Abstract
Why do social scientists choose certain theoretical and methodological stances over others? Three broad explanatory models can be derived from the literature on the sociology of social sciences: (1) worldview, arguing that intellectual preferences reflect general cultural and political orientations of broad social groupings to which an individual belongs; (2) status, according to which all forms of hierarchies are reproduced in the academic field through preferences for innovative research by those occupying dominant positions and their avoidance by agents lacking resources; (3) ecological, holding that opportunity structures existing at the historical moment at which an individual enters the academic field determine the theory choice. This article analyses the adoption of globalist or localist professional ideologies, favouring an international career and global recognition over a domestic one, or vice versa, to explore the biographical antecedents of choosing one side over the other in an important disciplinary divide. In doing so, the study draws on statistical data from a community study of sociology in Leningrad/St Petersburg between 1984 and 2011. The worldview hypothesis finds the strongest support: the preference for national or international scholarship reflects more general liberal or conservative attitudes characteristic of certain milieus existing in Russian society.
Introduction
This article is intended as a contribution to two discussions. The first is the discussion on biographical determinants of theoretical and methodological choices in the social sciences. Our idea of a social scientist’s life course holds that possibly the most important episode in it is the choice between several competing intellectual positions or traditions, such as positivism, phenomenology or poststructuralism. 1 Its importance for the discipline arises from the fact that the aggregation of such choices results in maintaining an intellectual consensus, or producing a shift in dominant approaches or paradigms – a scientific revolution. While the choice of one competing paradigm, theory, professional ideology or work style is understood as both a turning point in an individual’s intellectual career and the development of scholarship in general, the subject is scarcely researched empirically, and only very few studies have addressed theory adoption in the social sciences. This article is aimed at partially filling this gap.
The second issue the article addresses are the causes of choosing a specific professional stance: that is, for doing predominantly local or global social science. For academics in non-English speaking countries today, picking a side means making an uneasy choice between publishing in international English-language periodicals – and addressing their discipline globally – and publishing in their native language in domestic editions and addressing a narrower audience, sometimes confined within the borders of their nation-state. Choosing one or the other entails decisions such as in which country to finish one’s PhD, which social networks to cultivate, conferences to visit, and, largely, of literatures to follow, of genre conventions to adopt, theories to rely on, methods to use and themes to study. A few studies demonstrated that segregation between those wholly oriented to an international career and those oriented to a national one indeed exist in various countries, with ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘locals’ affiliated with different institutions and using different publishing circuits (Biegel, 2014; Hanafi, 2011; Sokolov, 2009; see also Fourcade, 2006: 174–180). There have so far been, however, few attempts to study the biographical antecedents of such choices, as well as correlates of the systems of attitudes advocating them and favouring one form of achievement over others. This study is aimed at partially filling this lacuna.
The article will first review the literature on the two issues at hand: theory choices and the local/global divide in social sciences, then go on to describe the research field, that of sociology in present-day Russia, and subsequently discuss methods and empirical findings.
Why do social scientists choose the sides they choose?
When Harriet Zuckerman identified the problems of theory and topic choice as central to the whole project of the sociology of science in 1978, she was only able to cite a few studies investigating how such choices are made (Zuckerman, 1978). While significant progress has been made since, it has been limited by, among other things, the drastic discontinuity between a more theoretical literature mostly relying on historical case studies, and more empirical literature on theory adoption using quantitative analysis.
The explanations of theory choices found in theoretical literature could be situated between two poles. At the one pole we find, as the major explanatory mechanism, conceptual schemata referring to worldviews characteristic of wide social groupings to which the chooser belongs. This position might be called a worldview model. At the other pole we find an emphasis on incentives specific to the intellectual field (what we will call career model). The worldview model holds that a scholar’s theoretical orientation is but a continuation of a more general perspective originating in the class position one occupies (other approaches in this vein point to gender, ethnicity, etc.). This perspective emerges either as a reflection of social experience or as a form of ideology instrumental in legitimizing the dominant order or in challenging it. The worldview theorizing was present in the 1970s sociology of natural-scientific or mathematical knowledge, although in this field it was subsequently replaced by newer versions of science and technology studies that abandoned looking for broad correlations between ideas and the class origins of their inventors and adopters. In contrast to the analysis of natural sciences, attempts to find ‘class interests’ behind theoretical or methodological positions are still widespread as far as the social sciences are concerned. A prototypical example here is Alvin Gouldner’s classic book The Coming Crisis of Sociology, where he criticizes Talcott Parsons’ systems theory as an expression of an establishment conservative orientation (Gouldner, 1970).
In contrast to the worldview model, which accepts a direct correlation between the structural position of thinkers and the contents of their theoretical or methodological views, the career model holds that the adoption of theoretical beliefs, professional ideologies and work styles reflects the career benefits an individual might expect from such choices. The career model exists in two varieties: status and ecological. The status model suggest that class attributes influence the general strategy of building an intellectual career (Bourdieu, 1975, 1988). Those who are from privileged social backgrounds, male, and are located within elite academic networks are more likely to achieve career success as they are more likely to identify and invest in the development of less conventional lines of work and follow less conventional, but potentially much more rewarding career paths (Bourdieu, 1975). While the character of these careers cannot be specified in advance – they are contingent on what is considered ‘conventional’ at the moment – such paths are likely to require the widest and most extensive training, including proficiency in mathematics, philosophy, languages or literary skills. This view corroborates the abounding evidence that innovations originate in the dominant centres in all kinds of fields, not only academic. That those enjoying the highest status are most likely to be early adopters of radical intellectual innovations (Frickel and Gross, 2005).
In contrast to both the worldview model and the status variety of the career model, which both see an individual’s social class as a likely correlate of their intellectual allegiances, another type of career model, ecological, claims that it is the changes in structures of opportunity one encounters at the formative period of one’s career that are responsible for subsequent intellectual and professional choices (Ben-David and Collins, 1966). Thus, Randall Collins suggests, rather than the privileged social background of individuals, it is the general economic and organizational expansion of a discipline occurring when they enter the labour force that is responsible for their breaking with the intellectual past: when opportunities abound, a new movement can easily find resources and joining it is a good career strategy (Collins, 1998). Further, sociology as a discipline depends on support by various external publics. It is the particular configuration of such publics that stands behind the list of occupational niches available to sociologists at a given period – e.g. public intellectual or social engineer. Each niche makes special demands on its occupants, and an individual’s beliefs, skills, or styles of work adapt to a particular niche (e.g. see Kropp, 2013 on epistemic divides between applied and academic sociologists in Denmark). Ecological theorizing recognizes the predominant role of historical changes in the available niches in shaping the face of sociology (e.g. Wagner, 2001 on the role of coalitions with progressive spreading of sociological positivism). As a result of changing demand, the overpopulation of existing niches and other factors, different generations face different opportunities and are likely to specialize in different niches. For all versions of the ecological model, academic age is the most important individual attribute as it determines availability and attractiveness of different niches at the moment individuals start their academic career. The relations between the three models are depicted in Figure 1.
The theoretical models.
While all three explanatory models are present in the history of social sciences, there have been only limited attempts to test them directly. In an early example, a pioneering work by Seymour Lipset and Everett Ladd (1972) attempted to test Gouldner’s claims that adoption of structural functionalism is an expression of the general conservative political leanings of the adopters (they found that, surprisingly, Parsonians were more likely to be on the political left than the average US sociologist).
With this notable exception, Neil Gross’s paper (2002) is possibly the only attempt to compare statistically the explanatory power of various theoretical models in accounting for theory choices in social sciences and humanities. Gross found significant correlation between socio-economic status and variables characterizing an individual’s cultural capital on the one hand, and choice of philosophical tradition on the other hand (e.g. knowledge of French or symbolic logic made studying continental or analytical philosophy, correspondingly, more likely), although variables related to identities and general worldviews (Catholicism, strong identification with American history) also proved significant.
This theoretical discussion existed in isolation from a bundle of empirical studies of theory adoption, most of which looked for correlations between age and likelihood of embracing intellectual innovations. These studies produced important, although not unambiguous findings (Jones et al., 2014). However, one finds little attempt in these studies to discover which one of several candidate mechanisms, from age-related changes in intelligence to having greater stakes in the intellectual status quo, could account for whatever age differentials are observed.
Global sociology and its discontents
In many countries, including most post-Soviet ones, one encounters a divide running across many social-scientific disciplines that opposes those who identify themselves with international and global science with those who are oriented towards predominantly local debates and audiences. The most immediate correlate of this orientation, for non-English speaking countries, is the choice of primary language to write one’s results in and circuits in which to publish them. This choice, however, is not limited to the preference of a certain transmission medium, as addressing different audiences implies asking different research questions these audiences would regard as important, using empirical methods they would regard as up-to-date and convincing, and following literatures in the context of which one’s findings will be placed by their readers. While most would agree that, ideally, everybody should address all publics, some decisions on allocation of time and other resources between the tasks of reaching different audiences is still inevitable. This allocation is even more evident at an institutional level, at which academic organizations and national research systems in general have to establish the relative weight of credentials and symbols of academic recognition originating from different intellectual scenes (Is a degree from Cambridge more valuable than one from a leading country’s university? Should publications in leading national periodicals be given equal weight as those in international ones in promotions decisions?). In this article, we will call beliefs favouring international over national scholarship as ‘globalist’, while the opposite beliefs will be called ‘localist’.
The precise details of the divide between localist and globalist are probably highly country-specific and depend on the language spoken by its population, the character of the country’s cultural and political ties with other countries, and the international reputation of a given discipline within it. Probably the best-known expression of localist beliefs is the intellectual movement calling for the development of what is called indigenous science (Fahim and Helmer, 1980; Jahoda, 2016). The ideologists of this movement shun what they call ‘academic dependency’, ‘cultural’ or ‘academic imperialism’, or, as one seminal paper defines it, the ‘domination of one people by another in their world of thinking’ (Alatas, 2000: 24). The expression of such domination is usually seen in the well-documented fact that the leading institutional centres, influential publications and most renowned authors are disproportionally located in the countries identified with ‘the West’ or ‘the global North’ (Heilbron, 2014).
The indigenous science movement deems this situation regretful for two major reasons. First, it argues that theoretical models originating from the global North have limited theoretical relevance for the global South. At the same time, as gatekeepers of the most important professional forums originate from the global North, Southern perspectives have limited possibilities of getting through their filters and reaching their audiences. As a result, the views of non-Western or non-Northern scholars remain largely marginalized even in the countries of the South themselves, lacking the legitimacy of ‘international recognition’ or ‘visibility’.
Second, these externally located sources of disciplinary recognition lead to the suppression of certain research styles and the abandoning of important roles sociologists could play in their societies. ‘Applied’ or ‘public’ sociologies, serving local clients for local issues, have to use the same language as their audiences. Moreover, the research questions they pose are likely to be much more relevant to citizens of the same political communities, rather than colleagues abroad. In contrast, purely academic research has less reason to stick to local languages, and a wider opportunity to reach a truly international audience (Hanafi, 2011). The intellectual dominance of the global North means the suppression of applied research that could immediately contribute to local development in the South, and forced flourishing of detached academism.
The indigenous scholarship movement was pioneered by anthropologists in the 1970s (Fahim and Helmer, 1980), soon enough spreading to psychology, and later, sociology and other social sciences. Possibly the first call for an indigenous sociology was voiced by Frederick Gareau (1988). While widespread, the indigenous sociology movement is still only one form of localism. Its other forms can be found in the countries of the global North themselves, particularly those non-English speaking ones which once enjoyed the status of centres of non-English speaking ‘academic empires’ (France, Germany, Russia). The Russian case, described in more detail below, belongs to this category.
The opposite position, dubbed here ‘globalism’, is not represented by an organized movement with an articulate ideology decrying localism, akin to indigenous sociology. Rather, it relies on the legitimizing myths of science as a cumulative and universalistic enterprise, and on institutional pressures arising from the global spread of university rankings that make English-language publications an important asset for any higher education institution globally.
In spite of the broad spread of the indigenous sociology movement and nearly universal presence of some forms of academic localism and globalism, there have been few studies of them, and nearly none has explored whether the choice of work style and professional niche precedes choice of ideology or follows from it (a partial exception is Gabrenya et al., 2006).
The three models listed above give conflicting predictions about sources of localism and globalism. What we have called the worldview model suggests that one’s position at the globalist–localist divide is likely to primarily correlate with more general political and cultural attitudes, the influence of class on professional ideology choice will be indirect and mediated by general ideology, and the choice of an occupational niche or work style will largely follow from both general ideological attitudes and the professional ideology one embraces.
From the point of view of both status and ecological varieties of the career model, professional ideologies are accepted as a rationalization of choices of occupational niches made for economic reasons. For example, those who turn to international academia for better economic prospects and societal prestige will develop scorn towards what they see as provincialism; those seeing more prospects at home loathe academic colonialism. Correlation with political attitudes, if any, will follow from choosing a professional ideology – those becoming globalists develop more favourable views towards globalization in order to eliminate cognitive dissonance.
The status model presumes that class will directly influence choosing a more or less rewarding professional niche: the ecological model holds that age, rather than class, may emerge as a principal variable, especially in times of rapid economic change.
Post-Soviet academic history offers a natural-historical experiment that will allow a comparison of these three explanations as to the choice of localism or its opposite.
The setting
Sociology first emerged in Russia within the international positivist and social survey movements in the second half of the nineteenth century, but during Stalin’s rule, between the 1930s and the beginning of the 1950s, the word was banned and the practice of empirical social research was suppressed. The gradual revival started in the early 1950s – a result of pressure from global cultural trends combined with attempts to increase efficiency within the planned economy (Sokolov, 2011). Nevertheless, there were no undergraduate programmes in sociology; ‘applied sociology’ was only available at graduate level in some universities. Party philosophers continued checking theoretical developments, insisting that sociology was the applied ‘subdiscipline’ of historical materialism – the only true theory of society (Titarenko and Zdravomyslova, 2017).
Party philosophers also severely restricted intellectual imports from the West; few books were translated into Russian and citing Western theories as a source of inspiration was risky.
The end to this state came with Perestroika. Between 1985 and 1992 several important developments occurred. The Party lost its ideological monopoly and the importation of Western sociology or the opening of higher education programmes in sociology was no longer obstructed. Moreover, as departments responsible for teaching historical and dialectical materialism, scientific Communism and political economy of socialism, subjects present at every higher education institution, obviously lost their relevance in the shifting times, their employees had to rebrand them. A widespread tactic was to rename them as departments of sociology or political science. While the first sociology departments emerged in the Soviet era, the rapid wave of institutionalization of sociological education in 1990–1992 predominantly emerged from this sort of conversion: thus, in 1989 there were only two universities offering undergraduate programmes in sociology; by 1993 their number had skyrocketed to 50. As a result, the number of individuals identifying themselves as sociologists proliferated.
The principal new players appearing were Western foundations, including George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Ford and MacArthur foundations, among dozens of others who supported what was seen by them as building social sciences that met international standards in Russia as a part of transition to liberal democracy. They administered research grants, distributed scholarships, gave money for foreign travel for conferences or internships, and provided institutional support for Western-style private research centres and universities appearing alongside the older public institutions. During the economic crisis of the 1990s, those institutions supported by Western money were much more well-to-do financially than those supported exclusively from the Russian state budget; after the 1998 devaluation of the rouble, a professor’s salary at a major Russian public university equalled some $70 a month, while some of the Western-supported universities were able to pay graduate student scholarships of $200 a month.
The economic growth of the early 2000s reduced this gap. Moreover, the Russian state, suspicious of alleged interference by Western foundations in Russian politics, gradually forced them out of the country. At the same time, however, the Ministry of Science and Education took over the globalist agenda of the foundations and continued their policies of supporting research demanded by the international academia. Thus, under the global institutional pressures, the Ministry formulated its tasks in terms of increasing the country’s universities’ position in international rankings and continued lavishly rewarding the same centres and universities Soros and others had previously supported. That allowed private institutions to continue after the Western sponsorship was reduced or rescinded.
For much of the post-Soviet period, the cleavage between globalists and localists formed one of the central nerves of sociological community life; institutions and networks of scholars were identified by their position on one or other side of the divide. Indeed, both positions were rarely, if ever, present in their extreme forms. In Russia, presumably as elsewhere, localists (at least those continuing to call themselves ‘sociologists’) are unlikely to deny completely the value of any Western intellectual products. Instead, some of them insist that much of the imported theorizing fits poorly with the needs of understanding Russian society. 2 Others add that Russia possesses a sociological tradition of its own, which, while emerging from the sources imported from the West, developed independently on Russian soil and currently offers an intellectual resource not surpassed by any foreign theorizing. Those who share this belief often accept the role of historians of national sociology. On the practical side, all localists strongly agree that following and contributing to ongoing debates in foreign-language journals should not be regarded as a paramount measure of professional worth for a sociologist in Russia. The tensions increased in 2008–2012 when the Ministry launched a series of initiatives aimed at boosting the international visibility of Russian scholarship and incorporated metrics of international recognition (e.g. indexes derived from Web of Science and Scopus citation databases) in the systems of research evaluation inside the country. This was the situation in 2009–2011 when the reported study took place.
The study
The research presented here is a community study analysing the structure of a local scholarly community as it existed in 2009–2011. It was accompanied by a microhistorical study covering the period from 1984 to 2009. Our aim was to trace career paths and depict intellectual preferences and work styles of a sample including all those who could be defined as a sociologist active in St Petersburg during this period.
The sample
The process of forming the sample is described in detail elsewhere (Sokolov, 2012). The criteria of defining individuals as sociologists were based on their (a) working at one of city’s divisions having ‘sociology’ in their name (research centres, institutes, university departments); (b) publishing in one of the most important sociological periodicals and giving St Petersburg as their affiliation; (c) participating in a major sociological convention and giving St Petersburg as their location; (d) being members of the local sociological association (St Petersburg Association of Sociologists). These criteria provided a list of 622 individuals, around 350 of whom were active in the period of our study.
The choice of a geographical locality as a setting for studying scholarly communities requires additional explanation. The rate of academic mobility in Russia is very low by international measures, and moving to another city after defending one’s PhD a rare occurrence during the period covered by our study.
The local sociological population thus fulfilled the criterion classical community studies relied upon: isolated with a reasonable chance of spending one’s whole academic life without ever leaving it (40% of those surveyed in 2009 reported never going to an academic event outside St Petersburg). It was, though, sizeable enough 3 and diverse enough to serve as Russian sociology writ small. Sociology BA diplomas were awarded by a dozen public universities. There also existed the Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Centre for Independent Sociological Research and the European University at St Petersburg, the latter two private and largely Western-sponsored at the time of the study, and a local branch of the Higher School of Economics – a newly established public university siding with the globalist camp.
Methods
The study relied on a wide array of methods, but in this article we deal only with the results of a survey covering 251 subjects – approximately 70% of the city’s sociologists active in 2009 when it was conducted. Interviewers contacted potential informants via email, phone, or personally, met them and either handed them a questionnaire or read questions from it and marked answers if subjects preferred so. When subjects could not be contacted in person, the questionnaire was sent to them via email (23 cases). The survey was carried out between June and September 2009. As far as we could detect, the sample accurately reproduced major demographic parameters of the general population (56.1% female, 43.9% male in the sample, 54.1% female and 45.9% male in the population, average age 47 years in the sample and 49 years in the population). Central figures mentioned in interviews or in answers to survey questions about colleagues with whom an individual collaborated were overrepresented, while peripheral agents were somewhat underrepresented; the sample also probably underrepresented those involved in applied studies, but covers those doing academic research almost without exclusion.
Variables and measures
Dependent variables
The survey included questions on a wide variety of aspects of professional life, including an individual’s sources of income, their professional fields of view – lists of periodicals read regularly, conferences attended, authors read and books that most influenced one’s intellectual careers, methods preferred and used, social networks (name-generating questions about those offering one a job, inviting to give a talk, etc. were included), attitudes towards various socio-political and professional issues, and a list of social and demographic questions. We complemented their analysis with analysis of publication and citation data
This list of variables allowed for a construction of two measures of localism and globalism, attitudinal or declarative and behavioural:
Attitudinal Globalism–Localism (G–L) scale. The items included in the scale are listed in Table 1. Each item was evaluated on a four-point Likert scale (‘completely disagree’, ‘mostly disagree’, ‘mostly agree’, ‘completely agree’). The weight of each item was determined by principal component analysis with Varimax rotation (analysis extracted one component with an eigenvalue exceeding 1, loadings reported in the table). The component explained 51.6% of variance. We normalized the scale so that it had a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1.
Data on the professional field of view – the behavioural measure. In addition to the attitudinal measure, we analysed the professional fields of view of our subjects – sets of figures and publications they claimed familiarity with. These sets were chosen from lists that comprised (a) 15 major Russian-language social scientific periodicals and selected English-language periodicals (the task was to identify if an individual reads this periodical ‘regularly, several papers a year’, ‘from time to time, no more than 1–2 papers a year’, ‘heard of a journal, but never read it’, ‘never heard of the journal’); (b) names of 20 well-known sociologists, Russian as well as international, frequently mentioned in interviews (the subjects were asked to say if they had read any works by the authors); and (c) answers to the question about five books ‘influencing most your development as a sociologist’ (most frequent answers were coded). The data were then factor-analysed with the analysis producing two factors – one loaded with older Russian-language periodicals such as Sotsiologicheskie issledovanija and older figures of Soviet sociology, such as Vladimir Yadov, Gennadii Ossipov and Zhan Toschenko, and the second one loaded with those, lesser known in Russia at the time, important international figures such as Bruno Latour or Norbert Elias, and also some newer periodicals, less well recognized by state academic institutions, but trying to follow ‘international best practices’, such as the online Economic Sociology. We called them the Yadov and Latour scales, respectively. We also calculated the differences between individuals’ scores on both scales (Latour–Yadov, L–Y scale) to measure preferences for one or the other set of publications and figures.
The Globalism–Localism scale (with factor loadings).
We recognized that these two variables could influence each other (both globalist and localist attitudes could influence behaviour and vice versa – behaviour may require rationalization in terms of professional ideologies), and so they figure both as dependent and independent variables in the following analysis.
Independent variables
As our major aim was to test several suppositions on the sources of globalist or localist attitudes, we wanted to include data on three principal groups of independent variables – class membership, ecological pressures at the early stages of an academic career, and wider ideological orientations.
Class variables included parents’ education, knowledge of foreign languages after school (an indicator of family’s cultural capital widely used in studies of former state-socialist societies) and parents’ occupation.
C1. Parents’ education was measured by completed years of formal schooling, with candidate of science (lower level) dissertation defence counting as three years (usual period of formal postgraduate studies [aspirantura]), and doctor of science (higher-level dissertation) counting as three additional years. We calculated the education of both parents (whose educational attainments were correlated at the 0.5 level).
C2. Knowledge of foreign languages was estimated by asking subjects if they were able to perform different tasks after completing secondary school (read a scholarly article, give a public talk, etc.) in three principal European languages studied in Russian schools (English, German or French). Positive statements were then added to receive an index of language proficiency.
C3. Parents’ occupation. We asked subjects about their parents’ occupation at the point they graduated from secondary school. We later experimented with several ways of coding and applying different class schemas. Regretfully, there is no consensus on which schema best fits the Russian situation, and so we decided to use two very simple measures: (C3.1) the individual had at least one parent in an academic job at the age of completing secondary school (including higher education, Academy of Sciences institutions, or applied research institutes); or (C3.2) where the individual had at least one parent in a supervisory job at that point in time. Both were binary variables with 1 corresponding to a positive answer.
Ecological variables included age and the economic niche an individual occupied. Principally, ecological influences are determined by Age (A), measured in years.
In addition, we included direct sources of academic income, including Teaching (I1) – share of income in the previous 12 months coming from teaching or performing administrative duties at a university (1 if share is 50% or above, 0 if it is below this threshold); and Grants (I2) – the share of income in the previous 12 months coming from Western grants or scholarships (1 if share is 25% or above, 0 if it is below this threshold). 4
Finally, as an ideological variable we included a Liberalism–Conservatism (L–C) scale constructed for the aims of this study, which was intended to capture the principal political divide existing in Russia. The scale included items on widely debated political issues such as abolishing capital punishment, suitability of liberal economics and liberal democracy to Russia, approval of Russia’s 2008 military intervention in Georgia to protect pro-Russian separatists, approval of same-sex marriage, evaluation of the disintegration of the USSR as a ‘great catastrophe’ and recognition of the special role of Russian culture. All variables demonstrated high correlations, thus proving the common wisdom that the principal divide in Russian politics is between Western-leaning liberals and conservative Slavophiles is still valid. There was one factor extracted with a principal component analysis with an eigenvalue exceeding 1. With religious education excluded, it explained 59.6% of variation. We normalized the scale so that it also had a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1.
We also included Gender (G) coded as a binary variable (0 – male, 1 – female).
Results
Figure 2 uses multiple correspondence analysis to visualize relations of the independent variables with each other and with the dependent variables (which are added as supplementary points). 5 A two-dimensional solution explains 46.4% of observed variance. The first dimension, accounting for approximately 27% of variance, opposes political liberalism, economic reliance on Western money, absence of teaching, younger age, having parents in academia and all sorts of globalist behaviours and attitudes to political conservatism, having a higher education job, older age and all kinds of localist behaviours and attitudes. The scale demonstrates a Cronbach alpha of 0.62 showing a significant degree of consistency. The second dimension, less easily interpretable, possibly deals with academic status attained (it opposes individuals belonging to the 1956–1965 generation, male and reporting having research grants to younger females). As it seems uncorrelated with globalism, it will not be examined further here.
Multiple correspondence analysis of individual attributes (Globalism, Localism, Yadov and Latour scales – supplementary points).
Tables 2 and 3 represent a series of multiple OLS regression models with, correspondingly, the attitudinal G–L scale and the behavioural scale of globalism–localism as dependent variables. The first three models in each table correspond to the three groups of variables associated with the theoretical models – the status (Model 1), the ecological (Model 2) and the worldview (Model 3). Model 4 enters all groups of variables together. Finally, Model 5 adds the alternative measure of the dependent variable – attitudinal and behavioural – as independent variables. We excluded parents’ supervisory jobs as it apparently showed no strong association with any other variable.
OLS regression of Globalism–Localism scale on selected attributes, standardized betas.
p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.
OLS regression of Latour–Yadov scale score on selected attributes, standardized betas.
p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.
In Table 2, Model 1 explains only some 4% variation in the dependent variable with parents’ education being the only significant independent variable. In contrast, Model 2 shows much more definite patterns, with both age and the economic niche an individual currently occupies demonstrating direct association with globalist attitudes. Political liberalism, however, performs even better, explaining some 47% of variation alone (Model 3). When we enter all three groups of variables into our equation, all class variables become insignificant, but L–C scores and primary economic dependence on teaching remain strongly significant. This suggests that class variables influence choice of professional ideology only indirectly, via social-political attitudes, and the same to a significant degree could be said about ecological variables. 6 Of the variables characterizing the economic niche one occupies, only teaching influences G–L scores; the coefficients, however, are at the margins of significance.
The fact that variables characterizing the economic niche become insignificant after political orientations are included suggests that both the choice of career path and of professional ideology are influenced by the more general ideological overview. Indeed, one can easily suggest why different professional niches are attractive for subjects sharing different values. In the qualitative part of the study not presented here, informants were asked to imagine which profession they would choose if they did not become sociologists. Liberals nearly unanimously voted for various freelance occupations such as journalism or design; conservatives, in surprisingly high numbers, mentioned public service. University teachers often define themselves as a type of civil servant and strongly identify with state causes. This is not surprising when taking into account the character of their work: heavy teaching loads (often exceeding 20 contact hours a week) rarely allow them to pursue their research interests or regard themselves as free-floating intellectuals. As one informant put it, ‘those surviving [as university teachers] are people valuing discipline and responsibility above erudite knowledge or originality’. Finally, taking into account the ways most sociological departments in Russia came into being, as described above, one may expect to find more critics of liberalism among university teachers. This has made the choice of a teaching career more attractive to conservatives (who could expect to find similar-minded colleagues), than to liberals. Such self-selection has secured the reproduction of a conservative climate in most departments.
Table 3 shows the models with the same independent variables, but with the Latour–Yadov score as the dependent variable. ‘Class’ Model 1 again finds the least support, although some of the variables characterizing class position (knowledge of foreign languages after finishing school, parents’ education) are approaching statistical significance even in the model with the longest lists of control variables. In contrast to what Table 2 shows, however, ecological variables retain their significance – one’s economic basis influences reading practices and intellectual influences with Western grants becoming significant. Both political liberalism and globalism turn out to be important in the final model.
An analysis of an individual’s scores on the Latour and Yadov scales separately, presented in Table 4, sheds additional light on these findings, showing that different factors influence familiarity with local and global intellectual products. Interest in and familiarity with domestic sociology increases with age. At least partially this could be explained by the fact that older sociologists have spent a significant part of their lives in a situation when their contacts with international scholarship were restricted, and they had no choice but to pay more attention to their domestic colleagues. Currently, they may be reproducing reading habits formed in the previous political era. 7 Globalist attitudes decrease the probability of reading Yadov, probably by providing excuses for not doing so, but do not increase the probability of reading Latour. Immediate reasons for reading Latour are different – here funding sources play the greatest role, with political liberalism also being of primary importance, even with globalist attitudes controlled. Persistence of this effect may signal that our Western funding variable does not capture all aspects of a general choice in favour of an international career path.
OLS regression of Latour and Yadov scales score on selected attributes, standardized betas.
p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.
The narrative, putting together these observations, is as follows. It seems that general political and cultural liberalism and its opposite, conservatism, are the pivotal elements of our story. They influence choice in favour of domestic or international scholarship in at least two different ways. First, they influence the attractiveness of certain economic niches and the attached lifestyles. Thus, pro-Western liberals were the first to use the opportunity structures of international grant economics when they appeared, both because they found this source of funding more venerable and because they regarded the style of life entailed in grant economics more attractive. This, in turn, favoured familiarizing oneself with figures within the international sociological canon and following Anglo-American literature, as this kind of cultural capital was essential for successfully competing for international grants, scholarships, or positions in the European labour market. In opposition to this, conservatives were more likely to take on a teaching job at a mainstream post-Soviet public university that they found more attractive (or at least less repellent). Second, liberalism entailed developing a set of beliefs about the superiority of Western scholarship over the domestic. Globalist attitudes allowed for a disregard of work by older Soviet and Russian scholars – those who believed this scholarship was of inferior quality felt free to ignore it. Interestingly, we have not found the opposite effect: at least according to their own reports, localists were not less aware of international literature.
Discussion and conclusions
Read in the light of our hypotheses above, these conclusions might be regarded as a strong argument in favour of the worldview model. A set of general political and cultural attitudes directly influence the professional ideology and the occupational niche one adopts. The appeal of intellectual localism is primarily felt by those who favour mighty Russia following its own civilizational path and is not afraid of challenging Western superpowers (as evident from the answers to the questions comprising our Liberalism–Conservatism scale). A question one cannot but ask here is where liberalism and conservatism come from. The link of localism or globalism with social-structural position seems only indirect. There is no correlation with class, economically understood (although the measure we used is admittedly extremely crude), and most links with measures characterizing belonging to status groups of intelligentsia are significant, but at best moderately strong. This fits well with other studies showing that political cleavages in Russia have only moderate correlations with socio-structural variables (Kalinin, 2011). This lack of correlation is probably one of the greatest mysteries of Russian society for which we currently do not have the key.
Returning to our hypotheses, there is little evidence that those inheriting more resources are, by the very nature of their privileged class position, likely to occupy the most attractive of the occupational niches. Ecological factors are significant, but their effects are heavily mediated by ideological variables. In other words, counter to the wide currency status and ecological model theorizing enjoyed in recent years, an older, Gouldnerian, version of sociology of social-scientific knowledge seem more relevant for the Russian case. At the same time, counter to Gouldner’s assumptions, it seems that it is not the resonance with class experience, which is essential in theory adoption. Rather, it is affinity with the political and cultural orientations of broad ideological camps that is important – a set of attitudes or beliefs about the moral character of certain historical agents and institutions, particularly the Russian state on the one hand and the abstract ‘West’ on the other. These ideologies draw boundaries between different milieus.
Our survey was conducted back in 2009, and a reader can ask if much has changed since then. As the survey has not been reproduced, we can rely here only on casual impressions that the localism–globalism divide has become less salient, or at least clashes along this line became less bitter. Globalism has won much of the terrain due to generational changes, bringing younger globalists to the top of the profession, and due to the energetic support by the Ministry of Science and Education which dreamt of boosting the country’s share of international publications.
As our study dealt with a single country, Russia, its results cannot be generalized to social origins of localism and globalism elsewhere. Indeed, the character of milieus serving as a social basis of each professional ideology might be highly specific for each country. Nevertheless, the present study points to the direction in which such social bases should be looked for.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am foremost grateful to people with whom we conducted the study reported in this article: Timur Bocharov, Ekaterina Borozdina, Katerina Guba, Darya Dimke, Ekaterina Moiseeva, Maria Safonova, Lev Shilov and Kirill Titaev. At different stages of its development, the article benefited from comments by Vladimir Gelman, Christian Fleck, Oleg Kharkhordin, Alexander Libman, Fyodor Pogorelov, Alexandra Makeeva, Irina Olimpieva, Adil Rodionov, Anastasia Tsivinskaya, Vladimir Volokhonsky and three anonymous reviewers. Kirsty Kay’s assistance with proofreading the text was invaluable.
Funding
The study received funding from a governmental block grant allocated to the National Research University Higher School of Economics in 2009.