Book•
Science of Science and Reflexivity
01 Jan 2004-
TL;DR: Bourdieu's "Science of Science and Reflexivity" as mentioned in this paper argues that science is in danger of becoming a handmaiden to biotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, and military research that it risks falling under the control of industrial corporations that seek to exploit it for monopolies and profit.
Abstract: Over the last four decades, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died in 2002, he was considered to be a thinker on a par with Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan a public intellectual as influential to his generation as Sartre was to his. "Science of Science and Reflexivity" will be welcomed as a companion volume to Bourdieu's now seminal "An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology." In this posthumous work, Bourdieu declares that science is in danger of becoming a handmaiden to biotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, and military research that it risks falling under the control of industrial corporations that seek to exploit it for monopolies and profit. Science thus endangered can become detrimental to mankind. The line between pure and applied science, therefore, must be subjected to intense theoretical scrutiny. Bourdieu's goals in "Science of Science and Reflexivity" are to identify the social conditions in which science develops in order to reclaim its objectivity and to rescue it from relativism and the forces that might exploit it. In the grand tradition of scientific reflections on science, Bourdieu provides a sociological analysis of the discipline as something capable of producing transhistorical truths; he presents an incisive critique of the main currents in the study of science throughout the past half century; and he offers a spirited defense of science against encroaching political and economic forces. A masterful summation of the principles underlying Bourdieu's oeuvre and a memoir of his own scientific journey, "Science of Science and Reflexivity" is a capstone to one of the most important and prodigious careers in the field of sociology."
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TL;DR: In this article, the notions of ethos and eidos are used to represent the way in which such structures fall between two planes, that of the implicit and the explicit, for the sociology of morality and the anthropology of ethics.
Abstract: This article presents the notions of ethos and eidos as field level concepts for the sociology of morality and the anthropology of ethics. This is accomplished in the context of Bourdieuan social theory and, therefore, from the broad standpoint of practice theory. In the first instance these terms are used to refer to the normative structures of social fields and are conceived so as to represent the way in which such structures fall between two planes, that of the implicit and the explicit. Subsequently, they are used to further understand a distinction between morality—roughly, the implicit moral order of a social field—and ethics—the more explicit and often codified elements of a social field’s normative structure. When presented in relation to academic philosophical inquiries into the ethical issues in healthcare and the life sciences—meaning the disciplines of applied ethics in general and applied (bio)ethics in particular—the analytic perspective these terms facilitate enables us to represent the fundamental conditions required for academic enquiry; taken together the ethos and eidos of an intellectual field constitute the requisite background of its normative epistemic and methodological commitments, thereby providing the structures of disciplined intellectual practices. Seen in this light it not only becomes possible to grasp applied (bio)ethics as a socially structured practice but to understand it in terms that can also be used to frame our everyday moral practices. In this way applied (bio)ethics can be acknowledged as a relatively unique part of our contemporary moral culture.
5 citations
01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: While Norman (2011) identifies three distinct generations of medical education researchers it has, for the most part, been conducted by those involved with medical education itself and with a view to improving and developing the pedagogic practices that form the basis of their concern.
Abstract: The inaugural editorial of the British Journal of Medical Education (now simply ‘Medical Education’) claimed ‘medical education’ as “one of the subjects of medicine” (1966, p. 1) and, therefore, a legitimate medical specialism. Whilst Norman (2011) identifies three distinct generations of medical education researchers it has, for the most part, been conducted by those involved with medical education itself and with a view to improving and developing the pedagogic practices that form the basis of their concern. Such research can be distinguished from the sociology of medical education. Whilst these two endeavours can, and perhaps ideally should, closely inform one another they are often sharply distinct. This is reflected in the fact that whilst medical education was present at the inauguration of medical sociology, in the shape of Becker et al’s Boys in White (1961) and Merton’s et al’s Student Physician (1957), little was done to build on this foundation until recently (Jefferys and Elston 1989). Nevertheless the field of medical education research has grown steadily in the intervening decades.
5 citations
Dissertation•
29 Oct 2009
TL;DR: Sanchez-Ruiz, Javier Esteinou-Madrid, Fatima Fernandez-Christlieb and Raul Trejo-Delarbre as discussed by the authors present a trabajo that analyzes the participación of los investigadores of the dimension politicalica de los medios de comunicacion in el proceso de estructuracion e institucionalizacion.
Abstract: El trabajo que aqui se presenta analiza la participacion de los investigadores de la dimension
politica de los medios de comunicacion en el proceso de estructuracion e institucionalizacion
del campo academico de la comunicacion en Mexico. Este acercamiento relaciona la
trayectoria de un conjunto de investigadores de la comunicacion con la vision que construyen
sobre su practica y las tendencias de su produccion academica. La investigacion se realizo
en dos etapas: en la primera se entrevisto a 16 investigadores de la comunicacion cuyos
trabajos sobre la dimension politica de los medios fueron publicados en el Anuario de
Investigacion del Consejo Nacional para la Ensenanza y la Investigacion de las Ciencias de
la Comunicacion y en los libros colectivos de la Asociacion Mexicana de Investigadores de la
Comunicacion, entre 2001 y 2006. Las entrevistas fueron analizadas recurriendo a los
principios de la teoria fundada. En una segunda aproximacion se realizo un analisis detallado
de las trayectorias, la produccion academica y el trabajo profesional de los cuatro
investigadores mas reconocidos en este ambito de la investigacion de la comunicacion en
Mexico: Enrique E. Sanchez-Ruiz, Javier Esteinou-Madrid, Fatima Fernandez-Christlieb y Raul Trejo-Delarbre.
5 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that there is a common thread in Geertz's early work and that it addressed the reworking of the concept of cultural system, which he wrote on from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s.
Abstract: Clifford Geertz was a key protagonist in the development of “interpretive social science,” but much of our understanding of his position as an intellectual neglects the crucial years before the publication of The Interpretation of Cultures. In this article, I argue that there is a common thread in Geertz’s early work and that it addressed, quite sophisticatedly, the reworking of the concept of cultural system, which he wrote on from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s. This research program was first developed in the context of the “basic social science” that characterized Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, and it had the support of key figures in that network. Geertz’s position in that intellectual debate was as a contributor to the development of a theory of culture that could address issues left unsolved by structural-functionalism and action theory. In that process, Geertz gradually developed a more interpretivist reading of the cultural system, while maintaining the support of his original network. The article offers some conclusions about the role of support within attention spaces in cases in which emergent intellectual positions can lead to the definition of new research programs.
5 citations
01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: Crossing Discourses: Language Ideology and Shifting Representations in Sweden's Field of Language Planning as discussed by the authors, discusses the role of cross-discourses in language planning in Sweden.
Abstract: Crossing Discourses : Language Ideology and Shifting Representations in Sweden's Field of Language Planning
5 citations
Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"
...On some meta-level, this latter point is moreover germane to the enterprise of epistemic reflexivity in the research practice (e.g. Bourdieu 2004; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992)....
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...Hence, struggles over language never exist in a vacuum but develop as part of more general sociopolitical processes (Blommaert 1999, 2)....
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...This then attests to Bourdieu’s point that “[t]he struggles within the field are struggles to be or remain contemporary” (Bourdieu 2004, 64)....
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