Travelling in the Social Science Community: Assessing the Impact of the Indian Green Revolution Across Disciplines

The Indian Green Revolution, which began in the late 1960s,offers an exemplary case for studying the nature of evidence andhow it travels between academia and the public sphere, betweendifferent academic disciplines and over time. Initial assessmentsof the Green Revolution’s effects were generally positive; yet bythe mid-1970s, a more negative view of its impact had come toprominence. By the 1990s this view was, in turn, being displacedby a more optimistic one. The aim of this paper is not to evaluatethe impact of the Indian Green Revolution, but rather to examinehow the different constituencies of the social science communityhave communicated with one another on this topic and toexamine what facts about it have travelled over time and betweenthe different social science disciplines. By their very naturedifferent social science disciplines are concerned with differentaspects of any given issue: an economist might be interested inthe impact on output and income over time, whilst a sociologistmight be more concerned with the impact new technology has onexisting social relations, and a geographer on the use of land andwater. Through an in-depth analysis of 76 articles publishedbetween 1969 and 2004 in journals covering the range of socialscience disciplines, this paper shows how (and how well) factstravel between the social sciences.[...]