Social Science in Latin America

Social sciences in Latin America (19302003) Les sciences sociales en Amerique latine (19302003)
Social sciences in Latin America: a comparative perspective Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay
Thematic overview From the comparative analysis of modern social sciences in the ve countries analyzed, we clearly see that, much like what happened in other areas of the world, including Europe, Latin American social sciences, too, went through their process of institutional consolidation during the second part of the 20th century. We also see, in the emphasis on the various themes and contents approached, a signicant relationship between this process and the sociopolitical context, not only in each country, but also in the whole region and the world, even though the formats differ from country to country. Our comparative analysis shows that there are widespread similarities in processes of institutionalization occurring in different Latin American and European countries. This nding, which is in agreement with sociological and historical analyses of the emergence and development of social sciences in the West, does not prevent us from stating, at the same time, that such a relationship has not had uniform effects on social sciences activities in all countries at every period. On the contrary, different impacts can be seen, even totally opposing impacts, depending on the country and the period in question. Therefore, we should avoid the simplistic views that have often dominated the discussion on the politicization of social sciences in Latin America.
Social Science Information & 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 0539-0184 DOI: 10.1177/0539018405053297 Vol 44(2 & 3), pp. 557593; 053297
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The sociopolitical context of the development of social sciences Following the three-phase periodization adopted in this study, we can see that, in the rst step, which we have called the foundational phase, in cases such as Chile, Uruguay and Brazil, social sciences developed in a basically democratic context, without being hampered by the growing social and political tensions produced by the mounting crisis of the development model, usually called import replacement, and the resulting context of growing social mobilization. The dispute over development projects undoubtedly marked the pathways of social sciences in these countries, but in a framework of signicant political liberties. In the case of Argentina, on the other hand, we nd the paradox that the crucial thrust of afrmation of the social sciences took place in a context not only of depletion of the import replacement model, but also in the dictatorial framework of the so-called Liber ating Revolution that removed Juan Peron from power. The unique feature of this period was that the dictatorship made a relatively neutral pact with scientists and granted a very signicant autonomy to the Universidad de Buenos Aires. This was the time when Jose Luis Romero, a socialist historian, was the university president and Gino Germani exerted an inuence on sociology. In the case of Mexico, we nd a clearly different format. Since the time of Cardenas administration and in several forms, a highly verticalized political system and an authoritarian context were established: in fact, virtually a single-party regime, a strong state and a society with little mobilization or exercise of citizenship, but in which the government nevertheless systematically supported the development of social sciences with public funds. This support went rst to anthropology, and then to sociology and the other social sciences. If we focus on the three largest countries, we can see that, in the foundational phase, the development of social sciences became a reality, in many cases achieving outstanding levels under clearly distinct political formats. In all of them, the interaction with the political framework was signicant, but the diversity of inuences and interaction with social sciences precludes our making simplications. In the second stage of the period considered here (military dictatorships, except for Mexico), we also nd various formats of interaction depending on the country. In the case of Chile, Uruguay and Argentina, the policy of the military governments was strongly
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repressive regarding pre-existing centers and organizations related to social sciences, but this opened up room for the development or consolidation in some instances of the so-called independent centers, which were successful as a way of preserving and developing the scientic level. This was an extremely paradoxical situation. Very signicant and systematic, foreign nancial support was given to research in these centers, with the result that, in these three countries, social sciences and social scientists managed to preserve and in many instances increase their productivity and contribute to the original scientic knowledge existing in their countries. Political restrictions reduced the subjects that could be studied, but there is broad consensus that, contrary to what could be a plausible a priori hypothesis, the overall balance was broadly positive. A different format was found in Brazil under the strongly authoritarian regimes. The early Brazilian dictatorship (1964) undoubtedly imposed restrictions on the subjects that could be approached and removed many professors from public universities, but at the same time it set in the framework of its strategy of conservative developmentism a policy of clearly supporting growth of social sciences in the several federal universities. Through support and increased funding for graduate programs, in particular, the government enabled the most qualied social science academic institutions of Latin America to establish and consolidate themselves. These academic institutions were located in several regions of Brazil, counterbalancing the traditional dominance of the Sao PauloRio de Janeiro axis. At the same time, some signicant independent centers were set up, but they had less relative weight than was the case in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. In the second phase, which we call post-foundational, the case of Mexico once again presents signicant format differences. Given that Mexico had virtually a single-party political system and strong social control, it did not go through a stage of military coups. The opposite was true in this period: there was a slow move towards greater democratization and increased citizen mobilization, but this coexisted with a certain crisis in the existing social sciences model. Although they underwent considerable expansion from the quantitative point of view particularly with the establishment of the new university social science centers all over the country they were affected by increasing ideologization and a relative weakening of research, in the strict sense of the term. Unlike the other countries considered here, in the case of Mexico there was no development of

the so-called independent social science centers based on foreign funding. The importance, for the social sciences in Mexico, of the massive immigration of qualied social scientists eeing the dictatorships in the Southern Cone area in this period should be underlined. This was undoubtedly an unpredicted positive impact of the political interference in that area. In a way, this was a repetition of the late 1930s, when many Spanish intellectuals eeing Franquism came to Mexico. In the rst stage of this phase, which we call political-institutional normalization, we nd that, on the whole, the macro political and institutional context became more democratic in all countries, creating an atmosphere of greater academic freedom, enabling the return of many social scientists from exile, increasing academic cooperation agreements with institutions in Europe and the USA, etc. However, this does not mean that a systemic improvement took place in the social sciences in all countries, either in the university or in the private context, or in the independent centers, although in general certain basic quality levels remained. Each country is different, depending on the aspect analyzed. If we look at the independent centers, we nd that almost all of them experienced a steep fall in the scientic role they played, due either to the migration of their staff to universities or government, or to their transformation into consulting companies as a way to mitigate the dramatic decrease in foreign funds that occurred at the time of military dictatorships. In some countries, like Chile and to a lesser extent Argentina and Brazil, there was a strong displacement of qualied social scientists from academia towards new government organizations after the dictatorship period. In many of these cases, this weakened the mechanisms for reproducing new generations of social scientists in universities and research centers. On the other hand, almost every country saw a strong expansion of the number of students in the social sciences, which was followed to the same extent by increased budgets in public universities. This generated a massication and a trend towards lower quality in many public universities, for example in Mexico and in Argentina, where there were no entry quotas. A different situation was found in Brazil and Chile, where there was selection and a maximum quota, although higher education social science programs continued to be free, which was not the case in Chile.
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One specic process in this historical period is noteworthy in the countries considered here: the expansion of educators and researchers from European and North American academic organizations began in the region, sometimes frequently providing turnkey packages. There was an increase in horizontal agreements, too. Those processes unexpectedly produced a political opening in the local development of social sciences. However, the strong inuence of the political context expressed itself in various types of relationships between social scientists and political activity itself. The journey through the social sciences in Latin America was always strongly linked to the analysis of either small or large concrete problems, depending on the period and country, as well as to the will of social scientists to act upon such processes. This almost always led to a greater relative inuence in academia of the ideological levels of discourse, as well as to a trend towards an important relationship either supportive or oppositional, depending on the case between the work of the social sciences and their promoters, and politics, parties and government. The fact that society and politics in most countries had undergone a strong crisis gave a visibly more dramatic character in Latin America to what, with different shades, had in fact been a constant in some modern Western social sciences since their emergence. But this did not happen at the expense of the consolidation of their character as social sciences having the ability to perform theoreticalempirical analysis that was different from that found in philosophy of history and more or less scholarly essayism. We have seen that, depending on the country and the period, this almost constant involvement with the sociopolitical context could be found, to a greater or lesser extent, in the quality of the nal scientic product of social sciences, with some of the paradoxes we have mentioned earlier. Within this general framework, however, empirical evidence has shown that this relationship was expressed in a large variety of modes and styles. In the founding phase and in the next social scientists tended to practice their profession basically in an academic environment, and their relationship with politics was primarily one of opposition to and criticism of government policies; their opposition would often also carry over to social or party movements with which they were personally linked. Such a format was encouraged depending on the country both by currents of Marxist inspiration and by those linked to progressive Christian humanism.

In the dictatorial period, the political opposition style was different due to repression, but from a prole with a very strong emphasis on the technical-scientic character of the work; some schools, and in particular the independent centers, in every way actually became strong analytical and ethical benchmarks in the ght against authoritarianism, and they were thus recognized by citizens and the political elites in the transition phases. A few eloquent examples will sufce, such as the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO, Latin American School of Social Sciences) in Chile, the Centro Brasileiro de Analise e Planejamento (CEBRAP, Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning) and the Centro de Estudos de Cultura Contemporanea (CEDEC, Center for Contemporary Culture Studies) in Brazil, the Centro de Investigaciones sobre la Sociedad, el Estado y la Administracion (CISEA, Center for Research on Society, the State and Public Administration) and the Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad (CEDES, Center for the Study of the State and Society) in Argentina, the Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios sobre el Desarrollo en Uruguay (CIEDUR, Interdisciplinary Center for Studies on Development in Uruguay) and the Centro de Informaciones y Estudios de Uruguay (CIESU, Studies and Information Center of Uruguay) in Uruguay. In the post-dictatorial contexts, there was a strong shift in the recurrent connection between social scientists and politics. A signicant number of the most qualied social scientists those who had frequently played an active role in the transition held important positions or acted as consultants to governments in the democratic phase. The change in position and orientation did not alter the direct relationship with political action, however. The transition from the point of view of society and frequently from the point of view of the opposition to the point of view of government administration or techno-bureaucracy took more or less time, depending on the orientation of each scientist and government; but the important factor is that this active involvement of many high-level social scientists with politics was constant. From a long list of cases, it is enough to mention the two most emblematic and well known: Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Ricardo Lagos. Both were outstanding academics and left-wing political activists; both suffered the effects of dictatorship; and both later became ministers and presidents. But the simple list of the sociologists and political scientists who became part of government in Chile, Argentina and Brazil is so
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long that it would be virtually impossible to reproduce it here, and this does not include economists, anthropologists and others. This context is undoubtedly very different from the one in which social scientists in Mexico lived, where the PRI-ist regime maintained a delicate dialectic between academic autonomy, direct or semi-direct repression in particular cases and a policy of co-optation through several government and cultural mechanisms. But in Mexico, too, the signicant relationship between politics and social sciences was a constant in the periods studied. Special mention should be made of the remarkable impact of social sciences in Latin America in the regional and world political and ideological context, particularly since the 1960s. The heyday of the Cold War, the impact of the Cuban revolution with the Bay of Pigs invasion and the missile crisis, the appeal of the development models that, at the time, were known as the centrally planned economy, the US launch of the Alliance for Progress, but also strong destabilizing actions, the proliferation of leftist guerrilla movements and the expansion of the so-called post-conciliar Church, are all processes and ideologies that provided a unique context for the relationship between social sciences and politics in the 1960s and 1970s. In some cases, this was not an obstacle to the consolidation of highlevel scientic analysis. In others, the effect was the opposite, with an over-ideologization of intellectual activity and impoverishment of the dominant scientic level for long periods of time.
Pre-history of institutionalized social sciences in Latin America Before the complete institutionalization and professionalization of the social sciences, there were already different forms of systematic work and thinking in these areas. Our different national cases exhibit diverse forms of linkage between these antecedents and the type of work later institutionalized. We will consider three loci of approach to social topics during this period, which we have called pre-history: the academic chairs 1 , political thought and literary criticism and, nally, independent research and activities of public servants. By the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, chairs of sociology or social science had been established in all

the countries included in our study. Their establishment was the starting point of a process of institutionalization or even partial institutionalization, as we see the recognition of the social sciences as areas of knowledge to be included in the academic system. The new programs were part of professional elds such as law or philosophy. Later on they were included in elds such as economics or education. The rst chair to be established was that of sociology, created in the School of Philosophy and Letters of the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 1898. These programs represented only one of the forms in which the study of society was conducted at the time. There were at least two others, which were inuential in the development of the social disciplines. The second approach, then, adopted even before the creation of special academic chairs, was present in the interpretations and proposals of politicians and thinkers and as well in literary works intent on reecting social problems. It had been present for centuries, but at the end of the 19th century it became connected with more systematic ways of handling social analysis such as positivism, socialism, and the concern for social issues, often linked to the Churchs social encyclical documents, especially Rerum novarum. In the 19th century in Chile, rst Lastarria and later Letelier tried to ground their proposals in positivist thought. Although they were academics, they did not establish chairs formally dened as sociology or social sciences. In 1897, in Argentina, the journal La Montana, which dened itself as a revolutionary socialist journal, included a permanent section entitled Estudios sociologicos, which had a prominent role in the publication. Between 1920 and 1940, elites and counter-elites on both the right and the left emerged in Brazil. Even among the military, these currents of thought elicited committed responses. The relationship between political life and social sciences was such that it caused the writer Mario de Andrade to quip that sociology is the art of rapidly saving Brazil. Beyond the academic chairs and the politico-cultural interpretations, a third approach needs to be taken into account. Independent students and state technicians conducted studies with rich empirical content on specic aspects of social life. In Uruguay, this type of activity gave rise to a signicant volume of anthropological studies. These studies began quite early, as was the case with the work of Antonio Diaz, born in Spain, who was active during the
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19th century. During the 20th century, a good number of scholars carried on this tradition of independent study. A century ago, in Argentina, Juan Bialet Masse wrote a comprehensive review of the condition of the working class as part of a vast governmental enquiry oriented towards the development of a labor code. Let us now return to our three approaches to the study of society. In Argentina, the chair created in the School of Philosophy and Letters interrupted its activities, to be re-opened in 1905. In 1912, another chair was created in the Humanities School of the Universidad Nacional de la Plata. The process of chair creation moved to the interior of the country, where chairs were created in the universities of Cordoba and Litoral. In Buenos Aires, a chair was created in the School of Law early in the 20th century, while several schools of economic sciences engaged in the process of chair creation. A rm step towards institutionalization was taken by the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, where a doctoral program in political science was established. In fact, the program was oriented towards the study of branches of law, such as public law and international law, rather than towards political science as such. It is to be noted that the law schools tended to call themselves schools of law and social sciences without actually engaging in any activities corresponding to the social sciences. In 1940 we see the culmination of this process of partial institutionalization, when an Institute of Sociology was established in the School of Philosophy and Letters. In Chile there was a delay even in the establishment of chairs. Valentin Letelier, a devotee of social analysis, did not commit himself to proposing the creation of a sociology chair, although he occupied positions of power in the academic world, as a member of the Directive Council of the School of Law and President of the University. There was a strong resistance to sociology. Another important intellectual, the Puerto Rican Eugenio Mar a de Hostos, who worked in Chile, failed in his hope of renewing the study of law through the inuence of sociology. In 1940, Chile already had 50 chairs in different schools. In Brazil, the creation of chairs was a late phenomenon, but it covered the whole country. In 1933, a chair of sociology was established in the Escola Livre de Sociologia e Pol tica (Free School of Sociology and Politics). But sociology had gained a public image that earned the inclusion of the discipline in the curriculum of the Military School. This late character and the peculiar process of institutionalization that Brazil underwent made the Escola the beginning of a condition of full institutionalization.

In Uruguay the creation of a chair of sociology became a public issue, as it was created by an Act of Parliament in 1913, thus satisfying a requirement for the creation of university chairs. It was later reestablished by presidential decree and located in the School of Law. As Ernesto Campagna points out, in Uruguay sociology will be inuenced by its relationship to different areas of the study of law, while in Argentina it was linked to history and in Brazil it will be autonomous. These different linkages have been decisive, in regard to both the process of professionalization and the ability to subsist in the teeth of political change. Let us make it clear that the activity of most of the chairs was concentrated on offering courses devoted to the ordered presentation of theoretical approaches, without conducting research, especially research on specic aspects of social life. At some point in time, other disciplines taught at the university level or at the level of tertiary institutions training professors became the source of inuential orientations in the social sciences, lling the void left by the disciplinary chairs. History played this role in Uruguay, while Chilean structuralist economics became a powerful intellectual force even beyond the national borders. The second type of approach mentioned above, based on political thought and literary creation, was present from the beginnings of national society and the state. We will examine this way of taking social life into account, but we will look only at relatively recent times. Already by the end of the 19th century, after a long period of prominence in Brazil of the Bachelors trained in Coimbra and later in the country itself, intellectuals emerged who competed with the former professionals. With the appearance of the generation of 1870, intellectuals started taking collective positions, vying for moral leadership of the nation and trying to create a new image of the country and its future. They confronted social processes such as the repression of the Canutos and created a literature of anger. The children of the new urban bourgeoisie began entering the centers of higher education. They took up the great challenge of constructing the nation by means of the state. Thus, the sociological approach inspired a series of works related to the pedagogical reform of Minister Botelho de Magalhaes, an Army man who introduced the teach ing of sociology in the Military School. Finally, during the period
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192045, the nal defeat of the Bachelors allowed the expansion of a form of social sciences avant la lettre that opened the way for full institutionalization. Around the middle of the 19th century, some distinguished Uruguayan intellectuals came to the social sciences as part of their concern for the development of new ways of understanding politics and social action. From the last part of the 1960s until the 1970s, Carlos Quijano, a respected gure, director of the journal Marcha, was recognized as a teacher and inspirer. These militant activities could collide with the limitations of the chairs conservatism. At the beginning of the century, the doctoral thesis of Alfredo L. Palacios, later the rst elected socialist parliamentarian in the Americas, on the situation of the working class was rejected by the Law School of the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires. We will now examine the third type of approach, based on the activity of independent researchers and technicians linked to the state. This approach is especially interesting for the development of empirical social sciences. Among the practitioners we nd a combination of theoretical concerns and eldwork. Beyond the direct contact with social reality present in eldwork, the importance of this approach resides in the adoption of a style of work for which the question of verication was central. Two variants can be distinguished in these works. One is work linked to public institutions in need of reports for the tasks they have to assume. The other corresponds to studies by independent researchers. A notable example of the rst variety is the report on the situation of the Argentine workers in the interior of the country, authored by Juan Bialet Masse in 1904. Bialet Masse was an immigrant from Catalonia, who had distinguished himself in different disciplines, public posts and entrepreneurial activities. His report was based on a prodigious eld study commissioned by the Minister of the Interior, who was trying to draw up a labor code. The same ministerial commitment gave rise to a series of other reports on different areas of the country and types of labor. Decades later, an inspector from the Labor Ofce, L. Niklison, wrote detailed reports on the labor situation in different areas of the country. An independent scholar, J.B. Ambrosetti, devoted many years to the study of the situation of the laborers engaged in the production of yerba mate.

In Chile, a priest, Guillermo Viviani, and an independent antiCatholic thinker, Agust n Venturino, produced works of sociological synthesis that came closer to the construction of a disciplinary eld than most attempts originating in the formal chairs. Uruguayan anthropology is an outstanding case of prolonged and intense research organized by academic institutions. We have mentioned the Spanish researcher D as, who was followed by such founding gures as Eduardo Acevedo D az, a prominent politician who occupied government positions, and Jose Figueira. These researchers were already active during the 1890s. Around the 1960s, authors such as A.R. Castellanos and E.F. Campal produced research and works on rural Uruguay, whereas there were no academic courses or programs in the eld of anthropology. In Brazil, many research projects and studies originated in a state institution, the Council for the Protection of Aboriginal Peoples. Only afterwards did academic institutions become the locus for this kind of work. We can include, in this third type of pioneering activity, different from academic work and from political thought and action, the contributions coming from structuralist economics. This powerful intellectual current was developed in Chile by economists of different nationalities working with the Comision Economica para America Latina (CEPAL, Economic Commission for Latin America), who later became inuential throughout Latin America, providing central inspiration for researchers in most of our countries. Coming back to our three types of approach now, we see that behind these three types of intellectual activity were strong currents coming from mother disciplines of European or American origin. There have been also important direct linkages. We will not present here an analysis of the theories inspiring the three types of activities we have presented. We will simply mention some cases of great signicance. A rst major inuence to be taken into account is positivism. In both its Comtean version and its Saintsimonean form, it was predominant since the 19th century. In some cases, as in Brazil, it acted as a forceful inspiration for the process of national organization. Anti-positivist orientations appeared quite soon; Cousins philosophy of the spirit and the German reconstruction of the spirit of the peoples were the most common. In fact, diverse idealistic approaches appeared and operated as powerful obstacles
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to empirical research. It is to be noted that the encyclopedic constructionism of the positivists was ultimately another obstacle to empirical studies. Socialism and several variants of Marxism were widely used approaches to social interpretation and research. The American inuence appeared at the beginning of the 20th century through the work of Ward. In later decades, Durkheim and other contemporary authors were incorporated into the curriculum, although theoretically inspired empirical research had a very limited role. This rapid list of contacts and inuences is merely an indication of the enduring presence of external links. One early expression of these links was the presence of foreign scientists in our countries. In 1830, the Chilean government hired the French naturalist Claudio Gay with a view to organizing an ethnological section in the National Museum, based on data-gathering expeditions. In Brazil, contacts with foreign social scientists took the form of missions, such as the French and the American ones, which played a decisive role in the establishment and institutionalization of social disciplines. A nal example corresponds to institutional contacts established in Argentina by a historian-sociologist who headed the Institute of Sociology in the School of Philosophy and Letters at the Universidad de Buenos Aires around 1940. A. Povina tried to create a Pan American Institute of Sociology, in connection with American sociologists and the Institut International de Sociologie. The project failed, but it was an interesting antecedent of later contacts with international professional organizations. After this review of diverse types of activities representing antecedents in the process of disciplinary construction, we will attempt to assess the extent to which these activities effectively functioned as the basis for the institutionalized and professionalized disciplines. In this respect, there are marked differences between the countries we will examine, which present different patterns of continuity, historical breaks or change. At one extreme is Brazil, which shows a pattern similar to that of Mexico. In Brazil we nd a process of accumulation of knowledge and of organizational continuity. At the other extreme, Chile and Argentina attained full institutionalization and professionalization of the disciplines we are examining, and in particular sociology, through a break with preceding forms. Uruguay occupies an intermediate position. There we nd cases of social scientists trained

during the previous period who also participated in the new institutional condition. They were not always the generators of the new forms, but they were incorporated into the new style of work and broadened their previous intellectual style. Aldo Solari and Carlos Real de Azua are two outstanding examples of this development. As we indicated above, there were differences between countries in terms of the degree to which the initial forms of the discipline included a linkage between reections about society and eldwork. Such a connection was paramount in Mexico and almost nonexistent in Argentina. This characteristic strongly conditioned the development of our disciplines. Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira has presented an evolutionary schema of the periods through which Brazilian anthropology evolved. For him, a rst stage, the heroic stage, functioned as the basis for the emergence and consolidation of charismatic gures typical of the second stage and who acted as originators of the third stage of bureaucratic organization and institutionalization. Besides the way in which the stages are dened, Cardoso de Oliveiras schema of the transition between stages offers special interest. For instance in Argentine, in sociology and even in anthropology, there is a lack of connection with the work conducted during the heroic stage. The work by Bialet Masse was absent in the institutionalization phase. It is also important that the early ofcial academic version of sociology (known in Latin America as socio log a de catedra, or chair sociology, cf. note 1) did not pay attention to studies based on eldwork. If some interest in such work was expressed, as happened with one of the chair sociologists, E. Quesada, students and readers were warned to be very careful in handling such material, which had not been produced according to a systematic approach and was therefore liable to be embroiled in political processes. The lack of connection comes from afar. More than once, political writers made contributions to the understanding of social life of which the chair professors were incapable. We can ask if some of these forerunners might not represent more than a historical reference and are capable of serving as classics, providing a guide for the activity of contemporary social scientists. We can also ask if the construction of the social sciences is richer and more effective when it follows a pattern of continuity or when there is a revolutionary break with the past. The study of the situation of full institutionalization and professionalization takes these questions as points of reference.
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Institutionalization, internationalization and professionalization of social sciences Although the processes of institutionalization, internationalization and professionalization of the social sciences in Latin America in the period analyzed obey different national standards, the crosssectional analysis shows signicant transnational commonalities. The rst commonality results from the fact that, at the time, the rst institutions linked to social sciences, whether or not universities, were founded in the 1930s, in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, where important political and social changes were taking place. The post-revolutionary radicalization in Mexico under Cardenas inuenced the ideological conicts in the rst decade of the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociologicas (Institute for Sociological Research) (19309), but from the 1940s this institute, with the establishment by Mendieta and Nunes of the Revista Mexicana de Sociologa, as well as with the foundation of the Colegio de Mexico (1940) became decisive for the institutionalization of social sciences and history. In Brazil, the foundation of the Escola Livre de Sociologia e Pol tica (ELSP, Free School of Sociology and Politics) and the Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP) between 1933 and 1934 was the Sao Paulo state elites answer to the 1930 revolution that had removed it from national power. In the same year, the Sociedade Paulista de Sociologia was created. In Rio de Janeiro, the Universidade do Distrito Federal, established in 1935, provided the institutional foundations for the development of social sciences, but it was closed by the government under Catholic pressure. These new institutions received missions of foreign professors from France, the USA and Germany, but the new Faculdade Nacional de Filosoa (FNF, National School of Philosophy) of the Universidade do Brasil recruited its foreign professors under a new orientation. In the federal capital city, the Church turned its Instituto Catolico de Estudos Superiores (Catholic Institute of Higher Studies) (1932) into the Faculdade de Filosoa das Faculdades Catolicas (Philosophy Department of the Catholic Schools) (1940) to found, in 1946, the rst Ponticia Universidade Catolica (PUC, Pontical Catholic University). In Argentina, while national universities were dominated by chair sociology, a group of liberal and socialist intellectuals founded the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores (Free College of

Higher Studies) at the time the Radical Party occupied the presidency of the Republic (191630); it was overthrown, in 1930, by the Uriburu coup, which restored the traditional oligarchies to power. In the Peronist period (194352) the new school outside the university environment became an alternative space for debate and establishment of political and university staff who would later join the Universidad de Buenos Aires. At the same time anthropology, too, found institutional support in the three countries. Mexico established the rst Latin American institution for education in anthropology: the Escuela Nacional de Antropolog a e Historia (National School of Anthropology and History) (1934) and the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Institute of Aboriginal Studies) (1948). In Brazil, the National Museum was at the time devoted particularly to natural sciences and physical anthropology, although many foreign anthropologists were carrying out research missions. However, it was at the Escola Livre de Sociologia e Pol tica, in Sao Paulo, that some foreign pro fessors, from the Chicago School, with a background in community studies taught the rst Brazilian ethno-sociologists, while at the Indian Museum in Rio de Janeiro it was only in 1955 that the rst further education courses in anthropology were initiated. In Argentina, under European inuence, particularly German and Belgian, starting in 1932, seven centers were established with international contacts, the most active being the La Plata with its Anthropological Museum and the Tucuman Center. The second commonality is found in the 195060 decade, when the three countries saw the beginning of a process of actual institutionalization of sociology as a discipline through teaching and research. In Mexico, the Colegio de Mexico established the Centro de Estudios Historicos e de Estudios Sociales (Center for Historical and Social Studies) (1943), whose founder, J.M. Echavarr a, also played a strategic role in Latin American social sciences by translating the classic works of European sociology (Weber, Simmel, Pareto), published by the Fondo de Cultura Economica. In 1951 the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (National Autonomous University of Mexico) founded the Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Pol ticas e Sociales (National School of Political and Social Sciences). A few years later, under the direction of Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, the latter would become the rst graduate program at the School of Sociology at FLACSO-Chile.
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In Argentina, although the chairs of sociology had been in existence since the late 19th century in the capital city and several other provincial cities, the Instituto de Sociolog a at the Universidad de Buenos Aires was founded in 1947, with the R. Levene chair, which was already linked to G. Germani. In 1950, the Revista and the Sociedad Argentina de Sociolog a were established. With deperonization, the Department of Sociology was founded, the Institute was restructured, and the sociology program was organized (1957). Anthropology, in turn, established its program in 1958, but political sciences implemented theirs only in 1968, under the inuence of public law. However, there had been the publication of the Revista Argentina de Ciencia Poltica (191028) and the establish ment of the Associacion Argentina de Ciencia Pol tica, in 1957, linked to the International Political Science Association. Alternatively, the Universidad Nacional del Litoral was the only national institution which, since 1969, granted doctoral degrees in political sciences and diplomacy. Two important private research centers were established at this time: the Instituto de Desarrollo Economico (Economic Development Institute) (1958) and the Centro de Sociolog a Comparada (Comparative Sociology Center) (1963), as well as the two journals associated with them: Desarrollo Economico (1958) and the Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (1965), which included social scientists of the region on their editorial boards. In addition, two publishing houses were important for the legitimization of social sciences in Argentina: Paidos, with its Biblioteca de Psicologia Social y Sociolog a, and Eudeba, linked to the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). In Brazil, it was in the 195060 decade that the institutionalization of sociology in education and research actually started, with the completion of doctoral studies by Florestan Fernandes and his assistants at the Universidade de Sao Paulo, establishing around his Sociology I chair the renowned Sao Paulo School of Sociology. In 1949, away from the Rio de JaneiroSao Paulo axis, the Instituto Joaquim Nabuco was established by Gilberto Freyre. In the state of Bahia, important research projects on race relations in Brazil were developed in the framework of an international agreement with Columbia University and UNESCO, with the participation of researchers from Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. In Rio de Janeiro, other institutions were established in this eld: the Instituto de Direito Publico e Ciencia Pol tica (Institute of Public Law and

Political Sciences) at the Fundacao Getulio Vargas (1954) and the Instituto Brasileiro de Economia, Sociolog a e Pol tica (Brazilian Institute of Economy, Sociology and Politics) (1953), which would later become the Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros (Higher Institute for Brazilian Studies), in 1955. In Minas Gerais state, starting in the 1950s, the School of Economic Sciences, with sociology and public administration programs and its own system of grants for the best students, produced successive generations of social scientists, some of whom went on to pursue graduate studies in sociology at FLACSO-Chile. In the same decade, the rst program in sociology and politics was organized at the PUC-RJ and at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociais in the Universidade do Brasil, both in 1958. In 1960, the education of anthropologists that had rst begun at the Indian Museum was resumed, now with specialization programs in anthropological theory and research, at the National Museum, under the joint direction of Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira and Luis de Castro Faria, who laid the foundations of cultural and social anthropology in Rio de Janeiro and other regions of Brazil. This institutionalization process also generated its scientic societies: the Sociedade Brasileira de Sociologia (1954) and the Sociedade Brasileira de Antropologia (1955). In the same period, publishing production expanded strongly, with collections that became a reference for the education of historians and social scientists: a highlight of the period was the Brasiliana collection, published in Sao Paulo by the Companhia Editora Nacional. The latter, together with Jose Olympio in Rio de Janeiro and the Globo publishing house in Porto Alegre, controlled 61 percent of the publishing market. In addition, the rst scientic journals in social sciences appeared: Revista Sociologia (ELSP, 1939); Boletim Ciencia e Tropico (IJN/PE, 1952); Cadernos do Nosso Tempo (IBESP/RJ, 1953); Revista Antropologica (USP, 1953); Revista de Direito Publico e Ciencia Poltica (Fundacao Getulio Vargas/RJ, 1956); Revista Brasileira de Estudos Polticos (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 1957); Bulletin America Latina (CLAPCS/RJ, 1958); and Revista de Educacao e Ciencias Sociais (Instituto Nacional de Estudos Pedagogicos/RJ, 1958). In Chile, by comparison with Argentina and Brazil, the chair sociology or sociological essayism phase was a less relevant intellectual movement for the construction of sociology as a discipline. The rst generations of professional sociologists did not see themselves as being as closely connected with these forerunners, unlike
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the case in the other countries. There was a stronger disciplinary tradition in economics, but the institutionalization of scientic sociology started with Hamuy, after his return from graduate study in the USA, at the School of Philosophy and Education when he took over the Sociology Institute (1952). The latter replaced the Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas (Center for Sociological Research) (1946). Later, in 1962, chair sociology took over the Institute again, and sociology as a discipline in universities reemerged only in the 1970s. Anthropology, in turn, would become institutionalized a decade later, with the establishment of the Insti tuto de Investigaciones Sociologicas and the Instituto de Estudios Antropologicos. It should be pointed out that FLACSO, CEPAL and the Universidad Catolica de Chile established, in 1958, the School and Institute of Sociology at the School of Economics. In Uruguay, although social sciences were established later than in the other countries, they were part of the institutionalization process in the Southern Cone area. The founding period extended from 1958 to 1973, but the most prestigious disciplines, before the establishment of sociology, were history and economics. At that time, the Instituto de Profesores Artigas (Artigas Teachers Institute) was the most important institution for the education of secondary level history teachers, and several historians who played a precursor role recognized by the generation of social scientists were graduates of this institute. At the Universidad de la Republica, the Institute of History (1954) of the School of Humanities and Sciences and the Instituto de Econom a (1963), linked to the School of Economic Sciences, both preceded modern social sciences. Although chair sociology had started in the 1930s (Prando), it was Isaac Ganon who implemented the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales at the School of Law, in which Aldo Solari, as his successor in possession of an international reputation, would be the main professor. The key year for modern social sciences was 1969, with the competition of young sociologists who had graduated from FLACSO and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in Paris. The latter organizations would strongly expand their research and education activities with the establishment of the bachelors degree in sociology (1970). This process was interrupted at the university by the military dictatorship, and the emerging social sciences had to seek shelter in private centers. The restructuring and consolidation of social sciences in Uruguay would take place only after 1985.

It is extremely important to stress the connection between institutionalization and internationalization. Although in these national institutionalization processes there were many and varied international inuences in the education of professors in the institutional models of organization of education and research, resulting from the educational missions, from research exchanges and action by organizations (UNESCO) and international foundations (Ford Foundation), the national dynamics of the social sciences were linked domestically to different and unique institutional and politicalcultural contexts. It should be pointed out that in international terms the institutionalization of social sciences was at the same time convergent and autonomous in different countries and that UNESCO played a coordinating role by allowing the revival of sociology after the Second World War to ensure its promotion in various third world countries: in 1949 the International Sociology Association was established, which then founded the Newsletter and the International Social Sciences Journal (1959), as well as the International Social Sciences Council. There was also a signicant international movement of economists and social scientists among several Latin American countries resulting from exchange processes that were either voluntary or forced by political reasons. In the 195060 decade, social sciences were undergoing rapid expansion and institutionalization in Latin America. The rst specialized international associations started to be organized in Argentina: in 1950, the Latin American Sociology Association met in Cordoba, convoked by Alfredo Povina and Tecera del Franco. In 1951 the rst Latin American Sociology Conference was held in Buenos Aires. In 1960 Gino Germani founded the Asociacion Argentina de Sociolog a and in 1962 the Argentinian and Latin American Sociology Seminars were held in Buenos Aires with the participation of Gino Germani, Jorge Graciarena, Torcuato di Tella, Norberto Bustamante and foreign guests Costa Pinto e Manuel Diegues, Jr (Brazil), Aldo Solari (Uruguay), Pablo Gonzalez Casanova (Mexico) and Jose Augustin Silva Michelena (Venezuela). One of the modes of the internationalization of sociology, from 1958, was through graduate study abroad by successive generations of Latin American sociologists, who graduated from the rst Escuela de Sociolog a of FLACSO-Chile, where some professors, particularly Europeans (Peter Heinz, Lucien Brams, Johan Galtung, etc.) left their theoretical-methodological mark on young sociologists
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coming from various countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Peru, etc.). Later, the education prole diversied with the establishment of the Escuela de Econom a y Administracion Publica (School of Economy and Public Administration). Additionally, in 1960 the FLACSO signed exchange agreements with the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (fth section, now the EHESS) in Paris, the University of North Carolina and the University of Chicago (National Opinion Research Center). In Rio de Janeiro, also connected to UNESCO, the Centro Latinoamericano de Pesquisas em Ciencias Sociais (CLAPCS, Latin American Center for Social Science Research) was founded in 1957, the latter publishing the journal America Latina, which was the rst social sciences journal with a Latin American vocation published in Brazil. The rst international research was conducted in 1956 between France and Chile, in a cooperative effort between the Instituto de Sociolog a in Chile and the Centre dEtudes Sociologiques in Paris. It was a comparative research on workers awareness in two Chilean companies (Lota and Huachipato), with the participation of Alain Touraine, Jean-Daniel Reynaud and Lucien Brams. Torcuato di Tella participated in the data analysis phase, after having pursued his graduate studies in the UK and the USA. Research results were published in Chile (di Tella et al., 1967) and France (Touraine et al., 1966). As part of the internationalized institutionalization processes inspired by the models of European universities linked to the Catholic Church and usually controlled by the Jesuit order, mention should be made of the role played by Catholic universities in the institutionalization of social sciences in Brazil, Chile and Argentina, through the establishment of sociology programs. In 1958, as already mentioned, the Sociology and Politics program was founded at the PUC-RJ by the Jesuit Father Fernando Bastos DAvila; in 1959, in Argentina, the sociology program was established at the Universidad Catolica, and in Chile the Escuela de Sociolog a, with a predominantly foreign faculty from Belgium, the Netherlands and France who, with Organization of American States grants, sent Chileans to study abroad. The rst fellows of the Catholic university, Jose Sulbrandt and Raul Urzua, with the support of Father Roger Vekemans, were sent to the University of California at Berkeley. The Schools director was Hernan Godoy who, when control of the Sociology Institute at the Universidad de Chile was

taken over by chair sociologists, migrated to the Universidad Catolica. In Uruguay, Chile, Brazil and Argentina, inspired by the methodology and research of the French Dominican priest Lebret, several groups of young Catholic professionals formed and started doing research, and making diagnoses and development plans. Some were the forerunners of education and research centers like the Equipos del Bien Comun (Common Good Teams), created in Uruguay by Juan Pablo Terra, who later organized the Centro Latinoamericano de Econom a Humana (Latin American Center for Human Economy), which became an alternative education space during the dictatorship. Some were linked to parties inspired by European Christian Democracy in those countries: in Uruguay (Juan Pablo Terra), in Chile (Jacques Chonchol), in Brazil (Pl nio Arruda Sampaio) and in Argentina (organized through the Liga de los Estudiantes Humanistas). The last, also under the inuence of Jacques Maritain, strongly organized at the UBA School of Engineering and were persecuted under Peron (some were forced into exile in Uruguay), and others would join the Christian social wing of Peronism. Another signicant moment of internationalization of social sciences in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, took place during the governments of Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende in Chile. There, an intellectually and politically stimulating environment emerged in a conjuncture of social change. Such a situation and the inuence of several international organizations installed in the country also created a helpful and congenial atmosphere for Brazilian exiles and, more generally, for exiles from many Latin American countries. The presence of a signicant group of social scientists in Santiago at CEPAL, particularly at the Instituto Latinoamericano de Planicacion Economica y Social (ILPES, Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning) and FLACSO, and in other institutions, was highly relevant for greater integration between Latin American social sciences which, after Allendes overthrow, saw its axis move to Mexico. ILPES, where Jose Medina Echavarr a and Oscar Sunkel were directors, was the institution at which Enzo Faletto and Fernando Henrique Cardoso wrote the papers that are at the origin of the theory of dependency in one of its best known variants, found in the intense Latin American debate. We should ask whether this work would have been generated
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and debated in a situation different from the one provided by the Chilean context of that time. A new strategy for the expansion of social sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean was the foundation, in 1967, of the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO, Latin American Social Sciences Council): the idea of CLACSO emerged at the Conference on Compared Sociology organized in Buenos Aires, in 1964, by the Instituto di Tella, which was directed by Enrique Oteiza. In October 1966 the rst meeting of centers and research institutes in social sciences was held in Caracas, but no agreement on a formal organization was reached. Finally, CLACSO was founded in Bogota, with the participation of centers from 10 Latin American countries, at the Universidad de los Andes. Economist Aldo Ferrer from the Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE, Center for Economic Research) was chosen to be the rst general secretary of CLACSO. Brazilians who were part of foundation were Helio Jaguaribe (Instituto de Pesquisas Sociais da Sociedade Brasileira de Instrucao-RJ), Isaac Kerstenetzky (Instituto de Economia at the Fundacao Getulio Vargas-RJ) and Julio Barbosa (Political Sciences Department at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais). The USP was not represented at the foundation of CLACSO. CLACSO, which was based in Buenos Aires, had two important leaders in its early phase: Aldo Ferrer, who traveled Latin America to discuss the CLACSO proposal and who became its rst general secretary, and Enrique Oteiza, his successor, who had been director of the Instituto di Tella. The members of the rst CLACSO steering committees were Gino Germani and Enrique Oteiza (Argentina), Raul Prebisch (Chile), Enrique Iglesias (Uruguay), Helio Jaguaribe and Julio Barbosa (Brazil), Luis Lander (Venezuela), Orlando Fals Borda and Luiz Ratinoff (Colombia), Victor Urquidi and Rodolfo Stavenhagen (Mexico) and Jose Matos Mar (Peru). In 1970 Fernando H. Cardoso entered the committee along with Helio Jaguaribe; in 1972, Ricardo Lagos entered, representing Chile, and Edelberto Torres Rivas representing Central America. In 1974, Cardoso was replaced by Juarez Brandao Lopes. CLACSO played a federating and strategic role in connecting research centers in Latin America: by gathering together the main centers (increasing in number from 35 to over 100), it made them part of a federation and made them feel they were part of one. It became the transnational forum for dening the expansion policy

of the eld and a kind of invisible college where decisions on the scientic policy of social sciences were made, independently of the national states. In addition to the general secretary, who coordinated CLACSO activities, there was a steering committee that collectively dened the lines of political action to be taken by the council. The committees hard core was comprised of representatives from afliated centers in the main countries in which the most prestigious social scientists were found. In thematic terms, it is interesting to follow the progress of the working groups that were progressively organized around 15 themes, dened according to the actual demand for research or for an induced policy approved by the steering committee. The themes dealt with by the groups ranged from urban studies, rural development, science and technology to society and dependence. In the 1980s, the number of working groups doubled, including more comprehensive themes: population and development and theory of the state and politics. CLASCOs efforts in the graduate eld should be underlined. Considering the regional needs, a traveling Advanced Latin American Course on Rural Sociology was conducted between 1974 and 1982. This program graduated 81 students in Asuncion (1974/5), Quito (1976/7), San Jose (1978/9) and Santo Domingo (1980/2). There was, however, a second, more ambitious program involving 48 top-level sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists from various countries, distributed into ve working groups, whose aim was to form a critical mass and set up doctoral programs that would be based in Santiago, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. These programs were not imple mented for strictly political reasons arising from the military coup in Chile, although they had already obtained the nancial support of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Social Sciences Division of UNESCO for grants and visiting professors. In the development of Brazilian social sciences, it seems important to restore the importance of their Latin American location as one of the modes of internationalization. The importance of the French mission and the presence of American and German sociologists in the establishment of social sciences at the USP is undeniable, but it does not seem reasonable to disregard the internationalization produced by the exchange among Latin American countries themselves in the 1950s through 1970s, as well as the role played by universities, international and transnational organizations, specialized
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journals and publishing companies in the region. After 1964, with the military coup in Brazil, the nancial aid provided by the Ford Foundation became strategic in supporting the establishment and institutionalization of social sciences and also in contributing to the research conducted by Brazilianists. It is true that, after the foun dation of the Associacao Nacional de Pos-graduacao e Pesquisa em Ciencias Sociais (ANPOCS, National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Social Sciences) in Brazil in 1977, the latter would play a linking and federating role in the Brazilian graduate and research programs in social sciences by integrating researchers in research groups, which would result in the centers being less interested in joining CLACSO. The period 19702000 would be a time of institutionalization and professionalization of social sciences in Latin America, starting with the expansion of graduate programs, particularly in Brazil, during the military dictatorship, with the 1968 University Law. In 1994 the numbers of graduate courses in Latin America were as follows: specialization (2707), masters (4437) and doctorate (1417). In the distribution among the different countries, in 1994, 71 percent of masters and doctoral programs were in Brazil and Mexico, 23 percent in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela, and 6 percent in the remaining countries. In terms of qualication of the faculty in the period 19924, the distribution is different: Brazil comes rst, with 55.2% of MScs and 22.4 percent of PhDs, while Mexico has 28.7 percent and 3.5 percent, respectively, Argentina 26.3 percent and 12.0 percent and Chile 18.3 percent and 12.5 percent. Let us now look at the links between the labor market and professionals at the different levels generated through the institutionalization process. The encounter of qualied workers with university degrees and a labor market that offered them an occupation enabled the professionalization of disciplines. As we have already seen, the degree of specialization varied in the rst stages, which is important in characterizing professionals graduating from universities. While in Brazil the social sciences degree persisted for a long time, in the other countries, from the outset, degrees were granted in specic disciplines. Universities rst produced specialized professionals. Then they added a second level of differentiation by introducing masters and doctoral programs, which represented a stratied supply in the labor market. While in Brazil higher education was present early on, in the other countries

it became widespread only in the last decade. It is interesting to note that a study conducted in Brazil showed that having a PhD only marginally improves academic salaries. For a long time professionals with better qualications studied in the central countries and, as we saw in the section on internationalization, a central mode of connection with central countries has been precisely the generation of highly qualied professionals abroad or in joint programs in each country. Another difference that can be seen in the university faculty divides those specially prepared for teaching, those educated for research and those educated to do applied work. By generating a mass of professionals, universities at the same time generate the labor market to employ these professionals, since in all periods universities have, almost invariably, been the main employer of new graduates. It is precisely in this eld, the labor market, that important changes took place as the period under analysis progressed. Thus in Brazil the percentage of graduates working in the university system decreased over the years. A rst extension of the professional world took place with the establishment of institutions such as the Consejo Nacional de Inves tigaciones Cient cas y Tecnicas (CONICET, National Council for Scientic Research and Technology) in Argentina, the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa (CNPq, National Research Council) in Brazil and the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales (ISSUNAM, Social Sciences Research Institute) in Mexico, which funded research activities: the profession of social scientist researcher was constituted, with a greater or lesser connection with universities and education in the different countries. Another early extension of the labor market was generated by demand on the part of the state. In Mexico, the beginning of institutional research took place through a state institution: more specically, this institution was based on the personal contact of one researcher, Gamio, with the president, Carranza. State agencies linked to general programs, such as planning, or special areas, such as health, education, urban development, rural development and employment, started using graduates from social science programs. This type of occupation was sometimes compatible with teaching responsibilities at universities or tertiary institutes. In addition, application of the disciplines generated interesting products from the standpoint of research.
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We are dealing here with a very important feature of the labor market for these professions: the fact that low salaries frequently led to multiple jobs. For a long time, Brazil managed to maintain a higher education system able to provide professionals with jobs paying acceptable salaries, while in the other countries in the region this situation was infrequent. In Argentina, the average portion of university professors working full-time was 14 percent, although in the School of Sciences this gure was around 80 percent. Furthermore, the existence of a market for some well-paid occupations gave rise to a strong dualism when professionals managed to nd work in research institutes with foreign funding or worked in public agencies in positions that were also funded by foreign resources. This stratication of the marketplace did not always correspond to the differences in qualication. The existence of different labor market demands is linked to differences between teaching organizations. In Chile, after institutionalization came a process of differentiation between lines of professional education, depending on the institution. While the University of Chile emphasized the education of professionals that would be able to conduct empirical studies, the Catholic University privileged theoretical orientations and social intervention by their graduates, and FLACSO focused on disciplinary graduate programs. Almost since the beginning of the institutionalization, private companies provided jobs. In some cases professionals themselves organized companies that took over new activities having some connection with their education. We are referring to market research and polling companies. These activities occupied students and young graduates, who worked making surveys, and more experienced graduates working as analysts. Some leaders in this area were professional social scientists who went on to achieve visibility on television and in the press as well as value in the marketplace. Another increasingly important area in the labor market, for social sciences in the different periods, has been activities in special purpose organizations, and particularly in so-called NGOs. These organizations are present in varied areas of the life of our countries, linked to the environment, rural development or work programs for disadvantaged sectors. Generally speaking, they do not pay high salaries, but their activities appeal to young graduates with a sense of social responsibility. In addition, international Latin American institutions such as FLACSO have a long history, being present in several countries in the region and devoted to teaching and research.

Added to these work opportunities for social scientists with limited qualication were those that provide jobs for high-level professionals. This was the case of the private research centers, usually funded by foreign foundations or projects basically in response to the military coups in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. These centers, among which we could mention at random a few like the Centro Brasileiro de Analise e Planejamento (CEBRAP, Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning) in Brazil, the Centro de Investiga cion y Estudios de Planicacion (CIEPLAN, Center for Research and Planning Studies) in Chile, the Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad (CEDES, Center for the Study of the State and Society) in Argentina and the Centro de Informaciones y Estudios de Uruguay (CIESU, Studies and Information Center of Uruguay), in Uruguay, grew up in times of repression and discrimination in the universities and remained, although with a lower level of activity, after the re-establishment of constitutional governments. It should be pointed out that some, such as the Common Good Teams in Uruguay, were pre-existing centers with explicit ideological orientations. This brings us to a point of great interest for analyzing the professionalization and development of the labor market. The abovementioned centers emerged amid a violent interruption of the regular operation of the labor market, which shows that the market expansion we have been discussing here was not a linear process. The vicissitudes of national economies affected this market, as did the dominant policies which, in the case of developmentist or populist policies, generated jobs for social science professionals or, in the case of neo-liberalism, destroyed them. Military coups and repressive policies had a double effect on this market. On the one hand, they displaced, exiled and even killed many professionals working at universities and for the state. At the same time, however, they destroyed public and private institutions in which social sciences professionals worked. Paradoxically, in many cases the repression generated an environment that enabled, by reaction, the establishment of institutions that gathered social scientists and enabled them to carry out research projects and, in some cases, even teaching activities. The role of foreign funding was decisive in this area, although there were centers that persisted without this kind of support. At the same time, the dictatorship period, which was followed by a time of strong militancy, represented a quantitative and qualitative
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change in the search for participation on the part of professionals. New approaches to politics included contacts with popular sectors to which social scientists could make contributions. In most cases, no nancial compensation was given in exchange, but there were also cases of professionalization in political activity where a background in social sciences was desirable. After these organizational experiments and the attempts to combine analytical-theoretical concerns with militant and academic interests, the prole of social scientists more interested in their connection with protable professional activities gained ground. The most complete expression of the professionalization process is underway in several of our countries. Professional organizations have been established in Argentina and Brazil with the goal of making a professional degree mandatory for performing activities related to social sciences. If we think about the pre-history of the disciplines, with their chairs in the hands of lawyers and the absence of social scientists, the current situation stands out for the presence of social science graduates with different degrees and qualications in a highly differentiated labor market. The progress of the professionalization process has been remarkable.
Orientations, themes and perspectives Our basic hypothesis is that the sociopolitical processes of the region have constituted the main object of social sciences and molded their work. Furthermore, social sciences have contributed to dening the meaning of these historical processes and have inuenced their dynamics and, in part, their outcome. In spite of the diversity of theoretical directions and contents of the social sciences in the region, we can make a certain type of cross-sectional analysis, based on the periodization that organized the different national cases in this special issue: (1) the original phase of the disciplines, whose birth usually coincides with academic-political projects; (2) the period of rupture due to the crisis of the previous models and, especially, the presence of authoritarian regimes (Brazil 1964, Argentina 1966 and 1976, Chile 1973, Uruguay 1973);

(3) a phase associated with the processes of political democratization and the resurgence and/or consolidation of alternative approaches (since the mid-1980s). In all events, we will concentrate only on what is common to the region, and from a general perspective this does not take into account the particular practices of each one of the disciplines, since, as we have said, despite similarities, there is not an absolute correspondence between the different periods of institutionalization in the various national cases. Brazil, for example, whose founding phase began in the middle of the 1930s and whose moment of rupture went from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, marked a counterpoint in relation to the other cases. To this chronological angle must be added cultural attributes and specic political processes that left their mark on social-scientic academic production, particularly in the last period, with the resurgence of ethnography and the structural approach to indigenismo and multiculturalism. In the cases of Argentina and Chile, there seems to be more correspondence between the foundational phase of the social sciences and chronological periods since their foundation in the 1950s, which occurred somewhat later in Uruguay. Nevertheless, the moments of rupture and re-foundation differ remarkably, which means that the subjects or themes such as development, dictatorships, societal change and regional integration were not approached simultaneously. In the case of Mexico, like Brazil, the foundational process started earlier, with three main events occurring at different moments. These were the arrival of Jose Medina Echavarr a, the creation of the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales (Institute of Social Research) of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (ISSUNAM) and the Colegio de Mexico, founded by Spanish civil war exiles at the beginning of the 1940s. But there is also an important difference between the Mexican case and the other three cases concerning other periods. Unlike the South American countries, Mexico never experienced a military dictatorship, but the hardening of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional regime since 1968, the crucial presence of South American exiles eeing military dictatorships and the maintenance of academic freedom generated a situation, from the point of view of orientations and perspectives, that did not differ signicantly from that which existed in the other countries. Thus there was rst of all the survival and radicalization of what we will call the scientic-critical model (with
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Marxism as the predominant orientation). Later that was accompanied or somewhat replaced by self-criticism stemming from the reappraisal of political democracy, and nally a diversication of social sciences dealing with a variety of specic topics without a unique paradigm. These three important orientations existed at different times in all the other cases. Content and themes in the original phase can be schematically synthesized by two major perspectives or models of social sciences, whose presence will be modied by the particularities of each country according to its own moments of institutionalization. We therefore cannot force this pattern onto all the activities of social sciences or their cultivators. Both perspectives or models have in common, unlike what will come later, their foundation on big paradigms. On the one hand, there is what has been called the scienticprofessional perspective or model, characterized by the predominance of the structural-functionalist approach, usually accompanied by the use of quantitative techniques of collecting and measuring empirical data. Here the scientic approach was dened according to the standards of development of the disciplines in the USA and reected a preoccupation with aspects of society that could be classed under the concepts of development or modernization, with the predominance of sociology. Some of the main subjects were the future of development and the ways to achieve it, agrarian structure and reform, urban marginality and social integration, or the formulation and the design of sectorial state policies, among others. The classic works of Gino Germani (1964) and CEPAL/ ECLA (1965) can be remembered as representative of this period, beyond identication with any particular country and, in the latter case, without strict allegiance to any model. The second model has been called scientic-critical and was generally linked to the resurgence of academic Marxism. Some countries espoused a variety close to structural Marxist analysis, showing the decisive inuence of Althusser and Poulantzas, which in the works of Marta Harnecke became more of a manual of vulgarization. Here the predominant discipline was political economy, characterized by the perspective of a single science of society emphasizing comprehensive and global analysis. Central to the preoccupations of this model were problems derived from dependent capitalism or roads to socialism, and such issues as class structure and struggle, and political processes and ideology. In other countries, in addition to what has already been said, another linkage

with Marxism or Marxian studies was established, closer to the classic texts. For this variety, the central concern was the study of the forms of penetration and development of capital, and of the emergence of social classes and agents from the soil of capital. Many of the practitioners of this approach conducted surveys and research somewhat similar to the model of the recently institutionalized social sciences. Without a doubt, the emblematic work of this period, although it did not have Marxist connotations properly speaking, was Cardoso and Faletto (1969). In both models, the central axis was the theorization and investigation of social change. Unlike the development of social sciences in other parts of the world, here the concrete historical society and not abstract social regularities was the main focus of analysis. Society was a system of articulated structures economic, political, social, cultural in which one dimension or structure determined the others according to universal laws. In the case of the scienticprofessional model, this determinism could privilege the cultural, social or political structure, whereas for the scientic-critical perspective linked to Marxism the main determining structure was the socio-economic system. In this way, societies were conceptualized as developed or underdeveloped; traditional, modern or dual; democratic, authoritarian or totalitarian; feudal, capitalist or on the road to socialism; all this according to the determining factor in the last instance. Consequently, social change was dened as the passage from one type of society to another, depending on the structural factor selected. In this perspective, the social actors tended to identify themselves and to be dened from outside, being analyzed more like agents than like subjects, inasmuch as the meaning of their actions was predened by theoretical and/or ideological directions. In the period of rupture with the original model, with the caveats already stated for the Mexican case, themes and contents were conditioned by the context of institutional repression on the part of the authoritarian regimes and also and partly by the change in the sources of funding for social sciences. It was a period of diversication and extension of research, with a predominance of middle-range theories, combined and more exible theoretical frameworks, fusion of disciplines, a greater presence of political-science analysis and an emphasis on qualitative methods. All this means that there was a kind of re-foundation of all previous analytical marks. Within this framework, special elds started to develop and consolidate. Culture and communication, urban and rural studies, health and society,
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ducation and society, new social actors, for example, became areas of specialization within and across the major disciplines. People working in these areas conducted research on their topics and attempted to link their studies of specic processes with theory at the macro level. After an initial silence in social research, due to repression under military or authoritarian regimes, subjects and contents were oriented to understanding the structural and institutional transformations and, unlike in the previous period, the presence of the social actors made itself felt more strongly. In addition, as in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay surveys were ofcially prohibited, the techniques of statistical analysis were, at the least, supplemented and even replaced by systematic observations and action-research, and especially by documentary work in communities. Alternatively, and unlike in the 1960s or the beginning of the 1970s, big paradigms lost their importance for social analysis. All this may have generated some lag in the theoretical reection and the theoreticalmethodological evolution of some disciplines. Concerning the elds of intellectual preoccupation or research, there are at least two areas. The rst was the political-institutional eld, which initially included the study of certain political periods, with emphasis on analysis of the crisis that led to authoritarian regimes. Later, interest shifted to the nature of these states and regimes and the dominant actors, the military and their articulation with dominant socio-economic sectors, as well as the insertion of these regimes in the economic processes of world capitalism. The analysis of the authoritarian regimes followed three complementary lines. One more sociological and tied to political economy, which analyzed the new authoritarianism as part of a national and international capitalist crisis and recomposition. Another in which political science analyses were privileged dening the situation more as a particular type of political regime. The third approached authoritarianism by concentrating on the military actor and its transformation. The works of Guillermo ODonnell on the authoritarian bureaucratic state are a good illustration of the production of the period. The second area concerns the characterization of the new structures of society as being due to structural and institutional transformations. The impact of the dictatorships or authoritarian politics in different elds of social life, including violation of human rights,

consolidates a study eld in which critical analyses predominate. The main sphere of these changes concerns the effects of the neoliberal economic model on the political-institutional transformations, relations between the state and civil society, and the transformation of the state apparatus at central and local or decentralized levels. Behind these analyses, the central question was whether we were facing a societal change prompted as much by the crisis of the previous models as by the change of development model, a new institutional system or a cultural model that could engender a new world order. This implied an analysis of the ideology that oriented such transformations and of the specic policies that led to them. In this eld, the social organization and the new social actors, dened as new social movements or renascence of the civil society, were central thematic axes that led to the analysis of political democratization. The axis connecting the post-authoritarian period of the military dictatorships and authoritarian regimes and their different trajectories was, without a doubt, that of political democratization or democratic transition. This, along with the reection and research on transformations that led to the change of development model and their social effects, constituted the thematic nucleus of the social sciences in the region for more than a decade, beginning in the mid-1980s. One illustration is the classic analysis by ODonnell et al. (1986) on the democratic transitions, which sparked numerous studies on political democratization and its consequences in Latin America. This shift from analysis of authoritarian regimes to analysis of democratization processes stemmed from the process of democratization itself, international inuence and the demands and actions of specic actors. The question behind the analysis of these processes continues to be whether we are in the presence of a simple change of regime or witnessing a change of epoch and type of society. Beyond the particularities of signicantly different processes of democratization in the region, we can say at least that two general directions seem to coexist which are shaped in different ways according to the nature of the national processes. On the one hand, the analysis of the most global or macro processes concentrates on the construction of political democracy. After the analyses of the transitions and from the common diagnosis that, although the democratic regimes have consolidated, we are in the presence of incomplete democracies, the quality and relevance of democracy are the dimen-
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sion that receives the greatest importance in the reection of the social sciences. To this must be added the democratization of society, conceived as the overcoming of social inequalities, poverty, the effects of structural economic adjustments and the transition towards a new model of development. The debate surrounding the modernity model, that is to say, the relationship between national globalization and identities, has been a new and important focus since the mid-1990s. On the other hand, there has been a move away from general and interpretative essays on society towards more monographic and sectorial empirical studies, with special emphasis on methodological and technical dimensions, in terms of both the collection of data and their analysis. Here it is possible to emphasize themes having to do with exclusioninclusion, social stratication, gender and ethnic studies, citizenship, social mobility, the state, government and public policies, reform of the state, democratization and governability. The subject of the state, as the agent of national unity, development and modernization, as well as of domination, tends to occupy a privileged place in Latin America social sciences during periods of regime change and social transformation through modernization. Nevertheless, most of the academic reection on the historical dimension of the state and its relations with society tends to be subordinated, in the analyses of state reform, to instrumentalist visions connected with international nancial institutions that emphasize efciency and adjustment to the socio-economic model. In societies in which change is not reduced to the question of regime, greater interest is shown for studies on culture either through general discussion of the meaning of cultural transformations or through the study of popular culture. To this can be added the expansion and consolidation of areas such as the new nature of work, new rural structures, social movements and gender. In many cases, the predominant approach is to analyze the processes studied in the context of democratization, on the one hand, and globalization, on the other. Subjects dened from a socio-economic perspective are also signicantly present. Sociology, and to a lesser degree anthropology, are directly related to intervention in social problems and technical advice to the public state sector on social programs. The market, too, gives rise to demands for sociological and anthropological interpretation of market studies in the area of new patterns of consumption and stratication. The work of CEPAL on equity and

citizenship and the national case studies on human development by the UNDP are another good illustration of the present directions and contents of the social sciences. One of the most signicant changes that has taken place in the last period, concerning the orientations of the social sciences, is that reection and research on society seem to have yielded a general critical theory in favor of a perspective that shows possible scenarios from the prospective standpoint of a desirable society. In other words, the critical and utopian dimensions seem to be losing ground. There is also less reection on the development of disciplines as such and more on how society can use the information provided by the social sciences. This has to do with a repositioning of the disciplines in the professional market. Thus, more than a grand subject of debate and research, or an interpretation of reality by means of global theories, the emphasis is on segmented social processes approached from diverse and particular theoretical, methodological and professional perspectives. This implies a greater thematic and investigative diversication in both the academic and professional spheres. In short, we are in the presence of social sciences in which midrange theories predominate appealing to diverse sources of data and revitalizing the use of historiography. It seems that the internal borders of the disciplines are breaking down, which suggests that the problem areas of social research are more dynamic and have more autonomy and strength than the academic disciplines of the social sciences. To summarize: in the foundational and institutionalization period, social sciences were preoccupied with the social surroundings, that is to say, with a specic and historical society, at national and Latin American levels. The question was whether our societies were modern, industrial, developing, capitalist or dependent. In the period of rupture, there was a break with the previous model due to diverse phenomena associated with the end of the nationalpopular matrix, different kinds of authoritarianism, especially, although not exclusively, military dictatorships, processes of globalization and transformation of the development model, crisis of ideological and academic Marxism, appearance of new identitarian actors and other collective actors (such as NGOs, human rights, environment, ethnic and gender movements). The new analytical directions that emerged in the democratic phase seem to take distance from a vision based on exclusive paradigms. More than the
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postulation of general theories, as we have said, we are in the presence of conceptions or mid-range theories aimed at the description, analysis and interpretation of specic processes and designed for a partial approach to social reality. Perhaps this is, to a large extent, because we are in the presence of societies that do not seem to have a central problematique around which to construct a theoretical model, project or counter-project. Manuel Antonio Garreton, Miguel Murmis, Geronimo de Sierra and Helgio Trindade
Note
1. A rst stage of institutionalization of sociology, in the form of the creation of sociology chairs in the schools of philosophy, law and political economy, was prevalent not only throughout most of Latin America but also in Europe. During this stage there were no institutes, departments or programs. The abstract academic style of thought typical of many of the chairs has given rise to the expression socio log a de catedra (chair sociology), parallel to the common 19th-century expression chair socialism, used to characterize an academic abstract form of socialism. (Editors note)
References
Cardoso, F. and Faletto, E. (1969) Desarrollo y dependencia. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. CEPAL/ECLA (1965) El Desarrollo social de America latina en la post-guerra (The Social Development of Latin America in the Postwar Period). Santiago: CEPAL/ ECLA. di Tella, T., Brams, L., Reynaud, J.D. and Touraine, A. (1967) Sindicato y comunidad: dos tipos de estrutura sindical latinoamericana. Santiago: Editorial del Instituto. n. Germani, G. (1964) Poltica y sociedad en una epoca de transicio Buenos Aires: Ed. Paidos. ODonnell, G., Schmitter, P. and Whitehead, L. (1986) Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Touraine, A. et al. (1966) Lota et Huachipato: etude sur la conscience ouvrie`re dans deux entreprises chiliennes. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientique.

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