Critical Nexus or Pluralist Discipline? Institutional Ambivalence and the Future of Canadian Sociology
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While some scholars believe in a transdisciplinary future for the social sciences and humanities, we argue that sociology would do well to maintain its disciplinary borders, while celebrating the plurality of its intellectual, social, and political content. Although a pluralist position can threaten disciplinary coherence and increase fragmentation, we argue the counterbalance ought to be convergence around shared institutional norms of knowledge production. Establishing these norms is not easy, since there is a great deal of institutional ambivalence at play in the field of sociology. As such, sociology is pushed and pulled between two poles of at least four major continuums of knowledge production, which include the following: (1) interdisciplinary versus discipline‐based research; (2) political versus analytical scholarship; (3) professional versus public/policy sociology; and (4) local/national versus global audiences. Since both sides of these ideal‐typical continuums contain their own pathologies, we propose adopting a balanced position to correct for the shortcomings of each. Rather than imposing one philosophical or theoretical paradigm for the field, we suggest that embracing the "chaos" of our diverse forms of knowledge and centralizing and integrating findings will serve to strengthen our collective efforts in the long term. Alors que certains chercheurs croient en un avenir transdisciplinaire pour les sciences sociales et humaines, nous soutenons qu'il serait préférable pour la sociologie de maintenir ses frontières disciplinaires, tout en célébrant la pluralité de son contenu intellectuel, social, et politique. Bien qu'une telle position pluraliste puisse menacer la cohérence disciplinaire et accroître la fragmentation, nous défendons l'idée que la contre‐balance doit converger vers des normes institutionnelles communes de production de connaissances. La mise en place de ces normes n'est pas chose aisée. Une large quantité d'ambivalence institutionnelle est en jeu dans le domaine de la sociologie. Ainsi nous tendons vers quatre grands continuums de production de connaissances : (1) la recherche interdisciplinaire en opposition à la recherche par discipline ; (2) une érudition politique en opposition à celle analytique ; (3) une sociologie professionnelle contre une sociologie publique / politique ; et (4) un public local / national contre un public mondial. Dans la mesure où deux côtés de ces continuums idéaux‐typiques contiennent leurs pathologies propres, nous proposons d'adopter une position équilibrée pour corriger les lacunes de chacun. Ceci devrait être mieux reflété dans nos systèmes de récompense. Plutôt que d'imposer un paradigme philosophique ou théorique pour un domaine en question, nous suggérons de prendre en considération le «chaos» de nos diverses formes de connaissances, tout en centralisant et en intégrant plus efficacement nos conclusions. Ceci permettra de renforcer nos efforts collectifs sur le long terme.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it