CfP Special Issue: Governing (by) expertise. The politics of social scientific knowledge production

Governing (by) expertise. The politics of social scientific knowledge production

Guest-edited by

Christian Bessy, Arthur Jatteau, Frédéric Lebaron (IDHES UMR CNRS 8533, ENS Paris-Saclay), Vincent Gengnagel (University Flensburg) & Christian Schmidt-Wellenburg (University Potsdam) – corresponding guest-editors: Vincent Gengnagel & Christian Schmidt-Wellenburg

 

Timeline

30. September 2023: Submission of abstracts to both corresponding guest editors

01. November 2023: Editors’ invitation to submit a full manuscript

15. April 2024: Submission of manuscripts for review

May 2024: Online author workshop, t.b.a.

August-October 2024: Revisions and re-submissions

First half of 2025: Publication

 

Aim of the Special Issue

Social sciences’ place is as much in academics as it is with government. Social sciences, such as political sciences, sociology and economics, always aim both at charting and disenchanting the world as well as at projecting desired future societal states and reflexively optimizing governance. In this double role – as academic disciplines and as professions of government – social sciences not only shape prac-tices of governing but are being shaped in this interaction themselves (Abbott 1988; Miller/Rose 2008). While this Janus-faced character isn’t exactly a novelty and has played out differently in specific national contexts (Weber 1988 [1916]; Steinmetz 2016; Chen 2017; Cossu & Bartollini 2017; Moebius 2021; Consolim 2023), recent developments have changed the social sciences’ position at the centre of an increasingly transnational “knowledge warfare” (Kauppi 2018): On the one hand, the output-oriented quantification and projectification of academic meritocracy introduced new ways in which societal and especially governmental requirements have to be taken into account by autonomous so-cial scientific distinctions (Bérard/Crespin 2010; Boulet/Harari-Kermadec 2014; Münch 2014; Anger-mueller/van Leeuwen 2018; Gengnagel et al. 2019; Hamann 2020). On the other hand, new modes of governance increasingly rely on scientific legitimacy and represent an increasing demand for social scientific expertise (Power 2003; Desrosières 2011; Dezalay/Garth 2011; Heilbron et al. 2017, 2018) in national contexts (Bühlmann & Rossier 2018; Connell et all. 2018; Heredia 2018) as well as in transna-tional contexts such as the European Union (Georgakakis/de Lasalle 2012; Cohen 2013; Boncourt/Cal-ligaro 2017; Gengnagel et al. 2022; for the social scientific marginalization of non-Western Area Stud-ies in the globally dominant US, see Stanton 2002; Lie 2012).

This development entails both the active role taken up by social scientific knowledge in governing practices and how such utilization of academic legitimacy affects academic self-governance itself. Ef-fects can be seen on both sides of the relationship, with four developments standing out in recent times. First, the unbroken demand for governmental knowledge in an increasingly digitalised world has led to a rearranging of boundaries and jurisdictions in disciplinary and professional contexts, giving rise to new disciplinary developments such as computational social sciences (Edelmann et al. 2020),

and having unprecedented performative effects in markets, social networks, and digitalized interac-tions in general (MacKenzie 2006). Second, this has triggered changes in bureaucratic, political and economic spheres, increasing the importance of experts and expertise in governing. This may well challenge democratic logics and legitimacy of government, amplifying forms of bureaucratic, experto-cratic and even autocratic domination (Turner2014; Eyal 2019). Third, processes of transnationaliza-tion that have prevailed on both sides of this relationship between academic producers of govern-mental knowledge and political, bureaucratic and economic users. Social sciences have de-national-ized governmental knowledge and increasingly created instruments and methods for observing and influencing bureaucracies, politics and economics using a transnational scope (Gorski 2013). The very same processes have led to an accumulation of power and knowledge in institutions beyond the na-tion state confinement, creating “operators of global governance” (Kauppi 2018). Fourth, a diverse array of academic and political agents creates transnational spaces that empower them to challenge hegemonies in and between nationally anchored academic fields, between the Global South and North, as well as between rivalling governance projects of nationalization (Caillé & Dufoix 2013; Col-lyer 2018; Leyton & Simbürger 2022).

Keeping in mind that society-state relations differ across historical and national settings, we invite all contributions to reflect not only on differences between disciplines, but also between different na-tional and adjoint transnational contexts. In order to allow for discussing the broader politics of social scientific knowledge production, both empirical studies on specific academic fields as well as historical or contemporary case studies are welcome. We invite papers that investigate such developments e.g. in one of the following areas:

• How has economics influenced modes of governance in recent decades with e.g. evidence-based policy approaches or random control trials (Jatteau 2018)? How has the rise of certain methodologies impacted the paradigmatic structure of the discipline?
• How has political sciences changed by adapting to the requirements of “scientific” instead of “armchair consulting” (Erkkilä et al. 2016)? Has this influenced the practices of political gov-ernance, and changed the personnel that has access to decision-making?
• How do think tanks and semi-scientific lobbying institutions (Medvetz 2012; Laurens 2018) relate to certain disciplinary logics and academic populations?
• How has national law as an academic discipline and administrative body contributed and re-acted to the transformations of fields of state power (Vauchez/de Witte 2013; Dezalay/Garth 2014; Bessy 2015)?
• How have quantitative methods been put to governmental use to survey populations and op-timize human capital resources (Diaz-Bone/Didier 2016; Thévenot 2019)?
• Has such instrumentalization for quantified governance put more public, critical, and historical social sciences under pressure, e.g. in sociology (Chaubet 2014; Kropp 2022; Schmidt-Wellen-burg/Schmitz 2022), or educational sciences (Jessop/Fairclough/Wodak 2008; Nil-sen/Skarpenes 2022)?
• How can social scientific fields contest the academic and governmental status quo? Case stud-ies both on emerging or past counter-movements are welcome (Cramer 2023; Go 2023). 3
• As disciplines and professions especially associated with globe-spanning data and big data analysis, military and policing have developed towards a transnational guilds of security diag-nostics and merchants (Bigo 2016). How is the sovereignty of nation states transcended in these areas by agents foremost located in transnational fields (Mérand 2010)?
• Cases from other disciplines with emerging transnational guilds are very welcome!
•  

 

In case you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact the corresponding guest editors:

cschmidtw@uni-potsdam.de and vincent.gengnagel@uni-flensburg.de

 

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