ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses the question of how difficult is it to write a biography in social sciences by discussing the cases of Durkheim and Mauss 'Public Intellectuals and their Afterlives: Biographies, Reputation Building and Academic Disciplines'. It investigates scholarly publishing projects in the Great Depression, projects which he treats as cases of the economic structuring of knowledge. The book aims at contributing to a better understanding of standpoints taken by the Revue Internationale de Sociologie in the first 20 years of its existence. It discusses Czech and Polish narratives and what they tell about the construction of sociology's past. The book concerns both the supra-national institutional framework of European science policy and the impact it has on a re-definition of the so-called European Research Area (ERA). It examines the hierarchical rule-based structure of the civil service, where authority linked to office.
