I’ve written a couple of pieces on what seems to me to be the merging of the social sciences. Olivier Godechot at Sciences Po noticed the same thing and put together this fascinating quiz where respondents have to link article titles with their source journal (he includes AJPS, ASA, AER, and AHR). The quiz doesn’t check your answers (and I didn’t record mine), but I’m guessing that my guesses were often off. (Here are the correct answers.)
If his (and my) suspicion is correct, what might be leading to the increasing overlap? I can think of a number of reasons.
Competition within fields: The small number of new jobs and the increasing number of applicants for them puts more pressure on scholars to find original perspectives. Turning to the substantive focus of other disciplines provides an easy way to produce “original” results and impress one’s peers. The fact that the social sciences have been around for over a century means that it is harder to break new ground within established subjects. Better to be the first paper on a new subject, than the hundredth on a classic subject.
Lack of transdisciplinary sanctions: There are few costs to poaching on the grounds of other disciplines. Political scientists or sociologists might squawk on Twitter when economists invade their turf without acknowledging or citing their contributions, but tenure/careers are evaluated within disciplines and thus poachers face few career consequences.
Methodological convergence: The gold standards of methodologies have increasingly spread across the social sciences. This means the acknowledgment of experiments and techniques associated with the credibility revolution as the ideal. Failing that, the valorization of original and big data is now widespread. I think majorities in most social sciences would embrace the principles in a book like Thinking Clearly with Data. Disciplines are thus on common ground in the way they attack problems and evaluate answers.
Competition within universities: Tight budgets have also pitted disciplines against each other in the battle for resources within the university. Invading other fields helps to justify one’s allocation in two ways. Most simply, it provides evidence of productivity and originality. It also allows one to highlight to deans the failings of other fields - for example, historians can take jabs at economics in their research on the history of capitalism, while economists can return the favor through cliometrics (the economists of course threw the first punches here).
The economists started it: Economics has arguably been the most successful of the social sciences in public influence, accumulation of resources, development of powerful methods, and arguably intellectual firepower. It has also been the most imperialistic of the fields. The merging of the social sciences may simply be the expansion of economics to other subject areas (perhaps beginning with Becker) and the effort of other social sciences to emulate economics.
The rise of interdisciplinarity: Universities and some grant organizations have increasingly promoted interdisciplinarity. Perhaps these incentives have led social scientists to collaborate and learn from each other.
Failure of the social sciences. In my first post on this topic I mentioned Quine’s belief that the social sciences are cargo cults, always on the lookout for salvation from elsewhere. This implies that their own methods are increasingly not providing the goods they need, leading them to look elsewhere for answers. Presumably we cannot all feed each other and so this merging might mean the end of the social sciences.
If I were to choose, I would probably emphasize #3 and #5 and secondarily #1 and #2. Am I wrong and am I missing any reasons? Or is the entire premise of this post wrong and there is no merging? Next up: if there is some merging of the social sciences, is it a good or bad thing?