Keywords

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 from an original perspective. The globalization of the SSH is indeed shaped and structured at several levels by the competition between political powers.

Political actors have heavily invested in the development of the SSH. Guided by the belief that these disciplines play a key part in shaping political interactions and competitions, nation states, international organizations, and private actors with political agendas (such as philanthropic foundations and corporations) have consciously promoted or prevented the development of the SSH. At the national level, the connection between political regimes and the development of the SSH has been well documented, with democracies traditionally being understood as a setting favourable to the SSH (Easton et al. 1995). Colonial empires have been shown to be key proponents of disciplines such as anthropology (Asad 1973; Steinmetz 2007; De L’Estoile et al. 2002) and other, related social sciences (Escobar 1995; Steinmetz 2013; Davis 2016), as they sought to better understand the indigenous societies of their colonies. In so doing, empires played a major role in the globalization of the SSH and, more specifically, in the structuring of North-South relationships in these disciplines.

International political actors and struggles have provided a key impetus for the globalization of the SSH. After the Second World War, UNESCO sponsored the creation of international social science associations, as the SSH were conceived as a relevant medium for the promotion of peace and mutual understanding between countries and regions (Chap. 4 in this book). During the Cold War , the United States government, together with American philanthropic foundations, funded the development of transnational scientific exchanges between Europe and the United States, in order to contain the influence of Marxism (Solovey and Cravens 2012; Boncourt 2015). European institutions sponsored the creation of European SSH networks and the European University Institute, in order to organize the production of knowledge relevant to the legitimization of the European integration project (Boncourt and Calligaro 2017). US academic policies and American philanthropic foundations contributed significantly to the institutionalization of the Latin American social sciences during the Cold War. In particular, the Ford Foundation played an important role in the creation of national graduate programs (Garcia 2009, Chap. 9 in this volume) and regional teaching and research institutions (Chap. 5 in this volume). These external interventions seldom had a straightforward impact and often faced resistance, as they were interpreted by some as imperialist actions for cultural colonization, notably in Latin America (Navarro and Quesada 2010).

As the direct involvement of political actors suggests, the global field of SSH is marked by power struggles and inequality. To date, globalization has mostly favored the already dominant regions of North America and Europe . As the reference pattern in journals indicates, the autonomy of the other regions has diminished and their dependence on the dominant centers, North America and Europe , has increased (Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras 2014). A significant example of this uneven development is that the expanding exchanges have increasingly implied the use of English as the lingua franca of international social science. In the 1950s and 1960s nearly half of the publications registered in the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences were in English, by 2005 their share had gone up to over 75 per cent. The proportion of all other languages had declined; for the most important ones, German and French, to a level of about 7 per cent (Ammon 2010; De Swaan 2001a, b; Desrochers and Larivière 2016). Despite large numbers of primary speakers, none of the other language groups (Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic) is capable of competing with English as the international language of science and scholarship.

As the widespread use of English suggests, the predominant characteristic of this globalizing field of research and publication is a core-periphery structure (Heilbron 2001; Keim 2010). While having extended to most countries of the world, the research capacity and research output are very unevenly distributed. According to a selective North American database like the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) nearly half of the articles published worldwide are produced in North America alone; with almost 40 per cent, Europe has become the second producer. Together, North America and Europe account for about three-quarters of the registered world’s social science journals (Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras 2014). According to these bibliometric indicators one of the most significant global shifts during the past three decades is that Europe has increased its production of articles as well as its citations. In terms of output it currently has a position that seems more or less comparable to that of the United States. The share of social science articles in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) that are produced in Europe has risen most strongly. The only other region with a substantial increase is Eastern Asia, but its production is still much smaller than that of Europe . As a consequence of the growth of Europe and, to a lesser extent Asia , the proportion of articles produced in North America worldwide has decreased (Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras 2014).

Databases such as the Web of Science (WoS) favor Anglo-American publications and, by implication, western authors. There is no doubt, however, that the global field of the social and human sciences is characterized by highly uneven and asymmetrical power relations. On the most basic level, that of production capacity and output, it can be characterized as a structure with a duopolistic, Euro-American core, some semi-central and semi-peripheral countries (smaller European and larger Asian countries), and a host of peripheral countries, which have only a minor share of the world output, and few collaborative links with the dominant centers (Heilbron 2014b; Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras 2014, Chap. 2 in this volume).

If in addition to basic indicators such as production capacity and output, recognition and prestige (citations, prizes) are taken into account the distribution becomes even more skewed. Virtually all of the most cited scholars in the social and human sciences were born and have worked in western countries. Among the more than thirty most-cited book authors in 2007, for example, only one author was born outside of the Western hemisphere (Edward Said) but his career has developed in the USA.Footnote 1 The same goes for recipients of international prizes such as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel. Among the almost 80 laureates so far, Amartya Sen is the only one born in a non-western country and, again, his career has developed in Britain and the USA.

Toward a Global Understanding of Global Scholarship

These unequal relations are not restricted to material conditions and institutional structures. Power relations also affect the knowledge produced, i.e. the theoretical perspectives adopted, the assumptions made, and the categories and concepts used. In spite of its universalist claims, social science in the west has, in fact, focused on “modern,” western societies, relegating knowledge of other, non-western societies to anthropology and to the domain of “area studies” (Wallerstein 1996, 1999). This division of labor was premised on the dichotomy of “modern” versus “primitive” or “civilized” versus “non-civilized” societies (Goody 1977, 2006). This dichotomy was based, among others, on modernization theory, which assumed that all societies developed along a similar path, and could be thought of as more advanced or more backward.

In spite of its dominance in western social science (Gilman 2004), this view was fundamentally criticized. Latin American dependency theorists defended the idea that economic development in peripheral regions did not follow the same path as in the West. Rather than being conceived as belated modernization, underdevelopment was conceived as a consequence of the dependence of the South and the domination of the North in the world economy (Frank 1967; Seers 1981; Blomström and Hettne 1984; Hettne 1995). Similarly, several authors engaged in a criticism of the “western” character of the SSH and its influence on the reproduction of North-South inequalities (Alatas 2003). Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (1978) challenged dominant western representations of the Orient, and was of critical significance for the shaping of “postcolonial” and “subaltern studies” (Said 1993; Ashcroft et al. 1995; Guha and Spivak 1988). These inquiries have, in turn, contributed to renewed studies into the history of the humanities (Bod et al. 2016; Lardinois 2007; Clifford 1997). Other scholars have argued that it is necessary to “‘de-Westernize’ the human sciences” (Brisson 2015) and to “provincialize Europe ” (Chakrabarty 2000). Without necessarily lapsing into a relativist stance, part of this endeavour has been to propose alternative, “Asian” or “southern” perspectives on the social and human sciences (Alatas 2006; Connell 2007; Sousa Santos 2014; Keim et al. 2014; Go 2016).

As an integral part of the process of globalization, western social and human sciences have thus been critically re-examined, and alternative approaches from the South have become part of the global configuration of contemporary scholarship. This has enlarged the scope of inquiry, reappraised the plurality of human societies and civilizations, and reinvigorated comparative analysis. It has also implied a more sustained attention to the plurality of social science traditions (Patel 2010), which is a necessary step in building a truly global social science (Burawoy et al. 2010; Bhambra 2014). However, disciplines have not embraced this move in similar ways. Critical questioning of the hegemony of western social science has mostly emerged in disciplines informed by narrative and contextualized approaches, such as anthropology and sociology (Albrow and King 1990; Wallerstein 1996, 1999). By contrast, in disciplines such as economics and political science, globalization appears to have reinforced rather than undermined the dominance of western approaches (Boncourt 2016). What has become the “mainstream” in these disciplines (a blend of methodological individualism, statistical analysis, and causal reasoning) has been criticized for contributing to the diffusion of dominant democratic and neoliberal norms (Amadae 2003, 2016; Guilhot 2005; Chwieroth 2008), but is only marginally challenged by alternative paradigms. The emergence of “heterodox economics” has thus provoked a backlash from advocates of more “orthodox” approaches (Dezalay and Garth 2011).

This book proposes to study the institutional, social, and intellectual inequalities that shape the globalization of the social and human sciences from a structural perspective. Its contributors rely on theoretical frameworks informed by new approaches to dependency theory (Beigel 2013, 2014), field analysis (Bourdieu 1999a, b; Dezalay and Garth 1996, 2002; Sapiro 2013; Heilbron 2014b; Go and Krause 2016; Steinmetz 2016), or a world systems approach (Wallerstein 1999, 2004; De Swaan 2002). Such approaches allow contributors to veer away from strictly causal accounts of the globalization of the SSH (which would focus on the identification of explanatory variables and the evaluation of their respective importance) and to reflect, instead, on the asymmetric power relations of the global order, and on the channels through which dominant international norms and ideas are produced and reproduced.

In elaborating such a framework, the book is divided into four parts. Part 1 explores various patterns of transnationalization that shape the social and human sciences at the global level. If the current modes of transnationalization all occur in a “global” context, globalization in the more strict sense of the term is merely one form of transnationalization. It refers to processes of extending exchange to all parts of the globe, and to the dynamics of the more or less global structures that are the outcome of these processes. Part 2 examines a particular form of internationalization, transnational regionalization, by studying two cases: Latin America and Europe . Parts 3 and 4 focus on the circulation of ideas and scholars between respectively North and South, and between West and East.

Outline of the Book

Part 1 examines the global structure of transnational circulation and exchange through the study of citations, translations, and professional associations. On the basis of bibliometric data, Chap. 2 by Johan Heilbron and Yves Gingras shows that international collaboration in the social sciences and humanities has increased strongly in the period 1980–2014, but that its geographical pattern has known few structural changes. While at the basic level of production capacity and article output, the global field of the SSH has a duopolistic, Euro-American core, at the higher level of co-authorships and citations, the field structure tends to be monopolistic. No language can compete with English, no country can rival the USA, and globalization effects proper, that is, the extension of collaboration and exchange on a world scale, has been relatively weak. The growth of transnational exchange, according to the authors, has thus reproduced rather than undermined existing hierarchies. One of the consequences of this structure is that in the USA, due to its hegemonic position, journals remain largely national in their authorship and references, and researchers are less frequently involved in transnational co-authorship than their European colleagues. For European researchers, transnational collaboration has become somewhat more global in scope, but most of it has remained with the USA and other English-speaking countries. Of the other regions, China is the only country that has become significantly more important. Another dimension of the global hegemony of the USA is that in European countries the reference pattern in journal articles indicates that bi-nationalism is the predominant form of transnational exchange: citation hierarchies are dominated by a combination of national and American journals; journals from other countries as well as “international” and “European” journals are hardly ever among the most cited journals. Patterns of transnational collaboration and exchange thus tend to be structured like star networks with many relations to the US center, less frequent relations among semi-central countries, and infrequent or absent relations among semi-peripheral and peripheral countries.

Within this hierarchically structured global field, transnational circulation takes different forms. The circulation of scholarly books in translation offers an important site of observation. In Chap. 3, Gisèle Sapiro proposes a general assessment of the factors determining the translation of scholarly books and of their circulation channels. Six sets of factors are analyzed: power relations between languages and cultures, symbolic capital and other properties of the author (gender, academic position, social capital), properties of the book (content, form, length, “packaging”), symbolic capital of the publisher(s), networks (editorial and academic), and funding (private and public). Some of them are specific to this category of books, others are characteristic of upmarket translations, again others derive from the power relations structuring the global book market. This framework is grounded in an empirical study of the cross-circulation of scholarly books between French and English in the era of globalization, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. In the period studied, the United States became hegemonic in many domains, including the book market, a process which started in the 1970s, while French hegemony declined, without, however, losing its symbolic capital in the area of the social sciences and humanities.

Chapter 4 by Thibaud Boncourt shows that the patterns and meanings of internationalization change over time and across disciplines. Through a comparative study of the international political science and sociology associations, the chapter demonstrates that international social science organizations play different roles at different times. After their creation under the auspices of UNESCO after the Second World War, these associations focused primarily on promoting, and to a certain extent, inventing their respective discipline, in keeping with UNESCO’s agenda of developing knowledge that could foster mutual peaceful understanding between societies. Their “international” scope then mostly encompassed the western world and was vastly synonymous with the building of transnational connections within Western Europe and between Western Europe and North America. However, this emphasis on Western Europe, transatlantic connections, and transnational convergence changed from the 1970s onwards. With the evolution and, later, the end of the Cold War , and the increasing professionalization of political science and sociology as disciplines, professional social science associations focused increasingly on diversifying their membership and widening their geographical scope – a diversification more pronounced in sociology than in political science. Thus, rather than analyzing the internationalization of the social sciences as a single mechanism driving them all in the same direction (e.g. that of an “Americanization”), the chapter shows that internationalization is a plural process that takes different forms and shapes sciences in different ways depending on disciplinary, social, and political contexts.

On the whole, Part 1 documents and demonstrates that transnational circulation and collaboration have become significantly more important, but that the global structure of these processes has remained relatively stable. Within these structures, however, processes of internationalization do not necessarily result in transnational convergence. Internationalization may take various and sometimes contradictory forms depending on the historical period, the discipline, and the local or national context in question.

Part 2 pursues the issue of the varieties of internationalization. One of the more remarkable forms of internationalization of the social and human sciences has occurred not so much at the global, but at the transnational regional level, i.e. at the level between that of national states and the global field (Heilbron 2014a, b). The UNESCO World Social Science Report (2010), for example, provided brief but suggestive information about such transnational regional structures in Africa, Asia , Europe , and Latin America . While these transnational regional initiatives on a continental scale (research councils, professional associations, journals, data bases) have developed in most parts of the world – North America is the exception – Latin America has been one of the earliest examples. Chapter 5 by Gustavo Sorá and Alejandro Blanco demonstrates that the institutionalization of the social sciences in Latin America from 1950 to 1970 was at once a national and a regional process. The cycle of Latin Americanism began with the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), founded in 1948 and headquartered in Santiago, Chile. As evidenced by the proliferation of professional organizations, regional centers of education and training, research projects, journals and book series on Latin America , regionalization was a prominent strategy in the search for scientific autonomy in this peripheral part of the world. As a result of the regional institutionalization, Latin America was treated as an object of primary knowledge in all disciplines of the social and human sciences in this period, which ended with the waves of repression against the SSH under the region’s most violent military regimes in the 1970s.

Nonetheless, regional integration on a continental level cannot be achieved solely through political planning. In Latin America , it was a long-term cultural development that required a transnational framework of social relations and beliefs shared by the producers of ideas who made regional integration a priority. From the beginning of the institutionalization process, there was a decidedly Latin American emphasis among the intellectuals involved in the new disciplines of the SSH. The feeling of unity among Latin America’s cultural producers had also characterized modernism in the late nineteenth century and was cultivated in many publishing ventures. In all fields of culture, Latin Americanism was affirmed as a principle of self-assertion against threats of cultural colonialism, which was mainly identified with the United States. This study reveals that regionalisation can be a strategy adopted in any sphere of cultural production in a context of symbolic and political domination. In other words, the chapter suggests that regionalization is likely to occur when countries cannot individually compete in a cultural area (the case of Latin American countries) or lose their competitive edge (the case of the major European countries) to the hegemonic centres in a globalizing era.

One of the most important changes in the global system of the past decades has been the rise of Europe , which in terms of research output (articles, books) and research organizations (networks, journals, professional associations) is on a level that is almost comparable to that of North America. In a relatively short period of time a European infrastructure emerged (funding programs, journals, professional associations) that has reshaped the research and publication process in the region. In Chap. 6, Johan Heilbron, Thibaud Boncourt, and Rob Timans show that the building of European institutions was initially triggered by funding from American philanthropies in the context of the Cold War . Since the 1980s funding has been gradually taken over by an active European research policy. The European research infrastructure now includes “European” professional associations, journals, and databases in virtually all research fields. Transnational collaboration within Europe has increased significantly since 1980, although in several respects not more than transatlantic collaboration with scholars from North America. Within Europe collaborative networks are dominated by the largest countries, in particular by the United Kingdom . Smaller countries, however, including those of Central and Eastern Europe, have become more involved as well. As a whole, the European SSH research field has become larger, more inclusive and denser as well as slightly more centralized.

Although European journals, associations and networks have come to form a transnational European field of research and publication, it still appears to be relatively weak as compared to both the hegemony of the US and persisting national structures in the largest European countries. So-called “European” and “international journals,” for example, have multiplied but are still relatively few in number as compared to national journals. With few exceptions, furthermore, they do not rank very high in the citation hierarchies, which tend to be dominated by American journals and by the most prestigious national journals in individual European countries.

Part 3 uncovers some of the tensions and conflicts scientific internationalism has provoked. Similar to other parts of the book, this part documents some of the most significant variations across time periods, disciplines and countries. It also highlights several instances of internationalization as a movement from South to North, rather than the other way around.

In Chap. 7, Tristan Leperlier outlines the obstacles for developing the SSH in the context of postcolonial Algeria. In his chronicle of the fields of literary studies and sociology, the factors responsible for relegating the SSH in this region of Maghreb become evident. He reveals the persistence of forms of colonial dependence that prevent Algerian researchers from fully participating in an academic world where global connections have become essential. This suggests the need for examining the ways in which France still controls both the French language and international scientific exchanges between its former colonies. With an ethnographer’s sensitivity, the author notes that not all researchers view internationalization as a prerequisite, revealing thoughts and practices that are staunchly anti-global. This chapter makes a significant contribution to understanding the active engagement among scholars from the South in their connections with the dominant poles of academic production and scientific thought.

That the pace and degree of internationalization vary by disciplines, is also evidenced by the two following chapters on Latin America . In Chap. 8, Alejandro Blanco and Ariel Wilkis analyze the international mobility of recent generations of Argentine sociologists and the circulation of their books and journal articles. They examine the participation of these sociologists in the most coveted circuits based on current dynamics of international academic exchange and study how more international professional activities influence a sociologist’s intellectual prestige and power in local academia. In Chap. 9, Leticia Canêdo describes how the Ford Foundation contributed to the institutionalization of Brazilian graduate programs during the Cold War , analyzing complex interactions between academic and political competition as the foundation sought to establish political science as an academic discipline. Beyond the foundation’s interest in the SSH, Canêdo finds that its intervention reflected a broader international goal: to substitute traditional political studies for comparative studies on government and political behavior.

Far from being a passive importation of the academic models of the dominant North, the configurations of the institutionalization and internationalization of the SSH in peripheral regions reveal complex patterns of core-periphery relations. This becomes evident in Gustavo Sorá and Alejandro Dujovne’s study (Chap. 10) of translations in the social sciences and humanities in Argentina since 1990. Argentina is a hub within Latin America and a book market where the translations of French works outnumber those of English. The analysis of French, English, German, Italian and Portuguese translations into Spanish maps the intellectual connections across borders. Though at certain points, German and Italian works are more frequently translated than English, the authors show how the dynamics of book translation varies by discipline and also depend on other factors. Nonetheless, the publishing industry imposes its own rules and norms for cultural production, creating a market for symbolic goods that is relatively autonomous from the field of academia. In terms of publishers, their position in the industry varies according to discipline, topic and language. This study provides a fresh perspective on areas of competition between dominant and subordinate languages on academic markets.

In parallel to Part 3, Part 4 focuses on East-West relations, examining their most significant forms, and paying particular attention to reception dynamics, which go far beyond the commonly held diffusion model. In Chap. 11, Victor Karady and Peter Tibor Nagy focus on Eastern Europe through the case of Hungary . Their wide-ranging historical overview covers Hungarian state policies of international intellectual exchange, the position of foreign languages and books in the local academia, and the transnational circulation of Hungarian social science students and scholars. The study shows that Westernization in the Hungarian social sciences has always been conceived of as an integral part of strategies of modernization. In the pre-socialist regime it was under the sway of dominantly Germanic influence, given the geo-political position of the country and the structure of the emerging modernizing elites. The fall of the old regime in the years 1944–1946 and the rise of “socialism” prepared the ground for the attempt at a forcible Sovietization of the social sciences. Though some aspects of this attempt survived till 1989, such as mandatory Russian tuition and courses on “scientific socialism”, it started to be partially abandoned in the 1960s. In the re-emerging social sciences the Anglo-Saxon and, secondly, the German and, to a more limited extent, the French orientation tended to reach globally hegemonic positions as evidenced, for example, by the specialized literature accessible in major libraries. With the fall of the Kádárist regime in 1989 the social sciences in Hungary experienced an unprecedented expansion, accompanied by almost unhampered Westernization , as shown by the sudden rise of translations from Western tongues. However, recent policies by the current Hungarian government are putting this expansion and internationalization in jeopardy.

Chapter 12 by Thomas Brisson, Laurent Jeanpierre, and Kil-Ho Lee turns to East Asia to analyze how the social sciences, especially sociology, an outcome of Western modernity, have been implemented in the region. Through case studies of Japan and South Korea and a theoretical framework inspired by Immanuel Wallerstein and Pierre Bourdieu, the chapter shows the paradoxical discrepancy between the influence of the American academic field in East Asia and the continuing supremacy of European theoretical references. Even though South Korean and (to a much lesser extent) Japanese academics have been trained abroad, they refer selectively to American and European social scientists, with western references often used as tools to criticize western scientific imperialism. While there is no doubt, then, that western social sciences circulate and have an influence of the structuring of these disciplines in East Asia, the chapter shows that the circulation of orthodox and critical social sciences follows different logics. The influence of western references can, therefore, be variously embedded into the production of global power relations.

As a consequence of the processes of both “globalization” and “transnational regionalization,” research in the social and human sciences forms a four-level structure: in addition to the local and the national level, both the transnational regional and the global level have become significantly more important (Heilbron 2014b). This multi-level structure is all the more important to take into account, since – unlike in most natural sciences – locally and nationally oriented SSH research has not lost its significance. Since the object matter of the social and human sciences is more context dependent than in the natural sciences, research in these disciplines continues to take place and be published on the local and the national level as well.

One of the complexities of the globalizing social and human sciences is that the relationship between these different levels varies across disciplines and countries. Broadly speaking the social sciences are more internationally oriented than the humanities (in term of citation practice, international co-authorship, and international research ventures). But within each group of disciplines the variation is considerable: some social science disciplines are more internationally standardized (economics, management), others tend to be more nationally oriented (law, sociology). Within the humanities a similar differentiation exists contrasting strongly internationalized disciplines as linguistics with more nationally embedded fields as literature or national history. Smaller countries, furthermore, tend to be more internationally oriented than large and scientifically dominant countries, which are more insular and self-sufficient.

The development of this multi-layered structure comes with an increase in the number of actors involved in the structuring of the social and human sciences in a given setting. Power struggles involve scholars trained and socialized in increasingly transnational and diverse contexts, political actors at various levels (from local governments to regional and international organizations), and professionals related to academia (such as translators and publishers), who all pursue their own, sometimes contradictory, agendas. The combination of these multiple factors means that the globalization of the social and human sciences takes forms that are highly context specific and subject to considerable variation from one discipline to the next, from one era to the next, and from one local setting to its neighbours.

Such broad comparative conclusions could not have been reached without a collective research effort. This book is a result of the European research project INTERCO-SSH “International Cooperation in the Social sciences and Humanities”, which was conducted by an international team of social scientists between 2013 and 2017. The project aimed to unveil the processes at work behind the institutionalization of the social and human sciences after 1945. It focused on classical social science disciplines (economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, psychology) and on some of the humanities (philosophy, literature). Three dimensions of the development of these disciplines were studied: patterns of institutionalization, exchanges between disciplines and countries, and the international circulation of paradigms, theories and controversies. The project was funded by the European Commission with, in particular, the aim to gain a better insight into the functioning of social sciences and humanities in Europe , to identify obstacles to exchange and collaboration , and to stimulate new avenues for collaboration in the social and human sciences.Footnote 2 It is the editors’ hope that this volume contributes to fulfilling these objectives and does justice to the quality of the research developed in the framework of the INTERCO-SSH project.