Sociologija 2010 Volume 52, Issue 4, Pages: 337-358
https://doi.org/10.2298/SOC1004337B
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The Catch 22 syndrome of social scientists in the semiperiphery: Exploratory sociological observations
Blagojević Marina (Institute for Criminological and Sociological Research, Belgrade)
Yair Gad (Department of Sociology and Anthropology The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel)
This paper describes the parochial predicament of the social sciences by
looking at world sociology in its Janus-like face: on the one hand we focus
on the intellectual, political, and sometimes even ethical compromises that
social scientists in European semiperipheral countries forgo in order to gain
acceptance and recognition in world sociology. On the other hand we show how
these compromises paradoxically impoverish intellectual potentialities in the
major centers of academic excellence too. In the analyses we focus on
different interrelated facets of scholarly work where these paradoxes take
shape: problem setting and conceptualization, the hierarchy of scholarly
publications, the definition of excellence through citation patterns,
scientific conferences, and lastly, funding schemes for research. We argue
that the social and the political organization of the World System of Science
jeopardizes free access to multiple and plural perspectives of the social. A
potential source of ideas, theories, and paradigms is hampered by the
hierarchical division of labor between scientists in the centers of science
and their peers in semiperipheral countries, whose knowledge remains
unutilized and sidelined.
Keywords: semiperiphery, social scientists, knowledge production, marginalization, global hierarchies
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