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Migrations and Boundary Work: Harvard, Radical Economists, and the Committee on Political Discrimination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2009

Tiago Mata
Tiago Mata*
Affiliation:
Technical University of Lisbon and Duke University
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Argument

In the late 1960s, in the midst of campus unrest, a group of young economists calling themselves “radicals” challenged the boundaries of economics. In the radicals' cultural cartography, economic science and politics were represented as overlapping. These claims were scandalous because they were voiced from Harvard University, drawing on its authority. With radicals' claims the subject of increasing media attention, the economics mainstream sought to re-assert the longstanding cultural map of economic science, where objectivity and advocacy were distinguishable. The resolution of the contest of credibility came with a string of cases of dismissals and denial of tenure for radicals. The American Economic Association's investigations of these cases, imposing the conventional cultural map, concluded that personnel decisions had not been politically motivated. Radicals were forced to migrate from the elite institutions from which they had emerged to less prestigious ones. “Place” became a marker of their marginalization within the profession.

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 115 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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