Abstract
One of the characteristics of modern science is its organized form in separate knowledge-producing institutions. These institutions, their internal structure and their relations to society at large, cannot be taken for granted in a sociology of the sciences but are one of its key problematiques. Even if the day-to-day activities of scientists at work were hardly distinguishable from other social activities — a claim some scholars have raised based on ethnomethodological and interactionist research — still the location of these activities in particular institutions makes for sociologically relevant differences. Thus scientists distinguish themselves and their work not least by way of their institutional position. Their claims to social relevance are based on this position. They refer socially and intellectually crucially, though of course not exclusively, to actors in similar institutions (1). The very real phenomenon of struggles over admittance of individual scholars, intellectual “approaches,” or specific organizations to the realm of academic institutions could hardly be understood, if institutional difference were of little or no relevance (2). The institutional distinctiveness of science, however, varies over time and space, and across scientific fields. To disregard similarities between science and other social activities and to neglect the impact of societal institutions on science would be equally misleading as the more recent tendency towards denying all distinctiveness to science as a social activity. By implication, science would then tend to be reified, and sociological analysis precluded (3).
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Notes
A related position has been strongly argued for by Richard Whitley in debate with proponents of ethnomethodological and interactionist approaches in science studies, “From the Sociology of Scientific Communities to the Study of Scientists’ Negotiations and Beyond”, in: Social Science Information, 22,No. 4/5, 1983, pp. 681–720. He has also tried to develop this viewpoint in analyses of social science fields such as economics, “The Structure and Context of Economics as a Scientific Field”, in: Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, 4,1986, and management studies, “The Development of Management Studies as a Fragmented Adhocracy”, in: Social Science Information, 23,1984, pp. 775–818.
A strong emphasis on institutional distinctiveness and its relation to sociocultural differences has been laid by Pierre Bourdieu. For his analyses of institutions of science and higher education see Homo academicus, Paris, Minuit, 1984 and La noblesse d’Etat, Paris, Minuit, 1989.
Rolf Torstendahl, “Transformation of Professional Education in the 19th Century”, in: Sheldon Rothblatt and Björn Wittrock, eds., The Three Missions: Universities in the Western World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990; see also Friedrich Paulsen, Die deutschen Universitdten und das Univer-sitdtsstudium, Berlin, Asher, 1902; Abraham Flexner, Universities: American, English, German, New York, Oxford University Press, 1930; McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980.
For an analysis of state and society in terms of monitoring and surveillance see Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1985, in particular pp. 172–192; Giddens draws, among others, on the works of Michel Foucault.
See Björn Wittrock, Peter Wagner, and Hellmut Wollmann, “Social Science and the Modern State”, in: Peter Wagner, Carol H. Weiss, Bjorn Wittrock, and Hellmut Wollmann, eds., Social Sciences and Modern States, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991; Björn Wittrock and Peter Wagner, “Social Sciences and State Developments”, Stephen Brooks and Alain G. Gagnon, eds., Social Scientists, Policy, and the State, New York, Praeger, 1990; and Peter Wagner, Sozialwissenschafien und Staat, Frankfurt/M., Campus, 1990.
See for recent analyses of these developments Libby Schweber, “Social Policymaking and the Institutionalization of Social Science in Britain and the United States, 1880–1920”; Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Ronan van Rossem, “State Structures, Social Knowledge, and Early Modern Social Policy in Britain and Germany” both in: Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds., Social Knowledge and the Origins of Modern Social Policies, in preparation; Martin Bulmer, “Mobilising Social Knowledge for Social Welfare: Intermediary Institutions in the Political Systems of the United States and Great Britain, 1900–1940”, conference paper, New York, May 1989.
See Schiera in this volume, and Pierangelo Schiera, Il laboratorio borhgese. Scienza e politica nella Germania delVOttocento, Bologno, Il Mulino, 1987; as well as Wagner, op. cit., for a comparative, continental European perspective.
The notion of “Mandarins” stems from Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, Boston, Harvard University Press, 1969, in the meantime widely debated and criticized, e.g., by Schiera, op. cit., and Sven-Eric Liedman, “Institutions and Ideas: Mandarins and Non-Mandarins in the German Academic Intelligentsia”, in: Comparative Studies of Society and History, 28, No. 1, 1968, pp. 119–168; the notion of extra-academic discourse context is proposed by Carsten Klingemann, “Heimatsoziologie oder Ordnungsinstrument? Fachge-schichtliche Aspekte der Soziologie in Deutschland zwischen 1933 und 1945”, in: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 23, 1981; see also Helmuth Schuster, Industrie und Sozialwissenschaften, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987.
George Weisz, “L’idéologie républicaine et les sciences sociales”, in: Revue Française de Sociologie, 20,No. 1, 1979, pp. 83–112.
The notions of “halfway failure” and “success strategy” stem from Victor Karady’s analyses, “Durkheim, les sciences sociales et l’Université: bilan d’un semi-échec”, in: Revue Française de Sociologies 17,No. 2, 1976: 267–311, and “Stratégies de reéussite et modes de faire-valoir de la sociologie chez les Durkheimiens”, in: Revue Française de Sociologie, 20, 1979, pp. 49–82; a contemporary evaluation of interwar sociology in France is Raymond Aron, “La sociologie”, in: Raymond Aron et al., Les sciences sociales en France. Enseigne-ment et recherche, Paris, Hartmann, 1938.
On Worms and Tarde see Robert L. Geiger, “Die Institutionalisierung soziologi-scher Paradigmen”, in: Wolf Lepenies, ed., Geschichte der Soziologie, Frankfurt/M. Suhrkamp, 1981. We shall return to the case of Boutmy in the next section, below.
Georg Lukacs, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Berlin, Aufbau, 1954; on interwar sociology in Germany see Dirk Käsler, Die frühe deutsche Soziologie und ihre Entstehungs-Milieus 1909 bis 1934, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1984; and Erhard Stilting, “Kontinuitaten und Brüche in der deutschen Soziologie 1933/34”, in: Soziale Welt, 35, No. 1/2, 1984; for France see Johan Heilbron, “Les méetamorphoses du durkheimisme, 1920–1940: in: Revue Française de Sociologie, 36, No. 2, 1985; for Italy Robert Michels, “The Status of Sociology in Italy”, in: Social Forces, 9, October 1930.
Pierre Favre, “Les Sciences de l’Etat entre déterminisme et libéralisme”, in: Revue Française de Sociologie, 22,No. 3, 1981, pp. 461–2. The inside quotations are from a text Boutmy wrote in 1876.
See, for instance, Oskar Negt, Die Konstituierung der Soziologie als Ord-nungswissenschaft, Frankfurt/M., EVA, 1974; Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition, London, Heinemann, 1966.
See the status accorded to it in S. Collini et al. That Noble Science of Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983.
See Roger Geiger, “La sociologie dans les écoles normales primaires”, in: Revue Française de Sociologie, 20,No. 1, 1979, pp. 257–267, as well as Johan Heilbron, “Les métamorphoses du durkheimisme, 1920–1940”, in: Revue Française de Sociologie, 36, No. 2, 1985, and in this volume.
See Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford M. Lyman, American Sociology. Worldly Rejections of Religion and Their Directions, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1985, for the U.S.; Carl Heinrich Becker, Gedanken zur Hochschulreform, Leipzig, 1919, for Germany; see Reba N. Soffer, Ethics and Society in England. The Revolution in the Social Sciences 1870–1914, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978, for England; and for Italy, Giorgio Sola, “Sviluppi e scenari della sociologia italiana, 1861–1890”, in: Giorgio Sola and Filippo Barbano, Sociologia e scienze sociali in Italia, 1861–1890, Milan, Angeli, 1985.
A good example would be French sociology, the Durkheimian heritage of which continues to be visible in, e.g., Pierre Bourdieu’s work (cf. Peter Wagner, ‘The Theoretical Import of Practical Sense”, in: Bjflrn Wittrock, ed., Social Theory and Human Agency, London, Sage, 1991). For a discussion of the antecedents to Durkheim see Heilbron, in this volume.
Stuart H. Hughes, Consciousness and Society. The Reorientation in European Social Thought, 1890–1920, New York, Vintage, 1958, p. 13f.
Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe. Stabilisation in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade after World War One, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1975, p. 5.
Douglas Ashford, Policy and Politics in France, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1982, p. 13.
Peter Wagner, “Social Science and the State in Continental Western Europe”, in: International Social Science Journal, 36,No. 4, 1989 pp. 509–29; Sozialwissenschaften und Staat, Frankfurt, Campus, 1990.
Obviously, neoclassical discourse in economics has an enormous power of institutional reproduction and even legal positivism experiences renewed interest (see Werner Heun, “Der staatsrechtliche Positivismus in der Weimarer Republik”, in: Der Staat, 28,No. 3, 1989, pp. 377–403). Furthermore, there are types of systemic and functional social theorizing, in which elements of these discourses reappear. Niklas Luhmann’s theory of separate social subsystems, each working along their own formal codes, is essentially a formalized — and much elaborated-theoretical system with obvious parallels to various versions of such late nineteenth century ideology of the liberal capitalist state.
Carsten Klingemann, “Heimatsoziologie oder Ordnungsinstrument? Fachge-schichtliche Aspekte der Soziologie in Deutschland zwischen 1933 und 1945”, in: Kolner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 21, 1979, pp. 343–357.
Valerio Castronovo, “Cultura e sviluppo industriale”, in: Storia d’ Italia, Annali 4: Intellettuali e potere, Turin, Einaudi, 1981, pp. 1259–1296; Bjïrn Wittrock and Peter Wagner, “Policy Constitution through Discourse”, in: Douglas E. Ashford, ed., Comparing Public Policies (in preparation).
Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, London, Verso, 1989; Björn Wittrock, ed., Social Theory and Human Agency, London, Sage, 1991.
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Wagner, P., Wittrock, B. (1990). States, Institutions, and Discourses: A Comparative Perspective on the Structuration of the Social Sciences. In: Wagner, P., Wittrock, B., Whitley, R. (eds) Discourses on Society. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-29174-1_13
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