Introduction

How does knowledge circulate across countries and between disciplines? Paradigms and theories, as well as the scholarly controversies around them, have been powerful vehicles for the circulation of ideas and intellectual exchange. Beyond cultural and disciplinary boundaries, they provide a common language and a set of shared references. The objective of this volume is to elaborate on plausible explanations for the international circulation of ideas in the social and human sciences, based on case studies of these competing theories and paradigms and of the controversies they provoked. Against diffusionist theories that describe the circulation of ideas primarily in terms of contagion, the socio-historical approach developed here argues that ideas and knowledge are conveyed and circulated by agents (with their own strategies and positioning) and shaped by material conditions (books, journals, gatherings such as conferences, grants, etc.). These mediators and the conditions provide explanatory factors for understanding which theories and paradigms circulate and which do not, as well as for their appropriations and usages in the receiving country or discipline. Since some of these theoretical frameworks were more or less associated with major thinker (e.g. Lévi-Strauss for structuralism), the present volume also analyzes how they acquired an international reputation. This sociological approach has a strong commitment to intellectual history; the appropriations and uses of such paradigms and theories evolve differently in different contexts—in different disciplines and countries. But it also uses field theory and interactionist approaches such as network analysis, and combines quantitative and qualitative methods, in order to develop a historical sociology of knowledge.