The global knowledge system is undergoing profound restructuring and transformation, increasingly shaped by standardized indicators, rankings, and metrics. At the same time, working conditions for knowledge producers are deteriorating, marked by growing precarity and enormous pressures for performance. What explains the convergence of conditions for knowledge production in social sciences in the recent three decades?

By selecting Germany, Canada, and China—three countries with distinct historical trajectories, political systems, and positions in knowledge production—this comparative study challenges dominant nationally confined and discipline-centred narratives of social science development. It highlights how recent knowledge production in social sciences is not simply the result of different national traditions or disciplinary logics and practices but rather emerges from complex, transnational, and multilevel interactions shaped by shifting geopolitical, economic, and socio-cultural forces.

Building on a political-epistemological perspective informed by the sociology of knowledge and the history of science, this study goes beyond existing literature by integrating economic dynamics, cultural and social practices, and psychological insights. Based on an analysis of data from various sources, including ethnography, interviews, bibliometrics, and statistics, the study has identified recent converging conditions of knowledge production in these countries, marked by growing inequalities, precarity, and deepening hierarchies in both global and domestic knowledge production.

To explain these dynamics and the underlying mechanisms, I propose a new multidimensional, multitemporal, and multiscale theory that explains the evolution of social sciences in the three countries. Central to this theory are the concepts of the global knowledge value chain and knowledge hierarchy, which connect knowledge production across global, national, regional, and local levels. In sum, the study not only reveals but also explains the forces and mechanisms that generate the increasingly unsustainable, exploitative, and unequal structure of the global knowledge system.