Abstract
While sociologists of science generally agree that some form of exchange of recognition for contributions plays a central role in the organization of scientific work and fuels the quest of scientists for innovations, there is no general agreement on the manner in which the value of contributions is assessed collegially, on the strategies chosen by scientists to accumulate rewards (or credibility or credit), or on the uses to which reputations might be put.
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Notes and References
Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1979).
Latour and Woolgar, p. 207.
Richard Whitley, The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
Whitley, p. 25–26.
Georg Curtius, Zur Kritik der neuesten Sprachforschung (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1885), pp. 1–2.
Stanislaw Ossowski, “O wlassciwosciach nauk spolecznych” (On the Pecularities of the Social Sciences) in O Nauce. Vol IV of Dziela (Warsaw: PWN, 1967).
Terence Wilbur, Introduction to The Lautgesetz- Controversy: A Documentation (1885–1886) (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1977), p. xxxiv.
The data on career patterns in the humanities in general used for comparison with the Neogrammarians comes from Christian Ferber, Die Entwicklung des Lehrkörpers der deutschen Universitäten und Hochschulen 1864–1954, in Untersuchungen zur Lage der deutschen Hochschullehrer, ed. Helmuth Plessner (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1956), especially Tables 19 and 20.
Data from Johannes Conrad, “Allgemeine Statistik der deutschen Universitäten,” in Die deutschen Universitäten I, edited by W. Lexis (Berlin: Asher, 1893), pp. 118–121.
Wilhelm Lexis, ed., 1893. Die deutschen Universitäten I (Berlin: Asher, 1893), p. 620.
Ferber, Tables I and II.
Ferber, Table II and data from individual universities; see also note 13.
Information on the creation of chairs, their titles and occupants was collected from a number of sources. For individual universities, the following have proved most useful: Berlin: Max Lenz, Geschichte der königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin (Halle: Waisenhauses, 1910)
Hans Leussink, Eduard Neumann and Georg Kotowski, eds., Studium Berlinense: Aufsätze und Beiträge zu Problemen der Wissenschaft und zur Geschichte der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin (Berlin: Gruyter, 1960)
Bonn: Otto Wenig, Verzeichnis der Professoren und Dozenten der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn 1818–1968 (Bonn: 1968)
Friedrich von Bezold, Geschichte der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität von der Gründung bis zum Jahre 1870 (Bonn: Weber, 1920)
Breslau: Theodor Siebs, “Zur Geschichte der germanischen Studien in Breslau,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, vol. 43 (1911), pp. 202–235
Erlangen: Theodor Kolde, Die Universität Erlangen unter dem Hause Witteisbach 1810–1910 (Erlangen and Leipzig: Deichert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1910)
Freiburg: Badische Schulstatistik: Die Hochschulen (Karlsruhe 1912)
Ursula Burkhardt, Germanistik in Südwestdeutschland (Tübingen: Mohr, 1976)
Göttingen: Wilhelm Ebel, Catalogus Professorum Gottingensium 1734–1965 (Göttingen, 1962)
Greifswald: Festschrift zur 500- Jahresfeier der Universität Greifswald (Greifswald, 1956)
Heidelberg: Badische Schulstatistik; “Die germanischen Vorlesungen zwischen 1803 und 1900 an der Universität Heidelberg,” Rupert Carola Zeitschrift, XIX. Jahrgang, Vol. 42 (1967)
Jena: Dietrich Germann, “Die Anfange der deutschen Anglistik und die Entwicklung des Faches an der Universität Jena,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, vol. 41 (1959), pp. 183–200, 342–372
Max Stenmetz, ed., Geschichte der Universität Jena. 2 vols. (Jena 1958/60)
Kiel: Friedrich Volbehr and Richard Weyl, Professoren und Dozenten der Christian-Albrechts- Universität zu Kiel, 1856–1954 (Kiel: Hirt, 1956)
Leipzig: Franz Eulenburg, Die Entwicklung der Universität Leipzig in den letzten Hundert Jahren (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1909)
Festschrift zur Feier des 500 Jährigen Bestehens der Universität Leipzig, Band IV: Die Institute und Seminare der Philosophischen Fakultät an der Universität Leipzig (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1909)
Marburg: Franz Gundlach, Die Akademischen Lehrer der Phillipps-Universität in Marburg von 1527 bis 1910 (Marburg: Elwert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1927)
H. Hermelink and S.A. Kaehler, Die Phillipps-Universität zu Marburg 1527–1927, Fünf Kapitel aus ihrer Geschichte (1527–1866);
Die Universität Marburg seit 1866 in Einzeldarstellungen (Marburg: Elwert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1927)
Munich: Franz Babinger, “Ein Jahrhundert morgenländischer Studien an der Münchener Universität,” Zeitschrift fur Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, vol. 107 (1957), pp. 242–269
Stephanie Seidel-Vollman, Die romanische Philologie an der Universität München (Munich: Duncker and Humblot, 1977)
Tübingen: Burkhardt, Germanistik. Also data of Ferber;Lexis
Gustav Korting, Encyclopaedie und Methodologie der Romanischen Philologie (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1884)
Minerva: Jahrbuch der Universitäten der Welt (Strassburg, 1893 ff.).
Harriet Zuckerman and Robert K. Merton, “Patterns of Evaluations in Science: Institutionalization, Structure and Functions of the Referee System,” Minerva, vol. 9 (1971), pp. 66–100.
Compiled on the basis of Joachim Kirchner, ed., Bibliographie der Zeitschriften des deutschen Sprachgebietes, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1971).
Burkhardt, p. 35.
Karl Brugmann, Zum heutigen Stand der Sprachwissenschaft (Strassburg: Trübner, 1885), p.4.
Brugmann, Zum heutigen Stand, p. 8.
Seidel-Vollman, p. 15.
Burkhardt, p. 129.
On the basis of Lexis, pp. 607–612.
Andrew Pickering, “The Role of Interests in High Energy Physics. The Choice Between Charm and Colour,” in The Social Process of Scientific Investigation, edited by Karin D. Knorr, Roger Krohn and Richard Whitley, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook IV (Dordrecht, London and Boston: Reidel, 1982), p. 127.
In addition to holding a chair of comparative grammar in Berlin, Schmidt was one of the editors of Kuhn’s Zeitschrift, while from 1877 Bezzenberger edited a new linguistic journal, Beiträge zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprachen.
Of course, the idea that the cognitive development of science is shaped by the opportunities and limitations provided by the institutional structure within which science develops is not new. However, there have been only a few attempts to explain specific cognitive processes in these terms. Thus, in explaining the emergence of psychology, Joseph Ben-David and Randall Collins (“Social Factors in the Origins of a New Science: The Case of Psychology,” American Sociological Review, vol. 31 (1966), pp. 451–65) focused on the role of the university structure in nineteenth-century Germany which blocked career opportunities of physiologists and led them to migrate to philosophy. Ben-David and Collins, however, did not try to relate cognitive developments, except on the most general level of the emergence of a discipline, to specific institutional processes.
In his later work, Ben-David (The Scientist’s Role in Society: A Comparative Study, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1971) again focused on the institutional structure of universities in order to explain differences in scientific development in England, France, Germany and the United States, though in this study he did not deal at all with the particular cognitive effects of different institutional arrangements, but rather with rates of development.
More recently, Gerald Geison (Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) has examined the development of physiology in England in terms of existing opportunities for institution building
while Robert Kohler (From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) has traced the effects of the opportunities for institutionalization of biochemistry on the development of this particular discipline in Germany, England and the United States. In both of these studies, however, relatively little is said about the relation of specific cognitive claims to the institutional structures in which they were formulated.
On the other hand, studies in the sociology of scientific knowledge have generally attempted to elucidate cognitive developments in terms of broad social interests (e.g. Donald MacKenzie, Statistics in Britain 1865–1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge; Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1981)
or in terms of institutionally unattached cognitive interests (Trevor Pinch, “What Does a Proof Do if it Does Not Prove?” in The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge, edited by E. Mendelsohn, P. Weingart, and R.D. Whitley; Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook I; Dordrecht, London and Boston: Reidel, 1977
Pickering, “The Role of Interests” and “Interests and Analogies” in Scientific Context: Readings in the Sociology of Science, edited by Barry Barnes and David Edge; Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1982). While the present study fits well within Pickering’s perspective, it puts more emphasis on specific institutional structures rather than the interests of institutionally unanchored scientific communities.
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Amsterdamska, O. (1987). The Neogrammarian Revolution From Above. In: Schools of Thought. Sociology of the Sciences Monographs, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3759-8_5
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