Social Sciences at the Crossroads: Standardisation and Differentiation of a Century of Academic Thought

Abstract

modelling. The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Economics to the Americans Gary S. Becker, Robert Fogel and Douglass C. North or to Amartya Sen in the 1990s is representative of a trend in which socio-economic elements are of greater importance. Fogel, in fact, is more of a historian than a genuine economist and North discusses authors like Polanyi meticulously and quotes sociologists such as Berger and Luckmann (1966). In his writings, Sen stands out precisely because of the failure of a coherent theoretical model to materialise in the abstract. Altogether, with regard to North American developments this points to a turning point, which, in the words of Ernst Helmstedt could be described as 'circular progress' (1984, p. 2). Out of academic necessity, this transposition of the 'mainstream' in North American economics will also take place in Europe in all probability. Without a doubt sociology has great prospects in that its competencies are clear and are brought into discussions. Also significant is the fact that it does not retreat sulkily into its selfselected shell, but on the contrary, actively seeks to demonstrate its strengths. Sociology is in a position to claim that matters of commercial style, cultural attitude, ethnic specificity, social factors such as networks and other forms of 'human relations' are its prime subjects. The 'Commission on Behavioural Social Sciences and Education', initiated by the 'National Research Council' in the USA during the 1980s (Gerstein et al, 1988), made it clear that there is a range of important research topics and emphases that involve sociology in some kind of interdisciplinary co-operation. The context of sociology within spatially and temporally related disciplines (i.e. geography and history) is especially relevant with regard to theories with a moderate range of application and in the co-operation of metatheoretical and substantial questions and not in historical formulation of models and abstraction. Particularly in North American discussions the broad spectrum of authors on historical and comparative sociology is representative of such a programme. The British sociologist Philip Abrams m 'Historical Sociology' (1980) described this