Hounshell, Eric (Author)
Sabean, David (Advisor)
This dissertation examines the career and methodological thinking of the sociologist Paul F. Lazarsfeld (1901–1976) from interwar Vienna to the mid-twentieth century United States. It locates the roots of the research system and graduate student training at the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research in his Vienna formation. Lazarsfeld's approach to social research mediated between extreme Central European positions on the relationship between the natural sciences and the humanities and social sciences. Examination of Lazarsfeld's Viennese milieu uncovers the specific ways of thinking through this problem and the particular meanings attached to them that were highly local but embedded in conversations and scientific practices throughout Central Europe and across the Atlantic. In his American years, new constellations of thinkers and new political contexts imbued the problem with new meanings. A contextualized reconstruction of Lazarsfeld's career contributes to the ongoing revision of our understanding of "posivitism." Lazarsfeld anticipated "post-positivist" perspectives on skill, training, and objectivity that animate the practical turn in the history of science but from within the tradition of Viennese positivism. The dissertation is divided into three parts in rough chronological order but focused around Vienna from the end of the First World War until the early 1930s and the United States from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s. These periods cover Lazarsfeld's young adulthood in Vienna and the height of his influence and activity at Columbia University in postwar America respectively. Ways of doing social science that have seemed particularly "American" appear less indigenous because they can be traced in part back to Austria through Lazarsfeld. Attention to Lazarsfeld's idiosyncratic approach makes the supposed methodological consensus of the postwar American social sciences that vaunted "basic" or "pure" science and a "natural science model" appear less uniform. These findings open up space for nuanced examination of the relationships between methodology and context.
...More
Article
Jessica Pykett;
Mark Paterson;
(2022)
Stressing the ‘body electric’: History and psychology of the techno-ecologies of work stress
(/isis/citation/CBB933468112/)
Chapter
Degele, Nina;
(1999)
Gender, computers, and holistic knowledge: the case of homeopathy
(/isis/citation/CBB609741754/)
Article
David Sepkoski;
(2017)
The Database before the Computer?
(/isis/citation/CBB586818085/)
Article
Steinmetz, George;
(2013)
A Child of the Empire: British Sociology and Colonialism, 1940s--1960s
(/isis/citation/CBB001320619/)
Book
Dirlik, Arif;
Li, Guannan;
Yen, Hsiao-pei;
(2012)
Sociology and Anthropology in Twentieth-Century China: Between Universalism and Indigenism
(/isis/citation/CBB001202153/)
Article
Barahona Echeverría, Ana;
Ledesma-Mateos, Ismael;
(2002)
El positivismo y los orígenes de la biología en México: El entrelazado de los desarrollos filosófico y científico en un contexto histórico particular
(/isis/citation/CBB000740641/)
Book
Liliana Dell'Osso;
Dario Muti;
(2020)
L'accademia e la follia
(/isis/citation/CBB412262516/)
Article
Bartolucci, Chiara;
Lombardo, Giovanni Pietro;
(2012)
The Origins of Psychology in Italy: Themes and Authors That Emerge through a Content Analysis of the Rivista di Filosofia Scientifica
(/isis/citation/CBB001251154/)
Article
Antoine Roger;
(2021)
Une internationalisation disputée
(/isis/citation/CBB650898951/)
Article
Gimeno i Torrent, Xavier;
(2010)
L'estudi de la institucionalització de la sociologia a Catalunya (ii): un model d'anàlisi i un sistema d'hipòtesis
(/isis/citation/CBB001021861/)
Book
Aldon Morris;
(2015)
The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology
(/isis/citation/CBB962524670/)
Book
Kristoffer Kropp;
(2016)
A Historical Account of Danish Sociology: A Troubled Sociology
(/isis/citation/CBB004734935/)
Book
Marc Joly;
(2020)
Après la philosophie: histoire et épistémologie de la sociologie européenne
(/isis/citation/CBB219540123/)
Article
Matthias Duller;
(2022)
Regime and Sociology: A Comparative History of Sociology in Postwar Europe with Qualitative Comparative Analysis
(/isis/citation/CBB398839192/)
Book
Lykknes, Annette;
Opitz, Donald L.;
Tiggelen, Brigitte Van;
(2012)
For Better or for Worse: Collaborative Couples in the Sciences
(/isis/citation/CBB001202383/)
Book
Rickard Danell;
Anna Larsson;
Per Wisselgren;
(2013)
Social Science in Context: Historical, Sociological, and Global Perspectives
(/isis/citation/CBB694129322/)
Book
Johan Heilbron;
(2015)
French Sociology
(/isis/citation/CBB064499987/)
Book
Calhoun, Craig;
(2007)
Sociology in America: A History
(/isis/citation/CBB000930447/)
Article
Gimeno i Torrent, Xavier;
(2009)
L'estudi de la institucionalització de la sociologia a Catalunya (i): un estat de la qüestió
(/isis/citation/CBB001021862/)
Article
Włodzimierz Gogołek;
(2017)
Refining Big Data
(/isis/citation/CBB158654943/)
Be the first to comment!