Social Knowledge in the Making - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226092089 ISBN 13: 9780226092089

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Over the past quarter century, researchers have successfully explored the inner workings of the physical and biological sciences using a variety of social and historical lenses. Inspired by these advances, the contributors to Social Knowledge in the Making turn their attention to the social sciences, broadly construed. The result is the first comprehensive effort to study and understand the day-to-day activities involved in the creation of social-scientific and related forms of knowledge about the social world.

 

The essays collected here tackle a range of previously unexplored questions about the practices involved in the production, assessment, and use of diverse forms of social knowledge. A stellar cast of multidisciplinary scholars addresses topics such as the changing practices of historical research, anthropological data collection, library usage, peer review, and institutional review boards. Turning to the world beyond the academy, other essays focus on global banks, survey research organizations, and national security and economic policy makers. Social Knowledge in the Making is a landmark volume for a new field of inquiry, and the bold new research agenda it proposes will be welcomed in the social science, the humanities, and a broad range of nonacademic settings.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charles Camic is the John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and the author or editor of several volumes, including, most recently, Essential Writings of Thorstein Veblen. Neil Gross is associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia and the author of Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Michèle Lamont is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, professor of Sociology, and professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University. Her most recent book is How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment.

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Social Knowledge in the Making

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2011 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-09208-9

Contents

Preface.............................................................................................................................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION / The Study of Social Knowledge Making CHARLES CAMIC, NEIL GROSS, AND MICHÈLE LAMONT.............................................................................................1ONE / Library Research Infrastructure for Humanistic and Social Scientific Scholarship in the Twentieth Century ANDREW ABBOTT.....................................................................43TWO / In Clio's American Atelier ANTHONY T. GRAFTON................................................................................................................................................89THREE / Filing the Total Human: Anthropological Archives from 1928 to 1963 REBECCA LEMOV...........................................................................................................119FOUR / Academic Conferences and the Making of Philosophical Knowledge NEIL GROSS AND CRYSTAL FLEMING...............................................................................................151FIVE / Practical Foundations of Theorizing in Sociology: The Case of Pierre Bourdieu JOHAN HEILBRON................................................................................................181SIX / Comparing Customary Rules of Fairness: Evaluative Practices in Various Types of Peer Review Panels MICHÈLE LAMONT AND KATRI HUUTONIEMI..................................................209SEVEN / Meetings by the Minute(s): How Documents Create Decisions for Institutional Review Boards LAURA STARK......................................................................................233EIGHT / An Experiment in Interdisciplinarity: Proposals and Promises MARILYN STRATHERN.............................................................................................................257NINE / Subjects of Persuasion: Survey Research as a Solicitous Science; or, The Public Relations of the Polls SARAH E. IGO.........................................................................285TEN / The Practices of Objectivity in Regulatory Science SHEILA JASANOFF...........................................................................................................................307ELEVEN / How Claims to Know the Future Are Used to Understand the Present: Techniques of Prospection in the Field of National Security GRÉGOIRE MALLARD AND ANDREW LAKOFF.....................339TWELVE / What Do Market Designers Do When They Design Markets? Economists as Consultants to the Redesign of Wholesale Electricity Markets in the United States DANIEL BRESLAU......................379THIRTEEN / Financial Analysis: Epistemic Profile of an Evaluative Science KARIN KNORR CETINA.......................................................................................................405Contributors........................................................................................................................................................................................443Index...............................................................................................................................................................................................447

Chapter One

Library Research Infrastructure for Humanistic and Social Scientific Scholarship in the Twentieth Century

ANDREW ABBOTT

I have two major aims in this chapter. The first is empirical. I want to recover the practices, communities, and institutions of library researchers and their libraries in the twentieth century. There is at present almost no synthetic writing about this topic, and I aim to fill that gap. This empirical investigation points to a second, more theoretical one. There turns out to be a longstanding debate between librarians and disciplinary scholars over the proper means to create, store, and access the many forms of knowledge found in libraries. By tracing the evolution of this debate, I create a theoretical context for current debates about library research.

By library research I mean those academic disciplines that take as their data material which is recorded and deposited. Throughout the period here investigated, that deposit took place in libraries or archival repositories. In practice, the library research disciplines include the research branches of the humanities and a substantial portion of the social sciences: study of the various languages and literatures, philosophy, musicology, art history, classics, and history, as well as extensive parts of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and political science. (In earlier years, economics would have been on this list as well.) It is work in these fields that I mean when referring to "library research" throughout this chapter. For convenience I sometimes denote these disciplines as HSS (for humanities and humanistic social sciences). I am not concerned with library use by nonexperts such as undergraduates, avocational readers, and the larger public, nor with library use by natural scientists, for whom the library is not, as it is for their HSS colleagues, a crucial laboratory.

Three major ruptures mark library research in the twentieth century: World Wars I and II and the academic market crash of the 1970s. World War I broke the German dominance of the academic system, paving the way for American leadership. World War II not only confirmed the hegemony of American scholarship (and of English as the language of scholarship) but also produced an explosion in American higher education. The end of this expansion in the 1970s produced a final rupture, resulting in the research system that is just passing away today.

The periods between these transitions can be thought of as research regimes, periods in which there was a more or less stable library research world. I shall call these the formative, interwar, postwar, and implosion periods, respectively. In this chapter I try to sketch the basic qualities of research in each of them: its demography, its library resources, its basic reference structure, and the habitus of scholarship that those three things implied. Since the absence of prior literature forces my work to be largely descriptive, I cannot here theorize these "research regimes" in any deep way. For the moment, they are simply periods in which library research took a recognizable, somewhat constant form.

Since estimating scholarly demography and library resources is most conveniently done across the whole century, however, I shall begin with general discussions of those themes. I then turn to the main analysis, which is by period.

Demography

One central determinant of a research regime is its demography, the number of active scholars at a given time. There is no obvious measure of this number, nor are there consistent records for the likely indirect indicators: faculty numbers, PhD numbers, and society members. Since faculty data are the least specifically tied to research, I shall here use the other two—PhD numbers and society membership data—to estimate the demography of library research. For the major HSS disciplines, figure 1.1 shows rates of PhDs produced per year from the 1920s. The figure shows the five-year average for the period...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226092089
• ISBN 13: 9780226092089
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 471
• Herausgeber: Camic Charles, Gross Neil, Lamont Michele
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar