Evelyn L. Forget wrote:
> Two questions:
>
> 1. Are creative communities that develop outside universities 
> qualitatively different from those inside? Put differently, does an 
> academic appointment not encourage the kind of risk-taking and big 
> intellectual leaps that outsider communities seem to support?
>
> 2. Does it matter if outsider status is a matter of "exclusion" or 
> "choice"? If you think of RAND, for example, its participants worked 
> largely outside the academy, but they were hardly excluded. 

It's only been a few hours, and already we HES-ers are commenting at 
cross-purposes! The idea of a "creative community" may not be the same 
as a "salon" or a Fleck-ian "thought collective" or what Latour might 
call a "network" or Collins an "intellectual network" or Fish an 
"interpretative community". Are the "products" of these communities -- 
ideas, beliefs, knowledge claims -- objects of inquiry, or are the 
circumstances of their creation the appropriate objects for a causal 
analysis? Moreover, are we interested in micro or macro sociological 
theorizations or explanations or narratives? And what if any role does 
the "leader" play, if such there be?
 
E. Roy Weintraub