions are distinguished and for each one of them various indicators are presented. Although neither the dimensions nor the indicators are exhaustive, they capture some of the most significant aspects of internationalization. They pertain to international scholarly associations, international scholarly journals, the flows and meanings of book translations, transnational authorship, and policies of internationalization. In addition to these dimensions, three particular areas of inquiry are presented: changing relations between the North and the South, between Western and Eastern Europe, and between the West and Asia

Kropp: Danish Sociology

N

The Struggles for European Science. A Comparative Perspective on the History of European Social Science Associations

How and in what way are the social sciences becoming European? This paper answers this question by comparing the creation and development of eight European associations rooted in five disciplines (sociology, economics, anthropology, political science, psychology). It shows that the Europeanisation of the social sciences is linked to different types of competitions: rivalries between scientific paradigms, competitions between academic institutions, as well as geopolitical tensions. Europeanisation works as a resource that can be used on these different stages, in the framework of pre-existing institutional, intellectual and political conflicts. However, the use of this resource sometimes has unforeseen consequences. As associations grow, their objectives, practices and agendas become increasingly autonomous from what their founders intended. Scientific Europeanisation thus progressively spirals out of its initiators’ control

Bourdieu & Chartier: Sociologist and Historian

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Legitimising Europe with the Social Sciences and Humanities? The European University Institute and the European Integration Project (1976-1986)

This article analyses the conditions under which political attempts at influencing the activities of scientists succeed or fail. It does so by assessing the impact of European politics on the development of the social sciences and humanities. More specifically, it focuses on the creation of the European University Institute (EUI) and studies the extent to which European institutions succeeded in orientating EUI scholars’ scientific agenda, in a direction favourable to European integration. The article argues that this attempt only enjoyed limited success. It shows that the increasing autonomy of the disciplines under study meant that political injunctions had trouble gaining currency. The politicisation of sciences thus appears to be hampered by the changing structure of disciplinary fields