Abstract
Social science is a battlefield for concept formation, an important part of agenda setting. Yet concepts change and have to be renewed, and changing realities call for new concepts. To that end, Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michèle Lamont have edited Social Knowledge in the Making.
The sociology of knowledge is an amorphous field with diverse roots. If somebody calls for more of it nobody understands what that would be, precisely. The classic authors are a “mixed bag,” including Karl Mannheim, Max Weber, Thomas Kuhn, C. Wright Mills, Robert K. Merton, and more recently Robert Wuthnow, Michael Burawoy, Ron Eyerman and others. Steve Woolgar, Steve Fuller, and Peter Weingart, scholars more directly involved in STS (Science and Technology Studies), add new dimensions in the study of how context impacts actual research. In addition, the whole discourse on academics as public intellectuals might be relevant, although with a different focus.
A generation ago STS referred to an externalist scheme by Merton about science, technology, and society; today, rather to a wave of pan-disciplinary science and technology studies, as usual with America ahead of the crowd. If STS in its new meaning and TASK (Traditional Approach to Social Knowledge) will become common knowledge in the scholarly community remains an open question, but surely we now need a conceptualization that at least does not neglect the recent rapid developments, described in the thirteen chapters of this rich collection. STS networks pop up on a global scale, including Uppsala University. Often scholars from departments of management/economics are the driving entrepreneurs in these endeavours. In the United States there are already numerous departments where TASK appears as a more dubious acronym, having a crystallizing effect due to the normative dimension of finger-pointing.
For obvious reasons, the art of locating the research frontier is of utmost importance for the accumulation of knowledge. If we reread the excellent appendix “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” in Mills’ classic The Sociological Imagination, we realize how rapid the development of tools has been and how much needed is Andrew Abbott’s investigation. Mills’ advice now seems “stone age,” when every student has USBs and can use Google and have access to library search motors and often the “real thing” via SAGE, EBCOS, JSTOR, and so on. Twenty years ago, the CD-ROM revolutionized scholarship, helped overcome fragmentation, and increased cohesiveness in discourse. It also aided resolution of interpretative questions where old “truths” are slow to die.
That “science starts with problems” has become a common notion, thanks to among others Immanuel Wallerstein and the Gulbenkian Commission. The obsession with what is sociology and/or economics, political science, history, demography, and so on, is a passed stage. Yet we have a process of professionalization and diversification.
Abbott’s chapter on library research is indeed well designed to fill a lacuna. He offers a narrative and an analysis of the customers of library users in HSS (Humanistic Social Sciences), the growing number of PhDs and the tools available for identifying active scholars and finding the best sources, not to forget the development of libraries.
My only critical remark to this excellent text would be that it has a certain American bias, resulting in a German deficit. The Germans were after all really the masters in developing manual tools such as Kürschners Deutscher Gelehrten-Kalender, national catalogues (Deutsches Bücherverzeichnis), IBZ (Internationale Bibliographie der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Zeitschriftenliteratur) and IBR (Internationale Bibliographie der Rezensionen), before the internet revolution, in which they are lagging behind, obviously not at the “cutting edge.” Nevertheless these tools are now on line as well. Moreover, Sociological Abstracts (CSA) and SSCI (Social Sciences Citation Index) once meant a lot for overcoming fragmentation. Abbott is also well aware of the importance of trans-Atlantic reciprocity. More could be done.
Professionalization is a process starting from a formative period full of amateurs, do-gooders, idealists and world improvers, originally rather dominant in the American Sociological Association.
Transformations of both library infrastructures and customers come alive in Abbott’s text. An aging scholarly community results in a decline in reading and borrowing, and reading and citing has an inherent Ponzi-scheme element.
Encyclopaedias tend to appear more often and to be shorter, if we compare Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences with International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (now with a second edition) and the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS), the latter with second edition “in the pipeline”.
Anthony Grafton provides deeper insights in trans-Atlantic reciprocity and how German seminar culture influences especially Chicago activities.
Neil Gross and Crystal Fleming provide a narrative which most of us might recognize, about stressful modern conferences. In the 1950s conferences could well last almost a whole week—today rather one or two days—and once they are organized there is actually no need to hold them. It is an industry with some elements of déjà vu, yet necessary because of networking.
To give full justice to all the contributions in this volume is not possible. The volume is divided in three parts and I have mainly focused on Part I.
There are, however, also a number of more narrow case studies. I wish to mention Chapter Eleven, “How Claims to Know the Future Are Used to Understand the Present. Techniques of Prospection in the Field of National Security,” by Grégoire Mallard and Andrew Lakoff. Security policy tends to be a deficit theme in social science. Retired army officers and diplomats have more to tell, are richer sources, together with some historians. As soon as we enter the difficult research area of what the future might bring, we know that counterfactuals is a methodologically tricky field and in addition eschatological thinking has historically bad records, ever since the year 1000. Self-appointed doomsday prophets call for the programmatic scepticism that Merton and Popper teach us. Yet there is no more an important field of inquiry than forecasts of the future in a time of global environmental threats. “Techniques of prospection” certainly deserve urgent attention, in particular because of the role of contingency in the art of politics.
Is there something missing in the volume? At least in Sweden, theologians are often represented in STS networking, despite the country being very secularized. The religious dimension could have been better covered. This lacuna is a bit amazing because of “priest” being the second career choice for U.S. sociologists.