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

Sooryamoorthy: Sociology Global

Charles Crothers — 2024-12-18

Review of Sooryamoorthy, R. (2022) Sociology Global: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.

Camic: Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics

Alex Thomas — 2024-12-18

Not avaliable

Fontaine and Pooley (eds): Society on the Edge

Benno Nietzel — 2024-12-18

Not available

#ThanksForTyping … and the fieldwork

Rosalind Edwards — 2024-12-18

This article explores the role of social researchers’ wives in post-war British studies, in particular drawing on the diaries kept by the wives of two noted sociologists while their husbands, Peter Willmott and Dennis Marsden, were respectively undertaking studies in the working class communities of Bethnal Green and Salford. The wives – Phyllis Willmott and Pat Marsden, made contributions to the community studies in the mid 1950s/early 1960s, at the point where British sociology and social research was on the cusp of transition towards formalisation and professionalisation. The wives were co-opted into the academic endeavour. Their practices as part of their family lives became professionalised as they undertook knowledge gathering, bridging between community and scholarship for their husbands, and reflecting on their own practice. The paper enables contemporary social researchers to recognise the part played by the wives of major sociological figures in the establishment of the men’s reputations and the disciplinary enterprise of sociology.

Differences in Social Science Reporting

Jasper Korte — 2024-12-18

Public debate heavily relies on social scientific expertise as demonstrated by recent global events like the coronavirus pandemic. Social scientific knowledge is disseminated and discussed in the mass media, the main arena for the public understanding of social science. However, science communication research overlooks the significance of disciplinary differences in social science reporting while focusing on comparison with the natural sciences. To investigate the reporting of social sciences in the German press as societal communication, anthropology, sociology, and economics are compared within a distant reading approach. In the systematic sample (8,660 articles) over the previous 20 years, the absolute numbers for all disciplines are stagnant, but the share of reporting increases. The section distributions of the three disciplines are quite different but stable over time. In contrast, the sampled periodicals show only subtle differences in reporting. Dramatic events lead to a short-term increase in economics reporting. The combination of the metadata with the semantic structures of the text shows three distinct profiles of social science reporting. These findings reveal the varieties of social science reporting as an important feature in the societal role of the social sciences.

Edgar Zilsel ‘The Social Roots of Romantic Ideology’ (1933). A translation and commentary

Alan Scott — 2024-12-18

Edgar Zilsel (1891-1944) was an associate of the Vienna Circle and an Austro-Marxist. He is remembered for the so-called ‘Zilsel Thesis’, a historical reconstruction of the social and economic preconditions for the emergence of modern experimental science written in exile in the USA. His earlier work in Vienna on the cult of genius has recently been revisited by a number of scholars. The aim of this translation is to make one of his writings on this subject available to an Anglophone audience. Here he develops a genealogy of irrationalist ideology—one opposed to the rationalism of urban and commercial culture and to science—whose roots he traces to the German Romantic Movement. He offers a novel account of the interaction between Romantic writers, artists, and philosophers and wider currents of counter-revolutionary thought that emerged as a reaction to the French Revolution. The commentary seeks to contextualize the work as a critical, if indirect, contemporary engagement with fascism and points to its contemporary relevance.

The Social Roots of Romantic Ideology

Edgar Zilsel — 2024-12-18

Not available