Normativity in the UK

From the 1960s to the 1990s, research conducted by most British specialists of European integration featured a normative bias in favour of this process. Since then, this trend has continued, but more implicitly or even insidiously. This article explains the first period as resulting from “accidental resonance” between the scientific and political fields, whereas the normativity of the second period has stemmed from greater proximity between the logics of action of the scientific and bureaucratic fields. More generally, the approach applied here grasps inter-field relations from the angle of evolutions in the deep structuration ofthe professions concerned.