Yves Gingras

This paper describes my experience at presenting episodes of history of science in brief radio presentations of 8 to 10 min to a large audience of people interested in science as well as in writing brief essays explaining the dynamic of science using historical cases. The paper describes the constraints of such format and how it differs from writing long and detailed scholarly papers.

In this article, we analyze the relative (in)visibility of authors in four countries that are central to the global production of sociology: France, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. A cross-comparison of these national fields shows that, although citation distributions consistently follow a power law, authors who are the most frequently cited in their national field are not necessarily those who are the most frequently cited abroad. Mapping the space of national and international visibility of authors in each analyzed country shows an invariant structure: a majority of authors are only visible nationally, fewer authors reach a large national visibility and relative international visibility, and even fewer authors reach a large national and international visibility. Thus, only a very few authors of the four countries achieve what we can call a ‘global’ visibility, which is associated with the production and circulation, through translations, of works of theoretical nature. Our findings generalize Etienne Ollion and Andrew Abbott’s analysis of the reception of French sociologists in the field of American sociology, by showing that their results have nothing specific to the French case and rather constitute a very general result that applies to the distribution of citations within any national field.

Cet article analyse les embauches des professeurs d’université dans le champ des sciences sociales au Québec (principalement en sociologie, science politique, économie, géographie, anthropologie, communication, psychologie/psychoéducation et travail social) entre 1900 et 2020. Nous montrons que la langue d’enseignement (français ou anglais), la position géographique (métropoles ou régions) de l’université d’embauche et le prestige perçu des universités d’obtention du doctorat et d’embauche constituent autant de facteurs contribuant à la structuration du marché de l’emploi universitaire québécois en sciences sociales. Nous mettons au jour un mouvement historique de « québécisation » des embauches, analogue au mouvement de « canadianisation » observé dans le reste du Canada, qui a débuté à la fin des années 1960, atteint son apogée à la fin des années 1990, et connu ensuite un recul au tournant du 21^e siècle dans le contexte des discours sur l’internationalisation des universités. Nous montrons finalement l’existence d’une féminisation des corps professoraux qui, pour être différenciée selon les disciplines, est continuelle depuis la fin des années 1960.

Economics has the reputation to be an insular discipline with little consideration for other social sciences and humanities (SSH). Recent research ( Angrist et al., 2020) challenges this perception of economics: the perception would be historically inaccurate and especially at odds with the recent interdisciplinarity of economics. By systematically studying citation patterns since the 1950s in thousands of journals, we offer the best established conclusions to date on this issue. Our results do show that the discipline is uniquely insular from a historical point of view. But we also document an important turn after the 1990s that drastically transformed the discipline as it became more open, very quickly, to the influence of management, environmental sciences and to a lesser degree, a variety of the SSH. While this turn made economics less uniquely insular, as of today economics remains the least outward-looking discipline with management among all SSH. Furthermore, unlike in the other major social sciences, the most influential journals in economics have not significantly contributed to the recent increase in the interdisciplinarity of the discipline. While economics is changing, it is too soon to claim that it has completed an interdisciplinary turn.

Censures à l’université : panique morale ou déni du réel ?. Un article de la revue Bulletin d'histoire politique (Le nouveau clivage idéologique du Québec au début du XXI^e siècle) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.