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

Each contributor has been an articulator of diverse disciplines. Boulding spans economics, mathematics and sociology; Coleman relates mathematics and sociology., Etzioni, organizational sociology and international relations; Kardiner, psychiatry and anthropology; Klausner, sociology and psychology; Levy, social theory and sinology; Pool, sociology and political science; Rapoport, biology, mathematics, philosophy, psychology and sociology; and Tiryakian, sociology and philosophy. They were chosen as men familiar with the problem of bridging disciplines, to build an image of a total society. (Klausner, 1967, p. 15)

Replace the word discipline, with "polyspecialty" and add a generous dose of history, and you will have a better idea of the real content of this book.

As it has matured and spread out in every direction, sociology has become aware of its excessive fragmentation and of its dispersal and has felt the need to come back to its center without yet succeeding. This process is described by Ralph Turner (1991): "Sociology has gone through a cycle from emphasizing theory with little testable empirical basis to an atheoretical empiricism and back to the evaluation of research primarily for its relevance to grand theory" (p. 63). But at no time has sociology been willing to. retreat behind its official borders.

Political Science: Borrowing from Neighbors

All major issues are crossing the formal borders of political science: the breakdown of democracy, anarchy, war and peace, generational change, the nexus of freedom-quality, individualism in advanced societies, fundamentalism in traditional societies, ruling class, public opinion. There is no communication between two political scientists analyzing the crisis of the social security system, one by abstract modeling and the other by vernacular language. The first is in contact with modelers in economics, and the second cites scholars from other disciplines.

There are many hybrid branches of political science. political sociology, political psychology, political philosophy, political geography, public administration, area studies, and so on. Other hybrid fields or subfields can be mentioned. mass behavior (related to social psychology), elite recruitment (related to sociology and history), urban politics (related to social geography), welfare states (related to social economy and social history), values (related to philosophy, ethics, and social psychology) governmental capabilities (related to law and economics), poverty in tropical countries (related to agronomy, climatology, and economic geography), and development (related to all social sciences and to several natural sciences).

Between psychology and political science, there is a hybrid domain flying its own flag. political psychology. This is a hybrid at the third generation, because psychology itself was born as a hybrid discipline, rooted partly in the natural sciences and partly in the social sciences. Political psychology has two sisters: an older one, social psychology, formally recognized in all major universities of the world and a younger one, cognitive science, today the best endowed of the young sciences on both sides of the Atlantic. Political psychology rarely meets cognitive science, but it is in permanent contact with social psychology.