Textbooks, syllabi and disciplinary formation

In the history of an academic discipline, it takes a while before a textbook production appears. Even though the content of a textbook might be contested, in some way textbooks signify a certain level of establishment of the discipline; at the least the need for textbooks is connected to the existence of students of a certain numeral.

In that way, the first Swedish textbook, a collection of articles published in 1951, can be understood. Sociology had become an independent university discipline in 1947 with a chair, given to Torgny T. Segerstedt, and a department at Uppsala University, followed gradually by the universities in Lund, Stockholm, Gothenburg and, somewhat later, Umeå. The participating authors and the areas covered in the first textbook can be read as an image of the state of Swedish sociology by the time.

But textbooks can also serve a purpose in the disciplinary formation process itself. Besides presenting and analyzing the first Swedish textbook, I will in this paper examine syllabi for university courses in sociology in the 1940s and 1950s. By that we can see how textbooks and other course literature were used in the defining and boundary-work of the new Swedish university discipline of sociology.

/ PhD Anna Larsson, Umeå University