499739

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CSI62510.1177/0011392113499739Current SociologyHeilbron

Article CS

Current Sociology
2014, Vol. 62(5) 685­–703
The social sciences as an © The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0011392113499739
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Johan Heilbron
Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique de la Sorbonne, France; Erasmus University
Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Abstract
Exploring the ‘globalization’ of the social sciences, this article first presents an historical
interpretation of how transnational exchange in the social sciences has evolved. Earlier
forms of international circulation are distinct from the more global arrangements that
have emerged since the late twentieth century. Considering this globalizing field in more
detail, it is argued that its predominant characteristic is a core–periphery structure,
with a duopolistic Euro-American core, multiple semi-peripheries and a wide range
of peripheries. Focusing on the global level, much of the existing research, however,
has neglected the emergence of transnational regional structures. The formation of a
transnational European field of social science is taken as an example of this process of
transnational regionalization. The social sciences worldwide can thus be seen as a four-
level structure. In addition to the local and national level, transnational regional as well
as global structures have gained increasing importance and a better understanding of
‘globalization’ requires more precise studies of both levels, in their own right as well as
in their evolving interconnectedness.

Keywords
Globalization, internationalization, transnational regionalization of the social sciences

One of the vital but easily overlooked characteristics of the production of knowledge is
its dependency on how previous forms of knowledge have circulated. Ideas build on
other ideas, and access to this stock of knowledge is an essential component in the oppor-
tunity structure of scientific work. Whereas historical studies of the sciences tend to be
centred on the most authoritative producers and sites of production, it is no less impor-
tant to study patterns of circulation and their consequences for how knowledge is

Corresponding author:
Johan Heilbron, CESSP, Avenue de France 190–198, Paris, 75244 Cedex, France.
Email: heilbron@msh-paris.fr
686 Current Sociology 62(5)

produced. These processes of circulation do not merely entail the diffusion, transmission
and appropriation of knowledge, but also the feedback effects that occur when knowl-
edge returns in different guises to where it originated from. ‘Foreign’ interpretations of
indigenous authors, for example, frequently challenge and transform the established
view of canonical texts.
For the sociological understanding of how knowledge circulates two types of institu-
tions have a particular significance: disciplines and national academic systems. The
boundaries that separate disciplines from one another are a widely acknowledged obsta-
cle to the circulation of ideas. With the increasingly refined division of academic labour,
calls for ‘inter’ or ‘transdisciplinarity’ have become the predominant way to counter
disciplinary closure and stimulate the circulation of knowledge across disciplines and
research specialties (Heilbron, 2004; Wallerstein, 1999). The other major barriers to the
circulation of knowledge, the ones with which I am concerned here, are related to state
boundaries. Scientific enquiry is organized in disciplines but these disciplines cluster
into national academic systems. Circulation across national boundaries has become a
central issue in the debate about ‘globalization’. According to a popular view, traditional
barriers to mobility and communication have broken down, information is widely avail-
able at little or no cost, and national boundaries would have lost much of their meaning.
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’: traditional
hierarchies between and within countries would dissolve into global flows of communi-
cation (Friedman, 2005). Weaker versions of this argument have similarly insisted on the
transformative power of global connectivity and worldwide communication. However if
we take a closer look at global structures of exchange and communication, the predomi-
nant pattern is not that of a ‘flattening’ universe. Power relations between countries and
regions are shifting, established centres are challenged by upcoming ones, but there is
little evidence that contemporary societies will consist of communication flows between
more or less equally endowed individuals, organizations or states. Processes of globali-
zation, past and present, are about the intensification of transnational mobility, the wid-
ening scope of cross-border communication and the growing dependency of local settings
on transnational structures, but all these processes depend on resources, material as well
as symbolic, that are unequally distributed and that are at the root of asymmetrical power
relations. The approach best suited to understand such processes is a structural analysis
such as Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory (Bourdieu, 1999a, 1999b) or Immanuel
Wallerstein’s world systems approach (Wallerstein, 1999).
One of the questions about globalization that has not received much attention is
whether the social sciences themselves are becoming more global as well. Although few
empirical studies have dealt with this issue, the internationalization of the social sciences
is in itself hardly a new issue. Prior to the current debate on ‘global’ or ‘world social sci-
ence’ (Akiwowo, 1999; Alatas, 2003, 2006; Alatas and Sinha-Kerkhoff, 2010; Archer,
1991; Arjomand, 2000; Bourdieu, 1999a, 1999b; Connell, 2007; Fourcade, 2006; Keim,
2010, 2011; Patel, 2010; UNESCO, 2010), ‘internationalization’ was a regularly dis-
cussed topic in international journals such as International Sociology and Current
Sociology (Albrow and King, 1990; Gareau, 1988; see also Kuhn and Weidemann, 2010).
A closer look at the history of international social science journals and the associations
Heilbron 687

that publish them reveals that they have a much longer history than is commonly
assumed. International social science journals and associations were first created in the
nineteenth century and formed a regular part of the academic institutionalization of these
disciplines.
Against the backdrop of the current debate I propose a threefold analysis of the ques-
tion of the ‘globalizing’ social sciences. In order to break with the presentism of many
contemporary discussions and historicize the issues at stake I, first, present a brief his-
torical outline of the internationalization of the social sciences. This outline is intended
to clarify that current developments indeed differ from earlier forms of internationaliza-
tion. Second, I argue that the social sciences today are best seen as an emerging global
field or world system, because they have come to include producers from virtually all
countries and regions of the world. Like other transnational structures, this globalizing
field is best characterized as a core–periphery structure, firmly dominated by producers,
publishers and journals from western countries. The power relations that derive from this
structure form the background for much of the current debate about global social science.
What has been largely neglected in these debates, however, is that this emerging global
field is interrelated with the equally increasing significance of transnational regional
structures. Located between the national and the global level, these regional structures
are essential for understanding the scope and significance of global institutions. As an
illustration of these new forms of transnational regionalism, in the third part of the article
I consider the social sciences in Europe. While transnational regional initiatives have
developed in most parts of the world, the European experience represents the most
advanced case so far.

State formation and the rise of national academic

systems
From the perspective of international exchange, the development of western social sci-
ence has gone through roughly three historical phases. Organized social science emerged
within the framework of nation-states and national systems of higher learning. The pre-
cise chronology is open to discussion, but there is little doubt that the institutionalization
of the social sciences as a relatively autonomous scientific domain, as a ‘third culture’
situated between the sciences and the humanities (Lepenies, 1988), was part of a long
process of state formation. The rise of nation-states altered the balance of power between
ecclesiastical and state institutions, and created a new institutional setting for scholarship
and science, which eventually included the social sciences as well. During the second
phase, which partly overlaps with the first, international exchange became institutional-
ized through international organizations, which emerged during the second half of the
nineteenth century and expanded after the Second World War. These organizations were
set up to bridge the cleavages between national academic systems and to facilitate coop-
eration among the more advanced, industrialized nations. This phase was in several
respects the continuation of the previous one, but on a higher, ‘international’ level.
Although there is no clear-cut break, what is commonly referred to as ‘globalization’ can
be seen as a third phase in this process of internationalization. With the collapse of com-
munist regimes in Eastern Europe and the emergence of advanced economies in Asia and
688 Current Sociology 62(5)

various parts of the southern hemisphere, combined with the rapid development of
new communication technologies, the international circulation of knowledge entered
a new stage. Although many aspects of the more ‘global’ social sciences of today are still
quite diffuse, there is sufficient empirical evidence to examine at least some of the main
characteristics of this globalizing field of the social sciences.
Modern science has been closely related to the process of state formation and the
predominance, initially in Europe but eventually worldwide, of the nation-state. The
institutional infrastructure of the sciences in early modern Europe underwent a double
shift: from ecclesiastical to state institutions, and from a European-wide network of
learned organizations to national systems of higher learning. It was this process of
‘nationalization’ that provided the basis for the ‘international’ organizations that emerged
in the nineteenth and expanded in the twentieth century.
In the fragmented, feudal Europe, learning was preserved and transmitted by the
clergy. Their monopoly on the written word and the use of a lingua franca, Latin, gave
this network of monasteries, universities and churches communication advantages on
which secular groups depended for a long time. With the continuous growth of secular
centres – cities, courts and principalities – the power of ecclesiastical institutions gradu-
ally eroded; state formation was the decisive factor in this process. From the sixteenth
century onwards, the existing system of states, including city-states, federal states and
territorial monarchies, came to be dominated by the centralized national states that had
developed in France, Britain and Prussia. As Charles Tilly (1990) has argued, they pos-
sessed a combination of coercive means and capital resources unmatched by any other
state form. As a consequence most city-states were incorporated into unified national
states, federal states were transformed into nation-states, and most monarchical empires
crumbled.
The intellectual repercussions of this change are aptly illustrated by the fate of schol-
arly institutions. The world of learned societies, which had emerged since the Renaissance,
came to be dominated by national academies like the Académie française (1635) and the
Royal Society (1660). Latin lost its monopoly as the lingua franca of the Republic of
Letters, a process that was strengthened by the subsequent rise of periodicals, which
were often published by these same academies in national vernaculars. Although origi-
nally ecclesiastical institutions, universities increasingly came to rely on national states
as well. Especially after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the high rates of geographi-
cal mobility of students and scholars, the peregrinatio academica, plummeted all over
Europe and the proportion of foreign students and foreign professors declined (Charle
and Verger, 1994: 45; Karady, 2009).
Intellectual centres that were linked to centralized national states acquired an advan-
tage over those that depended on city-states and federal states. Around 1700 France,
Britain and Prussia were in the ascendancy and the changing demography of the European
scientific community clearly illustrates that pattern. While in the fifteenth century Italy
housed the largest number of scientists and scholars, it was subsequently overshadowed
by France, Britain and Germany (Gascoigne, 1992). In these countries, intellectual insti-
tutions had developed that were linked to the expanding state apparatus and that would
provide the infrastructure of national culture. National institutions acquired a predomi-
nant position in intellectual affairs, and inter-state rivalries helped to fashion images of
Heilbron 689

the distinctive traits of national cultures (Elias, 2012; Romani, 2002). State frontiers thus
increasingly became intellectual and cultural boundaries as well.
In the core countries of the European state system, higher education and scientific
research thus became organized in national systems of higher learning; teaching was
done in the vernaculars and Latin was reserved for ceremonial purposes. Church institu-
tions lost their scholarly authority, national ties became more important than dynastic
loyalties, and nationalism became a factor to be reckoned with. Not only education and
science, cultural heritage became a national concern as well. It was recorded in national
histories, exhibited in state museums, celebrated by poets and honoured in national mon-
uments and memorials. Both ‘fatherland’ and ‘mother tongue’ rode high on this wave of
growing identification with the nation, and through compulsory schooling and military
service, the inculcation of national virtues reached into the most remote corners of the
nation (Weber, 1976).
Parallel to this double process of state formation and nation building intellectual tradi-
tions often took on distinctive national profiles. The notion of the ‘sciences of the mind’,
Geisteswissenschaften, and the hermeneutic method were conceived as a German alter-
native to British empiricism and French positivism. Even in the sciences national schools
were a recurrent phenomenon (Heilbron, 2008). Disciplinary journals, which originated
in the nineteenth century, were by and large national periodicals; journals in mathematics
or physics were no exception (Gispert, 2001).
The expansion of nation-states thus produced a shift in the institutional structure of
science and scholarship as well as in the way knowledge circulated. The late-medieval
system of monasteries, universities and churches, based on translocal connections on a
continental scale that were maintained in a common language and based on a shared
cultural code, was superseded by national systems of higher learning. These national
systems were similarly organized in disciplines and more research-oriented universities,
but each had its own language and was marked by specific, national traditions.

Organizing international exchange and American

hegemony
Recognizing the central role of national academic systems in modern science and schol-
arship does not imply a view according to which nations exist in and for themselves. On
the contrary. National academic systems and national traditions not only developed in
multi-faceted interaction with each other, but national boundaries were crossed in vari-
ous ways, by travel and migration, or, more indirectly, by correspondence and transla-
tion. Instead of considering national academic systems and national traditions as
self-contained and self-sufficient universes, they are more accurately portrayed as being
embedded in transnational relations of various kinds (Heilbron et al., 2008). From the
mid-nineteenth century these transnational exchanges became organized through two
closely related institutions: the international scientific conference and the international
scientific association. Both are distinctly modern forms, unknown in the early modern
Republic of Letters. From the 1850s until the First World War, international organiza-
tions emerged in various domains, including the natural and the social sciences (Boli and
Thomas, 1999; Drori et al., 2003; Rasmussen, 1995). One of the first models for
690 Current Sociology 62(5)

international scientific associations were the international congresses of statistics, which

were held from 1853 to 1876, founded by the Belgian astronomer and statistical entre-
preneur Adolphe Quetelet (Brian, 2002). Every two or three years they brought together
hundreds of participants discussing the technical, scientific and organizational progress
of their work. The proceedings of the congresses represented the state of the art that was
required for anyone who wished to be up to date. These periodical congresses preceded
the formation of an international association, the International Institute of Statistics
(1883), which is still in existence as the International Association of Statisticians. The
temporal and organizational pattern in the social sciences was similar. In sociology, for
example, René Worms founded the Institut international de sociologie in 1893, parallel
to his international journal, the Revue internationale de sociologie (Fleck, 2011:
27–29).
Despite new initiatives like the League of Nations (1920), the interwar years were a
period of national closure and mounting international hostilities. A renewed expansion of
international scholarly associations occurred after the Second World War, when UNESCO
initiated and funded international disciplinary associations like the International
Sociological Association (Platt, 1998) or the International Political Science Association
(Boncourt, 2011; Coakley and Trent, 2000). Founded on the basis of small number of
national associations from the core countries, their growth was initially assured by the
increasing membership of national associations. In the course of the 1960s and 1970s,
membership expanded further by allowing individuals to join, thus breaking away from
the United Nations model of national representation. The widening of the geographic
range of recruitment, which occurred simultaneously, was stimulated by the rise of inde-
pendent nation-states in the former colonies and by including national associations from
communist countries in Eastern Europe. By incorporating an increasing number of
scholarly societies and individuals from a widening group of countries, international
organizations contributed to more regular transnational connections, while simultane-
ously contributing to the formation of an international disciplinary canon and an interna-
tional hierarchy, dominated by scholars and scholarship from the US.
In the social sciences actual collaboration across national borders, however, remained
infrequent. International organizations were more important for diffusion from the centre
to the peripheries, information sharing and intellectual diplomacy than for effective
transnational collaboration. The fact that the two most important sociologists around
1900, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, never met one another and never even referred
to each other’s writings, illustrates the limitations of international organizations during
these years. Although the rise of international organizations represented a new phase in
the relations between the more advanced nation-states (Boli and Thomas, 1999; Drori et
al., 2003), they didn’t challenge the pivotal role of national institutions. International
conferences, committees and institutes provided occasions for scientific exchange, but
they presupposed the existence of national institutions (Crawford, 1992; Crawford et al.,
1993). Often they functioned in a way that is analogous to the International Olympic
Committee, as an instrument to organize and regulate competition between nations. The
selective group of scientists and scholars involved were expected in some fashion to
represent their country.1 After the Second World War international organizations enlarged
their geographical base, and through research committees became more focused on
Heilbron 691

empirical enquiries, but effective collaboration across national borders remained rela-
tively rare just as the scope of transnational exchange remained limited.

An emerging global field?

What is commonly designated as ‘globalization’ is best seen as a new phase in the devel-
opment of transnational exchange. Since the tripartite division into three worlds –
capitalist democracies in the West, socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and China and
developing countries in the South – has made way for a new world order, and new tech-
nologies facilitate worldwide communication, interdependencies on a global scale have
become the object of study in all of the social sciences. But are the social sciences them-
selves becoming a more global field as well? Have organizations and other structures
emerged that allow social scientists to effectively move beyond the limited and relatively
sparse international exchanges of the previous phase?
The recent World Social Science Report (2010), published by UNESCO, provides
relevant documentation about these issues. The report shows that the social sciences are
today practised in virtually all regions and countries in the world, and that, in that sense,
they have come to form a global constellation. The main components of this field are the
social science disciplines as they are practised in national academic systems worldwide.
Not only have the social sciences spread across the globe, the production of articles and
books has increased almost everywhere (the Russian Federation being the only excep-
tion), while transnational exchange and collaboration have become more frequent and
more significant as well. In all regions, for example, the share of self-citations has gone
down. This is the case especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but a slight decrease
of self-citations has also occurred in the dominant centres of North America and Europe
(Gingras, 2002; Gingras and Mosbah-Natanson, 2010; Gingras and Mosbah-Natanson,
forthcoming). English, furthermore, has become the global language in the social sci-
ences. In the 1950s and 1960s nearly half of the publications registered in the International
Bibliography of the Social Sciences were in English, by 2005 this share had gone up to
over 75%. The proportion of all other languages declined, for the most important other
languages, German and French, to a level of about 7% (Ammon, 2010; De Swaan, 2001a,
2001b).
As the increasing use of English suggests, the predominant characteristic of this
global field is its core–periphery structure. The research capacity and research output are
concentrated in a relatively small number of core countries. North America alone pro-
duces half of the articles registered in the Social Sciences Citation Index; with almost
40%, Europe is the second producer. Together North America and Europe also account
for about three-quarters of the registered world’s social science journals. Four countries
only (US, UK, Germany, the Netherlands) publish two-thirds of the registered social sci-
ence journals (Gingras and Mosbah-Natanson, 2010).
The hegemony of English and Anglo-American journals would be less problematic if
the most significant works published in other languages were regularly translated into
English and published in Anglo-American journals. But the reality of translation and jour-
nal publication is a different one: translation flows tend to reproduce, not correct the core–
periphery structure. There are many more books translated from English than into English,
692 Current Sociology 62(5)

whereas for all other languages the reverse holds true. About 60% of all book translations
worldwide are made from English, while book translation into British and American
English represents 2–3% of the national book production in the US and the UK, which is
among the lowest translation rates in the world (Heilbron, 1999; Heilbron and Sapiro,
2007; Sapiro, 2008). The practice of translation is in this respect quite similar to that of
citations: the more central the scientific production of a nation or region is worldwide, the
more it has a chance of being cited and translated, and the lower the translation or citation
rate is into this language (for a general analysis, see Heilbron, 2002).
In their bibliometric study of publication and citation practices, Yves Gingras and
Sébastien Mosbah-Natanson conclude that beyond the international spread of the social
sciences and the general growth of articles and journals produced around the world, glo-
balization of research has essentially favoured the already dominant regions of North
America and Europe. The autonomy of the other regions has diminished and their depend-
ence on the dominant centres increased. The main change of the past three decades has
been that Europe increased its centrality, and in terms of articles and citations now has a
position that is roughly comparable to that of the US. In terms of the core–periphery model,
one could therefore say that the global field has a duopolistic structure.
When in addition to publications, prestige is taken into account, the global distribu-
tion becomes even more uneven. The most cited social scientists nearly all work in North
America and Europe. In 2007, for example, 37 scholars from the social and human sci-
ences were cited more than 500 times. Some of these citation stars are classical figures
(Kant, Marx, Freud, Weber, Durkheim, Dewey, Nietzsche), but most produced their
work after the Second World War. With a single exception – Edward Said – all are from
western countries.2 The same applies to the winners of international prizes like the Nobel
Prize for Economics, the Amalfi Prize for Sociology and the Social Sciences and the
Holberg Prize for the Human and Social Sciences of the Norwegian Parliament. Among
the 69 laureates of the Nobel Prize for Economics so far, only one was born outside the
western hemisphere: Amartya Sen. The Amalfi and Holberg Prizes have been an exclu-
sively Euro-American affair.
These unequal distributions, however, do not tell us very much about the institutional
structure of this global field. And the World Social Science Report is not very helpful in
this respect, because it contains virtually no information about the development and
functioning of international organizations and other transnational or global initiatives –
journals, professional associations, international databases and networks. The informa-
tion presented is organized primarily according to country and region, and only
exceptionally concerns international or global organizations. ‘Global social science’ is
implicitly taken to mean social science as it exists in virtually all countries around the
globe. It is not taken to mean social science as it exists and functions on the global level,
that is on the level above and beyond that of nations and regions. International associa-
tions and their journals, for example, are probably still among the more central arrange-
ments for global social science, but there is no account of how they have evolved. The
same applies to international agencies like UNESCO and the International Social Science
Research Council, which produced the World Social Science Report.
In spite of this restrictive conception of ‘global social science’, the Report does
contain some other relevant documentation. On the basis of Report, it could be argued
Heilbron 693

that the most remarkable institutional renewal in the internationalization of the social
sciences has not so much occurred at the global, but rather at the transnational regional
level, that is at the level between that of national states and the global field. The World
Social Science Report provides quite interesting information about transnational
regional structures in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. These include, for
example, research councils like the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), the
Association of Asian Social Science Research Councils (AASSREC), the Latin
American Council of Social Sciences (CLASCO) and the Council for the Development
of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Unfortunately, the information
provided about these transnational regional institutions is quite sparse and no analysis
is proposed of their historical development or their significance either within or beyond
the region.

Transnational regionalization:The case of Europe

Because transnational regionalization seems to have become a prominent dimension of
the contemporary process of internationalization, it is worth considering the case of the
social sciences in Europe. The European experience in all likelihood represents the most
advanced case of transnational regionalization. Since the 1980s European science policy
has become an ever more important factor in the shaping of research in Europe. European
support had occasionally been provided to specific research institutions, but it was not
until the 1980s that a systematic European science policy came into being (Guzzetti,
1995; Kastrinos, 2010). Against the background of a deep economic recession and in the
face of mounting international competition, European funding for research and develop-
ment expanded and became concentrated in long-term ‘Framework Programmes’. They
were launched in 1984, and European research funds for all disciplines increased from
€800 million in 1984 to €10 billion per year in the current, Seventh Framework
Programme (2007–2013).
The objective of the Framework Programmes was to strengthen the scientific and
technological bases of the European economy and improve its competitiveness. With the
so-called ‘Lisbon Agenda’ of 2000 research and innovation were explicitly singled out as
a European priority. Europe, as was famously declared by the government leaders assem-
bled in Lisbon, was to be transformed into the most competitive knowledge economy in
the world. Just as the Bologna Process of 1999 aimed at creating a single European
Higher Education Area (EHEA), research policy now set out to establish the European
Research Area (ERA). One of the consequences of the new policy was the founding in
2007 of the European Research Council (ERC), which funds excellent research in all
disciplines, independent of the policy objectives that have been central to the Framework
Programmes.
Although only between 1 and 2% of the Framework Programmes went to the social
sciences and humanities, the size of these programmes was considerable. The three
Framework Programmes between 1994 and 2006 funded some 580 projects in the
social sciences and humanities, which ran for about three years, had an average of 10
partners, and each one could include well over 100 individual participants. The output
of these projects may be estimated at between 5000 and 10,000 books and
694 Current Sociology 62(5)

Table 1.  European associations and journals in the main social science disciplines.

Professional associations Journals

European Consortium for Political European Journal of Political Research (1973)
Research (1970) European Journal of International Relations
(1995)
European Confederation of Political European Political Science (2001)
Science Associations (2007)
European Federation of Professional European Psychologist (1996)
Psychologists Associations (1981)
European Economic Review (1969)
European Economic Association (1984)
Journal of the European Economic Association
(2003)
European Association of Social
Anthropologists (1989)
Social Anthropology (1992)
European Sociological Review (1985)
European Consortium for Sociological
Research (1991)
European Sociological Association (1995) European Societies (1999)
Source: Gingras and Heilbron (2009).

20,000–32,000 journal articles (excluding the grey literature of research reports, work-
ing papers and the like).3
Because every Framework Programme project had to include researchers from sev-
eral countries, they functioned not only as tools for allocating funds, but also as a stimu-
lus for furthering transnational collaboration. In a remarkably short period of time, then,
a transnational regional field of research emerged, which is structured by a growing
number of European programmes and organizations. European associations and journals
have become an integral part of the institutional infrastructure of the social sciences (see
Table 1). Taking the social sciences and the humanities together, currently well over 100
English-language journals have the adjective ‘European’ in their title or subtitle (Gingras
and Heilbron, 2009). In virtually every discipline and research area, there is at least one
European journal and some sort of European professional association or network.
These institutional arrangements – funding programmes, journals, associations –
represent a widening range of opportunities for transnational collaboration. Articles reg-
istered by citation indexes indicate that transnational co-authorship in Europe has gone
up from about 4% of the registered articles in 1980 to 16% in 2006 (Gingras and Heilbron,
2009).4 Considering this expanding European collaboration in more detail, three general
patterns may be observed (Heilbron, 2012). The first concerns differences across coun-
tries. Scholars in some countries participate more often in cross-border activities than in
other countries. A second pattern of variation is across disciplines: certain disciplines
have a much higher level of international collaboration and citation than others. A third
and final pattern is related to the global context in which Europeanization takes place.
Transnational collaboration in Europe has increased and become institutionalized, but
Heilbron 695

how does it compare to collaboration with scholars outside Europe? How, in particular,
do European networks and journals compare to those in the US, which is still the domi-
nant force in the world republic of science?
The degree to which countries participate in European research projects depends
roughly on the size of their research system. Countries like the UK, Germany and France,
which house the largest number of researchers and research institutes, profit most from
European programmes. But among them the UK has a privileged position. Scholars who
work in Britain – they need not have British nationality – have coordinated the largest
number of European research projects, and they have been more often involved in such
undertakings than scholars from any other country. Germany and France come in second
and third place, before Italy and the Netherlands.5 The leading role of the UK is even
more apparent in the networks of transnational co-authorships. British researchers have
the most central position, a centrality that has increased slightly over the years (Gingras
and Heilbron, 2009). The predominant role of Britain is related to its linguistic advantage
and to the related fact that the country houses many more international publishers and
scholarly journals than any other European country. Although European networks are
dominated by the largest countries, smaller countries, including those of Central and
Eastern Europe, have become more involved as well. As a whole, the emerging European
research field in the social and human sciences has become more inclusive, more dense
as well as slightly more centralized.
European collaboration also varies across disciplines. Collaborative research is more
frequent in the social sciences than in the classical humanities (languages, literature, etc.),
where it is relatively rare and has a slower rate of increase than in the social sciences.6 In
addition to the lower levels of co-authorship, the humanistic disciplines are more strongly
bound to national languages and national publication systems. Some of the differences
between disciplines can be clarified by considering the example of the human sciences in
France. On the basis of citation patterns in the leading journals, the human sciences can be
compared along two dimensions: their degree of international openness (or closure) and
their degree of openness (or closure) to other disciplines. The two dimensions are visual-
ized in Figure 1 in which seven disciplines are represented.7 The citation profile of the top
journals in these disciplines indicates that there are three types of disciplines. In econom-
ics and management, and to a lesser extent political science, a high proportion of the cited
literature is non-French, but cited articles tend to be restricted to the discipline in question.
A high level of ‘international’ openness is thus accompanied by a high degree of discipli-
nary closure. Law has a strong monodisciplinary citation profile as well, but, unlike eco-
nomics and management, it is strongly oriented towards national journals. Sociology
represents a third type of discipline, since it combines a fairly pronounced national cita-
tion pattern with a high level of references to journals from other disciplines.
Figure 1 visualizes the orientation of some of the human sciences in a particular
national context – that of France – during the decade up to 2002. Whatever shifts may
have occurred since, it does not seem likely that they would have produced a radical
change in the relative position of these disciplines. It may well be that the citation pattern
in other countries departs from the French case – national differences remain significant
– but it is not unreasonable to assume that the social and human sciences form a triangu-
lar structure, varying in the degree to which they are receptive to what is produced in
other countries as well as to what is produced in other disciplines.
696 Current Sociology 62(5)

10

9
ECO/MAN
8 POL SC

7 PHIL
Degree of international

6
openness

5 ANTHR

4
HIST
3
SOC
2
LAW
1

0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Degree of disciplinary openness

Figure 1.  Degree of international and disciplinary openness of the human sciences in France.

Looking more closely into the practices of collaboration and citation, they cannot be
properly understood without taking the broader context into account. Here as in other
domains, the most important factor to take into account is the pre-eminent position of the
US. Typically more than two-thirds of the extra-European co-authorships are with North
American scholars (Gingras and Heilbron, 2009). While intra-European co-authorships
have increased significantly, growth was only at the same rate as co-authorships with
scholars from the US. In other words, while European collaboration has become more
frequent and more extensive, this growth is similar to the growth of collaboration
between European and US scholars. An assessment of the scholarly significance of
European collaboration makes the picture look even more limited. Citation patterns indi-
cate that European collaboration is still relatively weak, not only in comparison with the
supremacy of the US, but also with regard to the continuing importance of the national
level. Returning to the case of France, the most cited journals turn out to be either
American or French, with few exceptions to this bi-national citation pattern.8 German,
Italian or Spanish journals are rarely if ever among the most cited periodicals in France,
and roughly the same applies to journals that call themselves ‘international’ or ‘European’.
These are still few in number and do not rank prominently in the citation hierarchies. In
disciplines like philosophy, history and law, there is in France not a single ‘European’
title among the 50 most cited journals. In sociology and anthropology there is one
Heilbron 697

European journal among the 50 most cited; in political science and economics there are
two (Heilbron, 2009).
The citation pattern of American journals is even more skewed. The 50 most cited
journals in the two flagship journals of US sociology, the American Journal of Sociology
and the American Sociological Review, are all in English and the vast majority (88%)
consist of US journals, that is journals with a clear majority of editors working in the US
(Heilbron, 2009). The three journals among the top 50 that on the basis of their self-
presentation can be considered ‘international’ invariably have strong links to the US. The
highest ranked is Social Networks (16th position), which is the product of a research
tradition that emerged in the US and Canada. The two other frequently cited ‘interna-
tional’ journals are in the areas of demography and social stratification in 31st and 42nd
position (Population and Development Review and Research in Social Stratification and
Mobility). Three other journals among the top 50 most cited are non-American journals,
but they are in the lower regions of the citation hierarchy: two are British (British Journal
of Sociology and Sociology in 41st and 45th position) and one is European: the European
Sociological Review (36th position).
Aside from the references, the content of journal articles confirms the national focus
of much of US sociology. Around 85% of the articles in leading US sociology journals
are concerned with American society. The geographical orientation varies by specializa-
tion, but even research areas committed to understanding the world beyond the US face
pressures that reproduce the discipline’s national presumption in its international work.
This happens typically without acknowledgement, because it is so ‘apparently natural
and commonsensical. … Given the power and privilege of American sociology, it is easy
to imagine the world in American terms’ (Kennedy and Centeno, 2007: 668).
The comparative weakness of European and international structures within the core of
the global field of sociology is also perceptible for professional associations. Membership
of the European Sociological Association has definitely expanded since its founding in
1995, but the European association is still somewhat smaller than the national sociologi-
cal associations in countries like Germany and France. Its 1500 members, furthermore,
total merely one-tenth of the membership of the American Sociological Association
(ASA). If we compare the size of these associations to the International Sociological
Association (ISA), the European one is much smaller, whereas the American Sociological
Association alone is nearly three times as big as the world association.
Although European journals, associations and networks have come to form a 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. It would be illuminating to compare this process of transnational regionaliza-
tion in Europe to similar processes in other regions of the world.

Conclusion: What is global social science?

Having explored the historical background and functioning of the globalizing field of
the social sciences a few general conclusions may be drawn. Globalization is best seen
as a new phase in a much longer process of internationalization. In the modern era these
698 Current Sociology 62(5)

exchanges have been organized primarily in and through international organizations.

Since in the latter part of the twentieth century the tripartite division into capitalist
democracies, socialist regimes and developing countries has made way for a more
‘global’ world order, and new technologies facilitate communication worldwide, inter-
dependencies on a more global scale have come to the fore and are also affecting the
social sciences. What is referred to as ‘global social science’ is best understood in a
twofold sense. The expression refers, more generally, to the fact that the social sciences
nowadays exist in nearly all countries around the globe, while, more specifically, it
refers to a variety of institutions that have arisen on the global level. These global insti-
tutional arrangements significantly shape the production, circulation and reception of
the social sciences in all individual countries. This global field in the more restricted
sense consists of the older international organizations, which have obtained a more
global scope, and of new organizations – journals, networks, associations – which
equally aspire to a global role.
Although globalization has attracted enormous attention, it has obscured a process
that is currently perhaps a more important mode of internationalization: transnational
regionalization. In many parts of the world – North America is the main exception –
transnational regional structures are emerging – research councils, journals, professional
associations, databases. They have not only gained a more prominent role, but also mod-
ify the actual and potential role of global organizations. The social sciences today, there-
fore, form a four-level structure. In addition to the local and the national level, both the
transnational regional and the global level have become increasingly important, espe-
cially for peripheral and semi-peripheral groups, which have become more dependent on
the dominant centres. In order to understand contemporary forms of internationalization,
it is especially important to gain a better understanding of what happens on both transna-
tional levels, how institutions on these levels function and how they interact and inter-
relate with each other.

Acknowledgements
Parts of this article are extensions and elaborations of arguments that have been made in other
papers (Heilbron, 2012; Heilbron et al., 2008). The present text is based on lectures given for the
Third Flying University of Transnational Humanities (FUTH), Hanyang University in Seoul,
Korea (July 2012), and the Sociology Department of Bergen University, Norway (December
2012). I would like to thank the participants for their questions and comments; I am also indebted
to two anonymous reviewers.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. The pattern discussed concerns the main social science disciplines. As Nicolas Guilhot has
shown, however, certain disciplines and especially smaller research specialities like interna-
tional relations may well emerge out of an international network which precedes their estab-
lishment within national systems of higher education (Guilhot, submitted).
Heilbron 699

2. The citation study was based on the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts
and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI); it was published in the Times Higher Education
Supplement, 26 March 2009.
3. The calculation is based on data about the Fifth Framework Programme, which were multi-
plied by a factor corresponding to the size of the Fourth and Sixth Framework Programmes,
see EU (2010). For data about the three Framework Programmes between 1994 and 2006, see
Kovács and Kutsar (2010).
4. The databases referred to are the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and
Humanities Citation Index (AHCI).
5. Of the 529 research projects funded by the three Frameworks Programmes (1994–2006),
110 were coordinated in the UK, 88 in Germany, 76 in France, 44 in Italy and 40 in the
Netherlands; see Kovács and Kutsar (2010: 107).
6. The definition of the social sciences and the humanities varies significantly across academic
systems; in this passage I have followed the definition of the two databases that were used:
the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI).
For a comprehensive view of the European intellectual field see Sapiro (2009).
7. Figure 1 is based on a hitherto unpublished secondary analysis of a bibliometric study by
the French centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS); for provisional results see
Heilbron (2009).
8. Although journal submissions do not depend on the nationality of the authors, virtually all
major social journals remain national in the sense that a large majority of the editors work in
a single country. In that sense one can still speak of British, German or American journals.

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Author biography
Johan Heilbron is a historical sociologist at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science poli-
tique de la Sorbonne (CESSP-CNRS-EHESS) in Paris, and Erasmus University Rotterdam. His
work is on the development of the social sciences, economic institutions as well on transnational
exchange and cultural globalization. Relevant book publications include The Rise of Social Theory
(Polity Press, 1995, also in French and Dutch), The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation
of Modernity (co-edited, 2001) and Pour une histoire des sciences socials: hommage à Pierre
Bourdieu (co-edited, 2004).

Résumé
A partir d’une analyse de la mondialisation des sciences sociales, cet article propose une
interprétation historique de l’évolution des échanges transnationaux dans les sciences
sociales. Les formes antérieures de circulation internationale de ces informations sont
bien différentes des récentes collaborations internationales apparues à la fin du vingtième
siècle. En examinant de manière approfondie ce processus de mondialisation, l’article sug-
gère que sa caractéristique principale est constituée par une structure centre-périphérie
comprenant un centre duopolistique euro-américain, de multiples semi-périphéries et
une grande variété de périphéries. Mettant l’accent sur une approche globale, la plupart
des recherches antérieures ont négligé l’émergence des structures transnationales
régionales. La formation d’un champ transnational européen des sciences sociales sert
d’exemple pour illustrer le processus de régionalisation transnationale. Les sciences
sociales à l’échelle mondiale peuvent se concevoir comme une structure à quatre niveaux.
Au-delà des niveaux nationaux et locaux, les échelles régionales transnationales et mon-
diales occupent une place de plus en plus importante. Une meilleure compréhension de
la mondialisation demande davantage d’études précises sur ces deux niveaux, en tant que
tels et du point de vue de l’évolution de leur interconnection.

Mot-clés
Champ global, internationalisation, mondialisation, régionalisme transnationale, système
mondial

Resumen
Explorando la “globalización” de las ciencias sociales, este artículo, en primer lugar, pre-
senta una interpretación histórica de cómo ha evolucionado el intercambio transna-
cional de las ciencias sociales. Formas anteriores de circulación internacional son difer-
enciadas de los acuerdos más globales que han surgido desde finales del siglo XX.
Teniendo en cuenta este campo de la globalización con más detalle, se argumenta que la
Heilbron 703

característica predominante es una estructura centro-periferia, con un núcleo de duopo-

lio Euro-Americano, múltiples semi-periferias y una amplia gama de las periferias.
Centrándose en el nivel global, sin embargo, la mayor parte de la investigación existente
ha dejado de lado el surgimiento de estructuras regionales transnacionales. La formación
de un campo transnacional europeo de las ciencias sociales es tomado como un ejemplo
de este proceso de regionalización transnacional. Las ciencias sociales en todo el mundo,
por lo tanto, pueden ser vistas como una estructura de cuatro niveles. Además del nivel
local y nacional, las estructuras regionales y mundiales, así como multinacionales han
adquirido cada vez mayor importancia, y una mejor comprensión de la “globalización”
requiere de estudios más precisos de ambos niveles, por derecho propio, así como en
su interconexiones en desarrollo.

Palabras clave
Campo global, globalización, internacionalización, regionalismo transnacional, sistema
mundial