This is the rather delayed completion of a study begun apparently after 9/11 to address the controversies over "Area Studies" and "Title VI Centers." If you're engaged in the academic study of the non-Western world, you'll know what these are -- if you're not, and if your not a US gov't official in the Dep't of Education responsible for funding such centers, then this will be mostly pretty inside baseball. But if you are, it's quite interesting, and the conclusions are fairly important.
The authors divide US interest in the non-West European world into three stages: civilizational (before WW II), area studies (post-war), and global (from the 1980s on). This division works a little better for the Middle East, where they focus their research, than East Asia, I think. But more importantly, they emphasize that universities are cumulative organizations -- each new layer gets added on, without eliminating the previous one. This is a very important insight.
The authors also find that Title VI centers are effective in getting US universities to sponsor research on the non-Western world, but in a way that is somewhat indirect. Building off studies that emphasize the importance of the Department in organizing and credentialing knowledge, they show how "Not-Departments" form a crucial, but subordinate, role in giving the university flexibility. Finally, they show how in the "harder" social sciences, especially Economics and Sociology, but to a lesser degree Political Science, it is only the "Not-Departments" that are exercising a countervailing pressure against a powerful, inbuilt bias towards researching only those countries (pretty much all developed industrial economies, preferably English-speaking) where statistics are sufficiently reliable to be suitable raw material for advanced and theoretically interesting quantitative methodologies. (Kind of like the old joke: "Why are you looking for your keys under the lamppost? Is that where you dropped them?" "No, but that's where the light is!").
The authors don't discuss it, but the addition of the Dept of Defense funded Flagships in many ways support their conclusions. Intended at first by anti-area studies insurgents who just wanted top language skills as a replacement to Title VI centers, in the end they were ADDED to Title VI centers (cumulative again). But Flagships can't replace the Title VI centers' networking functions, and so remain a bit outside the mainstream of the Department-centered worlds. Again the authors' conclusion is validated: Departments are central to the University -- you can leverage them and network them as Title VI centers do, but if you just ignore them, you will remain marginal.
In sum, this is solid sociology of academia, that will be of interest to anyone working in US academia or allied parts of the US government who studies non-Western parts of the world.
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![“Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology Book 74) (English Edition)”，作者：[Mitchell Stevens, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Seteney Shami]](https://images-cn.ssl-images-amazon.cn/images/I/51m4aNYsOML._SY346_.jpg)
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