Social sciences internationally: The problem of marginalisation and its consequences for the discipline of sociology

Abstract

International audience ; The development of sociology in Africa and Latin America has remained largelyunder-researched until now. Ongoing debates on the globalisation of economy andsociety, as well as the increasingly cross-national activities of the scholarlycommunity, have been enhancing reflections on the internationalisation orglobalisation of the discipline, a topic on the agenda of each of the more recentWorldCongresses of Sociology. Diverging perceptions of these processes within sociologyhave been articulated, opposing those who argue for the internationalisation orglobalisation of the discipline without explicitly insisting on present North-Southdivides (Albrow/King 1990; Archer 1991; Genov 1991) on the one hand, and thosewho insist on the disadvantaged position of, for instance, African (Adésínà 2002) orIndian (Oommen 1991) sociologies, on the other hand. The debate around theglobalisation of sociology, political and often polemical at first sight, illustrates theincreasingly difficult articulation between the universalistic claims of the discipline assuch and its particular developments locally or nationally (Berthelot 1998; Keim2006), and is thus of epistemological importance as well.