Abstract
Scientific self-reflection has been increasingly professionalized since the 1980s, manifesting in the emergence of fields like Science and Technology Studies (STS), Science Studies and science communication. While most of these fields are themselves interdisciplinary, their research objects have been remarkably one-sided—concerning themselves largely with the natural sciences. For a long time, analyses of the arts and humanities, or “social sciences,” were relatively scarce.
In recent years, this appears to be changing, perhaps indicating the maturation of fields which are becoming increasingly aware of this omission. However, there are more material reasons—mirroring the fact that social scientific expertise has become more important in increasingly globalized, diverse, mediatized knowledge societies. Social sciences are increasingly included in interdisciplinary research on large-scale phenomena such as climate change, biotechnology, or human cognition. And partly, it can be understood as a reaction to the societal pressure faced by social sciences to questions about their “public value,” and to resulting budget and funding cuts in many countries.
All of these causes shine through in three recent volumes addressing the role of social science in society. Two of them are edited collections binding together a number of case studies.
Social Knowledge in the Making—edited by sociologists Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michèle Lamont and including anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and others—focuses on practices of knowledge production in different social sciences, their historical development, and their infrastructural preconditions (in “Part I” of the book); on their internal assessment and evaluation procedures (Part II); and on their uptake in wider society (Part III). Adopting a range of methods, from hermeneutic documentary analysis to observation, the 13 chapters contain many inspiring observations and findings. They show that social scientific knowledge production—both historically and currently—strongly depends on infrastructural conditions such as libraries and information management tools, and that the institutionalization of such conditions was instrumental for the rise of disciplines such as history (Grafton), sociology (Abbott), or anthropology (Lemov). In Section II, they demonstrate the importance of peer review panels (Lamont and Huutoniemi) or institutional review boards (Stark) and their underlying criteria—including the rising need to promise specific results in order to successfully apply for research funding (Strathern). In Section III, they look at the uptake of social science in fields such as public policy (Jasanoff), the role of predictive social science for national defense (Mallard and Lakoff) or financial analysis (Knorr Cetina), and show that “social knowledge” is often used instrumentally in wider society, detached from the context of its production.
Social Science in Context—edited by sociologists Richard Danell and Per Wisselgren and historian Anna Larsson—was published 2 years after Social Knowledge in the Making, referring to it several times, and expands on the themes introduced and developed there.
The first of its three sections focuses on the usage of social science outside of academia. Historical case studies illustrate the co-development of social science and societal conditions, analyzing, for example, the role of class versus gender in industrializing Britain and its implications for the development of statistics (Yeo), the analysis of public opinion via newspaper content analysis in the first half of the twentieth century (Harvard), or the use of psychological expertise in Swedish schools after World War II (Larsson). Section II analyzes processes within social science, such as the self-definition of sociology in Nazi Germany (Keim), the establishment of “men’s studies” since the 1980s in Sweden (Kärnebro), or the impact globalization had on geography (Knobblock). Section III puts social science in the context of globalization, analyzing the internationalization and subsequent stratification of scholarly publishing (Danell), the emergence of dependency theory in Latin America (Groglopo), or the interplay of social theory and indigenous knowledge about reindeer herding in Finland (Turi).
Both volumes fall somewhat short of integrating this wealth of information fully into an overarching coherent argument, as they do not use a joint theoretical basis or shared nomenclature, and do not systematically compare or cross-reference the single studies. But both books successfully showcase the potential of a reflexive social science that applies its analytical tools to itself, and point out fruitful ways to move the field forward (such as Jasanoff’s argument for more cross-national comparisons that might unearth taken-for-granted assumptions about domestic social scientific practices). Social Knowledge in the Making in particular is preceded by a conceptually rich introduction which—apart from introducing the volume’s aims, the current status of the field, and the contributions to come—sketches a 10-point research agenda for understanding the social sciences within and beyond academia.
This latter point—The Impact of the Social Sciences—is the eponymous subject of a monograph written by Simon Bastow, Jane Tinkler, and Patrick Dunleavy from the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Public Policy Group. The book presents results from a 3-year project mapping out the societal uptake of the social sciences, their impacts, and determinants in the United Kingdom.
In Part I, the authors measure the impact “footprint” of various social science and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Bibliometrics and citation analysis (both within academia and outside it) are at the core here, showing, for example, that a larger percentage of social science mentions remains inside the scientific community, but that social sciences are also more often mentioned by governments and administrations. Regression analyses subsequently highlight important determinants of such impacts (like a high number of publications, or a high positional status), and in-depth case studies shed light on individual motivations and successes. This “supply” side of social science’s impact is then complemented in Part II by the “demand” side: relationships between researchers and companies, political and governmental actors, civil society, media, and the broader public (measured via social media) are scrutinized. The authors show that social scientists have more links to non-scientific stakeholders than their STEM colleagues, and that interviewed decision makers emphasize the importance they give to social scientific research, demonstrating that their findings are in high demand. In Part III, the authors focus on “patterns of knowledge and impacts.” Here, they use econometrics to demonstrate the importance of social science for UK industry. They show that firms, government and public sector agencies, non-governmental organizations, and media employ some 380,000 post-graduate qualified social scientists, and that approximately 6% of the United Kingdom’s gross domestic product (GDP) may be traceable to academic social science—a worthwhile deal given the relatively low direct spending on social sciences.
The authors conclude that social sciences have considerable impact, but that this is often not recognized appropriately, endangering the status and future of these disciplines. They argue that insufficient funding and negatively biased public and elite perceptions need to be overcome, and that social scientists should play their part. They should be more forthcoming in their outward communication and strive for substantial changes in their science, such as a more integrated, cumulative mode of knowledge production, more integration with human-centered STEM disciplines, and more global cooperation. This hands-on advice is not fully convincing—the envisioned disciplinary changes ignore some of the histories and realities of social sciences outlined in the introductory part of the book. The idealistic view of social media and the impact of information-based communication convey a rather simple and outdated model of science communication, and the praise of big data alongside the criticism of established survey methods seems one-sided.
But the book is of high value nevertheless, for its thorough description as well as explanatory analysis of the social sciences’ impacts, for its wealth of empirical data, and for its conceptual and typological work on, for example, the types of linkages between the social sciences and other societal fields. These contributions and the impact framing that the authors emphasize may serve the case of the social sciences more than their explicit advice. And the three books show, after all, the value of the social sciences—not least when they look at themselves in the analytical mirror.