Institutional re-structuring in the social science world : Seeds of change

Abstract

In this paper we engage with the dominant debates about globalization of the social sciences exploring novel aspects in institutional infrastructure, and develop an account that is sensitive to changing historical forms. We take globalization as those processes of change, "which underpin a transformation in the organization of human affairs by linking together and expanding human activity across regions and continents" (Held et al., 1999, 67). Universality, when seen as synonym of globality, is often associated to homogenization and identified with Western-Northern imposed forms of thought. The set of norms, values and practices that characterizes the social sciences, while deemed to be universally valid and applicable in different contexts, faces a growing clamor for recognition from other knowledge forms under the charge that the supposedly general theory largely neglects or distorts the experience of the majority of mankind living in places distant from the centres as well as the theory production in those spaces. Variegated manifestations of social reality in different parts of the world, either unthinkingly or consciously, have often been subsumed under unwarranted knowledge claims produced in the West-North.