http://iss.sagepub.com/International Sociology

http://iss.sagepub.com/content/29/2/89The online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/0268580914524108

2014 29: 89International SociologyElisabeth Simbürger

The labor of knowledge in the making of the social sciences  

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of: 

  International Sociological Association

can be found at:International SociologyAdditional services and information for    

  http://iss.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

 

http://iss.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:  

What is This? 

- Mar 10, 2014Version of Record >>

at UNIVERSIDAD DIEGO PORTALES on March 12, 2014iss.sagepub.comDownloaded from at UNIVERSIDAD DIEGO PORTALES on March 12, 2014iss.sagepub.comDownloaded from

International Sociology Reviews2014, Vol. 29(2) 89 –97© The Author(s) 2014

Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0268580914524108iss.sagepub.com

The labor of knowledge in the making of the social sciences

Elisabeth SimbürgerUniversidad Diego Portales, Chile

AbstractThe two books reviewed in this essay mark a milestone in the turn to taking the social sciences as an object of research, compiling research about the production and use of knowledge in the social sciences, and setting an agenda to research the social. Both of them frame social knowledge in much broader terms, looking beyond the mere production of social scientific knowledge in the academic world and including social knowledge produced in think tanks and by knowledge professionals. However important the ‘turn to practice’ is to study the production of the social sciences, it seems to systematically leave aside one dimension that is crucial in the shaping of practices both in the social sciences and in the sciences: the labor relations of academic knowledge production.

KeywordsScience and technology studies (STS), sociological theory, sociology of knowledge, sociology of the social sciences

Ariztía Tomás, Produciendo lo Social: Usos de las Ciencias Sociales en el Chile Reciente, Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales: Santiago de Chile, 2012; 350 pp.: ISBN 9789563141764, US$23.00

Charles Camic, Neil Gross and Michèle Lamont (eds), Social Knowledge in the Making, Chicago University Press: Chicago, 2011; 471 pp.: ISBN 9780226092096, US$30.00

The publication of these two books – Social Knowledge in the Making, edited by Charles Camic, Neil Gross and Michèle Lamont, and Produciendo lo Social (Producing the Social), edited by Tomás Ariztía – marks a milestone regarding the turn to taking the social sciences as an object of research. They compile research about the production and use of knowledge in the social sciences, and set an agenda to research the social.

Corresponding author:Elisabeth Simbürger, Escuela de Sociología, Universidad Diego Portales, Avenida Ejército 333, Santiago, Chile. Email: e.a.simbuerger@gmail.com

524108 ISS0010.1177/0268580914524108International Sociology ReviewsSimbürgerreview-article2014

Review essay

at UNIVERSIDAD DIEGO PORTALES on March 12, 2014iss.sagepub.comDownloaded from

90 International Sociology Reviews 29(2)

The book by Camic et al. brings together ‘thirteen original empirical studies of what we call social knowledge practices … of the many historical and contemporary locations of social knowledge production, evaluation and use’ (p. 2). This book is the first collection of its kind in English in the field of social studies on the social sciences, headed by inter-nationally outstanding scholars in the field.

Coincidentally, the book by Tomás Ariztía accomplishes something quite similar for the Spanish-speaking audience at almost the same time. It compiles 10 original empirical studies on the production, evaluation, and use of the social sciences and humanities. There are some striking parallels between these two books. Both are dedicated to the study of the production of social knowledge and its use and dissemination. Furthermore, both of them frame social knowledge in much broader terms, looking beyond the mere production of social scientific knowledge in the academic world and including social knowledge produced in think tanks and by knowledge professionals. In a nutshell, these two volumes almost ask to be read together. One of the pleasures of being able to read in English and Spanish is to expand one’s academic horizon beyond the mere Anglo-Saxon production of knowledge as the status quo. As a consequence, a key purpose of this review essay is to put these two important books in a fruitful dialogue with each other.

Although the book by Camic et al. is based on chapters whose main empirical focus is on the United States, with a few exceptions from the UK and Europe, Ariztía’s collec-tion focuses on one country: Chile. Despite postcolonial critiques having gained certain ground, researchers published outside the academic hotspots of the Northern hemisphere are still often forced to label their work as ‘case studies from the Global South,’ as if their significance were merely local in contrast to publications from the English-speaking world that always claim global relevance by default (Connell, 2007). What makes Produciendo lo Social so compelling and moves its significance far beyond this stereo-typical label is that the insights from the original empirical pieces are of international relevance. This has to do with Chile’s political past and the forceful implementation of neoliberalism by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990). In the international literature, Chile is commonly known as the first laboratory experiment of the Chicago boys and the subsequent destruction of the public sector in the areas of health, education, work, and pensions (Taylor, 2002). Although these changes have been praised by some as neolib-eral successes as part of global developments and a turn towards more efficiency (Fried and Abuhadba, 1991), others point out the unequal and authoritarian sides of how this story of presumed success was implemented in Chile (Taylor, 2002; Torche, 2005). Neoliberal economics transformed Chilean society and had an impact on how the social sciences are understood in Chile and what counts as ‘good knowledge,’ to the extent that some speak of the capitalist revolution in Chile (Gárate, 2012). As Ariztía shows in his book, the historical, political, and economic conditions of the country are pivotal in understanding the transformation of social knowledge in Chile.

The major contribution of these two books consists in having brought together the original empirical work of scholars in social studies of the social sciences. Both volumes provide systematic introductory accounts of the various ways of theorizing and studying the production, use, and evaluation of the social sciences. As such, these books serve as key reference points for scholars in the field and those who are interested in researching the social sciences. The question is, though, why did we have to wait until 2011 and

at UNIVERSIDAD DIEGO PORTALES on March 12, 2014iss.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Simbürger 91

2012, respectively, for these compilations that are dedicated to the study of the social sciences and humanities? The main motivation of Camic et al. to edit the current volume was the lack of a compilation of studies on the production of the social sciences in com-parison to the vivid academic production on the sciences as objects of study. Since the 1970s, research on the production of knowledge and its surroundings has been an endeavor that was almost exclusively targeted at the sciences. Even though science and technology studies (STS) has gone through different modes of fashion since the 1970s, the social sciences were the only big blind spot that seemed to be overlooked as some-thing worth being studied until the turn of the millennium. In fact, some of the founda-tional figures in the field of STS who have extensively studied the production of knowledge in science in laboratory studies, such as Karin Knorr-Cetina or Sheila Jasanoff, turned to the study of the social sciences during the late 1990s and contribute to Camic et al.’s current book.

Having intellectual points of orientation is important indeed. The frustration of Camic et al. about the intellectual void they filled with their current volume resonates with a much more unspecified sense of dislocation I felt during the late 1990s as a sociology undergraduate student. Back then, working on my undergraduate dissertation on science communication, I was intrigued by why STS merely studied science and not the social sciences. I left STS behind and only came back to it through the backdoor years later when I did my PhD and subsequent research work on the sociology of sociology and the nature of academic work. Going far beyond the biographical aspect of this anecdote, what I hope to illustrate is the significance of intellectual points of orientation during one’s intellectual journey. In the light of this, the dedication of Social Knowledge in the Making, ‘To our students – past, present, and future,’ seems to capture something really important.

Theorizing the social study of the social sciences

The broad body of literature from STS is not the only theoretical entry to the study of the production, use, and evaluation of the social sciences. The sociology of knowledge has traditionally been dedicated to the study of knowledge. However, in their introductory chapter ‘The study of social knowledge making,’ Camic et al. set out to explain that their enterprise of studying the production, use, and evaluation of the social sciences is differ-ent from what they call TASK (traditional sociology of knowledge), a body of knowl-edge that draws on the history of ideas, sociology of knowledge, and intellectuals. According to them, those traditional approaches of the sociology of knowledge can be characterized by their method of working backwards, looking at how particular histori-cal, economic, and political conditions shaped knowledge and, most commonly, the knowledge produced by a particular social thinker. As such, the analytic TASK-approach works with an ‘input/output model, with societal macro-factors serving as inputs and finished ideas as outputs’ (p. 6). Although the traditional sociology of knowledge approach produced a lot of significant studies on the relationship between historical, material, and political conditions and the actual knowledge produced, TASK has mostly left aside the question of how knowledge is produced in the social sciences, the spaces of activity in between, and how knowledge is used and disseminated. Camic et al. want to

at UNIVERSIDAD DIEGO PORTALES on March 12, 2014iss.sagepub.comDownloaded from

92 International Sociology Reviews 29(2)

‘extend the contemporary “turn to practice” in STS to the study of social knowledge in order to not only address a serious absence in the traditional approach to social knowl-edge but, more importantly, to put in the foreground a set of empirical questions that TASK has thus far marginalized’ (p. 7). In researching social practices, Camic et al. explain that they follow the lines of STS as well as theorists in the social sciences and humanities that dedicated themselves to the study of social practices, such as Margaret Archer, Pierre Bourdieu, Hubert Dreyfus, Michel Foucault, Harold Garfinkel, Anthony Giddens, Hans Joas, Sherry Ortner, William Sewell, Jr, Quentin Skinner, Charles Taylor, and Charles Tilly (p. 7). Camic et al. subsequently define practices ‘as the ensembles of patterned activities – “the modes of working and doing,” in Amsterdamska’s (2008: 206) words – by which human beings confront and structure the situated tasks with which they are engaged’ (p. 7). Thus, practices would ‘include both the “taken-for-granted routines,”’ which Swidler (2001: 75) points out and what Schatzki (2001: 7) refers to as ‘open sets of non-regularized actions’ (p. 7).

Ariztía explains in his introduction that he sets out to do a sociology of the social sci-ences (una sociología de las ciencias sociales [CCSS]) in Chile. Not only would this consist of an analysis of the conditions of knowledge production in the social sciences but also of research into the role that the social sciences play in the production of the social. According to Ariztía, the study of the social sciences cannot be confined to looking at classrooms and university offices where knowledge is produced. Rather, using the term ‘practices,’ we would have to study the products as well as the actors of knowledge within and outside the university. He names books, concepts, models, narratives, hypotheses, public policies, minutes and meetings, experts, intellectuals, consultants, and academics as actors and objects of research (p. 9). One of the key objectives of his edited volume is to analyze the capacity of the social sciences to produce and affect what the social is in Chile. Ariztía is particularly interested in the traveling of concepts from the social sci-ences to the world of public policies (p. 10). In this undertaking of analyzing the produc-tion of the social, Ariztía relies heavily on Michel Callon’s work on performativity (Callon, 2010), the work of John Law and John Urry (2004), and Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (2005). He thereby understands the social world not as a fixed entity waiting to be discovered by science but the result of an active process of ensembling and producing in which the social sciences play a central role.

Practices of social knowledge: The dominance of economics and how ideas travel beyond the academy

Ariztía’s book is organized in three parts: ‘The policies of economists’ (La política de los economistas), ‘Production and use of social knowledge’ (Producción y usos del cono-cimiento social), and ‘Experts facing the world’ (Expertos frente al mundo). Ariztía’s book shows how the history of the country is visible in the present practices in the social sciences and how the knowledge devices of neoliberal economics implemented during the dictatorship have become mainstream discourses. It is ironic that a sociology of knowledge approach revives itself throughout the book without being labeled as such, in spite of the fact that Ariztía’s and some of his colleagues’ theoretical lineages can be found in the field of enactment and performativity of Callon, Law, and Urry.

at UNIVERSIDAD DIEGO PORTALES on March 12, 2014iss.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Simbürger 93

As Ariztía outlines in the introduction, there are at least three different ways in which the social sciences have contributed to the production of what the social is in Chile – politics, discourse, and performativity. The relationship between the social sciences and politics and how it unfolds in expert knowledge, decision making, and political govern-ance has been widely studied in Chile. In particular, the link between economics and politics and the perception of economics as a supposedly non-ideological and objective scientific discipline in Chile have been the core interest of this strand of research. This is documented in the chapters by Alfredo Joignant (La razón del Estado: usos políticos del saber y gobierno científico de los technopols en Chile [1990–1994]), Manuel Gárate (El nuevo estatus del economista y el papel de los think tanks en Chile: el caso de Cieplan), Veronica Montecinos and John Markoff (Del poder de las ideas económicas al poder de los economistas), and Patricio Silva (Tecnócratas y política en Chile: de los Chicago Boys a los Monjes de Cieplan).

The second thematic part of the book deals with the diagnostic potential of the social sciences and its impact on public discourse. Tomás Ariztía’s and Oriana Bernasconi’s chapter about public sociology and the production of social change in the 1990s in Chile illustrates how the all-encompassing power of neoliberal economics as the only accepted discourse made Chilean sociology shift towards public consultancy and social engineer-ing, ‘helping’ to manage the way back to democracy but not questioning the underlying economic model. This has deeply altered the intellectual essence of sociology in Chile. Shaped by a dictatorship that declared almost any knowledge, apart from the seemingly objective and numeric economics, as ideological, quantifiable knowledge devices, such as opinion polls, have become particularly powerful. In such an environment, the pros-perous development of the humanities has been equally difficult, as Cristián Retamal’s chapter on the state of the discipline of philosophy in Chile shows. Alejandro Pelfini’s chapter on the inflationary use of the concepts ‘elite’ and ‘populism’ demonstrates how key categories of the social sciences in Latin America have traveled outside of their dis-ciplines and shaped public discourse.

Nevertheless, the social sciences not only produce discourses; they also play a major role in shaping institutions, categories, social formations, and principles of evaluation. Sociology has used the concept of performativity to refer to the capacity of the social sciences in producing new realities as a result of its work (Callon, 2010). This is reflected in Claudio Ramoss’ chapter about the annual reports of the United Nations Development Program (the PNUD reports) in Chile since the 1990s. Their language and concepts had an effect both on academic circles and on the general public. In a similar way, analyzing the performative aspects of the social sciences, José Ossandón looks at the production of markets by economists, taking the Chilean private health care system (ISAPRE) as an example. Finally, Manuel Tironi’s chapter about conflicts between so-called experts and citizens in urban planning in Santiago documents a key theme in STS, the significance and power of scientific concepts in the public sphere.

The book by Camic et al. is divided into three parts: ‘Knowledge production in the disciplines,’ ‘Knowledge evaluation sites,’ and ‘Social knowledge beyond the academy.’ The first five chapters of Part I (‘Knowledge production in the disciplines’) are dedicated to a historically neglected chapter of the social sciences, the organization and structure of documentary material in various disciplines of the social sciences and their effect on

at UNIVERSIDAD DIEGO PORTALES on March 12, 2014iss.sagepub.comDownloaded from

94 International Sociology Reviews 29(2)

the development of research in this field. Andrew Abbott’s chapter, ‘Library research infrastructure for humanistic and social scientific scholarship in the twentieth century,’ is particularly interesting as it uncovers significant transformations in the field of library research in the 20th century. Abbott shows that technologies and accompanying practices involved in identifying and locating library materials have changed over the years. He shows that the study of library practices as an important means to shape scholars has been neglected. In Chapter 2, Anthony Grafton reconstructs the making of professional historians in the United States by looking at graduate seminar practices from the late 19th century onwards. He shows the shifting practices in training professional historians and the decreasing importance of the history graduate seminar in providing key historical research skills from 1960 onwards. Rebecca Lemov’s chapter, ‘Filing the total human: Anthropological archives from 1928 to 1963,’ discusses the practices of setting up anthropological archives that consisted of vast collections of relevant research material. Lemov questions the objective of these archives, transforming research material into ‘scientific facts’ and categorizing them. Whereas the first three chapters are dedicated to historical practices of producing knowledge in relation to archives, Chapters 4 and 5 look at contemporary practices of producing knowledge in the social science and humanities. Neil Gross and Crystal Fleming’s chapter, ‘Academic conferences and the making of philosophical knowledge,’ deals with one of the challenges of contemporary academic life: being confronted with a rapidly increasing body of literature while having less time and having to meet the expectation of producing more and more research output. As a consequence, the presentation of work in progress would gain a new function. Their chapter analyzes the practice of presenting work in progress at multidisciplinary confer-ences and discusses how participating in these conferences further shapes the direction one takes in one’s work, depending on the reception of the audience. In Chapter 5, Johan Heilbron demonstrates the practical foundations of theorizing in sociology by analyzing the case of Pierre Bourdieu.

Parts II (‘Knowledge evaluation sites’) and III (‘Social knowledge beyond the acad-emy’) comprise eight chapters of original research into the themes of how social knowl-edge is produced and disseminated beyond the academy. The chapters in Part II analyze the different processes of making the social sciences and the importance of evaluation, looking at peer review processes and minutes of review board meetings. Parts II and III in particular could engage in a fruitful dialogue with the chapters in Ariztía’s book that are dedicated to the journey of concepts beyond the academy, and the power of neoliberal economics in shaping knowledge in the social sciences and the humanities as well as the devices of evaluation that are now commonly used in higher education in order to meas-ure the ‘impact’ on society.

The chapter ‘Comparing customary rules of fairness: Evaluative practices in various types of peer review panels’ by Michèle Lamont and Katri Huutoniemi analyzes evalua-tive practices in various types of peer review panels in the United States and Finland. Their empirical research illustrates the key role that evaluation plays in the knowledge-making process and the mechanisms that enable certain types of knowledge to proceed while constraining others. Looking at the detailed social processes behind the closed doors of institutional review boards, Laura Stark analyses the minutes of institutional review board meetings, showing the processes that lead to a supposedly neutral and

at UNIVERSIDAD DIEGO PORTALES on March 12, 2014iss.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Simbürger 95

objective decision-making process. Likewise, the decision-making processes of funding councils and their impact on the epistemological development of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity – Marilyn Strathern’s chapter analyzes proposals and promises of interdisciplinarity. This part in particular shows the significance that evaluation has gained internationally in shaping the production of knowledge. The chapters reveal the complex social processes involved in the making of knowledge in funding decision-making processes and peer review. Especially in an increasingly global academic mar-ket, the employment of evaluation becomes more important (Strathern, 2000).

The omnipresent theme in Part III, ‘Social knowledge beyond the academy,’ is the dissemination of concepts from the social sciences and in particular from economics to society. This is illustrated by the articles of Daniel Breslau (‘What do market designers do when they design the market?’); Karin Knorr-Cetina (‘Financial analysis: Epistemic profile of an evaluative science’); Sarah E Igo (‘Subjects of persuasion: Survey research as a solicitous science; or, the public relations of the polls’); Sheila Jasanoff (‘The prac-tices of objectivity in regulatory science’); and Gregoire Mallard and Andrew Lakoff (‘How claims to know the future are used to understand the present: Techniques of prospection in the field of national security’). What is pertinent in this part is the idea of the performativity of the social sciences and how its concepts are finally applied. It par-ticularly highlights the defining power of economics in the social sciences and shows that certain modes of knowledge production and their current power are a result of the neoliberal regime we live in.

The absence of labor relations in the social study of the making of the social sciences

To summarize, one of the central themes of both volumes is the making of the social sci-ences and the use and dissemination of social knowledge within and outside the acad-emy. Like ‘identity’ in the 1990s, ‘practices’ and ‘performativity’ have turned into buzzwords in the social sciences. However, as with any fashion, a word of caution may be needed. It is surprising that the emphasis on ‘things’ and ‘practices’ in studying the production of knowledge (Callon, 2010) does not result in looking at the conditions of production. However important the ‘turn to practice’ is to the study of the production of the social sciences, it seems to systematically leave aside one dimension that is crucial in the shaping of practices in the social and hard sciences: the political economy of knowl-edge production. Even though both books set out to look at ‘social knowledge in the making’ and at ‘producing the social’ (produciendo lo social), the dark side of the turn to practice is that the dimension of labor relations in making knowledge is left aside. There is no mention of the conditions of academic work as a key factor in how knowledge is produced. Without doubt, one can only address a limited number of issues within the realms of an edited volume. Hence, these observations are relevant far beyond the two reviewed volumes and may be emblematic of a more general blind spot in the broader field of social studies of the social sciences.

I would hypothetically partly ascribe this phenomenon of almost systematically put-ting aside the dimension of labor relations from an analysis of knowledge production in the social sciences to the ideological omnipresence of Actor-Network Theory in STS as

at UNIVERSIDAD DIEGO PORTALES on March 12, 2014iss.sagepub.comDownloaded from

96 International Sociology Reviews 29(2)

well as in social studies of the social sciences. As documented in the longstanding dis-pute between two leading antagonistic figures of the field, Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller, Latour insists that the dichotomy between objects and people is no longer in exist-ence whereas Fuller argues that science is a moral and political project (Barron, 2003). However, as Fuller himself writes, for many years STS has shown much more affinity to the more politically remote project of Latour than to recognizing the normative and polit-ical character of science as a social project (Fuller, 2005). Although the study of practices is an important step forward, the political and economic underpinnings of a global knowledge production enterprise also have to be taken into account. The issue of precari-ous academic labor, an overflow of PhDs, and less available academic work has become so traumatic over the last decade that it cannot possibly be left aside any longer. Certain inroads have been made in this respect by authors who come from the field of labor stud-ies, such as Gigi Roggero (2011) in his latest book The Production of Living Knowledge. However, the field of social studies of the social sciences and these two otherwise out-standing books that should be read by everyone within the field could gain even more strength by having a wider understanding of ‘practices,’ integrating an analysis of labor relations in how social knowledge is produced.

Funding

The writing of this review essay was facilitated by a research grant of Conicyt Chile on the produc-tion of neoliberal discourses about academic work in Chile (project nr. Fondecyt 11110528).

References

Amsterdamska O (2008) Practices, people, and places. In: Hackett EJ, Amsterdamska O, Lynch M and Wajcman J (eds) The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3d edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 205–209.

Barron C (2003) A strong distinction between humans and non-humans is no longer required for research purposes: A debate between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller. History of the Human Sciences 16(2): 77–99.

Callon M (2010) Performativity, misfires and politics. Journal of Cultural Economy 3(2): 163–169.

Connell R (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity.

Fried B and Abuhadba M (1991) Reforms in higher education: The case of Chile in the 1980s. Higher Education 21(2): 137–149.

Fuller S (2005) Is STS truly revolutionary or merely revolting? Science Studies 18(1): 75–83.Gárate Chateau M (2012) La Revolución Capitalista de Chile (1973–2003). Santiago de Chile:

Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado.Law J and Urry J (2004) Enacting the social. Economy and Society 33(3): 390–410.Latour B (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Roggero G (2011) The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the

Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Schatzki T (2001) Introduction: Practice theory. In: Schatzki T, Knorr-Cetina K and von Savigny E (eds) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, pp. 1–14.

at UNIVERSIDAD DIEGO PORTALES on March 12, 2014iss.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Simbürger 97

Strathern M (ed.) (2000) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge.

Swidler A (2001) What anchors cultural practices. In: Schatzki T, Knorr-Cetina K and von Savigny E (eds) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, pp. 74–92.

Taylor M (2002) Success for whom? A historical-materialist critique of neoliberalism in Chile. Historical Materialism 10(2): 45–75.

Torche F (2005) Privatization reform and inequality of educational opportunity: The case of Chile. Sociology of Education 78(4): 316–343.

Author biography

Elisabeth Simbürger is an Assistant Professor at the Escuela de Sociología at the Universidad Diego Portales. Her work centers on social epistemology and academic work in the social sciences and the idea of the university in contemporary times. She is currently working on a research project about the production of neoliberal discourses on academic work in Chile in three different disci-plines: sociology, education, and biology.

at UNIVERSIDAD DIEGO PORTALES on March 12, 2014iss.sagepub.comDownloaded from