Abstract
ABSTRACT Taking France as its example, the following article examines the relations between the disciplines of social sciences discovered during the arduous task of classifying French social sciences journals according to more specific disciplines (sociology, political science and anthropology, etc.). Based on a study of the journals’ own methods of self-labeling and the methods used to classify these journals by a French assessment body (AERES), as well as the forming of journal executive committees, the article highlights the fact that the journals frequently cover a range of disciplines, without this implying the disappearance of disciplinary structures. In fact, the article instead reveals that the connections made by the journals between the various disciplines of social sciences are unlikely and disproportionately represented.
Highlights
This research note is supported by a database comprising 198 “French” journals classified in 2013 by the Agence d’Évaluation de la Recherche et de l’Enseignement Supérieur (AERES4) in the fields of Economics-Management (n=82), Sociology-Demography (n=76), Anthropology (n=62), or Political Science (n=54)
Genesis, a journal founded in 1990 by researchers located at the crossroads of History and Political Science, and with the displayed goal of “contributing to the social History of the sciences closer to the history of society” is classified under six disciplines at the same time: History, Anthropology-Ethnology, Sociology-Demography, Sciences et techniques des activités sportives (Staps), Political Science and Geography. Fall into this group of journals classified by AERES under various disciplines, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (“RHSO” in Figure 2) founded in 1975 by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and several thematic journals as Archives de sciences sociales des religions (“ASSR”, founded in 1956 under the original title of Archives de sociologie des religions, Déviances et sociétés (1977), Sciences sociales et santé (1982), or Réseaux (1983) and Terrains (1983)
Connections established by Social Sciences journals with the field of “Natural Sciences” or “Life Sciences” appear to be substantially scarcer than the connections between Social Sciences disciplines themselves, without losing sight of the particular cases of Psychology and Economics
Summary
I n Europe, interdisciplinarity has imposed itself as a watchword for scientific policies. We will give attention to put into practice the assignment to Social Sciences journals of one or more disciplines attached to them If these practices of classification, implemented by the organizations responsible for the numerical access to the scientific resources, by the agencies evaluating research activities, or even by the journals themselves when they define their field of reference, do not mention anything about the effective collaboration among the researchers of different disciplines, we are inclined to suppose that they reflect diffuse representations of relationships among disciplines and – in the case of the classifications established by the organizations in charge of the evaluation – a performative effect by the fact of delineating the space of probable combinations and possible combinations
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