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De geschiedenis van de discipline heeft niet alleen een nationale, maar ook een linguïstische context. Deze bijdrage belicht beknopt de geschiedenis van de Nederlandstalige sociologie in Vlaanderen.

Onze universiteiten lijken een bijna onuitputtelijke stroom aan innovaties voort te brengen. Het zoeken naar oplossingen voor echt complexe problemen noodzaakt volgens velen echter het overstijgen van de traditionele disciplinaire opdeling. Eykens en Vanderstraeten vatten de inzichten samen uit een aantal recente bibliometrische analyses waarvan interdisciplinaire uitwisseling het onderwerp was. Zij tonen aan dat toenemende specialisering de disciplinaire indeling niet bestendigt, maar uitdaagt. De manieren waarop ons kennissysteem ontwikkelt worden niet vastgelegd langs de bestaande disciplinaire grenzen, maar breiden deze in plaats daarvan voortdurend verder uit.

ZusammenfassungWissenschaft wird häufig als selbstorganisierendes und selbstkontrollierendes System beschrieben, und die wissenschaftliche Fachliteratur mit ihren Peer-Review-Verfahren als das Grundmodell dieser Form der Selbstorganisation. Der Genese dieses Modells wurde jedoch bisher kaum historisch-soziologische Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet. Die vorherrschende Perspektive hat eher dazu ermutigt, zeitgenössische Ideen über gute und schlechte Wissenschaft auf frühere Epochen zurück zu projizieren. In dieser Arbeit analysiere ich die Geschichte einflussreicher Fachzeitschriften im Bereich der Erziehungswissenschaft. Ich beschäftige mich mit den sich verändernden Erwartungen an Herausgeber und Autoren und gehe näher ein auf die sich ändernde Bedeutung von Peers und Peer Review. Die dominanten Bewertungsmechanismen heben auch die Bedeutung von Peer-Reviewed Publikationen hervor. Insgesamt zeigen diese Analysen, dass die soziale Struktur der Wissenschaft viel weniger stabil ist als oft angenommen. Zu vermuten ist, dass die zunehmende Betonung der Rankings und Impact Faktoren die Selektion von neuen Varianten determinieren wird.

This paper presents a sociologically informed analysis of the historically changing relation between education and society. Using a set of socio-geographical methods and longitudinal data from popu...

Niklas Luhmann speaks of the function of education in relation to modern society. Only within modern society, he argues, is it possible to speak of the differentiation of a specific function system of education. It is, more particularly, the differentiation of other function systems that leads to the question about the function of education. I look closely at Luhmann’s analyses of the function of education and make a plea for a socio-historical approach, which looks at the ways in which education “functions” within society. Depending on the situation, beliefs in the functionality of education have given form to specific characteristics of the contemporary world society.

The rise of nation-states created new spaces for scholarship. The development of sociology has been shaped, both institutionally and intellectually, by different national contexts. This paper looks at the development of the social sciences, and sociology in particular, in little Belgium. We first discuss the work and the international ambitions of the social physicist and homo statisticus Adolphe Quetelet. Next we look at the ideological rivalry between the emerging sociological centers in and around the universities of Brussels and Louvain in the decades around 1900. Afterwards we discuss the growing divergence between the French- and Dutch-speaking scientific communities and the development of different sociologies within Belgium in more recent decades. We conclude with a discussion of the internationalization imperatives currently imposed by Belgian universities and funding agencies.

Educational research expanded rapidly in the twentieth century. This expansion drove the interested “amateurs” out of the field; the scientific community of peers became the dominant point of orientation. Authorship and authority became more widely distributed; peer review was institutionalized to monitor the flow of ideas within the scientific literature; reference lists in journals demonstrated the adoption of cumulative ideals about science. The historical analysis of education journals presented in this chapter looks at the social changes which contributed to the ascent of an “imagined” community of expert peers in the course of the twentieth century. This analysis also helps us in imagining ways in which improvements to the present academic evaluative culture can be made.

In this study we explore the disciplinary diversity present within subject specialties in the social sciences and humanities. Subject specialties are operationalized as textually coherent clusters of documents. We apply topic modelling to textual information on the individual document level (titles and abstracts) to cluster a multilingual set of roughly 45,000 documents into subject specialties. The dataset includes the metadata of journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, and monographs. We make use of two indicators, namely, the organizational affiliation based on the departmental address of the authors and the cognitive orientation based on the disciplinary classifications at the publication level. First, we study the disciplinary diversity of the clusters by calculating a Hill-type diversity index. We draw an overall picture of the distribution of subject specialties over diversity scores and contrast the two indicators with each other. The goal is to discover whether some subject specialties are inherently multi- or interdisciplinary in nature, and whether the different indicators are telling a well-aligned, similar story. Second, for each cluster of documents we calculate the dominance, i.e. the relative size of the largest discipline. This proxy of disciplinary concentration gives an idea of the extent to which a specialty is disciplined. The results show that all subject specialties analyzed serve as interdisciplinary trading grounds, with outliers in both directions of the disciplinary-interdisciplinary continuum. For a large share of specialties, the dominant cognitive and organizational disciplinary classification were found to be well aligned. We present a typology of subject specialties by contrasting the organizational and cognitive diversity scores.

Drawing on the evolution of socio-geographical imaginaries of scholarly journals published in Chile, this article provides a picture of the socio-historical trajectories of internationalization of scholarly journals and communities in that part of the (semi-)periphery of science. In order to break with the presentism of many contemporary discussions, the analysis covers a relatively long period of time, from the end of the nineteenth century until the first decades of the twenty-first century. However, based on an inductive analysis of the journals, the article particularly focuses on the rise of nationalist and regionalist orientations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the intensification of the pressures for internationalization in more recent decades. Building on the findings, the article concludes highlighting key elements and making some general observations on the internationalization processes in the semi-periphery of science.

In this article, we address the question whether political activism can be triggered by sustainable consumption. Specific attention is given to the crowding-out and crowding-in hypotheses. The first hypothesis is driven by a conflict view as it assumes that sustainable consumerism displaces the willingness to act collectively. In contrast, the latter hypothesis&mdash, crowding-in&mdash, frames conscious consumption as a potential political act whereby individual sustainable consumption may trigger political acts such as signing a petition, demonstrating, and voting. To address this issue, German survey data were analyzed (n = 936). Our analysis appears to confirm the crowding-in hypothesis. However, the results of multiple logistic regression analyses also show that the relation between sustainable consumption and political activism depends on the type of political action. Particularly, sustainable consumption does not relate to traditional political actions such as voting, but it does relate positively to less conventional (e.g., attending a demonstration) and online forms of political engagement (e.g., social media activism). Our findings also indicate that the positive association between sustainable consumption and less conventional politics may be moderated by educational attainment, suggesting that it is weakest among less educated groups. The paper ends with the empirical and theoretical conclusions that can be drawn from this study, and indicates some directions for future research.

Over the last few decades, education has acquired a fairly robust social identity worldwide and participation in higher education has also become increasingly common. Building upon Luhmann’s theory of society, in this paper we analyze the expansion of higher education in Chile, specifically looking at the transformations the Chilean higher education system has undergone and the interactions between this system and its social environment. We will include statistics to clarify the extent of the changes to – and costs of – increasing inclusion. We will also focus on the ever-changing rationales for the expansion (or contraction) of higher education in Chile. Altogether, our analysis show not just how the Chilean system of higher education adapts to its social environment, but also how individuals and other function systems currently adapt to this system and how it is organized. We end with a brief reflection on the ways in which education may or may not make a difference to society and a discussion on whether our findings shed any light on the evolution of other countries’ education systems.

ArgumentThis paper examines the early institutionalization of sociology in Belgium. It displays how different intellectual and social contexts bred their own research interests and research approaches. It shows, more particularly, how ideological affiliations and divisions defined the setting within which this new discipline had to develop in Belgium in the decades around 1900. As a consequence of the ideological controversies, sociology had difficulty gaining legitimacy as a theory-driven analysis of society. Most scholars in Belgium could not avoid taking an explicitly normative position on society. This paper also displays how secularization and the reinforcement of the international level and its infrastructure gradually allowed for more academic autonomy for sociology in Belgium.

Internationalization pressures are omnipresent in the world of science. Scholars and administrators now often make use of international impact as a yardstick by which to assess the quality of national scholarship. However, little is hitherto known about the effects of the internationalization incentives at the level of specific national scientific communities. This article presents an analysis of the forms of internationalization in Chile over a period of four decades, from 1976 to 2015. Using Web of Science data, the article looks at the evolution for both publications and citations and examines the internationalization pressures on Chilean scholars and Chilean journals in relation to changes at the level of publication language and co-authorship. The article particularly focuses on the differences between the three cultures (humanities, natural sciences and social sciences). Building on the findings, the article concludes with some suggestions for research policy.

This article focuses on the shift from informal to formal employment in the sugarcane plantations of Alagoas, Northeast Brazil, and its unintended consequences. Drawing on the employment experiences of sugarcane cutters, the authors stress the main mechanisms that produce precarity within formal employment structures. Precarity is forged by means of employers’ hiring practices, which turn formal employment contracts into insecure and temporary ones, disciplinary techniques used to control workers’ daily productivity within this labour-intensive production process, and the parasitic uses of the unemployment insurance system. While job formalisation has given access to more social protection, it has also created a permanently temporary workforce, which is rehired discontinuously by the plantations. The authors’ analysis of the link between formal employment, precarity and state protection more particularly leads to a reconsideration of Ulrich Beck’s ‘Brazilianization thesis’.

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) is the most common way of assessing teaching quality at universities. Since the introduction of SET procedures at the start of the previous century, thousands of research studies on the validity, reliability and utility of SET were written. By means of a citation analysis on journal articles included in Google Scholar, Scopus, and the Social Science Citation Index (Web of Science), this paper aims at mapping the high impact studies, the leading researchers, and the key journals in this research field. The results indicate that, although we find considerable overlap between the three databases, a number of high impact journal papers are not included in all three databases. Furthermore, the analysis reveals three main topics in the SET literature: the use of SET, validity issues concerning SET, and the construction and validation of SET instruments. Also, it is shown that many high impact studies were written by only a few researchers, with Herbert Marsh as the leading author. Although some of the most impactful studies date back to the 1960s, it's coming of age situates in the seventies. Since then SET became increasingly visible. The high proportion (25%) of impactful articles since 2000 indeed suggests a trend of continuous growth in SET research. At the same time, the historical knowledge in the form of classic studies on SET lives on through the many citations in recent studies.

Summary The uneven geographical distribution of university graduates in Belgium, 1970-2011 University education in Belgium expanded rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century. However, the geographical distribution of university trained human capital has remained unequal. In this paper, we focus on the historical evolution of the geographical segregation of university graduates during a period of four decades (1970-2011). Our analyses show that Belgium’s major universities have come to operate as attractors for university graduates; the regions around these universities have become brain hubs. But the regions where university graduates want to live do not always coincide with the regions where they find appropriate employment opportunities. Our findings show that university regions are able to attract highly schooled human capital despite a lack of appropriate employment opportunities.

In the period around 1940, when the Seminar on Rationality took place at Harvard University, Talcott Parsons seemed no longer satisfied with the concept of rationality that he had used and developed in his early writings, including The Structure of Social Action, and which had also attracted Joseph Schumpeter ’s interest. In his own autobiographical statements, Parsons referred on several occasions to institutional changes, viz., his transfer from the Economics to the Sociology Department at Harvard University, to account for his reticence with regard to the Seminar on Rationality. In this chapter, I suggest that new intellectual challenges also triggered his reconsideration of his earlier relation to economics and economic theory. I first sketch why Parsons had difficulty participating in a project that (still) took its point of departure in an economic concept of rationality. Afterward, I clarify a basic transition in Parsons ’ understanding of rationality in society—from an individualized, actor-oriented conception of rationality to one that deals with rationality as value pattern at the level of social systems. The first indications of this transition can already be observed in work on the professions, on which Parsons embarked shortly after the publication of The Structure of Social Action. But The American University, which is the last monograph which Parsons saw into print, also contains elaborate discussions of the problem of rationality. Perhaps Parsons ’ chapter on cognitive rationality in this monograph might be read as his full chapter for the Seminar on Rationality, which took place more than three decades earlier.

In his late work on Christianity, Talcott Parsons obviously built upon the writings of both Durkheim and Weber. While he departed from the idea that increasing differentiation of the system of action did not have to threaten the unity of the system as a whole, his emphasis on structural differentiation was also complemented by one on value integration. He believed that, especially in the New World, religion (i.e. Christianity) has gradually become able to impose its definition of the situation in highly different, highly heterogeneous contexts of action. In this paper, I reconstruct Parsons’ historical-sociological analyses of the relation between Christianity and modern society. I discuss how Parsons appropriated the writings of Durkheim and Weber – in ways which did not fully exploit the potential of some of these writings. I suggest some alternatives, which rely less on a concern with value integration (Durkheim) but more on one with the differentiation of meaning systems (Weber).