Provincialism and Internationalism in Contemporary American Sociology

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Abstract
This study examines the relative degree of culture-boundedness in mainline American sociological research in 1985 compared with British research at the same time and with American research two decades earlier Culture-boundedness is defined in terms of two dimensions: (a) the extent to which data are included from societies other than the local society (non-localism) and (b) the extent to which the possibilities of international influence and of variations in other societies are acknowledged (conditionalism). Cross-classification of dichotomies of these dimensions yields four types of research: provincialist (local, unconditional), contextualist (local conditional), generalist (non-local, unconditional) and internationalist (non-local, conditional). Classification of all substantive articles in the top two sociological journals in both countries indicates almost twice as much provincialist research in the United States than in the United Kingdom and little reduction in US sociology provincialism from the level in 1965. The implications of these findings and the importance of incorporating international data and perspectives in sociological research are discussed.

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