One of the very first books to explore the role of the social sciences in historical, sociological, and global perspectives, it does so by analyzing the practical making and discursive aspects of social scientific disciplines, including sociology, economics, psychology, business and administration studies, social gerontology, gender studies, educational science, geography, and political science. It looks at them not only in their academic setting but also in extra-academic contexts and in a broader global setting. The volume includes 15 chapters written by an international and multidisciplinary group of scholars. The overall aim of the book is to encourage a contextual and reflexive understanding of the complex and dynamic relationship between the social sciences and society of the past and in today's globalized world. It is concerned with the bonds between the social sciences and society at large, including themes such as gender and power, science and politics, academic boundaries and global power relations, and postcolonial perspectives.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
  • Contextualizing social science
• I OUTSIDE ACADEMIA
  • 1. Central not peripheral
    • Social science, class, and gender, 1830–1930
  • 2. ‘Not too many ladies, but too few gentlemen’
    • On the gendered co-production of social science and its publics
  • 3. Expert views or mass opinion?
    • Newspaper enquêtes in the Swedish press, 1900–1920
  • 4. Making society a public matter
    • A cultural history of the social sciences’ politico-didactics
  • 5. School psychologists as experts
    • Some notes on the uses of behavioural science in post-war Sweden
• II DISCIPLINES AND INTERDISCIPLINARITY
  • 6. Lessons learned from German sociology, 1933–45
    • Contexts and content
  • 7. Business administration
    • An open discipline and answer to the call for restructuring the social sciences
  • 8. Successful ageing in modern social gerontology
    • A historical perspective on theories of activity and disengagement
  • 9. The emergence of men’s studies in educational research
    • Experiences from the Swedish case
  • 10. Geography’s roots and routes
    • Towards a globalized social science
• III GLOBAL CONTEXTS
  • 11. Geographical diversity and changing communication regimes
    • A study of publication activity and international citation patterns
  • 12. Knowledge appropriation
    • Turning social research into political action in colonial India
  • 13. Dependency theories and internal colonialism
    • The politics of epistemology and theoretical resistance
  • 14. Diversifying hegemonic social science
    • Traditional knowledge and indigenous epistemologies in social research on Sámi reindeer herding
  • 15. Between periphery and metropole
    • Towards a polycentric social science
• References
• About the authors