Indicators for the Institutionalization of the Social Sciences and Humanities

We will present an interim report of work done in the EU funded INTERCO-SSH project, which deals with the institutionalisation and development of the social sciences and the humanities (SSH) in Europe. We will suggest a concise set of indicators which is being established for a comparative analysis of the development of the SSH in different national contexts. Preliminary data will focus on SSH disciplines in Germany, France and the UK from 1945 to the present. We will ask how these indicators can be used for the history of the SSH and what developments they are able to depict. The sources used are of qualitative and quantitative nature: interviews, statistical and bibliometric data, academic texts and archival records are gathered and combined for this purpose.

The objectives of this work is to identify national patterns of institutionalization which might explain the relative isolation of national traditions in the SSH and to assess the importance of the disciplinary division of labor within the SSH in order to reflect upon the historically changing power relations between branches of study, processes of professionalization of new disciplines, the reshaping of traditional forms of scholarship and the potentialities of new mechanisms of intellectual and institutional collaboration and exchange with or without consequences in terms de-disciplinarization of disciplines.

The development of SSH disciplines will be compared in the domains of research, teaching, publication outlets and professional associations. The social and intellectual characteristics of the disciplines’ research staff, students, degrees, the research communities’ dominant topics and study targets, the technicalities and methods applied and their preferential forms of both, scholarly and popular communication in various periods are part of the data processed in this project.

«The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant Agreement n°319974 (INTERCO-SSH)»