Communities of Scholars: A Conceptual Scheme of Knowledge Production

• Main Author: Konstantinos Zougris
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-11-01
• Series: Societies
• Subjects: sociology of knowledge; institutional theory; communities of practice; field theory; knowledge production; meta-theoretical synthesis
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/8/4/118

This conceptual paper provides a meta-theoretical synthesis describing knowledge production processes in the sociological discipline. The first part of this paper gives an overview of recent studies exploring the sociological knowledge space with an emphasis on the epistemological tension, and the structural divides induced by social conditions that contribute to the process of knowledge production. A meta-theoretical synthesis -constituted by the institutional theory framework, combined with the field theory and the theory of communities of practice- aims to identify the structural arrangements, the cultural domains and the interactive processes that establish intellectual consensus, from which, validated forms of scientific knowledge are generated. I detect an intrinsic mechanism of different camps of communities of scholars accumulating intellectual capital through a process of participation, negotiation, and reification, which is based on a knowledge circuit among academic fields and the intellectual habitus that form a holistic institution of knowledge generation practices. Finally, I suggest that further research in the direction of detecting the institutional arrangements of knowledge exchange, with an emphasis on the epistemological preferences across countries, should be carried out.