Abstract

This dissertation examines five major sets of problems of knowledge production in peripheries that are brought about by international cultural influences and analyzes the different possible responses to the problems. By focusing on the international instead of single national context of cultural production, it directly challenges and complements current comprehensive models of culture, knowledge, and science . It uncovers the theoretical modifications that need to be made when we apply current middle-range theories of culture, such as those of Collins , to contemporary non-Western cases. It also advances the study of international intellectual stratification pioneered by Shils with contemporary cultural sociological approaches. ;My analysis of the first set of problems shows that the great need for resources in establishing modern academic organizations in peripheries encourages academics to rely on academically unmotivated sponsors such as the state and thereby undermines academic autonomy. At the same time, the strategic concentration of resources for economies of scale in academic organizational development encouraged an oligopolistic market structure of academic organizations that limits creativity and diversity. The second set of problems deals with how academics in peripheries need to modify modern Western schemes of knowledge compartmentalization in order to accommodate indigenous knowledge, and how this jeopardized their legitimacy and productive efficiency. The third set focuses on how the international stratification of academic organizations distorts the functioning of academic organizations in peripheries. Essential functions such as graduate training are suppressed, secondary functions such as transmission of foreign knowledge are greatly inflated, and powerful functions such as communal integration come to be appropriated for completely undesignated ends. The fourth set details the severe intergenerational conflicts in academic communities in peripheries that derive from the wide difference of symbolic resources between academic networks in the West and peripheries. These conflicts obstruct the growth of nascent academic networks and legitimation of academic innovation in peripheries. The fifth set deals with how academics' participation in extra-disciplinary activities are encouraged by international factors and how it generates serious obstacles for academic professionalization and rampant fragmentation in disciplinary communities