Immanuel Wallerstein

Concerned about the worldwide state of the social sciences—the relations among the disciplines, and their relationship with both the humanities and the natural sciences—the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, based in Lisbon, established in 1993 the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. It comprised a distinguished international group of scholars—six from the social sciences, two from the natural sciences, and two from the humanities.The report first explores how social science was historically constructed as a form of knowledge and why it was divided into a specific set of relatively standard disciplines in a process that went on between the late eighteenth century and 1945. It then reveals the ways in which world developments since 1945 have raised questions about this intellectual division of labor and have therefore reopened the issues of organizational structuring that had been put into place in the previous period. The report goes on to elucidate a series of basic intellectual questions about which there has been much recent debate. Finally, it discusses in what ways the social sciences can be intelligently restructured in the light of this history and the recent debates.

The Domain(s) of The Social Sciences4 stars

Reviewed on 1999-12-28

This is a short and easily read book about the social sciences, how they evolved, what basic topical and methodological issues defined them, how they found their place between natural science and the humanities, and how they developed their internal relations. The book is not just descriptive, but also critical in its analysis. It discusses the special kind of narrow view that dominates these sciences, and argues for a new organization of the social sciences. It basic argument is that one cannot meaningfully study a problem in one of the social sciences without regarding perspectives from the other. One could wish some more details of the single social sciences (e.g. psychology and educational research) and about epistemological influences (e.g. behaviorism and cognitivism).

The book should be of interest to science studies and to people concerned with the classification of the sciences and the organization of knowledge. It is one element in what I have christened "domain analysis" in library and information science.

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