Introduction: The Social Sciences in a Cross‐Disciplinary Age

Abstract

As studies of the history of social science since 1945 have multiplied over the past decade and a half, it has not been unusual for commentators to present cross-disciplinary ventures as a byproduct of the disciplinary system and to contrast the stability of disciplines with the highs and lows of interdisciplinary relationships. In contrast, this special issue takes the view that cross-disciplinary ventures should be considered not so much as efforts to loosen up the disciplinary yoke, but as an alternative form of production and dissemination of social scientific knowledge. Paradoxically, the relationship between cross-disciplinary ventures and the disciplinary system appears as one of complementarity and not of dependence. The essays in the special issue provide examples of ways to reconsider what can be called the interdisciplinary chaos.

Refining Species Traits in a Dynamic Vegetation Model to Project the Impacts of Climate Change on Tropical Trees in Central Africa

“…The development of approaches that integrate two spatial and dynamic models, one simulating vegetation and the other simulating land use by human agents (multi-agent model), should be encouraged to expand our knowledge of the complex interactions between human beings and ecosystems. The call for the integration of perspectives of natural sciences with those of social sciences [115,116] is then obvious. The question also arises whether the species would be able to migrate in order to reach newly suitable potential areas.…”

What topic modeling could reveal about the evolution of economics

“…It seems reasonable to assume that topic modeling can also assist in analysing the shifts that have recently occurred in the structure of economics. In many ways, the history of social sciences is a complex story of fragmentation and recombination: specialization produces continuous creation of hybrid specialties (Dogan and Pahre 1989), while cross-disciplinary ventures, traditionally considered as attempts to revise disciplinary boundaries, can in truth play a complementary role to such divisions (Fontaine 2015). The pluralistic mainstream landscape created by once "insufficiently hybrid" (Dogan and Pahre 1989, 68) economists may reflect the advent of a new balance, in Knudsen's (2002) terminology, between normal and revolutionary science, between unification and fragmentation.…”

Feminism and/in/as psychology: The public sciences of sex and gender.

“…However, as Kirsten Leng (2015) demonstrates here, the psychology of women could be understood as exemplifying the interdisciplinary social sciences before their formal institutionalization in the postwar era (cf. Fontaine, 2015). We suggest that our genealogies of interdisciplinary social knowledge should pass through the salons of Heterodoxy in 1920s New York (Schwarz, 1982), the institutes of child welfare from Minnesota to California (Lomax, 1977), and the meetings of the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex that furnished Kinsey’s surveys (Pettit, Serykh, & Green, 2015), just as much as they should pass through the hallowed halls of Harvard (Isaac, 2012) or the vaunted Bell Labs at Murray Hill (Gertner, 2012).…”