ABSTRACT
The patterns of borrowing and lending across disciplines are obviously of high interest, although probably impossible to quantify in any way which takes into account the relative innovativeness of the various flows. If one expands the picture to include imports from disciplines outside the social sciences, anthropology is the leading importer, borrowing from “science,” zoology, linguistics, biology, and medicine; geography borrows from “science” and engineering, while psychology is a moderate importer from “science” and medicine. Political science has exported organization theory to economics, theories of the balance of power to sociology, and the concept of power to psychology. In the 1930s, political science was mostly introspective, borrowing almost exclusively from law when it borrowed at all; in the 1950s, it borrowed from sociology and history and to a lesser extent from philosophy; in the 1970s economics, psychology, and mathematics became prominent sources of imports into political science.
