The changing academic priorities of universities are often discussed but little
investigated by social scientists: What accounts for the striking expansions and
contractions in disciplinary fields over time? Focusing specifically on the natural
sciences, this article articulates a global-institutional argument that holds that
deep shifts in ontological conceptions of action and structure over the course of the
20th century fomented shifts in the teaching and research emphases of universities
worldwide. Specifically, it hypothesizes that scientific fields that are premised on
fixed categories and hierarchies of entities (for example, zoology) declined relative
to fields that are premised on dynamic, horizontal networks of entities (for example,
physics). In addition, it hypothesizes that as globally institutionalized reality
shifted in favor of human, rather than divine, actorhood, fields that position their
practitioners as active investigators in a dynamic universe gained ascendance over
those that position practitioners as passive observers of a divinely ordered
universe. Using data on worldwide faculty composition from 1915 to 1995, the authors
found that these shifts indeed transpired—the fixed-categorical fields of astronomy,
botany, and zoology declined precipitously, while the dynamic-network fields of
geology, biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics performed much more
robustly.
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