Bjorn Wittrock – författare

Universities are said to be the 'powerhouses' of modern society. They educate leaders and advance our basic knowledge of nature and society. Yet historically they have been vulnerable when meeting the challenges of dynamic industrial democracies or indeed of modern totalitarian states. Today universities are at the centre of society's attention and must therefore balance a great number of contradictory demands and pressures. Can this be done within the structure and ethos of an historic institution called a 'university', or are such institutions now passé and merely part of a bureaucratically managed higher education 'system'? These essays discuss the ways in which universities have coped with complexity since 1800, while retaining their basic 'idea'. Special attention is accorded to the role of the State and the autonomous professions in defining the mission of universities and in their struggle for individuality in the face of mounting pluralistic and bureaucratic pressures.

Universities are said to be the 'powerhouses' of modern society. They educate leaders and advance our basic knowledge of nature and society. Yet historically they have been vulnerable when meeting the challenges of dynamic industrial democracies or indeed of modern totalitarian states. Today universities are at the centre of society's attention and must therefore balance a great number of contradictory demands and pressures. Can this be done within the structure and ethos of an historic institution called a 'university', or are such institutions now passé and merely part of a bureaucratically managed higher education 'system'? These essays discuss the ways in which universities have coped with complexity since 1800, while retaining their basic 'idea'. Special attention is accorded to the role of the State and the autonomous professions in defining the mission of universities and in their struggle for individuality in the face of mounting pluralistic and bureaucratic pressures.

This book, which represents probably the most comprehensive discussion of the emergence of modem social science yet produced, is of far more than merely historical interest. The contributors set out to rewrite the history of the social sciences and to show the limitations of conventional conceptions of their development. These tasks they accomplish with great success and much distinction. Yet in so doing they contribute in a direct way to our understanding of the relation between social analysis and the nature of human societies today. The brilliant and distinctive perspective of the papers in this collection is to demonstrate, with many specific examples, that social science and modem institutions have helped shape each other in mutual interplay. Modem systems are in some part con­ stituted through the reflexive incorporation of developing social science knowledge; on the other hand, the social sciences organise themselves in terms of a continuing reflection upon the evolution of those systems. Such a perspective, as Wagner and Wittrock in particular make clear, does not in any way either impugn the status of knowledge claims made within social science or destroy the independent reality of social institutions. The book questions the notion that the institutionalising of the social sciences can be understood as a process of their increasing autonomy from extemal social connections. ''Autonomy'' forms a mode of legitima­ tion and a basis of power rather than a distinctive phenomenon as such.