“Structuration” by Intellectual Organization: The Configuration of Knowledge in Relations among Scientific Texts

Using aggregated journal-journal citation networks, the measurement of anticipation in empirical systems is examined in two cases of interdisciplinary developments during the period 1995-2005: (i) the development of nanotechnology in the natural sciences and (ii) the development of communication studies as an interdiscipline between social psychology and political science. The results are compared with a case of stable development: the citation networks of core journals in chemistry. The textual networks are intellectually organized by networks of expectations in the knowledge base at the specialty (that is, above-journal) level. This “structuration” of structural components in the observable networks can be measured as configurational information. The latter can be compared with the Shannon-type information generated in the interactions among structural components: the difference between these two measures provides us with a redundancy generated by the specification of a model in the knowledge base of the system. The knowledge base incurs to variable extents on the knowledge infrastructures provided by the networks of exchange relations.