| This dissertation contributes to the sociology of knowledge and the history of the human sciences by a unique case study that traces the complex social action processes through which knowledge is produced about a major classical author, George Herbert Mead. The case raises acute questions regarding how authoritative knowledge comes to be produced about an intellectual and more generally about the social nature of knowledge production in academic scholarship. Instead of treating Mead’s problematic reputation or his place in academic canon as a separate topic of study from his own intellectual biography, the analysis reconceptualizes both as essentially knowledge production processes with empirical connections to one another in identifiable social actions. In this endeavor, the study builds on recent work in social action process and “knowledge production practices.”;Four years of research in ninety archival collections and a variety of published primary documents provides the materials for this analysis. In substantive chapters, the dissertation examines the centrality of Mead’s public speaking and engagement with the social problems of territorial Hawaii in his published work, the variety of representations Mead’s students made of his courses and his students’ influences on him, the problematic process of putting together volumes posthumously attributed to Mead, the mobilization of controversial claims about him by former students on the basis of their sense of his approval and collaboration, the development of patterns of published reference to Mead along lines of social connection and in response to local institutional transformations, and the reconstruction of domains of Mead’s research that have been neglected in dominant accounts of his philosophy.;No single set of documents, concepts, individuals, or mechanisms provides the key to the ways Mead has been treated in scholarship; instead the study demonstrates that only a focus on empirical social action processes as they connect and change over time can adequately explain the production of knowledge about Mead. In this way the study provides a novel analytical frame through which to reexamine the often problematic processes of knowledge making in academic scholarship. |
