scholarly journals “Disciplining” Educational Research in the Twentieth Century

Author(s):  
Raf Vanderstraeten

AbstractEducational research expanded rapidly in the twentieth century. This expansion drove the interested “amateurs” out of the field; the scientific community of peers became the dominant point of orientation. Authorship and authority became more widely distributed; peer review was institutionalized to monitor the flow of ideas within the scientific literature; reference lists in journals demonstrated the adoption of cumulative ideals about science. The historical analysis of education journals presented in this chapter looks at the social changes which contributed to the ascent of an “imagined” community of expert peers in the course of the twentieth century. This analysis also helps us in imagining ways in which improvements to the present academic evaluative culture can be made.

Human Affairs ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier Ullan de la Rosa

AbstractThe article revisits the debate between the positivists and non-positivists currents in sociology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, concluding that it is actually a false debate, due to the fact that, beyond their differences, both shared some of the basic principles of the paradigm of modernity. From this historical analysis the article seeks to draw lessons for the social sciences in the present, at a time when these seem to have reached a certain synthesis between the modern and postmodern epistemologies. The article shows us that such a synthesis was already prefigured in the writing of classical theorists as it is, in fact, an ineluctable structural law of science itself if it wants to escape from the trap of skepticism and epistemological nihilism. The article also explores how, as a consequence of the pervasiveness of the modern paradigm, a common ethnocentric bias can be traced in all the fathers of sociology and wonders whether sociology today has actually got rid of this problem.


1961 ◽  
Vol 107 (450) ◽  
pp. 819-827 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franklin S. Klaf ◽  
John G. Hamilton

Have there been changes in the clinical picture of schizophrenic illness over the past hundred years? Or, to put the question more precisely, are the schizophrenic patients of the 1950s any different phenomenologically from their counterparts in the 1850s?Recent studies (4, 5, 9, 14, 20) have aimed at determining the presence or absence of an increased incidence of psychosis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Opinion is evenly divided as to whether the social changes of the twentieth century have significantly altered the epidemiology of psychotic illness. In spite of an increasing preoccupation with social psychiatry (13), the psychiatric literature is silent on the vital question “Have the changes of the past hundred years altered the clinical picture of schizophrenic illness itself?”The present study, comparing a selected group of schizophrenics of both sexes from the 1850s and 1950s, begins the search for information on the change or lack of change in this important condition over the past hundred years.


Author(s):  
Svetlana Shcherbak

In this article, we discuss the modernization hypothesis in consideration of the causes of democratization related to economic development. The modernization hypothesis was formulated in the mid-twentieth century in the midst of specific economic and socio-political conditions. Since then, both societies and representations of their developments have changed. Current research disregards these transformations; therefore, with this work, we aim to fill the gap. We make clear how the neo-liberal turn influenced representations of economic development and democracy. Realization of the neo-liberal economic policy resulted in important social changes, particularly the rise of inequality and the wave of populism that endangers liberal democracy. At the same time, the modernization hypothesis is based on presumptions that economic development leads to income equalization and the creation of the broad middle class. Our analysis reveals that empirical surveys tend to confirm the relationship between economic development and democracy. However, economic growth does not necessarily entail more equal income distribution. The rise of populism indirectly confirms the rightness of the modernization hypothesis and suggests an important role for class dynamics. Democratization necessitates not only the establishment of liberal institutions but also the transformation of the social structure via convergence of incomes.


1994 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Petkova ◽  
Pepka Boyadjieva

This study is an attempt to reveal the historical roots of the idealized image of the scientist, and its functions for the scientific community. The analysis is based on historical excursions into important periods of the development of science. The evidence reveals the specific ways and means of the idealization of the image of the scientist, the importance of this ideal for the social recognition of science, and the establishment and functioning of the scientific community. The image is also revealed by empirical data, i.e. content analysis of essays written by a sample of Bulgarian high-school students. The students shared representation comprises idealized elements. The historical analysis and the empirical data show that the idealized image of the scientist has become a means for recruitment to the scientific community and for regulating its relations with other social communities.


2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 1276-1301 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW SANCHEZ ◽  
CHRISTIAN STRÜMPELL

AbstractInspired by E. P. Thompson's modelling of class as the contingent outcome of historical processes, this paper explores how autochthony and descent came to inform the boundaries of industrial workforces in the Indian steel towns of Jamshedpur and Rourkela. We suggest that if class is a historical object, then it relates to other forms of power and identity in ways that question the use of rigid analytic typologies. In the private sector Tata company town of Jamshedpur, an industrial working class was constructed during the late colonial period from labour migrants, whose employment became heritable within families. In the public sector Rourkela Steel Plant, founded in the mid-twentieth century, the politics of ethno regionalism coincided with state development policy to inform employment reservation for autochthons. Through a historical analysis of urbanization, migration and employment policy, we consider how elite workforces that bound themselves according to the principles of autochthony and descent were formed in the social laboratories of India's steel towns. We suggest that such processes demand a class concept that engages more subtly with the work of E. P. Thompson.


2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 1125-1139 ◽  
Author(s):  
EGBERT KLAUTKE

ABSTRACTSince the beginning of the twentieth century, European observers and commentators have frequently employed the term ‘Americanization’ to make sense of the astonishing rise of the USA to the status of a world power. More specifically, they used this term to describe the social changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization. In this context, European intellectuals have often used ‘America’ as shorthand for ‘modernity’; across the Atlantic, they believed, it was possible to learn and see the future of their own societies. Criticism of ‘the Americanization of Europe’ – or the world – easily led to outright anti-Americanism, i.e. a radical and reductionist ideology which held the USA responsible for the economic, political, or cultural ills of modern societies. The war in Iraq in 2003 and the alienation between the USA and France and Germany that followed provided a new impetus for studying the history of European perceptions of America. A large number of studies have since been published that deal with the history of the ‘Americanization of Europe’ and anti-Americanism, and several monographs, which are based on original research and promise new insights, will be the focus of this historiographical review.


2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saty Satya-Murti ◽  
Jennifer Gutierrez

The Los Angeles Plaza Community Center (PCC), an early twentieth-century Los Angeles community center and clinic, published El Mexicano, a quarterly newsletter, from 1913 to 1925. The newsletter’s reports reveal how the PCC combined walk-in medical visits with broader efforts to address the overall wellness of its attendees. Available records, some with occasional clinical details, reveal the general spectrum of illnesses treated over a twelve-year span. Placed in today’s context, the medical care given at this center was simple and minimal. The social support it provided, however, was multifaceted. The center’s caring extended beyond providing medical attention to helping with education, nutrition, employment, transportation, and moral support. Thus, the social determinants of health (SDH), a prominent concern of present-day public health, was a concept already realized and practiced by these early twentieth-century Los Angeles Plaza community leaders. Such practices, although not yet nominally identified as SDH, had their beginnings in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social activism movement aiming to mitigate the social ills and inequities of emerging industrial nations. The PCC was one of the pioneers in this effort. Its concerns and successes in this area were sophisticated enough to be comparable to our current intentions and aspirations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 611-621
Author(s):  
Sára Horváthy

SummaryEgeria, a 4th century pious woman from the south of present-day Spain, retold, after visiting Palestine with the Bible in hand, her observations to her sisters. If the linguistic aspects of her letters are quite well-known, much less is known about its stylistic value, inappropriately called “simple”.What seems to be boringly the same again and again, is in fact a constantly renewed and perfectly mastered “variation on a theme”, just as in a well-composed piece of music. Her apparent objectivity is indeed a wish to focus on what she considers the most important, namely to tell her community, as closely to reality as possible, what she observed during her pilgrimage. However, Egeria’s latin is also a testimony of the christian lexicon in construction and of the social changes that were in progress by that time.Linguistics and stylistics work together here, the choice of a word or a grammatical formula reveals hidden information about the proper style of an author who, despite her supposed objectivity, had real personal purposes.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Egdūnas Račius

Muslim presence in Lithuania, though already addressed from many angles, has not hitherto been approached from either the perspective of the social contract theories or of the compliance with Muslim jurisprudence. The author argues that through choice of non-Muslim Grand Duchy of Lithuania as their adopted Motherland, Muslim Tatars effectively entered into a unique (yet, from the point of Hanafi fiqh, arguably Islamically valid) social contract with the non-Muslim state and society. The article follows the development of this social contract since its inception in the fourteenth century all the way into the nation-state of Lithuania that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century and continues until the present. The epitome of the social contract under investigation is the official granting in 1995 to Muslim Tatars of a status of one of the nine traditional faiths in Lithuania with all the ensuing political, legal and social consequences for both the Muslim minority and the state.


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