Knowledge Monopolies by Alan Shipman & Marten Shipman

Author:Alan Shipman & Marten Shipman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, sociology, philosophy, academisation, education, knowledge, academia, society, higher education, university, public, elitism, elite, academic social science, commodified knowledge, open society
ISBN: 9781845405229
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2016
Published: 2016-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

5. Prodigy to Problem Child: Academic Social Science

On top of providing essential inputs to ‘knowledge society’, universities make a unique claim to provide knowledge of society. This is the one area of study they can claim to have originated, and not just assimilated. Natural sciences long flourished outside the academy, and have never fully entered its control. Arts and humanities, similarly, were practised long before the arrival of the academy, and can still be successfully pursued outside them. Social sciences, by contrast, appeared on the scene as universities were undergoing their modern revival and expansion. Mutual interdependence was soon established, and co-evolution followed.

The academy rapidly absorbed the work of social science’s ‘founding fathers’, and fashioned them into the mainstream disciplines of politics, sociology, economics and psychology. Subsequent proliferation of subdisciplines, carved out of the mainstream, took place wholly within it. As the twentieth century progressed, social scientists stretched academic knowledge across an ever wider spectrum of human issues, from the ultimate to the intimate, with studies extending beyond the mainstream. They probed into motives and beliefs, ideologies and the unconscious, rationality and its reversals. Social science itself became a target for study, critical theorists accusing it of assisting capitalist oppression, racism and sexism. Thinking about people can change the way that they think. This in turn ensures that social science also changes. It makes academic ideas applicable to even the most idiosyncratic human behaviour. Social science is ubiquitous, defining new problems as well as suggesting solutions, and so creating new topics for study.

Exclusivity and Ubiquity

The most obvious evidence of this growing ubiquity is the number of students and staff engaged in social disciplines. These were the chief beneficiary of postwar research and teaching expansion, in Britain and elsewhere. In the majority of the 100+ UK universities at the start of the twenty-first century, the social sciences were the largest group of subjects, contributing to the largest number of professional courses. In more than a third, over 50% of the students were reading business or social studies. These have become major faculties in academia, integral to the training of a wide range of professionals. This uptake has helped them diffuse into the school curriculum, even when this is resisted by professional bodies such as the British Sociological Association. In the UK, social studies became available as school-leaving qualifications at 16 and 18, and were even introduced into primary schools. The school leavers faced similar questions to those set fifty years earlier for graduates, asking for information on social structure plus a little theory to explain how and why this has been organised.

Popular exposure to social sciences from an early age, even for those who do not go on to specialist courses in them, substantially strengthens universities’ social influence. The populace is now informed, and expects there to be experts on a wide range of economic, personal and social issues, just as much as it looks to medical doctors to give them better physical health or electronic engineers to give them better computers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.