Research methods and their developers play a crucial role in bringing together scientific fields. Scientists, who wish to have their methods acknowledged and used in another discipline have to bridge the gaps between different practices and worldviews, and they often experience hostility, incredulity, and in general feelings of ‘otherness’, while changing the established practice in a scientific field. Researchers representing newly emerging fields such as materials science have to overcome obstacles that are caused more by feelings of threat and fear (...) than by arguments rooted in epistemic or social considerations. In using the habitus concept of Pierre Bourdieu, I analyze in this article statements and observations of the scientists who in the 1950s and 1960s have introduced physical methods into chemistry and in so doing merged characteristic features of research communities into a new unit. The habitus of physicists, chemists and method-oriented researchers are shaped by hierarchical relationships inside the disciplines, and between them. Studying emotional expressions in interviews and self-descriptions gives access to hitherto neglected parts of the historical processes leading to new disciplines and fields. The brief case studies presented are seen as exemplars, and the analysis offered is intended more to provide a possible model for further research than as giving conclusive answers. (shrink)

What Determines the Emergence and Establishment of an Academic Discipline? The Development of Pharmacy at German Universities from 1880 to 1970. At universities new specialist subjects are developing steadily, but they rarely become established sub‐disciplines. The leading mechanisms of these processes seldom have been analyzed. The article investigates this problem, the development of the discipline of pharmacy at German universities from 1880 to 1970, from three different viewpoints: the processes inside the university structures, the politics of the organizations of professional (...) pharmacists, and the research promotion invested by the industry. The analysis is based on archival data. It results in the chokepoint that the proximity of neighbouring disciplines and their behaviour are essential. They limited the ways of getting academic reputation and the award of a new specialisation. The professional pharmaceutical organizations rather hindered processes of disciplinary differentiation. The research promotion by the industry had only marginal effect on the development of disciplinary structures. (shrink)