Social Construction of Knowledge in Political Science: Evidence from the School of Political Science in the NRU "Higher School of Economics"

The problem of the study is posed of conditionality of political knowledge by social practices of its production and evaluation, considered on the example of the Department of Political Science of the Higher School of Economics. The research is based on the six supporting concepts, borrowed from sociology, political science and economics and then placed in the general methodological framework of the theory of practices (Volkov, Kharhordin 2008). At the level of data analysis, the author uses the mixed-methods strategy. The empirical base of the study is twenty interviews with students and employees of the Department and data from a survey that was conducted among three courses of students. The basic mechanism for the production of knowledge (in the form of student course papers and Graduation papers) is a model of interaction between student and scientific advisor. Through the prism of the principal-agent model, the author describes mutual selection criteria, instruments of mutual influence, continuation patterns of cooperation and other important aspects. Subsidiary mechanisms are investigated one of the main discipline of program, «Research Seminar», and the network community of the Department. These mechanisms are embedded in the broad structural context of the Department; the study includes some explanation of why this context turned out exactly this way. Finally, on the example of the defenses of students’ paper, the author describes some problems and different approaches to the evaluation of academic knowledge and tests hypotheses about five possible forms of power in the academic process. Hypotheses about two of them are confirmed on the empirical material.