Categories of Social Knowledge Research Working Group

The intellectual and institutional difficulties associated with the study of governance have led to widespread appeals for more interdisciplinary and cross-national research. Our uncertain grasp of current trends, and the potential of new conceptions, research strategies, and institutions is illustrated by the increasingly strident "culture wars" and "science wars" that have erupted in response to movements towards new epistemologies challenging the historic divisions between the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences. The calls for the implementation of these new perspectives, through innovative methods and new institutions, have given rise to a myriad of new journals, academic programs and departments, and extramural research establishments.

Do these efforts prefigure, in historical terms, a new synthesis or redivisioning of how we produce knowledge and scholars, and do they do so on a world scale? What intellectual paradigms and institutional proposals might we support to investigate efficaciously the "global" economy and new forms of "global" participation and governance? And how might this be done not only in the rich core of Europe and North America, but across the institutions of higher education and research in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America?

We have few if any answers to these questions. Yet they remain central to pressing intellectual and policy issues. We have tackled, in past projects, the general lineaments of the long-term, historical development of the logical structures and institutional organization of the social sciences. This provides a basis for our next step, how this secular trend has been established and institutionalized in particular social settings. Here we are particularly concerned with the institutionalization of large-scale theoretical antinomies such as "traditional/modern" or "status/contract," and their comparison based on the nomothetic classification of race/ethnic/national and gender groups according to reputedly transhistorical - or essential - attributes. This leads in turn to the investigation of the creation of a series of cognitive constraints that have contributed to and legitimized the exclusionary aspects of liberal governance - but in different ways at different times and in different locations in the world-economy.

Preliminary work has led to the selection of a series of sites where the diffusion and institutionalization of these processes may be observed. We have furthermore associated with each specific site moments in which the categories of social knowledge have undergone transformation. The settings so far selected include the US/UK, France, the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, southern Africa, and Latin America. Other sites may be added as our inquiry proceeds. We shall concentrate on the institutionalization of the social sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the current debates in each zone.

In each of these locations we shall analyze four interlocking vectors defining the direction in which pressure or influence has been exerted: we shall track, on the one hand, the impact of both the global structures of accumulation and the antisystemic movements on the world of knowledge, and, conversely, the impact of the world of knowledge on the structures of accumulation and on the antisystemic movements.

Our data will be collated from a variety of sources. We have found, for example, that the diffusion of conceptual frameworks has been marked by the publication, and where necessary the translation, of major social science texts and the interpretative literature accompanying them. We shall thus seek data on these phenomena across our sites and time periods. Similarly, the institutionalization of such frameworks, moreover, suggests we look for the foundation of new journals and the creation of university chairs and departments. We are also interested in documenting the provenance of scholars teaching and conducting research in the nascent fields and the direction young scholars take in programs of study abroad. In evaluating the impact of the world of knowledge on the structures of accumulation and the antisystemic movements, we shall be particularly attuned to the claims made legitimating their actions, whether in parliaments, boardrooms or the popular press. For the impact they have in turn on the world of knowledge we shall focus on the extent to which interests, despite assertions of objectivity, have driven scholarship.

Finally, we shall evaluate the same four vectors in the present, and shall pay particular attention to the degree to which the historic construction of the production of knowledge is in fact being called into question, and the consequences this will have for the political economy of the world-system.

This group seeks to discern how the secular trend deepening the intellectual divide between "facts" and "values," the institutional divisions expressing the "two cultures," has been established and reproduced in particular social settings, deepened its inquiry in selected geographical and linguistic areas. In its most recent series of meetings, the group examined the particular form the process took in France, Southern Africa, and Turkey/Ottoman Empire. The group has now also initiated work on the UK, the US, and Australia, and instituted cooperative projects on the German-speaking world and, with the Centro de Estudios de Desarollo of the Universidad Central de Venezuela (CENDES), on Latin America. Some of the work is still in the initial stage of exploring the literature, identifying relevant temporal frameworks, and making decisions on appropriate methodologies. Work in other project areas, however, is in the final phase of producing coherent manuscripts addressing the central focus of the Working Group: an analysis of the articulations between the structures of knowledge (and their institutionalization) in particular contexts and the spheres of decision making and coercion, i.e., politics, and production and distribution, i.e., economics.

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