ISW 40 - Making Social Science Matter

‘Interdisciplinary departments seldom last more than a few decades’.
This is an observation from studies focussing on the history of science. Established disciplines tend to throw strange eggs out of the faculty nest, swallow them up, or suffocate them. In this, they often are helped by contradictions within the interdisciplines themselves. ASW (now ISW) managed to survive such struggles and now celebrates 40 years of existence. Congratulations!

1 – Critical thinking

To some extent, ASW is a product of the 1970’s, when critical theories in psychology, sociology, pedagogics and cultural anthropology flourished. Proponents of these theories challenged established approaches, drawing on cross-cultural and historical evidence and the philosophy of science. The ultimate target of their criticism was social injustice and oppression. Most mainstream theories were seen as propping up the status quo.

Above all, critical approaches were meant to further the cause of emancipation. Today, many such theories have been incorporated in the curricula of universities that the US President regards as dangerously “woke”: they encourage activism to combat racism, sexism, the exploitation of labour, and neo-colonialism. I would not recommend anyone to travel to the USA with the foundational texts of ASW in their baggage.

Before going any further, I have to discuss a few issues that are in danger of getting “lost in translation” when we talk about the story of ASW in English.  

(a) The word ‘wetenschap’ is generally translated in English as ‘science’, but this is misleading. ‘Wetenschap’ includes both ‘natuurwetenschappen’  and ‘geesteswetenschappen’ (for example, history, linguistics or philosophy), whereas ‘science’ in English is limited to ‘natural sciences’. Of course, for disciplines that envy the status of the natural sciences, it can be appealing to label themselves ‘sciences’, with prefixes such as social and behavioural.

(b) A second translation problem is illustrated by the name of our own Faculty, the ‘Faculteit Sociale Wetenschappen’. As soon as we click the button on the web page to ‘English’, the name changes to ‘Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences’.
In the English-speaking world, Psychology and Pedagogics are not usually classified as social sciences, so just referring to the Faculty of Social Sciences would leave two important disciplines out in the cold. Nevertheless, in this talk I will stick to the translation ‘social sciences’ for ‘sociale wetenschappen’, including Psychological and Pedagogical approaches.

Going back now to the early history of ‘Interdisciplinary Social Sciences’.

 
2 – ASW: An experiment in academic education

The Faculteit Sociale Wetenschappen at Utrecht University also housed critical groups and individuals who longed to exceed the boundaries of their disciplines of origin, and let their ideas loose on university students.
They were helped, in the early 1980s, by government policies.
The Minister of Education felt that the social sciences had become too specialized, which had led to an explosion of subdisciplines and (more to the point) an equal explosion of costs.
Moreover, the Minister worried about the ability of people with a degree in social sciences to find jobs: he was convinced that Instead of more specialists, society needed more graduates with broad knowledge and skills. 

 

For their education, new departments were required. Hence: Algemene Sociale Wetenschappen – General Social Sciences. That was a bit of a misnomer on several accounts. First of all, ‘general’ suggests something vague and superficial. ASW was not. Furthermore, it should have been called ‘Algemene Sociale Wetenschap’ – singular, because the plural ‘wetenschappen’ wrongly suggests a simple piling up of disciplinary knowledge.
A more appropriate name would have been ‘Interdisciplinaire Sociale Wetenschap’ (ISW). It took some 35 years to have this name adopted. Nevertheless, ASW became a household name in Dutch higher education

Of course the critical groups within the Faculty didn’t waste time to take the opportunity offered by the Ministry of Education. Invited by the Faculty Board, they created a ‘Stuurgroep’ (1984) to steer progress towards an interdisciplinary curriculum, that would also direct the students’ attention to pressing social issues - for example in the fields of labour and income, welfare, migration, etcetera. Interdisciplinarity was not a goal in itself, it was meant to serve social policy and interventions. The Stuurgroep also zoomed in on  the role of the social sciences themselves in the modernization of society. To broaden their intellectual horizons, students were familiarized with the work of Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Sigmund Freud, Norbert Elias, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz and many more classical authors. 

     

In order to support the specific outlook of ASW, the Stuurgroep started to write its own series of books, ‘Kijk op mens en maatschappij’. Within ten years time, a handful of books was produced: about the genesis of the social sciences, knowledge and reality, paradoxes  of modernization, aggression and violence, gift giving and exchange, inequality, and Samenhang der sociale wetenschappen, a coproduction of 15 ASW authors. In these days writing books (in Dutch!) was a much valued activity.

Within a few years, ASW became a success. It started with 32 students in 1985, and had rising numbers of first year students from then on, with a peak of over 300 new students in the early 1990s, stabilizing later on an average of 200 new students pro year. From the ISW website I learned that in 2025 there were more than 300 new students.

3 – The disciplining of ASW

In spite of the initial success of ASW, the department was confronted with a range of problems. Crossing the boundaries of disciplines was a bit like tightrope walking between the departments of the Faculty.

 

First of all, the cohesion of ASW was based primarily on the fact that the groups which made it up were jointly responsible for the curriculum.
The accent lay on teaching: acquiring a reputation as a researcher was  considered less important. Research carried out by ASW members was meant to enhance the quality of the education. In spite of attempts to create a collective ASW research programme (Citizenship and Development), most publications were produced by separate groups and individuals. Moreover, almost all publications were written in the Dutch language; in this way it would be easier to connect with professionals working in the fields being studied, as well as lay people and the students themselves.

National and local science policies however, put pressure on departments to create their own schools of research, that were regularly visited by evaluation committees. In the late 1990’s, doing research to reach the required output – at least 5 peer reviewed ‘international publications’ in 5 years – became a precondition for obtaining tenure.
ASW as a new player in the field was not able to create its own school of research, and joined a collective called Arbeid, Welzijn en Sociaal-Economisch Bestuur (AWSB), that in 1998 was confronted with a negative evaluation. Later attempts at creating an overall collective ASW research programme were also unsuccessful. Fortunately, the evaluation of ASW (and ISW) teaching has remained positive all along, including the last external review (2026).

During the late 1990’s, ASW was expanded with a handful of new professors and dozens of new staff members. Within a short period, the ASW organization changed from a project team of 20 members to a department with about 100 staff members. Obviously, it was a challenge to create a unity within this large department. Due to the growing emphasis on research, and the lack of thematic coherence between the groups, the professors in charge agreed to disagree, and created three large islands within ASW: Development and Socialization, Migration, and Social Policy and Interventions, with their own research programmes. They worked together constructively to hold the ASW education upright. 

 

Unfortunately, the decisions on the future of ASW were made elsewhere.  Successive Faculty Deans from 1997 onwards kept up a stream of new plans to restructure departments, with a special interest in transforming and thereby disciplining ASW.
Around 2010 the department of ASW was actually reshuffled, with staff members divided among the psychology and sociology departments. But since the ASW curriculum had to be continued, it was inevitable that some central unit – the directorate of ASW education - was preserved, that tried to deal with the demands and pressures from both the Faculty and the groups involved in the work of teaching.

Finally, an important measure taken on the national level was the introduction of the Bachelor-Master System, with university education organized in undergraduate and graduate schools. The regular curriculum was reduced from 5 to 4 years of study, and choices needed to be made. This of course affected all disciplines, but ASW had to let go its so- called ‘contextvakken’, meaning the historical and philosophical parts (‘modules’) of the programme. Looking back, this can be considered a further step in the ‘normalization’ of ASW. Also, the ambition to straddle the divide between social and behavioural sciences had to be given up. Officially, ISW is now a division within the department of Maatschappijwetenschappen.

4 – Concluding remarks

ASW/ISW in the course of its existence has undergone reorganisations originating on various levels: on the national level (VF-programmes; BaMa); the university level (UU as a Research University); and finally the level of FSW, that did more than just implement decisions taken by external bodies – it displayed an active policy toward ASW/ISW, creating lots of stress in its organization.

Summing up the most important general changes, resulting from an interplay between external forces and internal struggles:

1) In the mid-1980s ASW was seen as a promise, as a model for the Faculty as a whole. Very soon however, the traditional social science disciplines regained their prominence within the Faculty. and ASW became ‘one of the curricula’.

2) At its inception, ASW was an experiment in university education, with interdisciplinarity as a starting point for a critical assessment of mainstream approaches within the social and behavioural sciences.
Later on, in line with University and Faculty policies, research output in terms of publications in international (English-language) journals and books became the main criterion by which staff members were assessed.
This focus on research had various consequences for the ASW/ISW curriculum: (1) additional emphasis on methodological and statistical skills, and (2) a division of graduate courses along the lines of the three research groups (Youth; Social Policy; Migration and Ethnic Relations).

3) In the first fifteen years of ASW, interdisciplinarity used to be a broad perspective, deriving inspiration from ‘grand theories’ and the criticisms thereof, fostering a questioning attitude towards mainstream social science, and focussing on analysing social problems in their context. Later on the elimination of the ‘contextvakken’ helped to turn ISW into a more regular social science discipline.

Still, it is fair to summarize the mission of ASW/ISW during these 40 years as ‘Making Social Science Matter’.

 

Now, these are just impressions of a participant in ASW during the first thirty years. It would be worthwhile to verify these impressions by having a more detailed historical study conducted of ASW/ISW, also including recent developments. At the 50^th anniversary we then might have a book ready on the history of this unique interdisciplinary experiment!