Abstract
Why do social scientists choose certain theoretical and methodological stances over others? Three broad explanatory models can be derived from the literature on the sociology of social sciences: (1) worldview, arguing that intellectual preferences reflect general cultural and political orientations of broad social groupings to which an individual belongs; (2) status, according to which all forms of hierarchies are reproduced in the academic field through preferences for innovative research by those occupying dominant positions and their avoidance by agents lacking resources; (3) ecological, holding that opportunity structures existing at the historical moment at which an individual enters the academic field determine the theory choice. This article analyses the adoption of globalist or localist professional ideologies, favouring an international career and global recognition over a domestic one, or vice versa, to explore the biographical antecedents of choosing one side over the other in an important disciplinary divide. In doing so, the study draws on statistical data from a community study of sociology in Leningrad/St Petersburg between 1984 and 2011. The worldview hypothesis finds the strongest support: the preference for national or international scholarship reflects more general liberal or conservative attitudes characteristic of certain milieus existing in Russian society.
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