RESEARCH COMMUNICATIONS

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1. The Increasing Ethnocentrism of American : An Empirical Study of Social Science Encyclopedias*

FREDERICK H. GAREAU

The Florida State University, Tallahassee, U.S.A.

The few pages allotted to us have been cast in a mold appropriate for providing for indicating, by empirical means, whether American social science in the past half century has been becoming increasing international or parochial. By three strokes of good fortune-what would be called providential in a more reverential age-the chief "blue ribbon" social science agencies in the United States have com- missioned the publication of two encyclopedias and a supplementary biography, nicely spaced over the years from 1930 to 1979. American editors in each case chose the scholars who contributed the articles to each opus. It was to the nationality of the con- tributors (operationalized as the nationality of their professional affiliation) that we looked for the raw material to construct the measures of the internationalism- parochialism of American social science. The first in the trinity of encyclopedia-type works which we have exploited-the first stroke of good fortune-was the fifteen-volume Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. It was published in the period 1930 through 1934. Its successor, published in 1968, was a seventeen-volume work, which bears the same name, except that the term "Interna- tional" was deliberately added to the title. Moreover, the American editors this time stated that they had made a deliberate effort to find contributing scholars from foreign lands. The third in the series was more an incident than an occasion, a supplementary one-volume biographical work published in 1979. What we have done here is to convert these three strokes of good fortune into three cases of decision-making-three special cases in which the most prestigious American social science organizations commissioned fellow-American scholars to write en- cyclopedias. We concentrate upon the nationalities of the scholars whom the American editors chose as contributors to the encyclopedias: we expose nationalist or ethnocen- tric bias when we think we have discovered it in their choices; and we try to account for the causes for such bias. The distribution of contributors to the 1968 "international" encyclopedia is singled out as being particularly significant. The distribution found in its 1979 biographical supplement is used here merely to confirm an existing "trend". The 1968 publication appeared late enough after the first encyclopedia so that "behavioralism" (we prefer the term "new ") had enjoyed ample time to set down its roots in American soil and to become the dominant academic flora crowding out previous academic 'weeds'. For this and other reasons, we argue that this "inter- * ' Thanks are due to Theodore Davis for his cheerful help with this project. 245

national" 1968 encyclopedia is behavioralist and that the ethnocentrism which characterizes it is evidence that behavioralism is also ethnocentric. We justify this project with the reminder that little research exists on the subject. Alemann made this point, and gave as the reason for this deficiency the widely held assumption that science is international (Alemann, 1974, p. 445). This deficiency (lack of research) still exists, despite research that postdates Alemann's assertion. The widely-held belief referred to by Alemann, suffers somewhat when science is divided into its two unequal halves-the larger and the smaller social science. True, mainline social scientists still tend to cling to the belief in the international character of their craft.' Dissent is often found among third world scholars, and it fre- quently appears in UNESCO publications. One can find there the assertion "that there is little in (the) way of cross fertilization in international " (Haj- jar, 1977, p. 328) and the claim that the drive to indigenize social science is a worldwide phenomenon (Atal, 1981, p. 190). Even a developed and industrialized 2 Canada has experienced this phenomenon.2 We should emphasize that those with faith in the international character of social science seem to be in the majority. Nor do we want to suggest that the literature of sociology is witnessing a great debate between the internationalists and the in- digenizers. The ingredients for a debate exist, but the contestants remain isolated and have not confronted each other in Academic battle. This is but one illustration of a cen- tral theme of this paper: the isolation and ethnocentrism of social science communities.

Research Design In this short section we define ethnocentrism and indicate the procedures which we have followed to support our charge that it was present in the selection of the contributors to the 1968 encyclopedia and the 1979 biographic supplement. The remainder of the section has been given over to the nitty-gritty of quantitative research-such matters as the manner of operationalizing nationality. Ethnocentrism (or nationalism or parochialism) means here an undue preference for one's own group at the expense of other groups, or the unwarranted assumption that one's group is superior to others. Ethnocentric bias manifests itself in this study when the American editors "unduly" and "without adequate warrant" choose too many Americans as contributors and discriminate against certain foreign scholars by choosing too few of them. It means that in some cases the motivation, in whole or in part, was the American nationality of the contributor. This is a violation of "univer- salism", one of four basic norms of "science" set forth by Merton (Merton, 1973, pp. 270-271). True, the latter was discussing the judging of the claims of science, but the principle is the same. He says that this norm demands that the acceptance or rejec- tions of such claims is not to depend upon personal or social traits. Nationality is specifically mentioned as a motive to avoid. Bias is often hard to prove because those who make the charges cannot establish standards of just what is "due" and "warranted". Lacking such standards, those who make the charges cannot demonstrate what is "unwarranted", "undue", and therefore prejudiced. This problem did not seem to concern Lenski when be ques- tioned the international character of the 1968 encyclopedia, because his sample sug- gested that eighty percent of its contributors were American (Lenski, 1968, p. 804). Nonetheless, we use a baseline and an "objective" standard to justify our charges. The former is the distribution of contributors to the earliest encyclopedia, and the latter is the relative number of social science periodicals published (see Table II below). The