The Hybridization of Social Science Knowledge

A TWOFOLD PROCESS CAN BE SEEK in the growth of science: the fragmentation of formal disciplines and a recombination of the specialties resulting from this fragmentation. The division of disciplines into specialized subfields has led to the development of hybrid specialties. The process of hybridization consists, first of all, of borrowing and lending concepts, methods, theories, and praxes. The fruitful point of contact is established between sectors and not along disciplinary boundaries. The hybrid specialties do not necessarily stand midway between two sovereign disciplines. They may be enclaves of a section of a discipline into a sector of another discipline. They combine two limited domains. For this reason, the concept of hybridization seems more appropriate than the concept of interdisciplinarity. INTRODUCTION To the title “Navigating among the Disciplines” proposed by Carole Palmer, the protagonist of this issue of Library Trends, I would like to add “and traversing the bridges between specialties,” since, in the archipelago of social sciences, there are relatively few formal disciplines but dozens of fields, subfields, and specialties. If we crossed each of the twelve principal social sciences with all the others, the result would be a grid with 144 squares. Some squares would remain empty, but most of these would be filled by hybridized specialties each having some autonomy (Dogan & Pahre, 1990). Mattei Dogan, 72 Boulevard Arago, Paris 13, France LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 45,No. 2, Fall 1996, pp. 296-314 01996 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois DOGAN/HYBRIDIZATION OF SOCIAL SCIENCE KNOWLEDGE 297 These hybrid specialties then subdivide, giving rise, at the second generation, to an even larger number of hybrids. A full inventory of all the existing combinations cannot be obtained by crossing the disciplines two by two, even at the level of the second generation, since some of the most dynamic of hybrid fields are of multiple origin. In addition, hybrid fields like prehistory, which are partly rooted in the natural sciences, would not appear in the 144-square grid, which is confined to recombinations of segments of the social sciences. The configuration of hybrid social sciences fields is changing constantly. Social psychology, political sociology, human ecology, and political economy have long been recognized, whereas political psychiatry is still fighting for acceptance. Some specialists in cognitive science announce that traditional psychology will soon vanish as an independent discipline and would ultimately be dissolved in a full-blown neuropsychology, which would show, somewhat as chemistry supplanted alchemy, the illusory and prescientific character of the old psychology. Which branch of linguistics is on the right path, structural linguistics or generative grammar? The structuralists criticize the historicism of comparative grammars and the generativists reject the presuppositions of the structuralists. In the history of science, a twofold process can be seen: a fragmentation of formal disciplines and a recombination of the specialties resulting from this fragmentation. The new hybrid field may become completely independent, like social psychology, or continue to claim a dual allegiance, like political geography. In the latter case, one may not be sure whether to place a work in the category of geography or political science. The criterion could be based on the predominance of one or the other components or on the formal affiliation of the author. Political anthropology is a branch of anthropology but is also a subfield of political science. Where does historical sociology end and social history begin? One may feel even more unsure when faced with a case of threefold recombination. As the relative proportions are not always obvious, it remains somewhat arbitrary where the essential affiliation may be said to lie, especially since the degree of kinship among disciplines varies greatly: sociology and social psychology are consanguineous, but geology and social geography are far less so, despite appearances. FROMSPECIALIZATION THROUGH FRAGMENTATION INTO HYBRIDIZATION Some scholars praise “interdisciplinarity.” Such has often come from the most creative scientists, because they are the first to see the problems caused by gaps between disciplines. But this is not realistic. Presently, it is no longer possible for anyone to have a thorough knowledge of more than one discipline. It is utopian thinking to master two or more whole 298 LIBRARY TRENDS/FALL 1996 disciplines. Given that this implies the ability to be familiar with, and combine, entire disciplines, the idea of interdisciplinary research is illusory. Because it is so difficult for a single scholar to be truly multidisciplinary, some methodologists are led to advocate teamwork. This is what is proposed by Pierre de Bie in the monumental work published by Unesco (1970). Teamwork is productive in large science laboratories but, where the social sciences are concerned, it is difficult to achieve in practice. The only examples of successful teamwork concern data production or collection and very seldom interpretation or synthesis-with the exception of archaeology. The multidisciplinary approach is illusory because it advocates dividing up reality. Some researchers proceed piecemeal with philological, anthropological, historical, ethnological, psychological, and sociological approaches. This alternation of approaches, that almost never allows disciplines to meet, results at best in a useful parallelism but not in a synthesis. In fact, research enlisting several disciplines involves a combination of segments of disciplines, of specialties, and not whole disciplines. The fruitful point of contact is established between sectors and not along disciplinary boundaries. Considering the current trends in the social sciences, the word “interdisciplinarity” appears inadequate. It carries a hint of dilettantism and consequently should be avoided and replaced by the phrase “hybridization of fragments of sciences.” All sciences, from astronomy to zoology, have made progress, from the sixteenth century on, by internal differentiation and cross-stimulation among emergent specialties. Each specialty developed a patrimony of knowledge as its understanding of the world developed. With the growth of these patrimonies, specialization became less a choice and more a necessity. Increasingly, focused specialization has led to the creation of subdisciplines, many of which have gone on to become autonomous. There are, in the literature, dozens of lamentations and jeremiads about the fragmentation of disciplines. In reality, fragmentation is the result of specialization. The division of the discipline into subfields tends to be institutionalized as can be seen in the organization of large departments of natural and social sciences. A good indication of the fragmentation of the social sciences is the increasing number of specialized journals. In the last twelve years, dozens of specialized journals in English have been launched. Most of these journals overlap two or three disciplines, and many of them are located in Europe. Other new hybrid journals have appeared in French and in German. European unification also has had an impact on the development of cross-national journals focusing on special social science fields. It is necessary to stress both parts of the social science division process: fragmentation into special fields and specialization by hybridization. DOGAN/HYBRIDIZATION OF SOCIAL SCIENCE KNOWLEDGE 299 It is the interaction of these two processes, and not each one in isolation, that has led to the remarkable advance of the natural, as well as the social, sciences. The continuous restructuring of all disciplines has been the result of these two contending processes. However, both fragmentation and its correlate hybridization have developed much more recently in the social sciences than in the natural sciences. In the distant past, hybrid fields were the result of gaps between full disciplines. Today the gaps appear between specialized subfields among neighboring subdisciplines. As a result, in the last few decades, the fragmentation of disciplines into specialized subfields has led to the development of hybrid specialties. The hybrid specialties do not necessarily stand midway between two sovereign disciplines. They may be enclaves of a section of a discipline into a sector of another discipline. These combine two delimited domains, not entire disciplines, and do not need to be adjacent. Sociometric studies show that many specialists are more in touch with colleagues who belong officially to other disciplines than with colleagues in their own discipline. The “invisible college” described by Robert Merton, Diana Crane, and other sociologists of science is an eminently interdisciplinary institution because it ensures communication not only from one university to another and across all national borders, but also, and above all, between specialists attached administratively to different disciplines. The networks of cross-disciplinary influence are such that they are obliterating the old classification of the social sciences. SCIENTIFIC BY HYJXIDIZATION PROGRESS AND THE POSTULATE OF PARADIGMATIC UPHEAVALS Paradigm is a word often abused. Thomas Kuhn (1979) has explicitly acknowledged that, in the social sciences, use of the word paradigm is notjustified. He explains in his preface to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that it was during a stay at Palo Alto Center for Advanced Studies, in the company of social scientists, that he was led to formulate the concept of paradigm with the primary purpose of making clear the essential difference between natural sciences and the social sciences (p. 8). The reason given by Kuhn was the absence of a theoretical consensus in any discipline of the social sciences. Are there, in the social sciences, instances of paradigmatic upheavals comparable to those generated by Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, or Einstein? Can the theories of Keynes, Chomsky, or Parsons be described as paradigmatic? In the social sciences, does progress occur through paradigmatic revolutions or through cumulative processes? Are there really paradigms in the social sciences? Several major theories may coexist within a formal discipline, but there is a paradigm only when one testable theory alone dominates all other theories and is accepted by the entire scientific community. When 300 LIBRARY TRENDS/FALL 1996 Pasteur discovered the microbe, the theory of spontaneous generation collapsed, and contagion became the new paradigm. In the social sciences, however, we see at best a confrontation between several nontestable theories. Most of the time there is not even a confrontation but careful mutual avoidance, superb disregard, on all sides; this is a relatively common occurrence owing to the size of scientific communities and its division into schools. This is true for all countries no matter the size. This mutual disregard is an old practice in the social sciences. At the turn of the century, the great scholars did not communicate at all or very little. In the writings of Weber, there is no reference to his contemporary, Durkheim. Yet Weber was acquainted with Durkheim’s journal 1Xnnie Sociologigue. For his part, Durkheim, who could read German, makes only one fleeting reference to Weber. Yet they worked on a number of the same subjects such as religion. Durkheim does no more than mention Simmel and Tonnies in passing. Harshly criticized by Pareto, Durkheim never alluded to Pareto’s work. Pareto’s judgment of Durkheim’s book on suicide was unfavorable. “Unfortunately” he wrote, “its arguments lack rigour” (Valade, 1990). Weber seems to have been unaware of Pareto’s theory on the circulation of elites, and Pareto, in his turn, says nothing about the Weberian theory of political leadership. Weber and Croce met only once and then just briefly. There was no exchange between Weber and Freud. Ernst Bloch and George Luk5cs met regularly with Weber in Heidelberg, but their work shows no sign of Weber’s influence nor was there any communication between Weber and Spengler. Of Weber’s contemporaries, the only one who referred to him was Karl Jaspers, but he was a philosopher (Mommsen & Osterhammel, 1987). As was noted by Raymond Aron, each of the three great sociologists-Weber, Durkheim, Pareto-followed a “solitary path.” Many examples could be cited of scholars co-existing in the same discipline without influencing one another, such as Angus Campbell and Paul Lazarsfeld, who nevertheless devoted a large part of their lives to studying the same political behavior. The same remark can be made with reference to other topical fields. It is not a bad thing to pit theories one against the other, but there must be debate. There are no paradigms in the social sciences because each discipline is fragmented. The more ambitious a theory is, the less it can be directly tested by the data available. In the social sciences, there are no “fundamental discoveries” as there sometimes are in the natural sciences. Instead, unverifiable theories are constructed. Consider Malthusianism for instance. Is it a theory or a paradigm? Malthusianism is one of the major theories in the history of the social sciences. Malthus influenced many scientists, primarily Charles Darwin, who acknowledged Malthus as one of his main sources of inspiration. A host of sociologists, political scientists, demographers, and economists took their cue from Malthus either to agree or DOGAN/HYBRIDIZATION OF SOCIAL SCIENCE KNOWLEDGE 301 to disagree with him. But when demographic conditions changed in the West, Malthus’s projections were invalidated, and he was condemned as a false prophet. However, if we consider today the gap between economic development and population growth in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, he could be hailed as a great visionary. We need only agree to an asynchronous comparison between the England of his time and the Third World to admit the asynchronous validity of his theory. Should we go further and talk of a Malthusian paradigm? Today no paradigm seeks to order any discipline of the social sciences. In fact, the word paradigm should be excluded from the literature unless it is placed between quotation marks. The process of hybridization of specialties does not encounter disciplinary paradigms. THESPREAD METHODS, OF CONCEPTS, AND THEORIES ACROSSOCIAL SCIENCES The process of hybridization consists first of all in borrowing and lending concepts, methods, and theories. The Diffusion of Concepts Numerous scholars have denounced the conceptual confusion and the polysemy of terms in various disciplines. This semantic problem comes from the spread of concepts from one discipline to another. Borrowed concepts need some adaptation to the context of the new discipline, because a concept is not only a term, but it is also a notion or an idea. A recent study of more than 400 concepts used in the social sciences has found few neologisms, and this can be explained by the fact that more concepts are borrowed than created. We can neglect the etymology of concepts in order to stress how borrowing fertilizes imagination. The word role comes from the theater, but Max Weber gave it a sociological meaning. From sociology this concept spread everywhere. The word revolution was proposed by Copernicus, but it was first applied to politics by Louis XIV. Historians adopted it, sociologists articulated it before offering it to political science. The patrimony of each social science is full of borrowed concepts, which are hybrids in the sense that they were concocted in other disciplines and replanted skillfully into another. Using the International Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences (Sills, 1968) and the analytical indexes of some important books, this author has compiled an inventory of more than 200 concepts “imported” into political science. In the process of adoption and adaptation, many of these concepts have changed their semantic meaning. Many concepts have multiple origins. Authoritarianism has two roots, one psychological and one ideological. It is often inadvertently interchangeable with despotism, autocracy, absolutism, dictatorship, etc. Authority has been analyzed from different disciplinary perspectives by Malinowski, Weber, 302 LIBRARY TRENDS/FALL 1996 Parsons, Lasswell, Kaplan, B. de Jouvenel, and C.J.Friedrich, among others. The concept of culture (civic, political, national) has many variants-e.g., cultural convergence, cultural configuration, cultural evolution, cultural integration, cultural lag, cultural parallelism, cultural pluralism, cultural relativity, cultural system, and post-materialist culture. Max Weber and Karl Marx, both hybrid scholars, were the most prolific generators of concepts. Only Aristotle is comparable to them. Almond and Parsons are also the fathers of an impressive number of concepts. Concepts are often germinal grains of theories: structure generates structuralism, system becomes systemism, capital engenders capitalism, and so on.