Abstract
Swedish social sciences and humanities have expanded dramatically since 1945. The augmentation has been especially strong in the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1990s, coinciding with transitions from elite to mass to universal higher education. However, the expansion has been very uneven. The social sciences have surpassed the humanities in a number of aspects such as student enrolment, research financing and demand for their expert knowledge. Thus, a long-established order has been reversed. Our main conclusion is that the differentiated path the disciplines take is explained largely by their altered position in the field of higher education and changing demands from the labor market as well as the strengthened link between the expansion of the welfare state and the social sciences.
Keywords
- Swedish higher education fields
- Morphological transformations
- Reforms
- Welfare state
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- 1.
See Blomqvist (1993) for a detailed account of these late nineteenth century transformations.
- 2.
The following section is based on Börjesson et al. (2014).
- 3.
For a detailed account of the dawn of social sciences in Sweden and the part played by the Loren Foundation, see Wisselgren (2015).
- 4.
For a thorough account of the troubles facing women in academia from the first female student in 1873 to the first professor in 1949, see Markusson Winkvist (2003).
- 5.
For an evaluation of this reform, see Jordansson (1999).
- 6.
The history of business studies in Sweden has been well documented by Engwall (2009).
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Dalberg, T., Börjesson, M., Broady, D. (2019). A Reversed Order: Expansion and Differentiation of Social Sciences and Humanities in Sweden 1945–2015. In: Fleck, C., Duller, M., Karády, V. (eds) Shaping Human Science Disciplines. Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92780-0_7
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