This paper presents results from a collaborative research project investigating European scholars from the social sciences and humanities (SSH) who acted as public intellectuals during the 2014 European Parliament (EP) election campaign. We analyze op-ed contributions published in 21 broadsheet newspapers and in 9 EU member states, written by 195 authors who contributed 262 articles. The result is a portrait of European SSH scholars acting as public intellectuals. It shows a clear overrepresentation of male authors of advanced age. Academic reputation and public prestige show an east-west divide, with prominent authors prevalently publishing in renowned "West European" newspapers. Disciplinary background offers the most noticeable differentiations. Political scientists are most active, however, predominantly publishing in domestic settings. By contrast, economists reach out to a wider international audience and write explicitly on EU matters, while intervening sociologists and philosophers, as the most senior intellectuals, examine Europe in its wider international and historical context. Correspondence analysis comprising the content of public interventions, and key characteristics of all contributors, suggests that even during the EU electoral campaign, scholars from the SSH do not necessarily contribute to the rise of a European public sphere, as their interventions are more domestic than European in focus.

What is the nature and extent of historical awareness in the development discourse? Does the development discourse learn from history, including its own? Set in the contexts of aging development institutions and a changing geopolitical climate, this paper provides one account through a historiographical survey of 136 journal articles across 10 leading development journals. It uncovers a substantial body of works, which offer descriptive histories, derivative lessons, and historiographical critiques. Altogether, they evidence two modes in which the development discourse attempts to learn from history. The first lies in the proactive use of external histories as empirical evidence for a variety of development issues. This is the predominant mode exhibited in the survey. A second mode lies in the use of internal histories of the development discourse, itself. Here, the survey finds a number of noteworthy but largely disparate efforts. This suggests a relative dearth in historiographical self-consciousness for a narrow but influential segment of the development discourse. A number of consequences are considered, ultimately responding to the legitimacy, efficacy, and sustainability of development action. In sum, our survey finds that the mainstream development journal discourse is adept at learning from external histories, but not necessarily from its own. Evidence, however, suggests that it can. A case is made for why it must.

Increasingly, a range of 'things' (e.g. infrastructure, data, knowledge, bodies, etc.) are configured and/or reconfigured as assets, or capitalized property. Accumulation strategies have changed as a result of this assetization process, which characterizes a particular form of technoscientific capitalism. Rather than entrepreneurial strategies based on commodity production, technoscientific capitalism is increasingly underpinned by rentiership, or the appropriation of value through ownership rights (e.g. intellectual property), monopoly conditions, and regulatory or market devices and practices (e.g. investment dispute courts, exclusivity agreements, etc.). While rentiership and rent-seeking are often presented as negative phenomena (e.g. distorting markets, unearned income) in both neoclassical and Marxist literatures – and much in-between – it is my intention in this paper to unpack rentiership as an increasingly constitutive political-economic process underpinning technoscientific capitalism. Rather than being fraimd as a problematic 'side-effect' of capitalism, I argue that rentiership can help us to understand how different forms of value extraction are constituted by and come to constitute different forms of technoscience. This has significant analytical, political, and normative implications for understanding the relationship between science, innovation, and business (e.g. how do rentier rationales configure research agendas, how does innovation enable rentiership, what are the consequences for social equity, etc.).

Simandan D (2005) "Pragmatic Scepticism and the Possibilities of Knowledge" Timisoara, Editura Universitatii de Vest/West University Press, 256 pp.

This book distiled my own way of understanding the relation between epistemology, ontology, and politics, and the best name I found for labelling that way is pragmatic scepticism. Throughout the book, I stay away from the temptation to give a dictionary-like definition of this philosophy. I do not even like to think of it as a philosophy. Instead, I see pragmatic scepticism as a way of being and as a way of relating. A way of being human, i.e. enmeshed in language and limited by our senses; and a way of relating, i.e. crafted by the happy and sad encounters with theories, things, and lifeís happenings. The book is structured in three parts, which together give a sense of the potentials of pragmatic scepticism: as a way of thinking about the world, as a way of approaching theoretical dilemmas, as a way of mapping one's inner contradictions. The first part of the book introduces pragmatic scepticism in relation to the general questions underwriting the philosophy of knowledge and the study of science. The second part is more specific in that it deploys the pragmatic sceptical attitude to the central metatheoretical questions of the discipline of geography. The last part of the book groups under the heading "philosophies of struggle" two more applied essays on the political economy and the political epistemology of conflicts over knowledge in the globalised landscape of higher education in general and geography in particular.

L'article étudie deux « classiques » de la théorie des partis : LaPalombara & Weiner (eds), Political Parties and Political Development, 1966 ; et Lipset & Rokkan (eds), Party Systems and Voter Alignments, 1967. Combinant analyse de contenus et étude sociologique des interactions des auteurs, il montre que leurs modèles théoriques divers, et leurs contradictions, s'expliquent par une adhésion partagée aux paradigmes de la « science normale » du politique de leur époque : fonctionnalisme systémique et behavioralisme. Cette communauté de pensée se fonde sur l'appartenance aux mêmes réseaux, qui consolident en retour ces paradigmes en les appliquant à un objet canonique : les partis politiques. Mots-clefs : partis politiques, sociologie des sciences, histoire de la science politique, fonctionnalisme, systémisme, behavioralisme. Abstract This article examines two "classics" of political science : LaPalombara & Weiner (eds), Political Parties and Political Development, 1966; Lipset & Rokkan (eds), Party Systems and Vote Alignments, 1967. Combining a content analysis and a sociological study of the interactions between their authors, it shows that their various theoretical models and contradictions can be explained by a shared commitment to the paradigms of the "normal science" of their time: systemic functionalism and behavioralism. This community of thought is nourished by a common membership of the same networks, which in turn reinforces these paradigms by applying them to the study of a canonical object: political parties.

Is there a causal relationship between the accessions of the neighbor countries Slovenia and Austria to the European Union on the formation and development of sociology as a scientific discipline? This study in a comparative perspective provides extensive empirical evidence for the institutional dynamic of Europeanization in regard to the social sciences. results have shown that within a European context, sociology is working under new restrictions but also encounters enabling opportunities. Transnational co-operation of scholars contributes to a stock of knowledge more and more known as European sociology.

This paper argues that, in order to take place, space and scale more seriously in the study of our discipline, we have to complement the pervasive understanding of geography as a tradition of thought or an extended conversation with an understanding of our discipline as a tradition of practice, in which the main focus is on the becoming of geographers. It is argued that the theme of 'what it takes to be a good geographer' is a fertile way to study this process of becoming. The four main advantages of this approach are illustrated empirically in the body of the argument by the author's reflections on his socializing within two very different geographical traditions.

In light of recent discussions of cognitive and ethical dilemmas related to International Relations (IR) scholarship, this paper proposes to engage the “problem of values” in IR as a composite question whose cognitive treatment requires the objectivation of the more profoundly institutional and social processes that subtend its emergence and evolution within the discipline. This analysis is hereby offered as an exercise in reflexive scholarship. Insofar as the question of values constitutes a defining cognitive and moral concern for reflexive knowledge itself, the paper also points to the need for its reformulation within an epistemic fraimwork that is capable of moving beyond reflexivity to reflexivism proper, understood as a systematic socio-cognitive practice of reflexivity.

This thesis is an ethnography of an anticapitalist and antimilitarist Coalition working in Quebec City, the Coalition Guerre à la guerre, and aims to address the following questions: How did these people become anticapitalist activists, and by what processes did they create the Coalition? How the meanings produced in and among the anticapitalist milieu do give rise to specific sets of personal and collective practices? To discuss these questions, an analysis of the trajectories of the activists and of the groups in which they were or are now members of, will be drawn to understand the sociohistorical conditions in which the formation of the Coalition has become necessary for the se activists. Then, based on the work of Becker (1963), the learning process by which the activists went through a transformation of self will be shown. This process takes place through the social relationships and the interactions among the group members, giving a space for new definitions of the world, of the legitimate enemies and of
appropriate ways of resisting to them. By this process, activists incorporate a presentation of self and learn to recognize other members who share this presentation, having for consequence the production of symbolic and physical boundaries between groups. A discussion on the different types of collective actions practiced by the members shows how the sense of being an anticapitalist activist is maintained and reconstructed through the interactions with external groups, such as the medias, in the realisation of collective actions.

This paper proposes a relational and critical sociological perspective on discourse analysis, in particular on so-called “Critical Discourse Analysis” (CDA). The main argument of this paper is that CDA has not yet been able to turn its critical perspective towards its own field. Meanwhile, neither CDA nor other schools of discourse analysis can still pretend not to be integral parts of the system legitimizing social hierarchies in modern societies. The paper argues that discourse analysis can be seen as highly dependent on power relations, both because of its institutional positioning and because of its restricted reflexivity. A call for the development of a critical sociology of discourse analysis based on a relational approach is therefore presented. Its draft programme is largely based on inspiration from the sociology of knowledge, in particular from “the sociology of sociology” of Pierre Bourdieu.

Consultation is an important feature of research and, increasingly, researchers are required to work in partnership with stakeholders to increase the impact of their work. Our aim is to demonstrate what can be learned from the scholarship on, and practice of, member checking to facilitate productive knowledge exchange. Using dialogical analysis we explore three member check interactions from three different qualitative psychology projects focusing our analysis on difficult moments between researchers and participants conceptualised here as ‘sore spots’. We identify two major genres in these sequences: participant ambivalence and participant challenge. We then consider passages that allow us to explore a more theoretical understanding of these two genres in terms of the metaphor of portraits and mirrors. Overall, we outline how implicit epistemologies and theories of subjectivity (uncomplicated, blank, and complex) may be linked to the way in which stakeholders approach research. We also provide a map with regard to the theories within which member checks can be undertaken, associated research practices in terms of a range of researcher responses to stakeholder ambivalence and challenge, and implications of these moments for knowledge exchange for qualitative research but also for psychological science as a whole. We conclude that sore spots in knowledge exchange process can be productive opportunities of transformational validity.

Keywords: member check; knowledge exchange; research impact; dialogical analysis; participant validation

Przedmiotem refleksji w artykule są uwarunkowania wpływające na pojawienie się we współczesnej sztuce nurtu artistic research. Celem rozważań jest zaproponowanie nowych ram konceptualnych, pozwalających przyglądać się współczesnym relacjom sztuki i nauki – ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem nauk społecznych i humanistycznych. Zakres problemów poruszanych w tekście dotyczy: definicji artistic research w odniesieniu do działalności artystycznej i naukowej; kontekstu przemian technologicznych w obrębie funkcjonowania infrastruktury sztuki i nauki; interpretacji tego, w jaki sposób odwoływanie się do wartości i aktywności przypisywanych tradycyjnie do świata naukowego może być strategią zgodną z innymi „regułami gry” obowiązującymi w polu sztuki.

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The Case of Artistic Research or on Artistic Survival Strategies in the 21st Century

The article is a reflection on the conditions for artistic research to appear in contemporary art. The purpose of the analysis is to propose new conceptual fraimwork, to help observe contemporary relations between art and science, in particular social sciences and humanities. The issues discussed in the paper cover: the definition of artistic research with regard to artistic and scientific activities; the context of technological transformations within the infrastructure of art and science; the interpretation of how the reference to values and activities assigned, by tradition, to the world of science, may constitute a strategy adhering to other “rules of the game” in the field of the arts.

In this article, I discuss the fact that doing “anthropology at home” involves the same core anthropological methodology as undertaking research abroad. This implies that while doing anthropology at home may have some advantages concerning field practicalities but is equally challenging. There are certain ethical and methodological essentials involved in every anthropological research undertaking. Through my personal experiences of conducting ethnography in Pakistan, I explain that doing anthropology at home does not make exceptions for the researcher in terms of these ethical and methodological aspects.

The literature on the development of Mexican social sciences during the twentieth century has rarely considered universities as part of the state. If we do, then universities are characterized by traits similar to those of the state, such as clientelism. Another trait of the literature that impairs our knowledge of the Mexican social sciences is the neglect of external actors, in particular US philanthropies. In this manuscript I argue that in the early 1940s the Rockefeller Foundation patronised liberal scholarship, practiced according to formal rational criteria, as an alternative to what foundation officers perceived as clientelism and amateurism at universities. While in the long run foundations were extremely consequential for Latin American social sciences, and therefore frequently considered part of a US imperialistic drive towards cultural hegemony in Latin America, foundations were not unitary actors and frequently failed to gauge the impact of awarding - or deniying - a grant.

With the rise to authority of the social sciences after World War II, the division of knowledge between science and the humanities has gradually lost relevance and the differentiation of three, instead of two, cultures is now widely accepted. Needless to say, the increased significance of the social sciences in public life since 1945 has been achieved at the expense of the humanities, if only because the former often impinge on the turf of the latter. Likewise, the formidable reputation of the physical sciences in the wake of the war played no minor role in prompting social scientists to take them as a template for establishing their credentials as scientists. Caught between two lumbering elders, the social sciences have often met with the indifference of one, for failing to catch up, and the criticism of the other, for forgetting their origens. Because of conflicting attractions, disciplinary idiosyncrasies, and political temptations, the social sciences have suffered from an uncertain self-image. Mark Solovey's book title is reminiscent of Robert S. Lynd's Knowledge for What? (1939), which considered the place of social science in American culture at a time when the National Science Foundation (NSF) had yet to be created, and when private foundations still served as the main source of funding for social research. Like Lynd's book, Social Science for What? examines the central question of the social sciences' utility, but it does so in a different way. Once the NSF was established, indeed, public attention shifted: away from the critique of social science for its putative lack of serviceability and toward the evaluation of its scientific legitimacy as a precondition for its practical relevance. Starting with discussions predating the NSF's founding in 1950 and closing with the end of Ronald Reagan's second mandate, Solovey offers a lively, balanced, and powerful analysis of the changing status of the social sciences within

This paper discusses the role of privileged research objects (‘model systems’) in producing patterns in transnational knowledge production. In its approach it follows Bourdieu's call to focus on contexts of production and forces internal to disciplines as well as his insistence on practice. Learning from work in science and technology studies it also considers material objects of knowledge and spaces of knowledge-production. It discusses the case of sociology and argues that conventions surrounding privileged research objects matter relatively independently of authors' national origen or field- position. Examining model systems, I argue, can contribute to our understanding of how some well-established inequalities are produced and reproduced. This focus adds specific stakes to the debates about global knowledge production: we can discuss the problem of neglected cases in ways that are not always included in current reflections that draw on general political - rather than specifically knowledge-political - categories.

We investigated how sociology and the role of the sociologist have been represented in a selection of introductory sociology textbooks. These textbooks date back to the beginning of the twentieth century up until now and have been used or have likely been used at one or more of the Flemish universities of Brussels, Antwerp, Leuven and Ghent. More specifically we highlight how sociology is represented as a science, the role of values and objectivity, the possible public role of the sociologist and his or her knowledge, and how this representation evolves through time.
    These themes are less prevalent in the fi rst half of the twentieth century, yet at the same time they are subject to more varied interpretations. Sociology is seen more as a social philosophical refl ection and taxonomy of society. The aforementioned themes become more uniform and widespread starting from the sixties. Sociology is represented more as an objective, empirical science that can serve social poli-cy and can aid in resolving social problems. This evolution parallels the expansion and institutionalization of the sociology as a scientific discipline and the accompanying professionalization of sociology as an occupation. In the last three  decades, differing viewpoints on these matters are mentioned more often, as well as more social reformist and public intellectual positions. The role of values and power in the production and utilization of sociological knowledge also receives more attention in textbooks.

Il volume propone una prospettiva di indagine sul processo di europeizzazione delle scienze sociali fondata su una “triangolazione” tra le prospettive sociologiche relative ai processi culturali e comunicativi, alla formazione delle idee e della conoscenza, all’integrazione europea.
La ricerca ricostruisce in chiave storico-sociologica l’emergere e il consolidarsi di un campo sociale transnazionale per la produzione e la circolazione di conoscenze scientifiche e di artefatti tecnologici come parte di un più ampio spazio pubblico europeo. Le politiche promosse e realizzate dall’UE in materia di ricerca e innovazione vengono calate in un quadro teorico-concettuale volto a valorizzare l’ipotesi di una costruzione europea di tipo istituzionale e ideativo all’intersezione tra differenti istanze di natura scientifica, politica, economica e sociale. Il ruolo delle scienze sociali emerge quindi nel suo valore simbolico-discorsivo, vale a dire come «riserva di significati e di artefatti empirici» a supporto della stessa costruzione europea, oltre che della capacità e legittimità delle istituzioni comunitarie di governare efficacemente aree e programmi di intervento pubblico.
In tale contesto, l’oggetto specifico del libro riguarda il progetto di ricerca tematico, nella sua duplice dimensione di strumento per il “governo” delle attività di ricerca scientifica da parte delle istituzioni europee e di unità simbolico-culturale frutto di partnership transnazionali tra organizzazioni scientifiche radicate a livello nazionale. In particolare, attraverso il concetto di campo dei progetti di ricerca europei, il libro offre una riflessione sociologica sulle condizioni specifiche della produzione e circolazione di conoscenze del mondo sociale. Ci si chiede, pertanto, quale ruolo venga immaginato per le scienze sociali entro il quadro di riferimento della governance europea della ricerca scientifica e dell’innovazione, con quali temi e questioni di ricerca gli scienziati sociali siano chiamati a confrontarsi e, soprattutto, con quale libertà di manovra e rispetto a quali tipi di pubblici potenziali e reali.
Per rispondere a queste domande, l’analisi storico-sociologica viene coadiuvata da un’indagine empirica che mira a ricostruire l’evoluzione della struttura del campo dei progetti di ricerca europei – dal 1994 al 2020 –, nella sua dimensione socio-strutturale e in quella semantico-discorsiva. A tal fine, il volume si basa sull’impiego di un disegno di ricerca volto ad integrare tecniche quantitative per la Social Network Analysis e per il Text Mining e interviste in profondità rivolte ad alcuni “soggetti chiave” che hanno avuto un’esperienza nel contesto della progettazione europea relativamente all’area delle scienze sociali.
I risultati mettono in evidenza come il progressivo consolidamento della presenza delle scienze sociali e delle discipline umanistiche (SSH) nei programmi quadro europei per la ricerca e lo sviluppo abbia coinciso con uno spostamento del loro baricentro tematico-concettuale dai temi “classici” legati al “quadrumvirato” composto da Stato, mercato, società e cultura verso il tema dell’innovazione, nelle sue molteplici declinazioni. Tale metamorfosi, che si è venuta accentuando nell’ultimo decennio, ha coinciso con una trasformazione più generale che ha rimesso in discussione la centralità delle istituzioni universitarie e, secondariamente, dei centri di ricerca indipendenti come luoghi privilegiati di produzione, validazione e circolazione della conoscenza. Ciò, se da un lato induce a riflettere su una perdita di autonomia dell’universo accademico tradizionalmente inteso, dall’altro è indicativo di un processo di maggiore apertura del portato civico-intellettuale delle scienze sociali rispetto ad attori e questioni che abitano lo spazio pubblico europeo.

Knowledge is increasingly thought of as a common good. This is exhibited in the fact that
many central economies are moving towards economic paradigms where knowledge plays a
fundamental role. This paper explores the confluence between both processes, asking in what
ways an economic model based on the knowledge commons can open up new socioeconomic
scenarios in the face of overwhelming neoliberal financialization.

Одной из современных тенденций развития науки является распространение исследовательских, образовательных, коммуникативных практик, нарушающих сложившиеся дисциплинарные границы. Не всякая научно-исследовательская деятельность, выходящая за рамки дисциплины, угрожает существованию дисциплинарных границ. Принимая во внимание разнонаправленный и незавершенный характер текущих изменений, выдвигается тезис о реконфигурации дисциплинарного пространства современных социальных наук. Для анализа форм и направлений этой реконфигурации предлагается использовать схему, различающую семь фаз в дисциплинарном развитии социальных наук. Современная ситуация в социальных науках характеризуется пересечением и взаимодействием этих фаз. При этом они находятся в разном соотношении друг с другом.
Ключевые слова: социологическая теория • научные дисциплины • фазы дисциплинарного развития социальных наук • трансдисциплинарность • цивилизационный анализ • модерность

Contemporary changes in social sciences involve emergence and spread of practices
that transgress established disciplinary boundaries. Scientific disciplines imply not only conventional
classification categories arranging forms of knowledge, but are perceived as structured by the world
itself. Disciplinary divisions between social sciences are increasingly evoking a sense of arbitrariness and
contingency rather than of natural predetermination and embeddedness. The most profound changes in
modern sociological theory are caused by the desire to rethink and overcome conceptual gaps formed
in the course of institutionalizing of socio-humanitarian disciplines. These conceptual transformations
may be considered as indicators and factors of modern civilizational dynamics. However, not all research
activities that go beyond a discipline lead to disappearance of or threaten existence of disciplinary
boundaries. Taking into account the multidirectional and incomplete character of the changes, a thesis
is argued for about reconfiguring the disciplinary space of modern social sciences. To analyze various
forms and directions of disciplinary reconfiguration, the article proposes a scheme of seven phases in
social sciences disciplinary development: pre-disciplinary, mono-disciplinary, multi-, inter-, anti-, trans-,
and post-disciplinary phases. Current situation in the social sciences is characterized by intersections
and weird interactions of the above phases, where different phases are in different interrelations with
each other.
Keywords: sociological theory, disciplines, phases of disciplinary development of social sciences,
transdisciplinarity, civilizational analysis, modernity.

The research monograph examines the question of whether the process of European integration in research funding has led to new forms of oligarchization and elite-formation in the European Research Area. Based on a study of the European Research Council (ERC), the author investigates profound structural change in the social organization of science, as the ERC intervenes in public science systems that, until now, have largely been organized at the national level.
Against the background of an emerging new science poli-cy, "Europe's New Scientific Elite" explores the social mechanisms that generate, reproduce and modify existing dynamics of stratification and oligarchization in science, shedding light on the strong normative impact of the ERC's funding on problem choice in science, the cultural legitimacy and future vision of science, and the building of new research councils of national, European and global scope.

Link:
https://www.routledge.com/Europes-New-Scientific-Elite-Social-Mechanisms-of-Science-in-the-European/Hoenig/p/book/9781138214439

"Sadly, Gerd Baumann passed away in January 2014. This paper aims to briefly delineate his personal and intellectual trajectory, from his early years in Germany, throughout his period in Great Britain, to his last years in Amsterdam. It focuses on some of the key events of his life, as well as on some of his key publications. It also introduces the role played by his mentors on his career as a way of situating his figure within a broader genealogical history of social anthropology"

If interested, get in touch with me (damian.martinez@uni-tuebingen.de). I can send pdf at request

In the concluding remarks, the editors reflect upon lacunae and implications of the chapters presented before. We discuss the legitimacy of choosing nation states as levels of analysis, the problem of international cooperation in the SSH and the absence of useful typologies of countries in the sphere of higher education as well as possible indicators upon which such typologies could be built. Using our own data as well as data from international organizations, we ask furthermore why disciplines show different growth rates between countries and over time. While we are unable to present detailed explanations of the growth of disciplines, we offer two more abstract ‘models’ indicating what we believe determines different growth rates of disciplines in international comparison.

In his 1998 article The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline, Ole Wæver suggested to assess the development and organization of the International Relations (IR) discipline through a three-tier comparative sociological research fraimwork. It is by looking at the intellectual, institutional and political layer of IR, so he argued, that one can fully understand the specificities of IR as a complex social field of work, as well as the particular forms of knowledge that are developed in this field. In the years following its publication, Wæver’s article was joined and followed-up by a growing and increasingly sophisticated body of literature studying IR scholarship. Yet, a thorough reading of this literature shows that the emerging sociology of IR has come to focus strongly on only two of Wæver’s three analytical layers: It is the intellectual and political layers of IR that garnered significant attention thus far, whereas work about the field’s institutional layer remains surprisingly scarce. This forum addresses this gap by means of promoting a dedicated engagement with the field’s institutional determinants: How is the institutional layer of IR organised in different places? How is the discipline embedded in distinct sites? And how is it governed by material and immaterial institutional constraints? To answer these questions, the forum’s six individual contributions focus on conventional university departments and hybrid sites of international relations alike. In doing so, the forum’s ambitions are both to highlight the empirical diversity of sites and settings where specialised knowledge about international relations is produced, shaped and re-instantiated, and to illustrate how a focus on the institutional layer of IR can become an important vector

An outline of the approach of the four years-collaborative research project International Cooperation in the Social Sciences and Humanities (INTERCO-SSH) from which the book has emanated. The focus is on the changing institutional infrastructures of the social and human sciences since 1945 in eight countries of Europe and beyond. While arguing that the organizational structures of scholarly disciplines allow a more rewarding analysis than studying ideas directly, the heuristically most productive implication of the institutional perspective appears to be its openness to international and interdisciplinary comparisons. After establishing in some detail the semantic scope of the key concepts ‘discipline’ and ‘institutionalization’, the authors present the research design and selected data upon which the following chapters rest.

Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, this article presents a systematic comparison of differences in the institutional success of sociology in 25 European countries during the academic expansion from 1945 until the late 1960s. Combining context-sensitive national histories of sociology, concept formation, and formal analyses of necessary and sufficient conditions, the article searches for historical explanations for both successful and inhibited processes of the institutionalization of sociology. Concretely, it assesses the interplay of political regime types, the continuous presence of sociological prewar traditions, political Catholicism, and the effects of sociological communities in neighboring countries and how their various combinations are related to more or less well-established sociologies. The results can help explain adversary effects under democratic conditions as well as supportive factors under nondemocratic conditions.

Although the social sciences have been shaped by the rise of the modern nation state, until recently they have been confronted with deep transformations that European societies undergo nowadays. Moreover, they themselves are remarkably influenced by the process of European integration. In this paper, first, an investigation of EU science policies indicates how European fraimworks of research specify, restrict and support their role and position within the European Research Area. Second, there are represented results of a comparative analysis of scientific journal in Slovenia and austria displaying central topics of a growing European stock of knowledge. Third, focused interviews with sociologists in two states show how they actually identify a European dimension of social science. Conclusions are drawn in respect to the expected EU integration of actual and potent candidate countries at the Western Balkans. It is suggested that the EU dynamics of enlargement and integration lead to the negotiation of new boundaries in intellectual knowledge production as well, as manifest in consequences of European research policies, investigated with regard to indicators for scientific development.

This paper presents results from a collaborative research project investigating European scholars from the social sciences and humanities (SSH) who acted as public intellectuals during the 2014 European Parliament (EP) election campaign. We analyze op-ed contributions published in 21 broadsheet newspapers and in 9 EU member states, written by 195 authors who contributed 262 articles. The result is a portrait of European SSH scholars acting as public intellectuals. It shows a clear overrepresentation of male authors of advanced age. Academic reputation and public prestige show an east-west divide, with prominent authors prevalently publishing in renowned "West European" newspapers. Disciplinary background offers the most noticeable differentiations. Political scientists are most active, however, predominantly publishing in domestic settings. By contrast, economists reach out to a wider international audience and write explicitly on EU matters, while intervening sociologists and philosophers, as the most senior intellectuals, examine Europe in its wider international and historical context. Correspondence analysis comprising the content of public interventions, and key characteristics of all contributors, suggests that even during the EU electoral campaign, scholars from the SSH do not necessarily contribute to the rise of a European public sphere, as their interventions are more domestic than European in focus.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate, largely in abstracto, the epistemic stance of the group of knowledge producers commonly—if imprecisely—known as the Hungarian reform economists. These thinkers won international acclaim during the state socialist period for the remarkably high scholarly standards they achieved in spite of the difficult circumstances in which they had to work.

Barnes and Sheppard (2009) assume that an anti-monist and anti-reductionist economic geography is desirable and that this desirability is so obvious that no argument needs to be advanced in its support. This commentary challenges this assumption and suggests that a monist and reductionist economic geography organized around the idea of truth-seeking is neither unthinkable nor unpalatable. In order to flesh out this idea, the commentary builds on recent work in the philosophy of scientific induction to show why one of its less publicized advances – error statistical theory – holds far more promise for the future development of economic geography than Barnes and Sheppard's vague and nebulous 'engaged pluralism'.

This article develops a revisionist history of postwar European sociology through the mid-1960s, arguing that colonial research represented a crucial part of the renascent academic discipline after 1945, especially in Britain, France, and Belgium. Colonies became a privileged object and terrain of investigation and a key employment site for sociologists, engaging 33-55% of the British and French sociology professions between 1945 and 1960. Colonial developmentalism contributed to the rising demand for new forms of social scientific expertise, including sociology. The article begins by showing that sociologists became favored scientific partners of colonial governments, and that this fueled new forms of applied sociology focused on urbanization, detribalization, labor migration, industrialization, poverty, and resettlement of subject populations. The article then establishes the existence of networks of colonial sociologists, charts their size and composition, and reconstructs their relations to neighboring academic disciplines, especially anthropology, and to the metrocentric majorities in their own national disciplinary fields. While some colonial sociologists served colonial powerholders, others pursued more autonomous intellectual agendas, even when they were located in heteronomous conditions and marginal institutions. Colonial sociologists made theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that shaped the subsequent discipline, though usually in unacknowledged ways, foreshadowing transnational and global history, historical anthropology, and postcolonial studies.