Social Science Learned Societies and Professional Associations
Jennifer Platt, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, UK
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract
The historical emergence of social science associations, as part of the academic institutionalization of the social sciences, is
sketched, and the membership and typical functions of learned societies in particular their conferences, journals, and
research sections are described. The pattern of afliations between disciplinary and cross-disciplinary, and national and
international, associations is outlined, and it is suggested that these are sufciently structured and comprehensive to have
created what is in effect a world system.
What do we count as a social science association? In this
context, it must be an organized body which gures in
academic social science. However, the history of such bodies
shows that some formal organizations have started much less
formally, that the boundaries between academic and nonaca-
demic have changed over time, that social science may be
more concerned with practical reform and social interventions
than with social theory, and that some bodies straddle
boundaries between social and physical science, or between
social science and history or literature. The situation must be
drawn more broadly to show the full picture.
The range of relevant associations has expanded enor-
mously, starting with their development in the second half of
the nineteenth century; before then, the main predecessors
were on the one hand academies, usually autonomous
national bodies representing wide elds of science and learning
and with a socially elite membership, or informal invisible
colleges, or on the other hand bodies concerned with social
reform, such as the American Social Science Association
(founded 1865). (Alter (1980) describes the emergence of an
International Association of Academies, a German scientic
initiative, and shows how what presented itself as learned
collaboration transcending national boundaries was inevitably
entangled with major political and economic changes and
conceptions of the national interest.) There are different types
of association, their difference traditionally labeled in English
as that between the learned society, which concentrates on the
advancement of the intellectual content of its sphere, and the
professional association, largely concerned with the more
material occupational interests of its members. The qualifying
association, whose functions include the award and policing of
the conditions of a qualication necessary to practitioners,
could be seen as bridging that gap. Existing associations are
certainly not all pure examples of these types, which should be
treated as abstract concepts rather than empirical descriptions.
This article focuses on the learned society bodies and functions.
Functions
Learned societies perform a wide range of functions. These
commonly include the holding of conferences at which papers
are given, the production of academic journals, and the repre-
sentation of their constituencys knowledge and interests to the
674 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 22
educational system, government, and the wider public; they
may also include the award of prizes, the provision of training
activities, the sponsorship of research, the production of
teaching materials, the creation of sections for members
working in specialized topic areas, and the establishment of
ethical codes to guide professional behavior. Described in more
theorized terms, these functions include establishment of the
legitimacy of their elds knowledge claims, knowledge trans-
fer, the maintenance of intellectual standards, disciplinary
socialization and social control, and the encouragement of
intellectual cooperation and social integration among their
members. There is considerable variation among existing
associations, depending on their size, history, and local tradi-
tions, but with a tendency for the same patterns of activity to
diffuse across the eld, even if similar functions are performed
in different institutional ways. The larger associations have the
resources to perform multiple functions.
Membership
Association members may be individuals or groups. Individual
membership has more often in the past been conned to elite
categories such as university professors, or holders of doctor-
ates, and is still sometimes honoric and by invitation only,
but in recent times the admission on application of at least
other members of university faculty and of students has
become normal. Where group membership exists it is
commonly dened by discipline in cross-disciplinary national
associations, and by national disciplinary association in inter-
national associations; the latter has been the standard pattern
within the United Nations Educational, Scientic and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) sphere of institution-building (see
later), though as the numbers of social scientists have grown
the importance of individual membership alongside national
representation has expanded considerably. Within this basic
framework, room has often been found for cases which do not
precisely correspond to the original constitutions concept.
Thus, there is sometimes special provision for social scientists
working outside academia, or for representation of teachers of
a discipline in schools, whether within the structure of the
national association or by the afliation to it of a specialist
association. Social scientists from the academic worlds
periphery (however, that is dened) often nd reason to
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03006-3
 Social Science Learned Societies and Professional Associations
establish some afliation with its perceived center, promoting
social integration of the disciplines.
The System of Associations
An important contribution was made to the emergent pattern
of associations by the policy of UNESCO which, following on
from the pre-war League of Nations Committee on Intellec-
tual Cooperation, in 1948 started to develop a plan to bring
national bodies together and promote internationalism in the
interests of world peace; it was hoped that cross-disciplinary
and cross-national research would support that. Sometimes
an earlier international association already existed that could
be used as a basis; the formation of national associations to
ll gaps, and afliation to international bodies by those that
already existed, was actively encouraged. (In the case of
sociology, however, leading members of the Institut Interna-
tional de Sociologie (IIS) were felt to have been sufciently
close to fascist regimes for that to be unacceptable, so the
foundation of the International Sociological Association
(ISA) was set in motion (Platt, 1998: pp. 2728).) An orga-
nizational hierarchy has thus in effect been created by
UNESCO, making use of existing developments, in which
national disciplinary associations are gathered together into
international disciplinary associations, and those in turn are
the members of cross-disciplinary associations such as the
International Social Science Council (ISSC) and the Interna-
tional Council for Science (ICSU). (The latter retains the
acronym from when it was known as the International
Council of Scientic Unions.) These bodies have not exercised
authority over their members, though their access to funds
sometimes gives them inuence, so they are at the top of the
UNESCO hierarchy only in the sense that in principle they
include all relevant associations, and their remit is at the
highest level of geographical and intellectual generality. This
hierarchy ignores the many independent special-interest
smaller associations for subelds such as medical anthro-
pology, history of economic thought, biographical methods,
or gurational sociology. These are important, but in their
intellectual activities very similar to sections, sometimes
moving between or combining section and independent
status, so are not discussed separately here. In this article, we
start at the bottom of the hierarchy.
National Disciplinary Associations
The process of formation of national disciplinary associations
is part of the establishment of a discipline as such, and of its
professionalization. (The members of a national association
are not necessarily citizens of that nation or working in it. For
instance, in Britain 60% of individual members of the Royal
Economic Society are recorded as living outside the UK; that is
probably an extreme case (http://www.res.org.uk/view/index.
html).) In many countries, there were no such associations
by the 1950s indeed little or no academic social science,
though there might be more or less formal groups of intellec-
tual notables, and what is now recognized as social science in
contexts not given that name. National disciplinary associa-
tions are voluntary associations, not state bodies; they
675
normally have elected ofcers serving xed terms, often sup-
ported by an ofce staff, although much essential work is also
done by post-holders without payment. In those countries
which had developed some academic social science by then,
mostly in Europe and North America, the process leading up to
the modern situation started around the mid-nineteenth
century. When the push to create national members for inter-
national associations came in the 1950s, many more emerged.
Henderson (1996) gives detailed accounts of the emergence of
German and British national economic associations, while
Fourcade (2009) places French, British, and US economics
associations in broader national contexts; Celebi (2002),
Glatzer (1994), Patel (2002), and Platt (2003) deal with soci-
ology in Turkey, Germany, India, and Britain. These examples
are sufcient to indicate the diversity of the routes that may be
followed, and the extent to which they may depend on current
political concerns and the existing structure of associations
but still reach similar goals. Such bodies surely offer the com-
monest form of social scientic associational participation.
In countries with relatively small numbers of social scientists,
whether as an effect of small total population size or the early
stage of disciplinary development, ways have been found of
creating viable associations based on larger constituencies. Thus
in Canada for some time there was one national association for
both anthropology and sociology, while in the antipodes there
was a joint Australia/New Zealand sociological association
(Crothers, 2005: pp. 7375); both have now divided. In addi-
tion to such bodies, both the British Association (whose section
on anthropology, for instance, started in 1884) and the Amer-
ican Association for the Advancement of Science were bodies,
facing toward a broader general public, which covered a broad
range of disciplines, including social sciences before there were
single-discipline national associations. Larger regional associa-
tions such as CODESRIA (Council for the Development of
Social Science Research in Africa) have been accepted by the
international bodies into the same category as national
members, and can offer more locally shared solidarity and
frameworks of reference, as well as some international perspec-
tive, at lower cost. Cross-disciplinary national associations are
less common; their appearance may be the start of the emer-
gence of a new discipline. But when government policy affects
broad areas of academia there have been cases, such as the USAs
Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), where
associations have united in a new national body to defend their
shared interests. Similarly, groups such as Sociologists for
Women in Society cut across disciplinary boundaries as they
address both the position of women in academia and the need
for gender to be taken into account in its intellectual products.
There are also cases where national subdivisions, such as the
English/French language cleavage in Canada, are important
enough to lead to separate associations. Patel (2002) sees the
Indian academic community as sharply hierarchical, with an
important division between universities teaching in English
and in local languages; the national association is mainly for
the former group, while the latter have established a number of
local associations. The USA used to have a Catholic association,
now defunct, and the originally oppositional Society for the
Study of Social Problems continues (while the American
Sociological Association remains clearly dominant), but the
country also has thriving regional groups such as the Southern
676 Social Science Learned Societies and Professional Associations
Sociological Association (Simpson, 1988: pp. 117) which
provide contacts closer to home geographically.
International Disciplinary Associations
The main international disciplinary associations are in principle
world-wide, although in practice the uneven diffusion of social
science sets limits to their constituencies. Local differences in
intellectual patterns contribute to the observed differences in
the dates at which national associations have afliated to the
international associations of different disciplines, but each now
has a very large number of national afliates. (The total number
of collective members available is subject to political events; thus
the dissolution of the USSR increased the number markedly,
while the reunication of Germany and division of Czechoslo-
vakia halved and doubled their representation.) The collective
members of these associations include some regional associa-
tions for Europe, Africa, and the AsiaPacic area.
There have sometimes been frictions over the patterns of
representation. The IIS for a while competed with the ISA to be
regarded as the world association, organizing parallel world
congresses, but eventually peace was made and IIS became
formally afliated to ISA. Although the headquarters of
UNESCO were in Paris, and French was one of the ISAs ofcial
languages, US hegemony made English more salient; when the
proposal of a French-speaking ISA section was rejected a sepa-
rate francophone association, the Association Internationale
des Sociologues de Langue Franaise was founded in 1958.
That continues successfully to this day, but has also long made
peace with ISA and become afliated. A similar accommoda-
tion was reached between the International Union of Psycho-
logical Science (IUPsyS) (which also has a francophone
afliate) and the earlier International Association of Applied
Psychology (IAAP); IAAP is now afliated to IUPsyS, and their
conferences alternate. By 2000 IUPsyS also had nine other
afliates, some of them regional groups (Rosenzweig et al.,
2000: pp. 23).
One of the major problems that the international associa-
tions face is how to get sufcient funding to support a desirable
range of activities; membership subscriptions are paid, but to
make the essential membership from the global South (and
students) practicable charges to them have to be low, and there
may not be much practical scope for subsidising them from the
North. Most associations may draw on a considerable input of
voluntary labor, but that has its limits, and is particularly
poorly suited to running a central ofce. The modern solution
is to budget for prots from conferences and journals. The
possible effects of the open access movement on journal
prots will only be seen in the longer term.
Sections
Disciplinary associations both national and international
usually have sections dened by their specialized research
interests; how many are generated is inuenced by the size of
the membership, but there appear to be both some generally
shared concerns, some of them responding to wide social
movements such as feminism (Platt, 2010: pp. 109110), and
specically national ones such as the Indian Sociological
Associations Dalits and Backward Classes or the Deutsche
Gesellschaft fr Soziologies Ost- und Ostmittel-europa-
Soziologie (the latter now renamed Europasoziologie)
which have arisen from local situations. (Some in practice are
not conned to members of the discipline; lawyers appear in
sections on deviance, clergy on religion, nurses on health and
medicine.) Their size may vary considerably, which affects their
programs, but a minimum level of activity is to organize
meetings at world congresses and to circulate a newsletter;
some will have more meetings, take part in joint and
comparative research, and publish their own journal. For many
individual members, sections have been their main locus of
identication within the wider discipline, and the intellectual
history of disciplines can in important ways be plotted through
study of these groups.
Conferences
Organized international meetings of people with shared
interests have commonly preceded the creation of international
associations. For instance, international congresses of statistics
were held regularly from 1853 to 1876 (Brian, 1989: p. 201);
various Congresses of Anthropological Sciences were held
before 1865 (International Union of Anthropological and
Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) web site); the rst of a series of
geographical congresses was held in Antwerp in 1871 (Inter-
national Geographical Union (IGU) website); and a one-off
political science congress was held in Paris in 1900 (Coakley
and Trent, 2000: p. 11). Thus some conferences led to the
creation of associations, rather than being initially organized
by them.
The organization of conferences is now a major and regular
associational activity, and they have grown in size and
expanded in the range of activities they offer. (Tourist ofces
send representatives to committee meetings to advertise their
countrys attractions, and rms exist whose business is to
organize conferences for associations.) Plenary sessions are
held, but the typical timetable of large conferences now
provides many points at which choices between speakers, often
classied by section, have to be made; special activities for
students, or for tuition in the latest developments for faculty,
are arranged; large publishers exhibitions are included, there
may be formal space for the conduct of job interviews, and
a variety of committee meetings, social scientic tours, and
social events are held. There is the opportunity to see the great
in the esh, get comments on your draft paper, develop
cooperative work, meet old friends and new ideas, buy cut-
price books, learn more about the country where the meeting
is held, and maybe add an exotic holiday. Conferences may
also serve broader social goals: they were important in the
diffusion of early second-wave feminism, and have provided
moral support and intellectual opportunities to members from
countries where social science is restricted or discouraged.
Meanwhile, it is a recognized problem that many academics
can get high costs of conference attendance paid by their
department, but only if they are giving a paper; this leads to
pressure to accept a large number of papers, so that the time-
table becomes excessively crowded and running expenses rise.
(Canada has an unusual solution to problems of distance:
every year in May/June, a large number of learned societies
in the humanities and social sciences hold their annual
 Social Science Learned Societies and Professional Associations
conference in the same place and over the same period, maxi-
mizing contact possibilities and minimizing travel costs.)
Journals
A major contribution to the literature is made by the journals
which associations produce. Crothers (2007) found that 51%
of sociological journals listed in the ISIs Journal Citation
Reports for 2006 were sponsored by associations; gures for
other disciplines are not available, but may well be comparable.
Many of these are run by commercial publishers on their behalf
(Singleton, 1981), though the associations maintain control
over decisions about intellectual content. The possession of an
ofcial journal is seen as important to the denition of asso-
ciational identity (Hudson and Hudson, 2005); national asso-
ciations normally have one, and may have several, while
specialist networks have specialist journals. Long ago now,
Lengyel (1967) reviewed the pattern of social science periodi-
cals in the world. He found that different countries had different
modes of journal sponsorship, depending on the structure of
local institutions; correspondingly, the growth of international
journals was related to the rise of international organizations. It
is commonly assumed that the national association journals, in
particular those with a nonspecialist remit, are at the top of the
hierarchy of local intellectual prestige, and can be taken as
representing the discipline. Whitley (1970: p. 255) suggests that
The study of journal operation is the study of the application
of discipline norms to the judgment of research, and
Vanderstraeten (2010: p. 561) sees journals as revealing the
collective character of the scientic practice. Coats (1971:
p. 32) nding that over the period 18861959 ve general
economics journals became increasingly similar in their
contents could support this. In that sense, journals and learned
societies are inextricably involved with each other as parts of the
system of research and disciplinary reproduction.
International Cross-Disciplinary Associations
UNESCO has cross-disciplinary associations for natural science
(ICSU), social science (ISSC), and the humanities (ICPHS)
whose standard members are international disciplinary associ-
ations. Not every existing organization ts neatly into the pre-
conceived categories of the system, but ways have usually been
found to incorporate them. The question of where an associa-
tion belongs has sometimes been answered by its having a dual
afliation; thus both IUPsyS and the International Geographical
Union (IGU) are members of both ISSC and ICSU, and the
IUAES also belongs to UNESCOs International Council for
Philosophy and Humanistic Studies. Some associations
involved in the system are not purely or mainly academic. Thus
the World Federation for Mental Health, which belongs to the
ISSC, has been a movement to promote mental health as much
as to study it. Brody (1998: p. 165) notes that since it was not,
like other afliates, composed of academic researchers, it was
less easy for it to follow ISSC initiatives up; although it took part
in work such as that on human rights and new bio-technologies,
it remained an association whose more signicant contacts were
elsewhere. Somewhat analogous is the International Peace
Research Association, founded in 1964. Its main aim is to
increase and improve research focused on world peace. Most of
677
its members are not national or regional bodies, but individuals
or research institutes. It has worked on topics such as interna-
tional human rights, and gender and peace, which relate to
UNESCO and ISSC agendas, but has not been prominent in
ISSC affairs. Thus disciplinary patriotism has not prevented the
growth of complex links, perhaps occasionally open to inter-
pretation as disciplinary imperialism. Many ISSC activities have
been on a project basis, and it has promoted research on specic
topics seen as relevant to its international and cross-disciplinary
remit; in recent years there have been major programs of work
on poverty, global environmental issues, gender, and disaster
risk. It also has responsibility for the World Social Science Report,
and the biennial World Social Science Forum, a major confer-
ence on a topical theme related to ISSC interests.
The ISSC has changed considerably over time, in ways too
complex to describe here (but see Platt, 2002). These changes
reect the intersection of the internal politics and policy goals
of UNESCO, the funding sources available at different times,
the agendas of some charismatic and interested individual
social scientists, and the concerns of the growing set of asso-
ciations involved. Its aim remains to advance the social sciences
while attempting to solve global social problems.
Conclusion
The complicated pattern of associations that has developed
uses a number of dimensions of classication:
National/regional/international
Disciplinary/cross-disciplinary/sub-disciplinary/topic-specic
Individual membership/group membership
Open individual membership/qualications for admission/
elite selection
These appear in different combinations. It is evident that
complex needs are met, and there is considerable practical
exibility to allow new actors to be introduced and interrela-
tionships to be created and maintained. As the social scientic
population has increased, its members individual and collec-
tive have become increasingly differentiated and specialized,
while at the same time arrangements to bring them together in
various combinations have evolved. The result can reasonably
be regarded as a system of interdependent parts.
See also: Discipline Formation in the Social Sciences; Ethical
Questions in Social and Behavioral Sciences, History of.
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