Matthias Duller | Central European University (original) (raw)
Books by Matthias Duller
Serendipities, 2020
Like any intellectual pursuit, social science is dependent on the international circulation of th... more Like any intellectual pursuit, social science is dependent on the international circulation of thought and thinkers in order to yield its promise of enlightening the understanding of the societies they study. The four articles in this special issue of Serendipities deal with various aspects of the international embeddedness of East European social sciences during the socialist period. While social sciences are typically strongly context-bound or "indexical" (Fleck et al. 2018)-meaning they refer to particular historical situations, the analysis of which does not always travel easily across time and cultures-knowledge of a multiplicity of social realities appears to be a precondition for imaginative social thought. This, it seems, places all social sciences in the context of a global history of thinking about the human condition.
This book presents an analysis of the institutional development of selected social science and hu... more This book presents an analysis of the institutional development of selected social science and humanities (SSH) disciplines in Argentina, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Where most narratives of a scholarly past are presented as a succession of ‘ideas,’ research results and theories, this collection highlights the structural shifts in the systems of higher education, as well as institutions of research and innovation (beyond the universities) within which these disciplines have developed. This institutional perspective will facilitate systematic comparisons between developments in various disciplines and countries. Across eight country studies the book reveals remarkably different dynamics of disciplinary growth between countries, as well as important interdisciplinary differences within countries. In addition, instances of institutional contractions and downturns and veritable breaks of continuity under authoritarian political regimes can be observed, which are almost totally absent from narratives of individual disciplinary histories. This important work will provide a valuable resource to scholars of disciplinary history, the history of ideas, the sociology of education and of scientific knowledge.
![Research paper thumbnail of Special issue of Stan Rzeczy [State of Affairs]: Sociology under state socialism](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/56958765/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Papers by Matthias Duller
Hungarian Studies Review, 2023
The primary sources published here were authored by the noted Hungarian-American historian István... more The primary sources published here were authored by the noted Hungarian-American historian István Deák (1926-2023). They provide a firsthand account of his expulsion from Hungary at the end of 1973 and also of his subsequent harassment by the Hungarian state security during his return trip in the summer of 1974. The documents are prefaced by an introduction to the various transAtlantic cultural exchange programs during the Cold War period, with a particular focus on the conflict between the Hungarian authorities and the International Research & Exchanges Board that was caused by Deák's expulsion.
Cultural Politics, Transfer & Propaganda: Mediated Narratives and Images in Austrian-American Relations, edited by Waldemar Zacharasiewicz and Siegfried Beer, 2021
Shaping Human Science Disciplines, 2019
An outline of the approach of the four years-collaborative research project International Coopera... more An outline of the approach of the four years-collaborative research project International Cooperation in the Social Sciences and Humanities (INTERCO-SSH) from which the book has emanated. The focus is on the changing institutional infrastructures of the social and human sciences since 1945 in eight countries of Europe and beyond. While arguing that the organizational structures of scholarly disciplines allow a more rewarding analysis than studying ideas directly, the heuristically most productive implication of the institutional perspective appears to be its openness to international and interdisciplinary comparisons. After establishing in some detail the semantic scope of the key concepts ‘discipline’ and ‘institutionalization’, the authors present the research design and selected data upon which the following chapters rest.
Shaping Human Science Disciplines, 2019
In the concluding remarks, the editors reflect upon lacunae and implications of the chapters pres... more In the concluding remarks, the editors reflect upon lacunae and implications of the chapters presented before. We discuss the legitimacy of choosing nation states as levels of analysis, the problem of international cooperation in the SSH and the absence of useful typologies of countries in the sphere of higher education as well as possible indicators upon which such typologies could be built. Using our own data as well as data from international organizations, we ask furthermore why disciplines show different growth rates between countries and over time. While we are unable to present detailed explanations of the growth of disciplines, we offer two more abstract ‘models’ indicating what we believe determines different growth rates of disciplines in international comparison.
Shaping Human Science Disciplines, 2019
German public life has been preoccupied with coming to terms with the Nazi past for decades. Whil... more German public life has been preoccupied with coming to terms with the Nazi past for decades. While the SSH were seen as an element of the re-education program, the power structures in West-German universities remained at first relatively untouched, opening possibilities for personal continuities to different degrees. Nevertheless, the authoritarian and extremely elitist habitus of the German professoriate disappeared within a generation and-a-half. After establishing the historical constitution of the academic and intellectual field from post-war, the establishment of the German Democratic Republic, 1968, 1989 to the Bologna process and the present, the chapter presents comparative narrative accounts and quantitative analysis of seven SSH disciplines over 70 years. A final section presents an analysis of German SSH scholars as public intellectuals.
Social Science History, 2022
Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, this article presents a systematic comparison of differen... more Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, this article presents a systematic comparison of differences in the institutional success of sociology in 25 European countries during the academic expansion from 1945 until the late 1960s. Combining context-sensitive national histories of sociology, concept formation, and formal analyses of necessary and sufficient conditions, the article searches for historical explanations for both successful and inhibited processes of the institutionalization of sociology. Concretely, it assesses the interplay of political regime types, the continuous presence of sociological prewar traditions, political Catholicism, and the effects of sociological communities in neighboring countries and how their various combinations are related to more or less well-established sociologies. The results can help explain adversary effects under democratic conditions as well as supportive factors under nondemocratic conditions.
Meilensteine der Soziologie, hg. v. Christian Fleck und Christian Dayé, 2020
Für die eilige Leserin Unter sozialen Mechanismen versteht man ein metatheoretisches Modell sozia... more Für die eilige Leserin Unter sozialen Mechanismen versteht man ein metatheoretisches Modell sozialwissenschaftlicher Erklärung. Soziale Mechanismen sind analytisch abstrahierte Beschreibungen von Prozessen, die zeigen, wie das Zusammenspiel bestimmter sozialer Einheiten mit bestimmten Eigenschaften unter bestimmten Bedingungen ein bestimmtes Ergebnis hervorbringt. Anders als statistische und kontrafaktische Erklärungen, begnügen sich mechanismische 1 Erklärungen nicht damit, die Ursache für ein Phänomen anzugeben, sondern wollen den generativen Prozess beschreiben, der die Ursache mit dem Ergebnis verknüpft. Einer gängigen Metapher folgend, wird die Black Box sozialer Kausalität geöffnet und die innere Mechanik sozialer Prozesse (die cogs and wheels, die nuts and bolts) offengelegt. Das Konzept der sozialen Mechanismen stellt damit in erster Linie eine Orientierung dar, was in den Augen ihrer VertreterInnen als gelungene soziologische Erklärung gilt. Seine Vertreter bezeichnen dieses Programm als einen pragmatischen Mittelweg zwischen stark abstrahierenden Theoriesystemen auf der einen Seite und theorieferner Empirie auf der anderen. Um Theorie und Empirie fruchtbar zu verknüpfen, streben soziale Mechanismen Semigeneralität an, d.h. Erklärungen beziehen sich auf genau bestimmte Phänomene, die jedoch in sehr unterschiedlichen Kontexten auftreten. Obwohl das Modell mechanismischer Erklärungen in der gesamten Geistesgeschichte identifiziert werden kann, begann das explizite Nachdenken über soziale Mechanismen als programmatisches Konzept soziologischer Forschung erst
Meilensteine der Soziologie, hg. v. Christian Fleck und Christian Dayé, 2020
Für die eilige Leserin Die historisch-komparative oder auch: vergleichende historische Soziologie... more Für die eilige Leserin Die historisch-komparative oder auch: vergleichende historische Soziologie ist heute ein kleines aber recht spezifisch umrissenes Subfeld der soziologischen Disziplin. Vor rund 80 Jahren waren ihre heutigen Vorbilder noch so zahlreich, dass man von historischer Soziologie kaum als einer Spezialisierung sprechen konnte, sondern von einem selbstverständlichen Bestandteil soziologischer Forschung. Wenn auch die Wiedergeburt in den 1980er Jahrenu.a. ausgelöst von Theda Skocpol (geb. 1947), die 1979 States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China veröffentlichteunzweifelhaft als Meilenstein der Soziologie gelten muss, bedarf der vorherige Niedergang der historischen Soziologie einer Erklärung. Für die Vorläufer wie für die Klassiker der Soziologie, allen voran Alexis de
Social Sciences in the "other Europe" since 1945, edited by Adela Hîncu and Victor Karády. Budapest: Pasts, Inc. CEU, 2018
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology, Volume 1: Core Areas in Sociology and the Development of the Discipline, edited by Kathleen Korgen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017
European Societies, 2017
This paper presents results from a collaborative research project investigating European scholars... more This paper presents results from a collaborative research project investigating European scholars from the social sciences and humanities (SSH) who acted as public intellectuals during the 2014 European Parliament (EP) election campaign. We analyze op-ed contributions published in 21 broadsheet newspapers and in 9 EU member states, written by 195 authors who contributed 262 articles. The result is a portrait of European SSH scholars acting as public intellectuals. It shows a clear overrepresentation of male authors of advanced age. Academic reputation and public prestige show an east–west divide, with prominent authors prevalently publishing in renowned “West European” newspapers. Disciplinary background offers the most noticeable differentiations. Political scientists are most active, however, predominantly publishing in domestic settings. By contrast, economists reach out to a wider international audience and write explicitly on EU matters, while intervening sociologists and philosophers, as the most senior intellectuals, examine Europe in its wider international and historical context. Correspondence analysis comprising the content of public interventions, and key characteristics of all contributors, suggests that even during the EU electoral campaign, scholars from the SSH do not necessarily contribute to the rise of a European public sphere, as their interventions are more domestic than European in focus.
History of the Human Sciences, 2016
This article has a dual purpose. First, it looks at the transfer of the methodology of systems an... more This article has a dual purpose. First, it looks at the transfer of the methodology of
systems analysis from the RAND Corporation to the International Institute for Applied
Systems Analysis (IIASA) in the wake of an East–West bridge-building effort during the
Cold War. Second, it draws out a more general argument about how the institutional
structures of these research organizations condition their methodological orientations.
Acknowledging the complexity of factors influencing methodological choices at RAND
and IIASA, the article concentrates on the centrality of institutional purpose, institutional
environments and internal organizational structure, and demonstrates how, when taken
together, these factors led to a methodological diversification at IIASA that is best
summarized as the internationalization of systems analysis.
Handbuch Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Soziologie. Band 2: Forschungsdesign, Theorien und Methoden, edited by Stephan Moebius and Andrea Ploder. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016
Area studies are the systematic efforts of knowledge production about particular world-regions th... more Area studies are the systematic efforts of knowledge production about particular world-regions through academic institutions often used to inform foreign policy strategies of national governments. Their history is a classic example to show the interrelatedness between the political history of the Cold War and the intellectual history of the social sciences in the twentieth century. This article outlines the emergence of area studies in the Soviet Union and the United States of America before turning to more recent trends and criticisms that characterize the field until today.
Book Reviews by Matthias Duller
International Sociology, 2022
Book review of: Andreas Kranebitter and Christoph Reinprecht (eds.), Die Soziologie und der Natio... more Book review of: Andreas Kranebitter and Christoph Reinprecht (eds.),
Die Soziologie und der Nationalsozialismus in Österreich [Sociology and National Socialism in Austria], Transcript: Bielefeld, 2019; 587pp. (incl. index): ISBN 9783837647334, €29.99 (paperback)
Serendipities, 2020
Like any intellectual pursuit, social science is dependent on the international circulation of th... more Like any intellectual pursuit, social science is dependent on the international circulation of thought and thinkers in order to yield its promise of enlightening the understanding of the societies they study. The four articles in this special issue of Serendipities deal with various aspects of the international embeddedness of East European social sciences during the socialist period. While social sciences are typically strongly context-bound or "indexical" (Fleck et al. 2018)-meaning they refer to particular historical situations, the analysis of which does not always travel easily across time and cultures-knowledge of a multiplicity of social realities appears to be a precondition for imaginative social thought. This, it seems, places all social sciences in the context of a global history of thinking about the human condition.
This book presents an analysis of the institutional development of selected social science and hu... more This book presents an analysis of the institutional development of selected social science and humanities (SSH) disciplines in Argentina, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Where most narratives of a scholarly past are presented as a succession of ‘ideas,’ research results and theories, this collection highlights the structural shifts in the systems of higher education, as well as institutions of research and innovation (beyond the universities) within which these disciplines have developed. This institutional perspective will facilitate systematic comparisons between developments in various disciplines and countries. Across eight country studies the book reveals remarkably different dynamics of disciplinary growth between countries, as well as important interdisciplinary differences within countries. In addition, instances of institutional contractions and downturns and veritable breaks of continuity under authoritarian political regimes can be observed, which are almost totally absent from narratives of individual disciplinary histories. This important work will provide a valuable resource to scholars of disciplinary history, the history of ideas, the sociology of education and of scientific knowledge.
Hungarian Studies Review, 2023
The primary sources published here were authored by the noted Hungarian-American historian István... more The primary sources published here were authored by the noted Hungarian-American historian István Deák (1926-2023). They provide a firsthand account of his expulsion from Hungary at the end of 1973 and also of his subsequent harassment by the Hungarian state security during his return trip in the summer of 1974. The documents are prefaced by an introduction to the various transAtlantic cultural exchange programs during the Cold War period, with a particular focus on the conflict between the Hungarian authorities and the International Research & Exchanges Board that was caused by Deák's expulsion.
Cultural Politics, Transfer & Propaganda: Mediated Narratives and Images in Austrian-American Relations, edited by Waldemar Zacharasiewicz and Siegfried Beer, 2021
Shaping Human Science Disciplines, 2019
An outline of the approach of the four years-collaborative research project International Coopera... more An outline of the approach of the four years-collaborative research project International Cooperation in the Social Sciences and Humanities (INTERCO-SSH) from which the book has emanated. The focus is on the changing institutional infrastructures of the social and human sciences since 1945 in eight countries of Europe and beyond. While arguing that the organizational structures of scholarly disciplines allow a more rewarding analysis than studying ideas directly, the heuristically most productive implication of the institutional perspective appears to be its openness to international and interdisciplinary comparisons. After establishing in some detail the semantic scope of the key concepts ‘discipline’ and ‘institutionalization’, the authors present the research design and selected data upon which the following chapters rest.
Shaping Human Science Disciplines, 2019
In the concluding remarks, the editors reflect upon lacunae and implications of the chapters pres... more In the concluding remarks, the editors reflect upon lacunae and implications of the chapters presented before. We discuss the legitimacy of choosing nation states as levels of analysis, the problem of international cooperation in the SSH and the absence of useful typologies of countries in the sphere of higher education as well as possible indicators upon which such typologies could be built. Using our own data as well as data from international organizations, we ask furthermore why disciplines show different growth rates between countries and over time. While we are unable to present detailed explanations of the growth of disciplines, we offer two more abstract ‘models’ indicating what we believe determines different growth rates of disciplines in international comparison.
Shaping Human Science Disciplines, 2019
German public life has been preoccupied with coming to terms with the Nazi past for decades. Whil... more German public life has been preoccupied with coming to terms with the Nazi past for decades. While the SSH were seen as an element of the re-education program, the power structures in West-German universities remained at first relatively untouched, opening possibilities for personal continuities to different degrees. Nevertheless, the authoritarian and extremely elitist habitus of the German professoriate disappeared within a generation and-a-half. After establishing the historical constitution of the academic and intellectual field from post-war, the establishment of the German Democratic Republic, 1968, 1989 to the Bologna process and the present, the chapter presents comparative narrative accounts and quantitative analysis of seven SSH disciplines over 70 years. A final section presents an analysis of German SSH scholars as public intellectuals.
Social Science History, 2022
Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, this article presents a systematic comparison of differen... more Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, this article presents a systematic comparison of differences in the institutional success of sociology in 25 European countries during the academic expansion from 1945 until the late 1960s. Combining context-sensitive national histories of sociology, concept formation, and formal analyses of necessary and sufficient conditions, the article searches for historical explanations for both successful and inhibited processes of the institutionalization of sociology. Concretely, it assesses the interplay of political regime types, the continuous presence of sociological prewar traditions, political Catholicism, and the effects of sociological communities in neighboring countries and how their various combinations are related to more or less well-established sociologies. The results can help explain adversary effects under democratic conditions as well as supportive factors under nondemocratic conditions.
Meilensteine der Soziologie, hg. v. Christian Fleck und Christian Dayé, 2020
Für die eilige Leserin Unter sozialen Mechanismen versteht man ein metatheoretisches Modell sozia... more Für die eilige Leserin Unter sozialen Mechanismen versteht man ein metatheoretisches Modell sozialwissenschaftlicher Erklärung. Soziale Mechanismen sind analytisch abstrahierte Beschreibungen von Prozessen, die zeigen, wie das Zusammenspiel bestimmter sozialer Einheiten mit bestimmten Eigenschaften unter bestimmten Bedingungen ein bestimmtes Ergebnis hervorbringt. Anders als statistische und kontrafaktische Erklärungen, begnügen sich mechanismische 1 Erklärungen nicht damit, die Ursache für ein Phänomen anzugeben, sondern wollen den generativen Prozess beschreiben, der die Ursache mit dem Ergebnis verknüpft. Einer gängigen Metapher folgend, wird die Black Box sozialer Kausalität geöffnet und die innere Mechanik sozialer Prozesse (die cogs and wheels, die nuts and bolts) offengelegt. Das Konzept der sozialen Mechanismen stellt damit in erster Linie eine Orientierung dar, was in den Augen ihrer VertreterInnen als gelungene soziologische Erklärung gilt. Seine Vertreter bezeichnen dieses Programm als einen pragmatischen Mittelweg zwischen stark abstrahierenden Theoriesystemen auf der einen Seite und theorieferner Empirie auf der anderen. Um Theorie und Empirie fruchtbar zu verknüpfen, streben soziale Mechanismen Semigeneralität an, d.h. Erklärungen beziehen sich auf genau bestimmte Phänomene, die jedoch in sehr unterschiedlichen Kontexten auftreten. Obwohl das Modell mechanismischer Erklärungen in der gesamten Geistesgeschichte identifiziert werden kann, begann das explizite Nachdenken über soziale Mechanismen als programmatisches Konzept soziologischer Forschung erst
Meilensteine der Soziologie, hg. v. Christian Fleck und Christian Dayé, 2020
Für die eilige Leserin Die historisch-komparative oder auch: vergleichende historische Soziologie... more Für die eilige Leserin Die historisch-komparative oder auch: vergleichende historische Soziologie ist heute ein kleines aber recht spezifisch umrissenes Subfeld der soziologischen Disziplin. Vor rund 80 Jahren waren ihre heutigen Vorbilder noch so zahlreich, dass man von historischer Soziologie kaum als einer Spezialisierung sprechen konnte, sondern von einem selbstverständlichen Bestandteil soziologischer Forschung. Wenn auch die Wiedergeburt in den 1980er Jahrenu.a. ausgelöst von Theda Skocpol (geb. 1947), die 1979 States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China veröffentlichteunzweifelhaft als Meilenstein der Soziologie gelten muss, bedarf der vorherige Niedergang der historischen Soziologie einer Erklärung. Für die Vorläufer wie für die Klassiker der Soziologie, allen voran Alexis de
Social Sciences in the "other Europe" since 1945, edited by Adela Hîncu and Victor Karády. Budapest: Pasts, Inc. CEU, 2018
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology, Volume 1: Core Areas in Sociology and the Development of the Discipline, edited by Kathleen Korgen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017
European Societies, 2017
This paper presents results from a collaborative research project investigating European scholars... more This paper presents results from a collaborative research project investigating European scholars from the social sciences and humanities (SSH) who acted as public intellectuals during the 2014 European Parliament (EP) election campaign. We analyze op-ed contributions published in 21 broadsheet newspapers and in 9 EU member states, written by 195 authors who contributed 262 articles. The result is a portrait of European SSH scholars acting as public intellectuals. It shows a clear overrepresentation of male authors of advanced age. Academic reputation and public prestige show an east–west divide, with prominent authors prevalently publishing in renowned “West European” newspapers. Disciplinary background offers the most noticeable differentiations. Political scientists are most active, however, predominantly publishing in domestic settings. By contrast, economists reach out to a wider international audience and write explicitly on EU matters, while intervening sociologists and philosophers, as the most senior intellectuals, examine Europe in its wider international and historical context. Correspondence analysis comprising the content of public interventions, and key characteristics of all contributors, suggests that even during the EU electoral campaign, scholars from the SSH do not necessarily contribute to the rise of a European public sphere, as their interventions are more domestic than European in focus.
History of the Human Sciences, 2016
This article has a dual purpose. First, it looks at the transfer of the methodology of systems an... more This article has a dual purpose. First, it looks at the transfer of the methodology of
systems analysis from the RAND Corporation to the International Institute for Applied
Systems Analysis (IIASA) in the wake of an East–West bridge-building effort during the
Cold War. Second, it draws out a more general argument about how the institutional
structures of these research organizations condition their methodological orientations.
Acknowledging the complexity of factors influencing methodological choices at RAND
and IIASA, the article concentrates on the centrality of institutional purpose, institutional
environments and internal organizational structure, and demonstrates how, when taken
together, these factors led to a methodological diversification at IIASA that is best
summarized as the internationalization of systems analysis.
Handbuch Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Soziologie. Band 2: Forschungsdesign, Theorien und Methoden, edited by Stephan Moebius and Andrea Ploder. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016
Area studies are the systematic efforts of knowledge production about particular world-regions th... more Area studies are the systematic efforts of knowledge production about particular world-regions through academic institutions often used to inform foreign policy strategies of national governments. Their history is a classic example to show the interrelatedness between the political history of the Cold War and the intellectual history of the social sciences in the twentieth century. This article outlines the emergence of area studies in the Soviet Union and the United States of America before turning to more recent trends and criticisms that characterize the field until today.
International Sociology, 2022
Book review of: Andreas Kranebitter and Christoph Reinprecht (eds.), Die Soziologie und der Natio... more Book review of: Andreas Kranebitter and Christoph Reinprecht (eds.),
Die Soziologie und der Nationalsozialismus in Österreich [Sociology and National Socialism in Austria], Transcript: Bielefeld, 2019; 587pp. (incl. index): ISBN 9783837647334, €29.99 (paperback)
National Identities, 2022
Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 2018
Serendipities - Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences , 2016
Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 2015
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences , 2017
s series Sociology Transformed is noteworthy for making national historical narratives of less we... more s series Sociology Transformed is noteworthy for making national historical narratives of less well-known sociologies available to an English-speaking audience. Besides providing great contextual detail, these little books offer an excellent opportunity for comparing the different roles sociology has played in a variety of societies. As presented, many of these short national histories of sociology expose highly interesting, complex, and often troubled trajectories. Kristoffer Kropp's history of Danish sociology is a good case in point, as the subtitle reveals.