ABSTRACT
Randall Collins’s Sociology of Philosophies is a major intellectual achievement: spanning the entire historical record of philosophy, it builds a general theory of intellectual innovation and reputational recognition that is in principle applicable to all fields of cultural production. In this chapter, I test his model of intellectual creativity as a function of dense network ties against Ronald Burt’s model of structural holes as a source of informational advantage. I extract network information from co-authorships and acknowledgement sections from two top journals in financial economics and language, speech, and hearing research—interdisciplinary fields where applied and abstract knowledge orientations coexist. I find Collins’s model to be a better predictor of creative success in financial economics, and Burt’s model to be more appropriate for language, speech, and hearing research. I suggest this difference is a function of the various kinds of creativity fostered by these fields.
