Methodology of the History of the Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing national histories of sociology: Methods, approaches and visions

“…There are few authors of national histories of sociology who explicitly address the employment of method and methodology for their study. A useful reflection on this issue is Fleck and Dayé’s (2015) descriptive typology of histories of the social and behavioural sciences, which they have derived from an examination of its historiography. This typology has subsequently been applied elsewhere (see Crothers, 2018; Carreira da Silva, 2016; Fleck, 2015).…”

“…Wiggershaus, 1994), or the Chicago School (Plummer, 1997). Looking across the social sciences as a whole, Fleck and Dayé (2015: 320) are critical of the way many of the works discuss individual scholars, or groups of scholars, in isolation, rather than the development of their ideas in their interaction with others. Even at the level of the group, conventional social research techniques, sociological concepts, theories and methodological frameworks are rarely applied, and there is a distinct lack of investigation into structured career patterns and the demographics of the discipline (Fleck and Dayé, 2015: 320).…”

“…This article seeks to address this problem by, in the first instance, critically outlining the main approaches and methods evident – though largely implicit – in the literature on the history of sociology. Fleck and Dayé’s (2015) typology of approaches to national histories is utilised to critically examine this literature, revealing areas of concentration as well as paucity, and indicating where Australian scholarship has differed from that conducted elsewhere. The general lack of attention to methods and methodology in the writing of histories of sociology is addressed, in the second half of the article, by the demonstration of an unusual approach to historical analysis: a content analysis of a sample of histories of Australian sociology.…”

A Systematic View on the Use of History for Current Debates in Sociology, and on the Potential and Problems of a Historical Epistemology of Sociology

“…Comparing the historiographies of various social science disciplines, the contributions to a volume edited by Backhouse and Fontaine 2014 addressed the questions how, by whom, and to what effect these histories had been written. The 2nd edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences included an entry on methodological and historiographical approaches and rationales (C. Fleck and Dayé 2015 ). Also, a collection of essays edited in German by Dayé and Moebius ( 2015 ) explicitly addressed the questions how and why one should write the history of sociology, as did a recent article by George Steinmetz ( 2018 ).…”

Review: Filipe Carreira da Silva, Sociology in Portugal: A Short History

“…Another redeeming quality is the systematic methodology used to trace disciplinary development, aggregating pieces of information into five units of analysis that Carreira da Silva calls ‘dimensions’: social agents, ideas, instruments, institutions, and contexts. These come from a new historiographical approach (see Fleck and Dayé, 2015) on the study of the social and behavioral sciences, to which we are introduced. This is unusual in historical accounts, yet welcome for sociological purposes.…”