The Social and Intellectual Structure of the IR Discipline.

This paper analyses the structure of the IR discipline, its mechanisms of control, hierarchy, coordination, dispersion and agenda setting. The case is made for looking at internal, social factors. Much of the discussion about explaining IR has assumed that 'internal' factors means the arguments and theories as such, thereby coming more or less close to an idealist explanation in terms of the power of the better argument. Externalist factors, in turn, are social, but this usually ends up with an emphasis on international affairs, meaning the object explains the developments of the discipline, which again points back to the traditional, empiricist image of science reflecting its object. What is usually missing is social, internal explanations. IR is a social system, and its practitioners are not disembodied bearers of theories, acting in terms of only ideal search for truth or assistance to the power holders in society. Most directly, researchers are influenced - as all others - by their immediate social context, i.e. the discipline and academe as social world. With the help of mostly Richard Whitley's theory of 'the intellectual and social organization of the science' (but with some addition of Fuchs, Collins, Bourdieu, and Abbott), the paper maps and measures the discipline of IR along the two dimensions of intellectual structure and social structure, whiche evolves into a placement of IR within Whitley's elaborate typology of disciplines. A main section then studies the drivers of change in this static picture -- how patterns of funding, interdisciplinary bordering, and general changes in the status of universities in the 'knowledge society' transforms the structure of the discipline, not least its gatekeeping mechanisms and how this in turn changes the content of IR, the theories and interpretations of i.r. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]