ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Book Reviewing and (Inter)disciplinarity in Postwar Science

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

It is widely recognized that book reviews have played a central role in the evaluation and communication of scientific knowledge. In addition to their well-known evaluative and communicative functions, however, book reviews have also served as important sites of disciplinary formation and interaction. This organized session addresses these additional, yet often overlooked, functions of scientific book reviewing. Focusing on the postwar period, the session examines the book review as an academic genre through which scientific disciplines negotiated their relations with neighboring disciplines as well as their own identities. Furthermore, it demonstrates how book reviews contributed to the exchange and reformulation of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. To clarify these functions of book reviewing in the history of science, the three papers in this session present in-depth case studies of book reviewing in scientific journals positioned within and between the twentieth-century disciplines of economics, history, psychology, sociology, and biology.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Projit Bihari Mukharji, Ashoka University

Individual Presentations

• The Functions of Book Reviews in Economics: The Case of Three Essays on the State of Economic Science by Tjalling C. Koopmans (1958) - Julien Gradoz, CLHDPP, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3

• Disciplinarity under Review: Sociobiology and its reception, 1975-1978 - Cora Stuhrmann, LMU Munich

• Book Reviewing in Interdisciplinary History and Psychology, 1970–2000 - Sjang ten Hagen, Utrecht University

Session Organizers

• Sjang ten Hagen, Utrecht University

• Cora Stuhrmann, LMU Munich