Structural Holes as a Resource Curse: Academic Dependency and Global Invisibility in Social Sciences

• In Event: 40858 - The Politics of Science Today

Abstract

Why do scientists from (semi)peripheral countries remain invisible to their international peers? Various explanations have been offered for this phenomenon, including the scarcity of research resources, brain drain, symbolic violence by the global Anglo-American academic establishment, and dependency rooted in an asymmetric division of academic labor. This paper elaborates on the latter approach, suggesting that global invisibility in the social sciences is a result of an inward orientation by scholars from peripheral countries, the most resourceful of whom exploit opportunities created by structural holes (Burt) that separate their local audiences from their global peers. Global invisibility is an unintended consequence of the spread of three practices that, in different ways, exploit the advantages offered by structural holes: (a) propositional import; (b) claim inflation; and (c) localized replications. The paper illustrates these three practices with the empirical example of sociology in Russia, which has one of the world's largest populations of researchers, yet has remained barely visible in the international academic landscape for many decades.

Author

• Mikhail Sokolov, Nazarbayev University