Serendipities. Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences

https://tidsskrift.dk/Serendipities/issue/feed Serendipities. Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences 2025-06-03T12:48:19+02:00 Fran Collyer fran@francollyer.com Open Journal Systems Serendipities publishes three kinds of texts: Articles reporting research results, developing theoretical arguments, or – at best – offering a combination of both. An article has to be concerned with the sociology and history of the social sciences and should demonstrate how it adds to our knowledge. This is best achieved when it is positioned in relation to the relevant literature from the field. Book reviews should present and assess new publications relevant to the subject matter of the journal. There is no restriction with regard to the language of the reviewed publication. Moreover, it is the explicit aim of the editors that this section will function both as a forum for critical evaluation of new books and as a platform for those who are not able to read them in their original language. A third kind of text are various forms of research materials. These may be archival materials, i.e., items from the past that are deemed valuable enough to be made visible to the scientific community (e.g. letters, unpublished manuscripts, administrative documents etc.). These should be presented with short commentaries on the significance of the documents. Alternatively, using some of the functionalities offered by digitalisation, such materials might be contemporary reconstructions of past situations (e.g., visualizations), data sets, or similar. Furthermore, Serendipities will make use of some of the more adventurous features of the Web by encouraging discussions online. https://tidsskrift.dk/Serendipities/article/view/150143 Sjoerd Hofstra's foray into the sociology of knowledge and science 2025-03-07T08:04:34+01:00 Henk van den Belt henkvdbelt53@gmail.com

In 1937 the Dutch ethnologist and sociologist Sjoerd Hofstra sketched a programme for a new sociology of knowledge and science in which he combined insights from Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, the anthropological study of "primitive" thought, and the Marxist-inspired views of leftist British natural scientists on the social role of science. Hofstra's programme looked promising at first but ultimately failed to take off. In this essay I will try to account for this failure by comparing Hofstra's programme with Robert K. Merton's contributions to the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of science. The essay also attempts to explain the long delay of almost 40 years before the sociology of knowledge seriously undertook to study the social genesis of scientific knowledge.

2025-06-03T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2025 Henk van den Belt https://tidsskrift.dk/Serendipities/article/view/144178 Making and Remaking a Social Science 2025-03-08T05:33:25+01:00 Agustín Cosovschi acosovschi@gmail.com

In this paper, I give an account of the history of Croatian sociology under socialism and I explore how the discipline underwent the transition to post-socialism, attempting to shed light on some of the effects that the Yugoslav breakup had on its institutions and its practitioners. Drawing on written and oral sources, also relying on data on authorship in the main sociological journal of the country, I argue that in the early 1990s Croatian sociology underwent a process of “republicanization/nationalization” and became detached from developments in other former Yugoslav republics. I also show that the nationalist and conservative political turn in the country translated into the decline of certain institutions that the new authorities identified as representatives of the Communist era.

2025-06-03T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2025 Agustín Cosovschi https://tidsskrift.dk/Serendipities/article/view/142861 Émile Durkheim in The Pampas 2024-03-31T08:01:18+02:00 Esteban Ezequiel Vila estebanvila@gmail.com

The present work aims to study the reception of Emile Durkheim’s ideas and those of his disciples among the chairs of sociology at the Universities of Buenos Aires and Córdoba in Argentina, and the University of the Republic in Uruguay, between 1895 and 1947. This study recognizes three periods of reception: the first covers the initial appearance of Durkheim in the Río de la Plata from 1895 to 1915, when the approach to this sociological school was mainly limited to The Rules of Sociological Method and, secondarily, The Division of Labour in Society. The second period comprises the years 1915-1933, when the readings of Durkheimian sociology are extended to other works such as The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, although its most outstanding feature was its comparison with German sociologies. Finally, the third period (1933-1947) involves a re-interpretation of Durkheim’s doctoral thesis in Argentina, creating a pre-functionalist thought, while in Uruguay this did not take place.