Alexander Szalai: A Transsystemic Career and Hungarian Sociology in the Cold War Era

IF 0.2 Q2 HISTORY
György Péteri
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Abstract

Abstract Through a detailed analysis of Alexander Szalai’s career as a major transsystemic academic entrepreneur in the Kádár era, this paper has been written to discern and assess how such activities impacted the ways in which science and scholarship worked at both sides of the systemic divide (the “Iron Curtain”). The single most important finding is the emergence of transsystemic spaces (fields), the undoing of national and systemic boundaries. These transsystemic configurations tended to provide social (formal and informal) frameworks within which reputations are generated and distributed, reputational hierarchies are established and reproduced. For scholars in the East such transsystemic spaces brought with them a great deal of good news: they could mean increased freedom and/or an unbiased assessment and genuine acknowledgement for what one has accomplished. Transsystemic fields brought with them a whole array of new (kinds of) opportunities. Acting as a nod of networks that generated transsystemic spaces could yield increased reputation and power at home. As all structures in the social world, however, transsystemic spaces could enable as well as constrain, they could propel you to the skies and might also crush you. As any other resources constituting social capital in academia, the space spanning along transsystemic networks of scholars and scientists could also be weaponized for the wrong purposes: they could enable impostors to acquire a status and reputation way over and above the person’s actual accomplishments, due to imperfect information available in foreign environments. Time would, of course, always show who they really are – but before that happens, they could bring havoc upon their field back home by distorted reputational hierarchies, by skewed distribution of competitive power between rivaling intellectual tendencies or “schools” and, eventually, by “paradigmatic” streamlining and contra-selection. This is, in a nutshell, what the story of A. Szalai shows.
亚历山大·萨莱:冷战时期的跨系统职业生涯与匈牙利社会学
本文通过对Alexander Szalai作为Kádár时代重要的跨系统学术企业家的职业生涯的详细分析,来辨别和评估这些活动是如何影响科学和学术在系统鸿沟(“铁幕”)两侧的工作方式的。最重要的发现是跨系统空间(场)的出现,国家和系统边界的瓦解。这些跨系统配置倾向于提供社会(正式和非正式)框架,在其中声誉产生和分布,声誉等级被建立和复制。对于东方的学者来说,这样的跨系统空间给他们带来了很多好消息:它们可能意味着更多的自由和/或对一个人所取得的成就进行公正的评估和真正的承认。跨系统领域带来了一系列新的(各种)机会。作为产生跨系统空间的网络节点,可以在国内提高声誉和权力。然而,就像社会世界中的所有结构一样,跨系统空间既可以限制你,也可以使你成为可能,它们可以把你推向天空,也可能把你压垮。正如任何其他构成学术界社会资本的资源一样,跨越学者和科学家跨系统网络的空间也可能被用于错误的目的:由于在外国环境中可获得的信息不完善,它们可能使冒名顶替者获得远远超过个人实际成就的地位和声誉。当然,时间总会证明他们的真实身份——但在这一切发生之前,他们可能会通过扭曲的声誉等级,通过在竞争的智力倾向或“学派”之间扭曲的竞争力分配,以及最终通过“范式”精简和反选择,给他们的家乡带来严重破坏。简而言之,这就是a . Szalai的故事。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.40
自引率
0.00%
发文量
23
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