Governing (by) Expertise. The Politics of Social Scientific Knowledge Production
Nøgleord:
relational sociology, expertise, sociology of science, field theory, governanceResumé
This special issue examines the Janus-faced position of the social sciences in modern societies. The social sciences explain and critique social life while simultaneously serving as professions of government embedded in governing, policy-making, and institutional reform. Hence, academic autonomy is never absolute but always relative, negotiated within fields and structured by power. Ultimately, the social sciences are embedded in the very processes they are meant to study. Recognising this immersion calls for collective, socio-historical self-awareness and continually re-negotiating the autonomy of the social sciences in the context of societal heteronomies being integrated into their practice, making reflexivity the distinctive vocation of a relational sociology grounded in methodological pluralism.
Referencer
Abbott, Andrew (1988) The System of Professions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Baier, Christian, and Vincent Gengnagel (2018) Academic Autonomy Beyond the Nation-State, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 43(1): 65–92. doi:10.1007/s11614-018-0297-7.
Benz, Pierre, Johanna Gautier Morin, Elisa Klüger, and Thierry Rossier (2024) International Circulations and Inequalities in the Social Sciences: An Introduction, Serendipities 8(1–2): 1–19. doi:10.7146/serendipities.v8i1-2.144872
Bourdieu, Pierre (1996) The State Nobility, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1998) Les usages sociaux de la science: pour une sociologie clinique du champ scientifique: une conférence-débat, Paris, 11 Mars 1997, Paris: Éditions Quæ.
Bourdieu, Pierre (2004) Science of Science and Reflexivity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (2014) On the State. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989-1992, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (2020) The Field of Power and the Division of the Labour of Domination, in: François Denord, Mikael Palme, and Bertrand Réau (Eds) Researching Elites and Power: Theory, Methods, Analyses, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 33–44. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-45175-2_3
Brankovic, Jelena, Julian Hamann, and Leopold Ringel (2023) The Institutionalization of Rankings in Higher Education: Continuities, Interdependencies, Engagement, Higher Education 86(4): 719–31. doi:10.1007/s10734-023-01018-8
Buchholz, Larissa (2016) What Is a Global Field? Theorizing Fields beyond the Nation-State. The Sociological Review Monographs 64(2): 31–60. doi:10.1002/2059-7932.12001
Büttner, Sebastian M., and Anna Delius (2015) World Culture in European Memory Politics? New European Memory Agents Between Epistemic Framing and Political Agenda Setting, Journal of Contemporary European Studies 23 (3), 391–404. doi:10.1080/14782804.2015.1056116
Büttner, Sebastian M., Lucia M. Leopold, Steffen Mau, and Matthias Posvic (2015) Professionalization in EU Policy-Making? The Topology of the Transnational Field of EU Affairs, European Societies 17(4): 569–92. doi:10.1080/14616696.2015.1072229
Chaubet, François (2014) Faire l’histoire des sciences sociales: le cas de la sociologie française, Histoire@Politique 22(1): 251–68. doi:10.3917/hp.022.0251
Desrosières, Alain (2015) The Politics of Large Numbers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Eyal, Gil (2015) Expertise, in: Robert Scott, and Stephen Kosslyn (Eds), Emerging Trends in the Social and the Behavioral Sciences, Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 1–12. doi:10.1002/9781118900772.etrds0126
Eyal, Gil (2019) The Crisis of Expertise, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Foucault, Michel (2007) Security, Territory, Population, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Gengnagel, Vincent (2026) Championing the Social Sciences or Creating Champions, in: Kristopher Kropp, Anton Grau Larson, and Rachel Fishberg (Eds) Europeanized Social Science. Changes in Hierarchies, Practices, and Institutions, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, in print.
Gengnagel, Vincent, Daniel Witte, and Andreas Schmitz (2016) Die zwei Gesichter der Autonomie, in: Julian Hamann, Jens Maeße, Vincent Gengnagel, and Alexander Hirschfeld (Eds.) Macht in Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Diskurs- und feldanalytische Perspektiven, Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 383–423. doi:10.1007/978-3-658-14900-0_15
Gengnagel, Vincent, Katharina Zimmermann, and Sebastian M. Büttner (2022) ‘Closer to the Market’: EU Research Governance and Symbolic Power, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 60(6):1573–91. doi:10.1111/jcms.13326.
Gengnagel, Vincent (2021) Im Dienste ihrer Exzellenz: der Beitrag der Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften zur europäischen Vergesellschaftung, Frankfurt; New York: Campus Verlag.
Go, Julian, and Monika Krause (2016) Fielding Transnationalism: An Introduction, The Sociological Monographs 62(2): 6–30. doi:10.1111/2059-7932.1200
Gorski, Philip S. (2013) Nation-Ization Struggles: A Bourdieusian Theory of Nationalism, in: Philip S. Gorski (Eds) Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 242–65.
Hamann, Julian, and Christian Schmidt-Wellenburg (2020) The Double Function of Rankings. Consecration and Dispositif in Transnational Academic Fields, in: Christian Schmidt-Wellenburg, and Stefan Bernhard (Eds) Charting Transnational Fields. Methodology for a Political Sociology, London: Routledge, 160–77.
Heilbron, Johan, Thibaud Boncourt, and Rob Timans (2017) Understanding the Social Sciences and Humanities in Europe, Serendipities 2(1): 1–9. doi:10.25364/11.2:2017.1.1
Heilbron, Johan, Gustavo Sorá, and Thibaud Boncourt (Eds.) (2018) The Social and Human Sciences in Global Power Relations, Cham: Springer.
Jatteau, Arthur (2018) The Success of Randomized Controlled Trials: A Sociographical Study of the Rise of J-PAL to Scientific Excellence and Influence, Historical Social Research 43(3): 94–119. doi:10.12759/hsr.43.2018.3.94-119
Kauppi, Niilo (2014) Knowledge Warfare: Social Scientists as Operators of Global Governance, International Political Sociology 8(3): 330–32. doi:10.1111/ips.12062.
Kauppi, Niilo (2020) How Many Fields Can Stand on the Point of a Pin? Methodological Notes on Reflexivity, the Sociological Craft and Field Analysis, in: Christian Schmidt-Wellenburg, and Stefan Bernhard (Eds) Charting Transnational Fields. Methodology for a Political Sociology, London: Routledge, 37–54.
Krause, Monika (2018) How Fields Vary, British Journal of Sociology 69(1): 3–22. doi:10.1111/1468-4446.12258
Krause, Monika (2020) The Post-National Analysis of Fields, in: Christian Schmidt-Wellenburg, and Stefan Bernhard (Eds) Charting Transnational Fields. Methodology for a Political Sociology, London: Routledge, 98–112.
Kropp, Kristoffer (2021) The EU and the social sciences: A fragile relationship, Sociological Review 69(6): 1325–41. doi:10.1177/00380261211034706.
Latour, Bruno (1987) Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lebaron, Frédéric (2000) La Croyance Économique. Les Économistes Entre Science et Politique, Paris: Le Seuil.
Lebaron, Frédéric (2018) Économie, Science et Champ Du Pouvoir, Regards croisés sur l’économie 22(1): 215–23. doi:10.3917/rce.018.0032
Lepenies, Philipp (2016) The Power of a Single Number: A Political History of GDP, New York: Columbia University Press.
Mannheim, Karl (1960) Ideology and Utopia, London: Routledge.
Mudge, Lee Stephanie, and Antoine Vauchez (2018) Too Embedded to Fail: The ECB and the Necessity to Calculate Europe, Historical Social Research 43(3): 248–73. doi:10.12759/hsr.43.2018.3.248-273
Münch, Richard (2014) Academic Capitalism. New York: Routledge.
Nichols, Thomas M (2017) The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, New York: Oxford University Press.
Nowotny, Helga (2003) Democratising expertise and socially robust knowledge, Science and Public Policy 30(3): 151–156. doi:10.3152/147154303781780461
Porter, Theodore (1995) Trust in Numbers, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Recchi, Ettore (2019) Is Social Transnationalism Fusing European Societies into One? in: Ettore Recchi, Adrian Favell, Fulya Apaydin, Roxana Barbulescu, Michael Braun, Irina Ciornei, Niall Cunningham, Juan Diez Medrano, Deniz Neriman Duru, Laurie Hanquinet, Jensen Solgaard, Steffen Pötzschke, David Reimer, Justyna Salamonska, Mike Savage, and Albert Varela (Eds) Everyday Europe: Social transnationalism in an unsettled continent, Bristol: Policy Press, 255–90.
Rosamond, Ben (2019) Theorising the EU in Crisis: De-Europeanisation as Disintegration, Global Discourse 9(1): 31–44. doi:10.1332/204378918X1545393450591.
Rose, Nikolas (1993) Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism, Economy and Society 22(3): 283–99. doi:10.1080/03085149300000019.
Schmidt-Wellenburg, Christian (2017) Europeanisation, stateness, and professions: What role do economic expertise and economic experts play in European political integration? European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 4(4): 430–456. doi:10.1080/23254823.2017.1335222
Schmidt-Wellenburg, Christian (2023) French Economists and the Symbolic Power of (Post-) National Scopes of Capital: Taking Sides in Discourses of Crises, 2008–2021, Serendipities 8(1–2): 77–108. doi:10.7146/serendipities.v8i1-2.133990.
Schmidt-Wellenburg, Christian (2025) Between Science, Economics and Politics: The Changing Face of Political-Economic European Expert Groups (1966–2018), European Politics and Society 26(2): 321–45. doi:10.1080/23745118.2024.2415988.
Schmidt-Wellenburg, Christian, and Vincent Gengnagel (2025) On the Relational Power of Economics: Economists between Academia, Government, and the Economy, Historical Social Research 50(2): 205–229. doi:10.12759/hsr.50.2025.23
Schmidt-Wellenburg, Christian, and Andreas Schmitz (2022) Divorce à l’allemande. Luttes Symboliques et Tensions Institutionnelles Dans La Sociologie Allemande Contemporaine, Actes de La Recherche En Sciences Sociales 2022/3(243–244): 110–23. doi:10.3917/arss.243.0110.
Schmidt-Wellenburg, Christian, and Andreas Schmitz (2023) Divided We Stand, United We Fall? Structure and Struggles of Contemporary German Sociology, International Review of Sociology 33(3): 512–45. doi:10.1080/03906701.2023.2244170.
Schmitz, Andreas, Daniel Witte, and Vincent Gengnagel (2017) Pluralizing Field Analysis: Toward a Relational Understanding of the Field of Power, Social Science Information 56(1): 49–73. doi:10.1177/0539018416675071.
Schmitz, Andreas, and Julian Hamann (2022) The Nexus between Methods and Power in Sociological Research, The American Sociologist 53(3): 415–36. doi:10.1007/s12108-022-09537-0
Schögler, Rafael, and Thomas König (2017) Thematic Research Funding in the European Union: What Is Expected from Social Scientific Knowledge-Making? Serendipities 2(1): 107–30. doi:10.25364/11.2:2017.1.7
Stampnitzky, Lisa (2023) Rethinking the “Crisis of Expertise”: A Relational Approach, Theory and Society 52(6): 1097–1124. doi:10.1007/s11186-023-09510-x.
Steinmetz, George (2013) Sociology and Empire: The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline, Durham: Duke University Press.
Steinmetz, George (2016) Social Fields, Subfields and Social Spaces at the Scale of Empires, The Sociological Review Monographs 64(2): 98–123. doi:10.1002/2059-7932.12004
Steinmetz, George (2023a) Concept-Quake: From the History of Science to the Historical Sociology of Social Science, in: Didier Fassin, and George Steinmetz (Eds) The Social Sciences in the Looking Glass, Durham: Duke University Press, 21–80.
Steinmetz, George (2023b) The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Straßheim, Holger (2020) The Rise and Spread of Behavioral Public Policy: An Opportunity for Critical Research and Self-Reflection, International Review of Public Policy 2(1): 115–28. doi:10.4000/irpp.897
Vanderstraeten, Raf, and Joshua Eykens (2018) Communalism and Internationalism: Publication Norms and Structures in International Social Science, Serendipities 3(1): 14–28. doi:10.25364/11.3:2018.1.2
Warczok, Tomasz, and Stephanie Beyer (2021) The Logic of Knowledge Production: Power Structures and Symbolic Divisions in the Elite Field of American Sociology, Poetics 87(101531). doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101531
Weber, Max (1948) Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions, in: Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Eds) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, London: Routledge, 323–59.
Weber, Max (2012) The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy, in: Hans Henrik Bruun, and Sam Whimster (Eds) Max Weber: Collected Methodological Writings, London: Routledge, 100–138.
Downloads
Publiceret
Citation/Eksport
Nummer
Sektion
Licens
Copyright (c) 2026 Vincent Gengnagel, Christian Schmidt-Wellengurg, Frederic Lebaron
Dette værk er under følgende licens Creative Commons Navngivelse – Ikke-kommerciel – Ingen Bearbejdede Værker (by-nc-nd).
CC-BY-NC-ND
