The processes of globalization that have transformed the shape of the world during the past decades are the subject of a vast literature and vivid controversies. Having become a core issue in the social and human sciences (SSH), the worldwide circulation of goods, people and ideas has been studied by disciplines ranging from economics (with the rise of multinational firms and global markets), cultural studies (with the spread of cultural goods and the phenomena of cultural “imperialism” or “hybridization”), and politics (with the internationalization of governance for example). Many of these processes and their interpretations are the subject of heated debates. According to a popular view, the global condition would be defined by the breakdown of traditional barriers to mobility and communication and a state of generalized “liquidity” (Bauman 2000). For Thomas Friedman, for example, globalization does not merely entail growing exchanges on a global scale; it also implies that the world is becoming “flat”, as traditional hierarchies between and within countries dissolve into global flows of communication (Friedman 2005). Weaker versions of this argument have similarly insisted on the transformative power of global connectivity and worldwide communication.
Taking a closer look at global structures of exchange and communication, however, the predominant pattern is not that of collapsing hierarchies and a “flattening” universe. Power relations between countries and regions are shifting, established centers are challenged by upcoming ones, but there is little evidence that contemporary social relations would consist of communication flows between more or less equally endowed individuals, organizations or states. Globalization, past and present, can be defined as those processes that are fundamentally concerned with a widening scope of cross-border communication, the intensification of transnational mobility, and the growing dependency of local settings on global structures. All of these processes, however, depend on resources that are unequally distributed and that are at the root of asymmetrical power relations.
The struggles they entail and their actual outcomes are far removed from the irenic vision that some economists and communication theorists have proposed. Economic globalization and the assumed benefits of unfettered global markets have, in fact, become increasingly contested among economists as well (Stiglitz 2002; Rodrik 2011). In particular since the financial crisis (2007–09) and the Great Recession that followed it, “globalization” in the more general, not just the economic sense of the term, is, in fact, widely criticized and combated. Populist revolts of various kind, forms of fundamentalism, and neo-nationalist movements have all identified “globalization” as the main threat of our time, and have, in doing so, become global movements as well (Sousa Santos 2014; De Lange 2017).
If the social and human sciences have studied various forms of globalization extensively, few of these inquiries have concerned the globalization of the social and human sciences themselves. Science being considered to be, in contrast to other activities, international by nature, the growing circulation of scholars and scientific ideas has only recently become the object of systematic study (Alatas and Sinha-Kerkhoff 2010; Beigel 2013, 2014; Bhambra 2007; Boli and Thomas 1999; Connell 2007; Danell et al. 2013; Fleck 2011; Fourcade 2006; Gili et al. 2003; Gingras 2002; Jeanpierre 2010; Keim 2011; Keim et al. 2014; Kennedy 2015; Krause 2016; Kuhn and Weidemann 2010; Medina 2014; Dubois et al. 2016). Regularly, however, considerations about globalization, including globalization of the social and human sciences, focus on the discussion of theoretical models rather than the analysis of empirical data (e.g. Sorá 2017). Breaking away from these tendencies, this book intends first and foremost to contribute to the systematic empirical analysis of the globalizing social and human sciences.
The Globalization of the Social and Human Sciences
Various developments indicate that the social and human sciences are indeed in the process of becoming a global field of research. As has been documented by successive versions of the UNESCO World Social Science Report (1999, 2010, 2013) and by the Humanities World Report 2015 (Holm et al. 2015), these disciplines are today practiced and debated in virtually all countries and regions of the world. Over the past decades, furthermore, the production of SSH articles and books has increased significantly almost everywhere; the Russian Federation being the only exception (Gingras and Mosbah-Natanson 2010; Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras 2014).
This growth of these disciplines on a global scale has been initiated and shaped by transnational dynamics from the outset. Even before the institutionalization of the social and human sciences into formal research and training units, intellectual debates about the nature and dynamics of society drew on both “national traditions” (Heilbron 2008) and on the transnational circulation of ideas (Porter and Ross 2003; Gunnel 2007; Heilbron et al. 2008; Heilbron 2014b). Historically transnational exchanges have gradually become more extensive in scope and more frequent in time. From the late nineteenth century and especially after the end of the Second World War, such exchanges were facilitated by the increasingly frequent translation of major authors (Sapiro 2008), the voluntary and forced migrations of scientists (Heilbron et al. 2008), and the institutionalization of international scientific congresses, associations, and journals (Rasmussen 1995; Brian 2002; Boncourt 2016). This has resulted in an increasing globalization of scientific references. Bibliometric evidence shows that in the main regions of the world the share of ‘self-citations’ (i.e. references to producers in the same region) has diminished, whereas references to producers outside of the region have increased. This is the case especially in Asia , Africa and Latin America, which have become more integrated into the field of “global” social science, but a slight decrease of self-citations has also occurred in the dominant regions of North America and Europe (Kirchik et al. 2012; Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras 2014).
In spite of the growth and extending scope of transnational exchanges, the globalization of the social and human sciences continues to face significant obstacles and limitations. Most of the actual teaching, research and publishing is still carried out at the local and national level. Careers are, for the most part, organized by national systems of higher education, which – depending on disciplines and countries – tend to be relatively closed to foreigners. The intellectual content of the social and human sciences is also, to a certain extent, tied to local contexts. The objects studied by the SSH are more context-dependent than in the natural sciences (Passeron 1991) and cross-cultural variations have shaped the way in which the SSH locally conceptualize their objects of study, and set the conditions for the circulation, or non-circulation, of social and human scientific knowledge. The globalization of the social and human sciences is therefore likely to be a more diverse, contradictory, and puzzling process than one might be led to believe. This book aims to systematically explore the complexities of this process by studying the struggles and structures that advance, or impede it.
Power Relations
While the studies gathered in this book focus on understanding the dynamics that shape the development of scholarly work, they also deepen our understanding of political power struggles ...