Academic Autonomy Beyond the Nation-State. The Social Sciences and Humanities in the European Research Council

Staats- und Gesellschaftswissenschaften

Baier, Christian, Gengnagel, Vincent

Academic Autonomy Beyond the Nation-State. The Social Sciences and Humanities in the European Research Council

Baier, Christian, Gengnagel, Vincent: Academic Autonomy Beyond the Nation-State. The Social Sciences and Humanities in the European Research Council, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 2018; Jg. 43 (1): 65-92: http://10.1007/s11614-018-0297-7 (download: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11614-018-0297-7) .

Originalarbeiten in wissenschaftlichen Fachzeitschriften mit Review-Verfahren

The social sciences and humanities (SSH) traditionally have a close relationship to the nation-state and there are substantial disciplinary differences across countries. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of the academic field, the present article examines how academic autonomy and heteronomy are applied as discursive strategies as the SSH compete for funding in the transnational European arena established by the European Research Council (ERC). To this end, we analyze mission statements of ERC Starting Grant projects in the SSH, using a mixed methods approach of statistical text analysis (topic modeling) and qualitative content analysis. Although the ERC puts the SSH under the constraints of academic capitalism, the classical humanities secure a strong position by signaling academic autonomy and engaging in the construction and consecration of European culture. However, economics and other social sciences gravitate toward a more heteronomous self-representation, emphasizing the political and social utility of their research, while disciplines like neuro-science and psychology exhibit self-representations closely related to the “hard sciences”—and relatively alien to the SSH.

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http://10.1007/s11614-018-0297-7

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