Abstract

This is the second edition (2/e) of the IESBS. Elsewhere, I acknowledge my immense debt to the editors of the first edition, Dr Neil Smelser and Dr Paul Baltes. Without their perspective and template to follow in assembling the second edition, this version would have scarcely been possible. The very thought of an encyclopedia covering all the social and behavioral sciences, one that drew on scholars from all corners of the globe, is itself so audacious that one would hesitate even to begin without a pretty detailed road map to the terrain.

On the occasion of the publication of Robert E.L. Faris's widely acclaimed Handbook of Modern Sociology, Joseph Gittler was moved to ask, “With the plethora of new handbooks, reviews, and compendia in sociology, one wonders whether there is a need for yet another one.” That question was posed almost 50 years ago; the ensuing half-century has been marked, as Sica says, by “an avalanche of reference materials the likes of which had never been seen in libraries prior to about 2000.” So readers and critics are within their rights to ask: Why a second edition? Why now?

The first edition (1/e) was reviewed in Contemporary Psychology as “the largest corpus of knowledge about the social and behavioral sciences in existence” ( Park, 2004). According to readily available data sources, IESBS 1/e has been cited nearly 6000 times in subsequent scholarly literature and has an h-index (h = 24) that would be the envy of many full professors. Citations are only one measure of impact, of course, and probably not the most important measure for a basic reference work intended more for students and a general audience than for practicing professionals. In addition to the thousands of scholarly citations, items from IESBS 1/e were ‘hit’ almost two million times on Science Direct between online publication in November 2002 and August 2014 – two million instances where IESBS 1/e was likely consulted as a basic reference source, to get quickly up to speed in a new area of research or to provide background for a paper or project, or just to satisfy a reader's curiosity. The first edition, in short, emerged soon after publication as a go-to reference work throughout the social and behavioral sciences. Michael Shanahan referred to the first edition as “the atomic bomb of reference works.” It was thus an easy conclusion that the work had sufficient value to keep it alive and current.

In reading selected articles from the first edition, however, I was taken aback by how much and how quickly they had aged. The first articles I looked at were those pertinent to my own areas of research and in nearly every case, there was important recent work that I felt needed to be discussed. With the assistance of colleagues in other areas of the social and behavioral sciences, it became obvious that this was a general problem. To be sure, much of the material in 1/e has enduring value; indeed, roughly half the articles in 2/e are updated and revised items from the first edition. Still, it is sobering to realize just how quickly the frontiers of social science knowledge shift and thus how quickly a basic reference source becomes dated. I am certain there are articles in the current edition that are already in need of some updating.

Smelser and Baltes enumerated six criteria that guided their decisions about what to include and what to leave out. The criteria are as follows:

1.

secure knowledge, realizing that security of knowledge is a dynamic and relative term,
2.

knowledge with balance and comprehensiveness,
3.

knowledge that is integrative rather than fragmented,
4.

knowledge that places the evidence into historical and theoretical context,
5.

knowledge that highlights connections between topics and fields, and
6.

knowledge that combines, where possible, theory and practice.

I would like to say I have followed these same criteria in determining the content of 2/e, but all six criteria have proved problematic in one or another way and thus deserve some comment in light of the present work:

1.

What is secure knowledge today is apt to be recognized as wrong tomorrow. Many of our requests for updates to 1/e articles generated some response to the effect, “All of this is completely obsolete. We need to write a new entry from scratch.” One would expect this to be true of areas of research such as behavioral genetics, say, or cognitive neuroscience or other fast-moving scientific fields, but it also turns out to be true of archaeology, history, and philosophy. The leading edge of research in every discipline threatens received wisdom; those who content themselves with received wisdom (‘secure knowledge’) will quickly find themselves behind the times. So our charge to authors was to focus less on the ‘secure knowledge’ in their respective fields and more on the cutting edge – the new perspectives, methods, findings, and issues that will animate social and behavioral science research in the coming decade.
2.

Throughout the social sciences, the distinction between theory and ideology is sometimes difficult to discern, and so too the distinction between applied research and community or political activism. We need not invoke Max Weber's conclusions about the impossibility of a truly value-free social science to understand that ideological undertones and political preferences can often be detected in social science research work; sometimes, they are quite explicit. Nor is it much of a surprise to learn that many social scientists struggle, not always successfully, to distinguish between what they want the world to be and what the world in fact is. Such struggles are part of the process by which knowledge develops and are thus in evidence in many of the 2/e articles. It would be unwise to enforce by editorial fiat a consensus on issues that the social sciences themselves have yet to resolve.
3.

The fragmentation of knowledge across disciplines is far more serious that the fragmentation of knowledge within them, although the latter is a problem as well. Many well-informed sociologists, for example, take pride in reading widely and can speak with some authority about what is going on in the field, even in areas of sociology that do not directly concern them. I assume this is also true of the other social and behavioral science disciplines and areas. But rare is the sociologist who is cognizant of work being done, say, in social geography even when, as is often the case, the fundamental problems, theoretical issues, and methodological approaches are similar. This is a widespread problem across the disciplines: The evolutionary psychologists do not know as much as they should about what the anthropologists are doing; the economists ignore a lot of pertinent work in sociology and political science; etc. For better or worse, disciplinary differentiation is an inherent element in the process of knowledge development and discovery, so this is a reality to be faced, not a problem to be solved. We dealt with this reality mainly in two ways: (1) Authors were encouraged wherever possible to think across rather than strictly within their disciplines. (2) Calling relevant work done in other disciplines to the reader's attention was a guiding principle for the choice of cross-references for each article.
4.

Social-constructionist theories of knowledge would argue that knowledge does not become knowledge until it is placed in historical, cultural, social, political, and theoretical context. As put very simply and succinctly in the opening line of the famous text by Berger and Luckmann, “reality is socially constructed” (1966: 1). This is no less true of social science knowledge than knowledge in any other realm. Unfortunately, a great deal of what we think of as social science knowledge is based on biased samples of WEIRD people – that is, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (Henrich et al., 2010). (The same point has, of course, been made by many others.) The WEIRD, thus defined, represent a rather exotic minority group judged by world standards, and the challenge for IESBS 2/e was therefore twofold: (1) to recruit non-WEIRD editors and authors where possible; and (2) to persuade all authors to incorporate comparative, cross-cultural, and international themes and perspectives wherever it was possible to do so. This effort was more effective in some sections than in others. Moving away from nation-specific literature, themes, and results to a truly international (the I in IESBS) account of the social and behavioral sciences was an ever-present desideratum in my discussions with editors and authors.

Alas, an emphasis on cross-culturalism often brings to light that everything, or nearly everything, seems to vary by culture, subgroup, ethnicity or nation, and at that point the question arises whether social science generalization is even possible. Are there universals that cross all social groupings? Or does social science dissolve into a mist of group-specific particularities that adduce no general principles? That hardly seems desirable. Yet myopic and ethnocentric fixations on one's own society or culture are scarcely to be encouraged either.

The worst offenders in this regard tend to be social scientists from the USA (and from the West more generally), who, of course, also comprise the largest share of editors and authors for IESBS 2/e. True, as with greenhouse gases, the USA (and the West) also produce the largest share of the world's science, social and otherwise, and so it is inevitable that they also represent the largest share of IESBS 2/e contributors. The Swedish social anthropologist Ulf Hannerz wrote about this very issue in his marvelous essay, “Editing Anthropology” (Hannerz, 2010). Hannerz quotes a Canadian anthropologist who said of the “neighborly presence” of US anthropology that it was like being “in bed with the elephant.” The same is true of most or all of the disciplines covered in this work. But then in a passage remarkable for both its insight and its generosity, Hannerz remarks, “No doubt tensions and conflicts may arise out of this situation, but perhaps it is better to understand that the elephant cannot help being an elephant, and that it makes sense for it, in its habitat, to behave in elephantine ways. A well-trained elephant, too, can do a lot of good, such as in carrying heavy loads.” So if the elephant that is Western social and behavioral science has been pressed to carry the heavier load in these pages, that is, the price to be paid for being an elephant in the first place.

The larger issue here is that the social and behavioral sciences, which were largely birthed in the West, in Europe and the United States, mainly address a trans-Atlantic scientific dialogue, a dialogue that is carried out almost exclusively in English. Indeed, throughout much of the world, a scientist's stature is indexed in part by his or her success in publishing in English. Publications in the native language are simply assumed to be inferior. The main exceptions, tellingly, are French and German social scientists whose native-language publications are valorized. A Dutch or Portuguese or Hungarian social scientist who only published in the native language would be seriously punished in merit and tenure reviews. Elsevier's citation database Scopus requires English-language abstracts before a journal will even be considered for inclusion. And English (with American spellings) is likewise the official language of this encyclopedia. No resources were made available to get articles submitted in other languages translated (although several such articles were submitted). Inevitably, this biases the encyclopedia's coverage in favor of social science addressed to the trans-Atlantic dialogue. Consequently, a great deal of excellent social science published in Spanish, or Mandarin, or Farsi, or any of the other world languages, is overlooked.

That said, steps were taken to improve the internationalism of the encyclopedia's coverage throughout the 4 years of its development. To begin, I sought area and section editors from around the globe and urged them whenever possible to seek international (vs strictly Western) authors. Articles were often returned to their authors with explicit instructions to add international coverage. And when all efforts failed and we ended up with articles that were unmistakably restricted to a single nation in their coverage (frequently but not always, this was the US), I indicated the national focus in the article subtitle. Still, a great deal more WEIRD social and behavioral science remains in these pages than would be desirable in an international encyclopedia. In a later section, I give the national breakdown of everyone involved in this project.
5.

An encyclopedia that “highlights connections between topics and fields” is easier to envision than to accomplish. Criterion (3) above speaks to the disciplinary fragmentation of our social science knowledge. William Easterly, the NYU economist, has written about the ‘tyranny of experts’ but the tyranny of the disciplines is an equal problem, a tyranny sanctified by the very academic structure of the modern university, where the separate and often warring colleges are each comprised of assorted departments, the latter representing basic academic disciplines. Interdisciplinary programs are almost invariably relegated to various centers, institutes, or specialized research laboratories – in short, to the periphery of the university's power structure. And while everyone says they want to encourage multi- and interdisciplinarity, very little is done to make that happen. Instead, departments remain as the fundamental unit of academic organization.

Hortatory admonitions to editors and authors have made IESBS 2/e somewhat more interdisciplinary than its several predecessors, but in the end, the disciplinary emphasis in many of our articles would be hard to overlook. Still, there are many sections of the work that were clearly developed with interdisciplinarity in mind and in which one finds interdisciplinary social science at its current best: environmental and ecological sciences; health; life course; sexuality; GLBT studies; public policy; evolutionary sciences; war, peace, violence, and conflict; and genetics, behavior, history, and society are a few sections that come immediately to mind.

I am particularly pleased with the extensive coverage given in 2/e to the interactions between the biological and social sciences. Harry Whitaker once remarked in a private e-mail that “we are all witnesses to the marriage of biology and the social sciences.” Many of the articles found here are offspring of that marriage. And those articles leave little doubt that the future offspring of this marriage will be among the most exciting and insightful social science products of the coming decade.

The social sciences once resisted everything biological as rank reductionism; in addition, the social scientists have always feared that a mature and complete biology would eventually drive us out of business. Articles included in IESBS 2/e make it clear that ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’ was the wrong question from the very beginning, that what we need to understand is how biological inheritance and social and cultural forces interact to produce individual and collective outcomes. This is where a lot of the interesting action in the social sciences is going to be in the coming years.
6.

The coverage of the practical or applied sides of the various disciplines has been increased in this edition, so the applied content of 2/e certainly exceeds that of its predecessor. New to this edition is the entire section on applied social and behavioral sciences; also new is our large section on social work and the separate section on applied, industrial and organizational psychology. But as Sara Strickhouser and I say in our article on the history of applied social research, “The history of ‘applied social science’ is indeed the history of the social sciences themselves” (Strickhouser and Wright, 2015). All of the social sciences in their modern form were birthed in the post-Enlightenment effort to understand why people, their institutions and society as a whole were as they were – why greed was more visible than generosity, why oppression was more common than freedom, why inequalities of various sorts characterized every social institution. To the founders of the disciplines, the modern distinction between basic and applied scientific concerns would have seemed meaningless, as indeed it was.