Penser hors les murs : notes sur la recherche indépendante en économie

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Abstract (English)

The sociology of scientific knowledge has extensively documented how paradigms structure disciplinary consensus, yet the specific mechanisms by which academic fields displace — rather than resolve — epistemic anomalies remain undertheorized. This article applies the anthropic transfer framework (Lalut, 2025) to the academic field itself, arguing that legitimate institutional selection coexists with a less visible process of relegation that imposes identifiable costs on marginalized researchers. Drawing on the AFEP/CNU controversy in French economics and on Merton's analysis of cumulative advantage, the paper shows that open-access infrastructures (HAL, ORCID, overlay journals) alter the visibility of relegation without suppressing its underlying logic — and may generate new forms of epistemic disorder through information overload and filtering collapse. The paper concludes with a reflexive falsifiability clause: the anthropic framework cannot serve as its own justification for the marginality of its author.