Knowledge production, interdisciplinarity, and structuralism

(Interdisciplinarity and local knowledge production: evidence from Colombia)

This paper examines the role of interdisciplinarity on research pertaining to local issues. Using Colombian publications from 1991 until 2011 in the Web of Science, we investigate the relationship between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the local orientation of the articles. We find that a higher degree of interdisciplinarity in a publication is associated with a greater emphasis on local...

Structuralism, post-structuralism, and the library: de Saussure and Foucault

Purpose – Explores the relevance of structuralism and post-structuralism to the field of library and information science (LIS). Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a literature-based conceptual analysis of the two philosophical movements, structuralism and post-structuralism, as represented by the seminal figures of Ferdinand de Saussure and Michel Foucault. Findings – The principles of ...

Structuralism, Reloaded

The attempt to institute a viable structuralist explanatory project in the social sciences (in particular anthropology and sociology) has been beset, since its inception, with what some have considered to be insurmountable difficulties. Four such roadblocks deserve mention. 1) The first, I refer to as Piaget’s question [Piaget 1970, 113]: “how do [social] forms acquire structural organization?”...

Biogenetic Structuralism

Structuralism is a movement within the sciences of man holding that the order which we are able to observe in the world is isomorphic with the order that obtains in the observing mind. The correspondences that exist between world and mind are not generally apparent from inspection, but require scrutiny into the "deep structure" that underlies phenomena, a concept first propounded by Ferdinand D...

Structuralism and Poststructuralism