PhDs and dissertations in the social sciences

Because the social science narrative has been extremely important in efforts to account for the process of Brazilian modernization, the study of social scientists themselves has become strategic to understanding Brazilian society's representation of self. This article examines graduate work in the social sciences, graduate students themselves, and their theses and dissertations. Research has been based on a survey conducted among candidates for master's degrees and doctorates, as well as on an analysis of doctoral dissertations defended between 1990 and 1997. The study reveals a discipline that is undergoing transformation a product of the process of democratization which its members has undergone and of the internalization of new parameters guiding cognitive production. While this may have implied a loss in the field's capacity to generalize, it has gained in capillarity, in plurality, and in capacity to understand. This study also pinpoints the limits of the discipline, determined by an institutional situation where greater exchange with the members of society is still missing.