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Creative marginality. Innovation at the intersection of the social sciences
670
Book Reviews
rather than the God who willed to become man, the humble God of true Christianity. In wishing to move beyond a concept of God as self-sufficient and absolute subjectivity, Jungel rightly presents Barth as searching for more enlightenment rather than less. Peter Forster
St. John’s College, University of Durham
The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100-1400, Robin Frame, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) x + 256 pp. 3Z22.50,Hardback;%.85,
Series: Opus Paperback.
The idea of the nation-state is conventionally traced to the French Revolution, but in the Middle Ages kingdoms sometimes claimed an ethnic basis. In the British Isles. the kingdom of the English and the kingdom of the Scats were firmly established in the period 1100-1400, but they contained at first a complex mix of ethnic groups, and the different social strata were divided ethnically. The Norman conquest of Britain with its feudal system brought the essential structure of state organisation which could lead to nationstates. Paradoxically, the ruling Normans were culturally assimilated to the native population in matters of language and ethnicity through intermarriage, and the project of expansion from London through Wales, Ireland and Scotland foundered when the natives and their Norman converts developed rival national identities. So by the end of the Middle Ages, the modern nations of the British Isles were formed. The question of nationhood remained ambiguous however, as it still does. How different are the English, Scats, Welsh and Irish from each other? What political system is appropriate for these nations-total independence, federal diversity, devolution, or provincial administration? Perhaps even a new ‘Europe of the States and Regions’ will emerge to take us back to something like the medieval European polity. Robin Frame brings the skill of the medieval historian to these questions, and his account is a fascinating puzzle to readers accustomed to modern categories of political system, What is clear is that many of our ideas of political identity and state structure were in process of formation at this time, and our understanding of contemporary problems is enhanced by the study of their historical background. It is a pity that the link between past and present is difficult to make when the historian’s antipathy to (or ignorance of) political science theory divides historical literature from that in the social sciences. James G. Kellas
Univer.s~ryof Cfasgow
Creative Marginality. Innovation at the Intersection of the Social Sciences, Mattei Dogan and Robert Pahre (Oxford: Westview Press, 1990), ix +278 pp., $34.85 (SC), paper. The authors’ thesis is that ‘innovation in the social sciences occurs more often and with more important results at the intersections of disciplines. This is both cause and effect of a continual fragmentation of the social sciences into narrow specialities and the recombination of these specialities across disciplinary lines into what we term “hybrid” fields’. Far from being ‘in~erdisciplina~’ (the authors repudiate the very notion), innovation in social sciences like political science, sociology, economics and history (and
Book Reviews
671
psychology, but with less evidence for the claim) takes place ‘in the area where two specialized subfields of formal disciplines overlap’. An analysis of numerous instances of conceptual, theoretical and/or methodological reorientation in and between any two of these disciplines reveals a multi-phased process in which movement in the direction of increased specialisation leads to fragmentation, followed by subsequent recombinations of those parts of two disciplines at the margin or boundary of their respective territories. The thesis and general line of argument developed in the text not only deny the validity of ‘interdisciplinary’ studies as anything more than one part of this process frozen in time and space- therefore an overly abstract and unreal basis for understanding innovation in these disciplines. They repudiate the ‘star system’ as well, contending (as noted) that innovation happens far more often and in ways significantly different from what the conventional wisdom tells us (c.f. Crane). For the authors (social) scientific progress is incremental, and innovation is a ‘mass phenomenon’, an inevitable upshot of ‘normal science’ itself, if not a bona@e part of its ongoing reality, it would seem. At the same time, however, once we observe scholars adapting new and novel concepts, theories and methods from other disciplines, we know that ‘the major innovations have already been made. This is the “paradox of density” ‘. As an ongoing phenomenon, we thus must be prepared, analytically speaking, to step into the process, such as it is, at any point, as this excerpt makes clear. Innovation is in one sense the idea or practice that gets this mass phenomenon going, not the mass phenomenon itself. In another sense, however, no idea or practice that is not socially recognised and accepted can count as an innovation, so both the suggested recombination at the margin of two disciplines and the mass phenomenon of recognition and acceptance are essential features of an adequate definition of what constitutes innovation in the social sciences cited. Not only are the authors’ observations and conclusions sensible and useful for dislodging overly personalised ‘great man’ (or person) notions of innovation. In effect, they serve to demarcate in a basic way discovery in the natural sciences and invention in technology from innovation, while avoiding a number of difficulties found in ‘sociology of science’ accounts of the process/phenomenon. Their emphasis on the relative ‘availability’ of the concept of innovation, and their consequent denial of a more restricted notion, is based on careful observations and notations of what has actually happened over time in these disciplines, and demonstrates to this reviewer’s satisfaction that research must focus, as the authors have, on the many and varied ways that recognition and acceptance is given. As a central feature of ‘normal science’, rather than something either wholly exceptional or extraordinary, they develop further the idea of recombination so well articulated by Barnett in 1953 (though Barr.ett is not to be found in the references or bibliography). Recombination addresses innovations as the emergence of newpatterns based on ideas, relations, processes, practices, methods, concepts and theories that already exist in the world, which explains both the relative ‘availability’ of innovation to scholars in these fields and the sense it makes to focus on acceptance and recognition associal practices and processes dependent on comprehension and understanding. Innovations are thus new or novel mainly in this sense, and it is necessary to follow them through employing history of science approaches in order to understand the process and the phenomenon which the authors have described. The fact that this occurs at the boundaries of given disciplines (‘margins’) and between only two at a time reinforces the notion of their relative availability and the role of acceptance and recognition. As noted, it is the forms this acceptance and recognition take, as well as the eventual transmogrification of these innovations into established social scientific conceptual, theoretical and methodological practices which provides us with a real window on the process/phenomenon of innovation.
Book Reviews
672
One way of looking at innovation-a Weberian way-would be to see it as the charismatic reshuffling of already existing elements which specialisation and rationalisation are heading toward stasis, as Crozier has done. The authors’ key point, however-a very sound one in my view-is that this particular process reaches ‘natural limits’ which, though not specifiable, can be expected to manifest themselves once the fragmentation that results from specialisation has gone too far. It is at this point (if not before) that recombination can be expected to occur, but only at the boundaries or margins and only between two disciplines at a time. Both the historical record and common sense would seem to bear this out, in contrast to Kuhn’s highly restricted notion of scientific revolutions (in contrast to Popper) which, as Toulmin has demonstrated, would render even Copernicus’ discoveries ‘non revolutionary’. Polanyi’s ‘republic of [natural] science’ is much closer to what the authors have in mind in this study, since it contains both the idea that innovation occurs at the margins and the view that normally only two disciplines are involved in this process/phenomenon. In both cases, it would appear that we must explain how it is that in the natural as well as the social sciences innovations can occur in the ways described and recorded at the pace indicated and with the corollary acceptance and recognition necessitated and still not fundamentally dislodge these established disciplines from their perch. But is this really the case, or are the authors of this text perhaps correct to imply that it is precisely these disciplines which musf, as it were, stay the same in order to provide the (very slowly shifting) boundaries which provide the margins of intersection between two disciplines which innovation requires? In a critique of Kuhn’s conception of theoretical change in the natural sciences (itself an example of what the authors are arguing), I stressed a similar need to attend to what does not change as a base point for studying change in scientific disciplines. It is therefore the gradual impact over time of these innovations (eg. specialisations, fragmentations, recombinations, acceptances, etc) on the disciplines themseIves which provides us with what is perhaps the most consequential clue to the role of change in the social, no less than the natural, sciences. The authors are to be commended for demonstrating the important role an understanding of the history of the social sciences (as opposed to the sociology, psychology or philosopy of [social] science) must play in coming to grips with the complex, yet comprehensible, process/phenomenon of innovation in these disciplines. True to their understanding, they would themselves appear to have been innovative in the way they claim that it occurs in their own (and allied) disciplines. This is an important book. H.T. Wilson York University,
Toronto
REFERENCES H. Barnett, Innovation (N.Y., 1953). D. Crane, Invisible Colleges (Chicago, 1972). P. Diesing, Patterns of Discovery in the Social Sciences (New York, 1972). T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed (Chicago, 1969). M. Polanyi, ‘The Republic of Science’, Minerva, Volume I (1962), pp. 54-73. K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York, 1961, originally published S. Toulmin, Human Understanding, Volume I (Princeton, 1972). H.T. Wilson, The American Ideology (London, 1977), chapter 4.
1934).
Book Reviews
rather than the God who willed to become man, the humble God of true Christianity. In wishing to move beyond a concept of God as self-sufficient and absolute subjectivity, Jungel rightly presents Barth as searching for more enlightenment rather than less. Peter Forster
St. John’s College, University of Durham
The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100-1400, Robin Frame, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) x + 256 pp. 3Z22.50,Hardback;%.85,
Series: Opus Paperback.
The idea of the nation-state is conventionally traced to the French Revolution, but in the Middle Ages kingdoms sometimes claimed an ethnic basis. In the British Isles. the kingdom of the English and the kingdom of the Scats were firmly established in the period 1100-1400, but they contained at first a complex mix of ethnic groups, and the different social strata were divided ethnically. The Norman conquest of Britain with its feudal system brought the essential structure of state organisation which could lead to nationstates. Paradoxically, the ruling Normans were culturally assimilated to the native population in matters of language and ethnicity through intermarriage, and the project of expansion from London through Wales, Ireland and Scotland foundered when the natives and their Norman converts developed rival national identities. So by the end of the Middle Ages, the modern nations of the British Isles were formed. The question of nationhood remained ambiguous however, as it still does. How different are the English, Scats, Welsh and Irish from each other? What political system is appropriate for these nations-total independence, federal diversity, devolution, or provincial administration? Perhaps even a new ‘Europe of the States and Regions’ will emerge to take us back to something like the medieval European polity. Robin Frame brings the skill of the medieval historian to these questions, and his account is a fascinating puzzle to readers accustomed to modern categories of political system, What is clear is that many of our ideas of political identity and state structure were in process of formation at this time, and our understanding of contemporary problems is enhanced by the study of their historical background. It is a pity that the link between past and present is difficult to make when the historian’s antipathy to (or ignorance of) political science theory divides historical literature from that in the social sciences. James G. Kellas
Univer.s~ryof Cfasgow
Creative Marginality. Innovation at the Intersection of the Social Sciences, Mattei Dogan and Robert Pahre (Oxford: Westview Press, 1990), ix +278 pp., $34.85 (SC), paper. The authors’ thesis is that ‘innovation in the social sciences occurs more often and with more important results at the intersections of disciplines. This is both cause and effect of a continual fragmentation of the social sciences into narrow specialities and the recombination of these specialities across disciplinary lines into what we term “hybrid” fields’. Far from being ‘in~erdisciplina~’ (the authors repudiate the very notion), innovation in social sciences like political science, sociology, economics and history (and
Book Reviews
671
psychology, but with less evidence for the claim) takes place ‘in the area where two specialized subfields of formal disciplines overlap’. An analysis of numerous instances of conceptual, theoretical and/or methodological reorientation in and between any two of these disciplines reveals a multi-phased process in which movement in the direction of increased specialisation leads to fragmentation, followed by subsequent recombinations of those parts of two disciplines at the margin or boundary of their respective territories. The thesis and general line of argument developed in the text not only deny the validity of ‘interdisciplinary’ studies as anything more than one part of this process frozen in time and space- therefore an overly abstract and unreal basis for understanding innovation in these disciplines. They repudiate the ‘star system’ as well, contending (as noted) that innovation happens far more often and in ways significantly different from what the conventional wisdom tells us (c.f. Crane). For the authors (social) scientific progress is incremental, and innovation is a ‘mass phenomenon’, an inevitable upshot of ‘normal science’ itself, if not a bona@e part of its ongoing reality, it would seem. At the same time, however, once we observe scholars adapting new and novel concepts, theories and methods from other disciplines, we know that ‘the major innovations have already been made. This is the “paradox of density” ‘. As an ongoing phenomenon, we thus must be prepared, analytically speaking, to step into the process, such as it is, at any point, as this excerpt makes clear. Innovation is in one sense the idea or practice that gets this mass phenomenon going, not the mass phenomenon itself. In another sense, however, no idea or practice that is not socially recognised and accepted can count as an innovation, so both the suggested recombination at the margin of two disciplines and the mass phenomenon of recognition and acceptance are essential features of an adequate definition of what constitutes innovation in the social sciences cited. Not only are the authors’ observations and conclusions sensible and useful for dislodging overly personalised ‘great man’ (or person) notions of innovation. In effect, they serve to demarcate in a basic way discovery in the natural sciences and invention in technology from innovation, while avoiding a number of difficulties found in ‘sociology of science’ accounts of the process/phenomenon. Their emphasis on the relative ‘availability’ of the concept of innovation, and their consequent denial of a more restricted notion, is based on careful observations and notations of what has actually happened over time in these disciplines, and demonstrates to this reviewer’s satisfaction that research must focus, as the authors have, on the many and varied ways that recognition and acceptance is given. As a central feature of ‘normal science’, rather than something either wholly exceptional or extraordinary, they develop further the idea of recombination so well articulated by Barnett in 1953 (though Barr.ett is not to be found in the references or bibliography). Recombination addresses innovations as the emergence of newpatterns based on ideas, relations, processes, practices, methods, concepts and theories that already exist in the world, which explains both the relative ‘availability’ of innovation to scholars in these fields and the sense it makes to focus on acceptance and recognition associal practices and processes dependent on comprehension and understanding. Innovations are thus new or novel mainly in this sense, and it is necessary to follow them through employing history of science approaches in order to understand the process and the phenomenon which the authors have described. The fact that this occurs at the boundaries of given disciplines (‘margins’) and between only two at a time reinforces the notion of their relative availability and the role of acceptance and recognition. As noted, it is the forms this acceptance and recognition take, as well as the eventual transmogrification of these innovations into established social scientific conceptual, theoretical and methodological practices which provides us with a real window on the process/phenomenon of innovation.
Book Reviews
672
One way of looking at innovation-a Weberian way-would be to see it as the charismatic reshuffling of already existing elements which specialisation and rationalisation are heading toward stasis, as Crozier has done. The authors’ key point, however-a very sound one in my view-is that this particular process reaches ‘natural limits’ which, though not specifiable, can be expected to manifest themselves once the fragmentation that results from specialisation has gone too far. It is at this point (if not before) that recombination can be expected to occur, but only at the boundaries or margins and only between two disciplines at a time. Both the historical record and common sense would seem to bear this out, in contrast to Kuhn’s highly restricted notion of scientific revolutions (in contrast to Popper) which, as Toulmin has demonstrated, would render even Copernicus’ discoveries ‘non revolutionary’. Polanyi’s ‘republic of [natural] science’ is much closer to what the authors have in mind in this study, since it contains both the idea that innovation occurs at the margins and the view that normally only two disciplines are involved in this process/phenomenon. In both cases, it would appear that we must explain how it is that in the natural as well as the social sciences innovations can occur in the ways described and recorded at the pace indicated and with the corollary acceptance and recognition necessitated and still not fundamentally dislodge these established disciplines from their perch. But is this really the case, or are the authors of this text perhaps correct to imply that it is precisely these disciplines which musf, as it were, stay the same in order to provide the (very slowly shifting) boundaries which provide the margins of intersection between two disciplines which innovation requires? In a critique of Kuhn’s conception of theoretical change in the natural sciences (itself an example of what the authors are arguing), I stressed a similar need to attend to what does not change as a base point for studying change in scientific disciplines. It is therefore the gradual impact over time of these innovations (eg. specialisations, fragmentations, recombinations, acceptances, etc) on the disciplines themseIves which provides us with what is perhaps the most consequential clue to the role of change in the social, no less than the natural, sciences. The authors are to be commended for demonstrating the important role an understanding of the history of the social sciences (as opposed to the sociology, psychology or philosopy of [social] science) must play in coming to grips with the complex, yet comprehensible, process/phenomenon of innovation in these disciplines. True to their understanding, they would themselves appear to have been innovative in the way they claim that it occurs in their own (and allied) disciplines. This is an important book. H.T. Wilson York University,
Toronto
REFERENCES H. Barnett, Innovation (N.Y., 1953). D. Crane, Invisible Colleges (Chicago, 1972). P. Diesing, Patterns of Discovery in the Social Sciences (New York, 1972). T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed (Chicago, 1969). M. Polanyi, ‘The Republic of Science’, Minerva, Volume I (1962), pp. 54-73. K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York, 1961, originally published S. Toulmin, Human Understanding, Volume I (Princeton, 1972). H.T. Wilson, The American Ideology (London, 1977), chapter 4.
1934).