The Study of China in Universities: A Comparative Case Study of A ...

Mannheim’s thinking is that cultures—scientific cultures, aesthetic cultures—all struggle for supremacy within their cultural spheres. For him, there is movement of the shift in value emphasis to the phenomenon of the culture itself. He described these activities as being endeavors of regroupment and believed that none ever established itself definitively. This theory not only analyzes the consequence of the struggle for supremacy of opposing scientific, aesthetic, and ethical cultures but also argues that the endeavors of regroupment, in order to achieve elements of a worldview, have proved to be unachievable. Due to the shift in value emphasis of the phenomenon of culture itself, no scientific, aesthetic, and ethical cultures would ever establish themselves definitively.

An example that supports Mannheim’s theory is found in Andrew Abbott’s (2001) analysis of the discipline of sociology. In his book, Chaos of Disciplines, Abbott, then chair of sociology at the University of Chicago, detailed the processes of reification and labeling of social theories existing in the discipline of sociology. These processes of the setting of boundaries, grouping, and regrouping of thoughts from different generations of sociologists in order to generate new epistemological debates are called by Abbott “the process of fractionation” (p. 26). While there is no mention of Mannheim in Abbott’s book, the fractionation process that Abbott described is, in my view, essentially what Mannheim referred to as the struggle for supremacy between opposing sides of scientific cultures. This kind of process was also identified by Bourdieu (1988) in his Homo Academicus. He saw sociology “derive its most decisive progress from a constant effort to undertake a sociological critique of sociological reasoning” (p. xii) by establishing categories of thought.

The process of fractionation (as Abbott described it), or sociological critique of sociological reasoning (as Bourdieu termed it), often results in the establishment of a new field of knowledge. A new label in the sociology of knowledge—the sociology of philosophical knowledge (SPK)—which has recently been established, is the latest example. It illustrates the kind of discipline changing, branching off, and merging with the sociology of knowledge, but primarily it is a new field of knowledge that has emerged through the sociological process.