Boundary-Work in United States Psychology: A Study of Three Interdisciplinary Programs (2005)
Root, Michael J. (Author)
University of New Hampshire
Woodward, William R.
Edition Details: Advisor: Woodward, William R.
Physical Details: 234 pp.
Language: English
Between 1970 and 2000 scientists from three interdisciplinary programs--- evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and chaos theory---contributed to changing U.S. psychology's disciplinary boundaries. These interdisciplinary scientists brought about this change through their conceptual, material, and social practices. Psychologists used "boundary-work" as a means to control the influx of these various practices. Boundary-work connotes activities that promote scientists' epistemic authority in society. Boundary-work also serves to demarcate a science's particular collection of knowledge from other collections. Through their boundary-work activities, various psychologists resisted some of the practices of these interdisciplinary scientists while making accommodations for other types of practices. These resistances and accommodations illustrate the ways in which psychologists conveyed their epistemic authority and demarcated their discipline's boundaries between these three decades. The purpose of my dissertation is to describe psychologists' boundary-work in reaction to the introduction of these interdisciplinary programs' practices between 1970 and 2000. First, I present an overview of psychology's complex disciplinary boundaries. I then use the history of psychology and sociology of scientific knowledge literature to describe the nature of boundary-work activities. Next, I present the foundational components and a brief history of each interdisciplinary program. Fourth, I outline each program's conceptual, material, and social practices. Lastly, I discuss psychologists' resistances and accommodations to each interdisciplinary program's practices with reference to how they affected psychology's disciplinary boundaries. My results indicate that certain psychologists most often resisted evolutionary psychologists', cognitive scientists', and chaos theorists' conceptual practices. Psychologists' resistances seemed ineffective in preventing these conceptual practices from entering the discipline and did not stop other psychologists from using them. Accommodations occurred for all types of practices for all three programs, indicating that psychology's disciplinary boundaries are relatively permeable. I argue that psychologists made accommodations for these practices to increase their epistemic authority within the scientific community and throughout society. Finally, I discuss the advantages of writing psychology's history through an examination of psychologists' boundary-work.
...MoreDescription On how evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and chaos theory changed psychology's disciplinary boundaries. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/12 (2006): 6934. UMI pub. no. 3198013.
Similar Citations
Book
Malik, Kenan;
(2000)
Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell about Human Nature
(/isis/citation/CBB000600037/)
Article
Cohen-Cole, Jamie;
(2007)
Instituting the Science of Mind: Intellectual Economies and Disciplinary Exchange at Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies
(/isis/citation/CBB000830206/)
Article
Philippe Fontaine;
(2020)
Calling the Social Sciences Names
(/isis/citation/CBB117012073/)
Article
Carluccio, Dana;
(2013)
The Cognitive Fictions and Functions of Gender in Evolutionary Psychology and Poststructuralist Theory
(/isis/citation/CBB001200846/)
Article
Hayles, N. Katherine;
Pulizzi, James J.;
(2010)
Narrating Consciousness: Language, Media and Embodiment
(/isis/citation/CBB001035622/)
Article
Brunner, José;
Ophir, Orna;
(2011)
“In Good Times and in Bad”: Boundary Relations of Psychoanalysis in Post-War USA
(/isis/citation/CBB001232219/)
Article
Marchel, Carol;
Owens, Stephanie;
(2007)
Qualitative Research in Psychology: Could William James Get a Job?
(/isis/citation/CBB000774007/)
Article
Barrett, Nathaniel F.;
(2010)
Toward an Alternative Evolutionary Theory of Religion: Looking Past Computational Evolutionary Psychology to a Wider Field of Possibilities
(/isis/citation/CBB001231453/)
Article
Yamalidou, Maria;
(2001)
Molecular Representations: Building Tentative Links between the History of Science and the Study of Cognition
(/isis/citation/CBB000101845/)
Article
Jan Surman;
(2021)
Productive marginalities: The history of science in/about Poland since 1989
(/isis/citation/CBB407601366/)
Book
Chandra, Jagdish;
Robinson, Stephen M.;
(2005)
Uneasy Alliance: The Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, 1956-1987
(/isis/citation/CBB000500361/)
Article
Nadine Weidman;
(2016)
Overcoming Our Mutual Isolation: How Historians and Psychologists Can Work Together
(/isis/citation/CBB761011156/)
Article
Giuliano Pancaldi;
(2020)
Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB517793271/)
Book
Frank W. Stahnisch;
(2020)
A New Field in Mind: A History of Interdisciplinarity in the Early Brain Sciences
(/isis/citation/CBB376085655/)
Article
Henrik Thorén;
Line Breian;
(2016)
Stepping stone or stumbling block? Mode 2 knowledge production in sustainability science
(/isis/citation/CBB657683298/)
Article
Goeminne, Gert;
(2011)
Once upon a Time I Was a Nuclear Physicist: What the Politics of Sustainability Can Learn from the Nuclear Laboratory
(/isis/citation/CBB001034592/)
Article
Warren D. Allmon;
(2020)
Invertebrate Paleontology and Evolutionary Thinking in the US and Britain, 1860–1940
(/isis/citation/CBB053017087/)
Article
Barnett, S. A.;
(2003)
The Pale Cast of Thought: An Essay Review of Thinks… by David Lodge
(/isis/citation/CBB000551078/)
Chapter
Moran, Mary H.;
(2005)
Barbarism, Old and New: Denaturalizing the Rhetoric of Warfare
(/isis/citation/CBB000651254/)
Thesis
Sripada, Chandra Sekhar;
(2005)
Conceptual Foundations for the Psychology and Evolution of Morality
(/isis/citation/CBB001561694/)
Be the first to comment!