Instructional Manuals of Boundary‐work: Psychology Textbooks, Student Subjectivities, and Disciplinary Historiographies

Abstract

This article aims to provide an overview of the historiography of psychology textbooks. In the overview, I identify and describe in detail two strands of writing histories of introductory textbooks of psychology and juxtapose them to provide an integrated historiography of textbooks in psychology. One strand is developed by teachers of psychology—first as a general approach for investigating textbooks in a pedagogical setting, and then later upgraded into a full history of psychology textbooks in America. The other strand follows a more familiar perspective of historians of science and historians of psychology who build on various post‐Kuhnian and post‐Foucauldian perspectives on textbooks. I make an argument for integrating these two views for a more comprehensive historiography of textbooks in psychology, recasting textbooks as objects of research and sources that are interesting sui generis for historians of psychology in their investigations.

Middle class sprawl: Locating the psychologesque in the history of psychology.

“…What is remarkable about it is that it accomplishes a task based on the interpretation of a set of principles embodied in the introductory texts that are qualified as suitable for Advanced Placement instruction and credit. This reinforces the idea, expressed by historians for several years (e.g., Flis, 2016;Morawski, 1996;Weiten & Wight, 1992), that there is a core set of principles and cognitive competencies which welds together not only the collective mind of the exam readers but, presumably, also restructures the cognitions and perceptions of the exam takers as well.…”

Through the looking-glass: PsycINFO as an historical archive of trends in psychology.

“….). That is of course a different view from what one would expect given how the discipline in described in textbooks (see Flis, 2016; Thomas, 2007). But this is because the approach presented here doesn’t just rely on individual insights or perspectives, derived from close-readings of primary and secondary sources; we are instead reflecting on a view of everything, all at once.…”

Framing psychology as a discipline (1950–1999): A large-scale term co-occurrence analysis of scientific literature in psychology.

“…They are collections bounded by certain methodological and institutional traditions. For more on what it means to generate and constitute facts in psychology, see the work of Mary Smyth (2001a;2001b; and the critical synthesis on psychology's textbook fact-making by Ivan Flis (2016).…”