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State-building and the Origins of Disciplinary Specialization in Nineteenth Century Germany
... In fact, more recent scholarship in the history of German universities suggests the emergence and consolidation of the university was driven by state-centralisation processes and the need for a rational civil service (Ash 2006;Habinek 2010;Lybeck 2017;McClelland 1980). While this interpenetration with state power might discount the thesis presented herethat universities represented an autonomous basis of power in the process of modernizationthe critical challenge for functionalist evolutionism consists in recovering the actual social science: the humanistic, professional and, indeed, religious bodies of knowledge other than natural science present during the birth of the modern university system. ...
... Ben-David's analysis suggesting university reform was internally driven, however, ignores the actual external factor of contemporaneous state reform in Germany. As Jacob Habinek has well documented, even Ben-David's paradigmatic success story, biology, cannot be explained by the autonomous effort of scientists striving for truth (Habinek 2010). University reforms did encourage focusing on basic research to the relative exclusion of traditional subjects, but scholars themselves were not responsible for disciplinary specialization. ...
... La principal consecuencia de este proceso, al menos en la esfera de influencia del modelo francés de educación, fue la hegemonía de una formación disciplinaria fragmentada en una universidad que, si bien antes era la casa de las ciencias, las artes y la cultura en una perspectiva amplia e integradora, se hizo una institución vocacional, promotora de formación técnica especializada orgánica al nuevo modo de producción fundado en la producción industrial masificada. Una primera hipótesis atribuye el surgimiento de la especialización profesional a la diferenciación académica, con ocurrencia de subdivisiones entre disciplinas científicas (26) . Weisz (27) propone una tendencia inversa: la especialización se habría iniciado en París entre 1830 y 1850, sobre todo, en el campo profesional de la salud, en el proceso de acomodación entre espacios de formación profesional, determinada por un mercado de trabajo ya de inicio competitivo, y de ahí a la consolidación de trayectorias curriculares especializadas. ...
In this essay, we seek to evaluate the impact of the Cabanis reform on the configuration of the health education model that became hegemonic in Argentina. First, we analyze the restructuring of the French educational system triggered by the revolution of 1789, primarily in its political and institutional dimensions. Second, we briefly discuss the process of the social, ideological and institutional reconstruction of the health system in post-revolutionary France. Third, we introduce the Cabanis reform, a proposal for medical education based on professionalism, disciplinarity and specialization that resulted in a higher education system without universities, looking into its main curricular and pedagogical aspects. Finally, we evaluate the sequence of events and processes that, throughout the 19th century, with strong Cabanisian influence through the Idéologie, shaped both the principal features of teaching health and medicine and the higher education model based on faculties currently predominant in the Argentine Republic.
... Com esse modelo institucional, consolidava-se uma arquitetura curricular para formação exclusiva em carreiras profissionais mediante ensino superior cada vez mais disciplinar e especializado. Para compreensão desse processo, uma primeira hipótese vê a origem da especialização profissional na especialização acadêmica resultante da diferenciação e subdivisões entre disciplinas científicas da Reforma Humboldt na universidade prussiana (Habinek, 2010). Com a difusão internacional do modelo da universidade de pesquisa, a especiação disciplinar das ciências teria se estendido à estrutura curricular do ensino e, posteriormente, à organização das práticas profissionais. ...
... Como ya señalamos, es la universidad moderna, es decir, aquella que surge después de la Revolución Francesa bajo el modelo napoleónico, así como aquella de los colleges del mundo anglosajón, y de la concepción humboltiana en Alemania, las que tienen la capacidad de transformar a las ciencias en disciplinas (Habinek, 2010). Será en particular el modelo francés el que consagrará a la universidad en torno a la formación de profesionales a nivel superior (Glavich s/f; Arredondo, 2011), ampliando así la noción de disciplina a un nuevo dominio, el de la profesión. ...
From a sociological-structural perspective, the socio-historical constitution of disciplines and fields is analyzed along with their constant differentiations and disputes for legitimacy. Disciplines, as institutionalizations of science, generate inclusions and exclusions but, above all, disciplines of their communications. The disciplines therefore form symbolic traditions that denote phenomena and that govern change and disciplinary permanence. Education, from this perspective, fails to establish itself as a discipline even though it is often treated as such. The result is a steady deregulation of this field of knowledge (education) which is reflected by the lack of specificity regarding training content, especially at the graduate level. Graduate school in education, furthermore, faces an impossibility of cultural regulation in its offer. It is empirically argued from the Chilean case.
... 13 Należy jednak pamiętać, że praktyka wewnętrznej promocji na uniwersytetach, tj. zatrudniania własnych absolwentów lub osób, które na tych uczelniach przeszły procedurę habilitacyjną, miała duże znaczenie aż do ostatnich dekad XIX w. nawet w niemieckojęzycznym kręgu kulturowym (Habinek 2010). 14 J. Ben-David i R. Collins (1966, s. 459), podkreślając znaczenie wprowadzenia zawodu naukowca dla rozwoju nauki, ujęli to metaforycznie: "idee, które nie są pielęgnowane przez ludzi, których praca polega właśnie na ich pielęgnowaniu (czyt. ...
The number of small specialty brewers in the U.S. beer brewing industry has increased dramatically in recent decades, even as the market for beer became increasingly dominated by mass-production brewing companies. Using the resource-partitioning model of organizational ecology, this article shows that these two apparently contradictory trends are fundamentally interrelated. Hypotheses developed here refine the way scale competition among generalist organizations is modeled and improve the theoretical development of the sociological bases for the appeal of specialist organizations' products, especially those related to organizational identity. Evidence drawn from qualitative and quantitative research provides strong support for the theory. The article offers a brief discussion of the theoretical and substantive issues involved in application of the model to other industries and to other cultures.
This penetrating case study of institution building and entrepreneurship in science shows how a minor medical speciality evolved into a large and powerful academic discipline. Drawing extensively on little-used archival sources, the author analyses in detail how biomedical science became a central part of medical training and practice. The book shows how biochemistry was defined as a distinct discipline by the programmatic vision of individual biochemists and of patrons and competitors in related disciplines. It shows how discipline builders used research programmes as strategies that they adapted to the opportunities offered by changing educational markets and national medical reform movements in the United States, Britain and Germany. The author argues that the priorities and styles of various departments and schools of biochemistry reflect systematic social relationships between that discipline and biology, chemistry and medicine. Science is shaped by its service roles in particular local contexts: This is the central theme. The author's view of the political economy of modern science will be of interest to historians and social scientists, scientific and medical practitioners, and anyone interested in the ecology of knowledge in scientific institutions and professions.
Many formal organizational structures arise as reflections of rationalized institutional rules. The elaboration of such rules in modern states and societies accounts in part for the expansion and increased complexity of formal organizational structures. Institutional rules function as myths which organizations incorporate, gaining legitimacy, resources, stability, and enhanced survival prospects. Organizations whose structures become isomorphic with the myths of the institutional environment-in contrast with those primarily structured by the demands of technical production and exchange-decrease internal coordination and control in order to maintain legitimacy. Structures are decoupled from each other and from ongoing activities. In place of coordination, inspection, and evaluation, a logic of confidence and good faith is employed.
In this history of the Chicago School of Sociology, Andrew Abbott investigates central topics in the emergence of modern scholarship, paying special attention to "schools of science" and how such schools reproduce themselves over time. What are the preconditions from which schools arise? Do they exist as rigid rules or as flexible structures? How do they emerge from the day-to-day activities of academic life such as editing journals and writing papers? Abbott analyzes the shifts in social scientific inquiry and discloses the intellectual rivalry and faculty politics that characterized different stages of the Chicago School. Along the way, he traces the rich history of the discipline's main journal, the "American Journal of Sociology". Embedded in this analysis of the school and its practices is a broader theoretical argument, which Abbott uses to redefine social objects as a sequence of interconnected events rather than as fixed entities. Abbott's theories grow directly out of the Chicago School's insistence that social life be located in time and place, a tradition that has been at the heart of the school since its founding 100 years ago.
Primary argument is "that genetic toxicology was ushered in by a scientists' social movement. That is, collective action among scientists involved in genetic toxicology's creation was organized, strategic, and infused with environmental values; it elaborated a social critique of the disciplinary organization of science and sought to create a new way of ordering environmental knowledge. Building a science centered on the study of 'environmental' mutagenesis and organizing a social movement of scientists committed to preventing further increases in the load of mutations were intertwined and mutually constitutive processes" (12)
This article relies on an analysis of the institutionalization of economics worldwide during the 20th century to argue that the logic of professional development in this particular field has come to be increasingly defined in global terms. Connections to ( mainly) U.S.based standards of work and professional practice are routinely used in the local competition whereby different professional segments and groups seek to assert their authority on particular jurisdictions ( scientific, corporate, or political). In this process of professional construction ( or reconstruction), economies are being transformed through complex transnational mechanisms which, ultimately, feed back into the identity and jurisdictional claims of the economics profession itself, both in the "core" and in the "periphery."
This article discusses causal analysis as a paradigm for explanation in sociology. It begins with a detailed analysis of causality statements in Durkheim's Le suicide. It then discusses the history of causality assumptions in sociological writing since the 1930s, with brief remarks about the related discipline of econometrics. The author locates the origins of causal argument in a generation of brilliant and brash young sociologists with a model and a mission and then briefly considers the history of causality concepts in modem philosophy. The article closes with reflections on the problems created for sociology by the presumption that causal accounting is the epitome of explanation within the discipline. It is argued that sociology should spend more effort on (and should better reward) descriptive work.
Journal of Social History 34.2 (2000) 445-447
With some notable exceptions, such as the work of Robert K. Merton or J. D. Bernal, the history of science in this century was long dominated by positivist intellectual history and near-hagiographic biography, both of which foregrounded theoretical innovation. But arguably dating from Paul Foreman's "Weimar Culture, Causality and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927" in 1971, concerns of the new social history, as well as those of ethnomethodology and the "new" sociology of science (the empirical programme of relativism, or EPOR) have increasingly penetrated the sacred domain of "pure" science. The resulting "new" history of science emphasizes experimental practices and technologies, and the institutional, social, economic, political, and cultural nexus in which they are situated.
The core epistemic and historical issue at stake in these new approaches can be framed two ways: To what extent is the content of science underdetermined by purely scientific evidence and considerations (which implies that other, "social," factors might play a role in problem choice, experimental practices, and scientific belief-formation)? Or, to what extent do extra-scientific factors alone determine the epistemic content of scientific beliefs? The two formulations are not equivalent, and an affirmative answer to the former does not entail an affirmative answer to the latter.
In this collection of essays, all but the first and last previously published, Timothy Lenoir clearly demonstrates the historical and cultural contingency of the development of scientific research programmes and disciplines, and of scientific belief choice (programmes and beliefs more harmonious with broader cultural suppositions, and with the social interests of the scientists involved, are more likely to be embraced by those scientists). Chapters 2 and 3 offer what amounts to a nuanced critical literature survey of the "social turn" in the history of science and the "historical turn" in the philosophy of science, circa the early 1990s: All the usual suspects -- Latour, Shapin and Schaffer, Peter Galison, Andy Pickering, even guest appearances by Foucault and Bourdieu -- are present and accounted for. These chapters are an excellent introduction to recent trends in the history and philosophy of science for those who haven't attended to their neighboring sub-disciplines for a while.
Chapters 4 through 8 comprise the substantive core of the book: In them, Lenoir persuasively demonstrates that the development of specific aspects of nineteenth and early twentieth century German physiology, medicine, optics, and organic chemistry can be comprehended only by understanding the political, cultural, economic, ideological, and even artistic contexts of their creation. On these accounts, science is of a piece with culture and politics. The great virtue of these chapters is that they eschew the usual pompous generalities, and instead minutely detail specific connections, say, between scientific optics, the physiology of vision, painting style and technique, political ideology, and personal affiliations and interests (Chapter 6). Finally, Chapter 9 extends the same sort of analysis, less theoretically enlightened, or encumbered, as the case might be, to the twentieth century: to Varian Associates' creation of nuclear magnetic resonance instrumentation and the discipline of physical chemistry.
It is in his eighth chapter, "Practical Reason and the Construction of Knowledge: the Lifeworld of Haber-Bosch," that Lenoir provides the clearest (although still somewhat opaque) elucidation of the interpretive stance that animates the entire book. First, for his portrayal of the character of scientific knowledge, Lenoir draws upon William James' pragmatism, as well as the phenomenology of Ernst Mach and others. Lenoir's central epistemological claim is that the only way scientists know the world is through their practices -- not only the whole concatenation of apparatus, technologies, and procedures through which nature is "produced" for scientific scrutiny, but also the social processes by which scientists negotiate and persuade. Second, and this is what sets Lenoir's interpretation apart from others of similar ilk, these scientific practices are integral to the "seamless web" of what Edmund Husserl characterized as a "lifeworld," which comprises "the total set of intuitive assumptions, habits, cultural practices broadly construed, and especially...
1. Introduction 2. Practice, reason, context: the dialogue between theory and experiment 3. The discipline of nature and the nature of disciplines 3. The discipline of nature and the nature of disciplines 4. Social interests and the organic physics of 1847 5. Science for the clinic: science policy and the formation of Carl Ludwig's Institute in Leipzig 6. The politics of vision optics, painting, and ideology in Germany 1845-95 7. A magic bullet: research for profit and the growth of knowledge in Germany around 1900 8. Practical reason and the construction of knowledge: the lifeworld of Haber-Bosch 9. Instrument makers and discipline builders: the case of nuclear magnetic resonance Notes Index.
Institutions are linkage mechanisms that bridge across three kinds of social divides—they link micro systems of social interaction
to meso (and macro) levels of organization, they connect the symbolic with the material, and the agentic with the structural.
Two key analytic principles are identified for empirical research, relationality and duality. These are linked to new research
strategies for the study of institutions that draw on network analytic techniques. Two hypotheses are suggested. (1) Institutional
resilience is directly correlated to the overall degree of structural linkages that bridge across domains of level, meaning,
and agency. (2) Institutional change is related to over-bridging, defined as the sustained juxtaposition of multiple styles
within the same institutional site. Case examples are used to test these contentions. Institutional stability is examined
in the case of Indian caste systems and American academic science. Institutional change is explored in the case of the rise
of the early Christian church and in the origins of rock and roll music.
Despite the huge place molecular biology has acquired in biological research, it remains difficult to provide a definition of it. Is molecular biology a scientific discipline, or a new vision of organisms? When did it emerge? Is molecular biology still alive, or has this discipline died, and been replaced by new disciplines such as systems and synthetic biology? Were molecular biologists too reductionist?
Three successive steps can be distinguished in the history of molecular biology: the 1930s, with the development of new technologies aimed at describing the structure of macromolecules, and an effort to ‘naturalize life’; a relatively short period (1940–1965) in which the main results were obtained; and the huge accumulation of molecular data that has modified biology since this time. Despite the fact that molecular explanations have in part reached their limits, I consider that molecular biology has succeeded in ‘naturalizing life’.
Key concepts
Reductionism, to naturalize a phenomenon, systems biology, synthetic biology, mechanistic explanations, relations between molecular and evolutionary biology.
Morphologyâthe study of formâis often regarded as a failed science that made only limited contributions to our understanding of the living world. Challenging this view, Lynn Nyhart argues that morphology was integral to the life sciences of the nineteenth century. Biology Takes Form traces the development of morphological research in German universities and illuminates significant institutional and intellectual changes in nineteenth-century German biology. Although there were neither professors of morphology nor a morphologists' society, morphologists achieved influence by "colonizing" niches in a variety of disciplines. Scientists in anatomy, zoology, natural history, and physiology considered their work morphological, and the term encompassed research that today might be classified as embryology, systematics, functional morphology, comparative physiology, ecology, behavior, evolutionary theory, or histology. Nyhart draws on research notes, correspondence, and other archival material to examine how these scientists responded to new ideas and to the work of colleagues. She examines the intertwined histories of morphology and the broader biological enterprise, demonstrating that the study of form was central to investigations of such issues as the relationships between an animal's structure and function, between an organism and its environment, and between living species and their ancestors.
In this detailed historical and sociological study of the development of scientific ideas, Jonathan Harwood argues that there is no such thing as a unitary scientific method driven by an internal logic. Rather, there are national styles of science that are defined by different values, norms, assumptions, research traditions, and funding patterns. The first book-length treatment of genetics in Germany, Styles of Scientific Thought demonstrates the influence of culture on science by comparing the American with the German scientific traditions. Harwood examines the structure of academic and research institutions, the educational backgrounds of geneticists, and cultural traditions, among many factors, to explain why the American approach was much more narrowly focussed than the German. This tremendously rich book fills a gap between histories of the physical sciences in the Weimar Republic and other works on the humanities and the arts during the intellectually innovative 1920s, and it will interest European historians, as well as sociologists and philosophers of science.
Tracing the transformation of early modern academics into modern researchers from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University uses the history of the university and reframes the "Protestant Ethic" to reconsider the conditions of knowledge production in the modern world. William Clark argues that the research universityâwhich originated in German Protestant lands and spread globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuriesâdeveloped in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a new kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and achieve fame through publication. With an astonishing wealth of research, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University investigates the origins and evolving fixtures of academic life: the lecture catalogue, the library catalog, the grading system, the conduct of oral and written exams, the roles of conversation and the writing of research papers in seminars, the writing and oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, the ethos of "lecturing with applause" and "publish or perish," and the role of reviews and rumor. This is a grand, ambitious book that should be required reading for every academic.
Thèse (Ph. D.)--Princeton University. Photocopie.
Thesis--Princeton University. Bibliography: l. 486-515. Photocopy of typescript.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Sociology, June 2003 Includes bibliographical references.
The uninterrupted growth of a scientific field depends upon the existence of a scientific community permanently devoting itself to the field. Therefore a new idea is not sufficient to start the take-off into sustained growth in a new field; a new role must be created as well. In scientific psychology, this occurred in the late nineteenth century in Germany. Using Germany as the positive case, and France, Britain and the United States as negative cases, it is shown that the new role resulted from academic career opportunities favoring the mobility of practitioners and students of physiology into other fields, and from the relatively low academic standing of speculative philosophy and its consequent receptivity to persons and ideas which promised to turn the study of the human mind into an experimental science.
1875-1912 Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 56 vols Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot Verlag vols
- Bayerische
Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften. 1875-1912. Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 56 vols. Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot Verlag. . 1953-2007. Neue Deutsche Biographie, 23 vols. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot Verlag
Organizational Decision-Making and the Emergence of Academic Disciplines Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago Department of Sociology Social Movement Tactics, Organizational Change, and the Spread of African-American Studies
- Rojas
- Fabio
Rojas, Fabio. 2003. Organizational Decision-Making and the Emergence of Academic Disciplines. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago Department of Sociology. . 2006. Social Movement Tactics, Organizational Change, and the Spread of African-American Studies. Social Forces 84(4): 2140-2180
Die Entwicklung der medizinischen Spezialfächer an den Universitäten des deutschen Sprachgebietes
- Hans-Heinz Eulner
Eulner, Hans-Heinz. 1970. Die Entwicklung der medizinischen Spezialfächer an den
Universitäten des deutschen Sprachgebietes. Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke.
Geschichte der biologischen Theorien, 2 vols
- Emmanuel Radl
Radl, Emmanuel. 1909. Geschichte der biologischen Theorien, 2 vols. Leipzig: Engelmann.