The hybridization of social science knowledge - Navigating Among the Disciplines: The Library and Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Many examples could be cited of scholars coexisting in the same discipline without influencing one another, such as Angus Campbell and Paul Lazarsfeld, who, nevertheless devoted a large part of their lives to studying the same political behavior. The same remark can be made with reference to other topical fields. It is not a bad thing to pit theories one against the other, but there must be debate. There are no paradigms in the social sciences because each discipline is fragmented.

The more ambitious a theory is, the less it can be directly tested by the data available. In the social sciences, there are no "fundamental discoveries" as there sometimes available. In the natural sciences. Instead, unverifiable theories are constructed. Consider Malthusianism for instance. Is it a theory or a paradigm? Malthusianism is one of the major theories in the history of the social sciences. Malthus influenced many scientists, primarily Charles Darwin, who acknowledged Malthus as one of his main sources of inspiration. A host of sociologists, political scientists, demographers, and economists took their cue from Malthus either to agree or to disagree with him. But when demographic conditions changed in the West, Malthus's projections were invalidated, and he was condemned as a false prophet. However, if we consider today the gap between economic development and population growth in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, he could be hailed as a great visionary. We need only agree to an asynchronous comparison between the England of his time and the Third World to admit the asynchronous validity of his theory. Should we go further and talk of a Malthusian paradigm?

Today no paradigm seeks to order any discipline of the social sciences. In fact, the word paradigm should be excluded from the literature unless it is placed between quotation marks. The process of hybridization of specialties does not encounter disciplinary paradigms.

The Spread of Concepts, Methods, and Theories

Across Social Sciences

The process of hybridization consists first of all in borrowing and lending concepts, methods, and theories.

The Diffusion of Concepts

Numerous scholars have denounced the conceptual confusion and the polysemy of terms in various disciplines. This semantic problem comes from the spread of concepts from one discipline to another. Borrowed concepts need some adaptation to the context of the new discipline, because a concept is not only a, term, but it is also a notion or an idea. A recent study of more than 400 concepts used in the social sciences has found few neologisms, and this can be explained by the fact that more concepts are borrowed than created.

We can neglect the etymology of concepts in order to stress how borrowing fertilizes imagination. The word role comes from die theater, but Max Weber gave it a sociological meaning. From sociology this concept spread everywhere. The word revolution was proposed by Copernicus, but it was first applied to politics by Louis XIV. Historians adopted it, sociologists articulated it before offering it to political science. The patrimony of each social science is full of borrowed concepts, which are hybrids, in the sense that they were concocted in other disciplines and replanted skillfully into another. Using the International Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences (Sills, 1968) and the analytical indexes of some important books, this author has compiled an inventory of more than 200 concepts "imported" into political science. In the process of adoption and adaptation, many of these concepts have changed their semantic meaning.