Science of Science and Reflexivity

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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.

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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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Journal Article•DOI•

Ordering theories: Typologies and conceptual frameworks for sociotechnical change:

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Benjamin K. Sovacool¹, David J. Hess²•Institutions (2)

University of Sussex¹, Vanderbilt University²

23 Jun 2017-Social Studies of Science

TL;DR: The article lays out tips for research methodology before concluding with insights about technology itself, analytical processes associated with technology, and the framing and communication of results.

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Abstract: What theories or concepts are most useful at explaining socio technical change? How can - or cannot - these be integrated? To provide an answer, this study presents the results from 35 semi-structured research interviews with social science experts who also shared more than two hundred articles, reports and books on the topic of the acceptance, adoption, use, or diffusion of technology. This material led to the identification of 96 theories and conceptual approaches spanning 22 identified disciplines. The article begins by explaining its research terms and methods before honing in on a combination of fourteen theories deemed most relevant and useful by the material. These are: Sociotechnical Transitions, Social Practice Theory, Discourse Theory, Domestication Theory, Large Technical Systems, Social Construction of Technology, Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Actor-Network Theory, Social Justice Theory, Sociology of Expectations, Sustainable Development, Values Beliefs Norms Theory, Lifestyle Theory, and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology. It then positions these theories in terms of two distinct typologies. Theories can be placed into five general categories of being centered on agency, structure, meaning, relations or norms. They can also be classified based on their assumptions and goals rooted in functionalism, interpretivism, humanism or conflict. The article lays out tips for research methodology before concluding with insights about technology itself, analytical processes associated with technology, and the framing and communication of results. An interdisciplinary theoretical and conceptual inventory has much to offer students, analysts and scholars wanting to study technological change and society.

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276 citations

Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"

...A relational approach to theory can draw attention to actors and conflicts, and dominant and subordinate positions within a scientific or cultural field, and thus can examine how habits and skills become ingrained in theoretical preferences forming a researcher’s habitus (Bourdieu, 2004)....
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Journal Article•DOI•

On the powers of powerful knowledge

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Michael Young¹, Johan Muller²•Institutions (2)

Institute of Education¹, University of Cape Town²

01 Oct 2013-Revista De Educacion

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors make a positive case for the idea of powerful knowledge as a sociological concept and as a curriculum principle and make a clear conceptual base for the concept.

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Abstract: The primary aim of this chapter is to make a positive case for the idea of ‘powerful knowledge’ (Young, 2009; 2013) as a sociological concept and as a curriculum principle. We seek to clarify its conceptual bases and to make its meaning, and the arguments it implies, less ambiguous and less open to misunderstanding. This will enable us to suggest some of the research and policy options that it opens up.

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258 citations

Journal Article•DOI•

Knowledge society discourse and higher education

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Jussi Välimaa¹, David M. Hoffman¹•Institutions (1)

University of Jyväskylä¹

18 Apr 2008-Higher Education

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyse the roles higher education is expected to play with regard to various knowledge society discourses, and reflect on current challenges and expectations generated within these discourses for higher education and the implications these expectations have for research in higher education research.

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Abstract: The growing importance of knowledge, research and innovation are changing the social role of universities in the globalized world One of the most popular concepts used to approach these changes in post-industrial and post-modern societies is the concept of ‘Knowledge Society’ In this paper, we will analyse the roles higher education is expected to play with regard to various knowledge society discourses We will begin with analyzing the uses of knowledge society as an intellectual device and continue by reflecting on how changes in higher education are related to knowledge society discourses in national, regional and global levels In the final section we will reflect on current challenges and expectations generated within these discourses for higher education and the implications these expectations have for higher education research

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253 citations

Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"

...It is precisely this lack of theoretical explanation which signals the conditions in which the most critical hypothesis which can be formulated about the university is identical to the critical hypothesises which our field of study indicates we pose about society ( Bourdieu 2004 )....
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...The principle task before higher education researchers regarding the knowledge society, is the critical evaluation of a situation in which our methodological gaze has become as meaningful when turned inward—to higher education itself—as when we purport to study contexts and phenomena outside our walls ( Bourdieu 2004 )....
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...There is considerable room for a more robust critique of reform trends in higher education ( Bourdieu 2004; Marginson 2006)....
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...Older, established universities with strong academic and disciplinary cultures possess more field-specific power ( Bourdieu 1988, 2004 ) and are able to resist, even generate change, while other types of higher education institutions are more vulnerable to neoliberal management ideas (Marginson and Considine 2000, in Tuunainen 2004)....
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...We assert— following Marginson (2006) and Bourdieu (2004) —that theoretically-driven explanation based on rigorous analysis of empirical data within robust conceptual frameworks will frequently illuminate both knowledge voids and the theoretical mirror images of the most popular policy fads and fashions....
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Journal Article•DOI•

From Constructivism to Realism in the Sociology of the Curriculum.

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Michael Young¹•Institutions (1)

Institute of Education¹

01 Feb 2008-Review of Research in Education

TL;DR: In the 1970s, education was seen as a good thing; the only big issues for sociology were distributional?in particular, the persistence, in all forms of selective education, of social class inequal ities as discussed by the authors.

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Abstract: What is educationally worthwhile knowledge, and what are (and what should be) the significant differences between curriculum or school knowledge and the every day, commonsense knowledge that people acquire at home, in the community and in the workplace? Until the 1970s, answers to these questions were either taken for granted by both sociologists of education2 and curriculum researchers as being part of existing educational systems or seen as issues to be left to philosophy. Education was seen as a good thing; the only big issues for sociology were distributional?in particular, the persistence, in all forms of selective education, of social class inequal ities (Jencks, 1975). Why was progress to upper secondary and higher education lim ited to the few, and how could these persistent inequalities, found in all systems of mass education, be explained and reduced or overcome? The what of education, the knowledge that students did or did not acquire, was not questioned, at least by sociologists.3 It was taken for granted that school and nonschool knowledge were different; they had always been so. Only rarely in the past, and invariably around religious issues, did the content of the knowledge that was included in the curricu lum become part of educational debates, let alone those involving the wider public.

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236 citations

Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"

...Many sociologists of education in the 1970s and 1980s were attracted by Bourdieu and Passeron's (1977) evocative conceptualization of pedagogy as "symbolic violence....
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...It is significant that Bourdieu (2004) himself tried,...
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...It is significant that Bourdieu (2004) himself tried, in my view not very successfully, to address this problem in relation to the sociology of science in his last book....
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Journal Article•DOI•

'Potted Plants in Greenhouses': A Critical Reflection on the Resilience of Colonial Education in Africa

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh¹•Institutions (1)

University of Cape Town¹

15 Feb 2012-Journal of Asian and African Studies

TL;DR: The authors argue that education in Africa is victim of a resilient colonial and colonizing epistemology, which takes the form of science as ideology and hegemony, and the outcome is often a devaluation of African creativity, agency and value systems, and an internalized sense of inadequacy.

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Abstract: This paper draws on Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino and other critical voices to argue that education in Africa is victim of a resilient colonial and colonizing epistemology, which takes the form of science as ideology and hegemony. Postcolonial African elite justify the resilience of this epistemology and the education it inspires with rhetoric on the need to be competitive internationally. The outcome is often a devaluation of African creativity, agency and value systems, and an internalized sense of inadequacy. Education has become a compulsion for Africans to 'lighten their darkness' both physically and metaphorically in the interest of and for the gratification of colonizing and hegemonic others. The paper calls for paying more attention to popular systems of knowledge, in which reality is larger than logic. It calls for listening to ordinary men and women who, like p'Bitek's Lawino, are challenging the prescriptive gaze and grip of emasculated elite.

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226 citations

Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"

...Given that recognition as knowledge is very much a function of the power to define and prescribe (Bourdieu, 2004: 18–21), European and North American scholars are only too aware that they can ignore with impunity what is done in peripheral sites like the African continent, while any African scholar…...
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...It is socially and politically mediated by hierarchies of humanity and human agency imposed by particular relations of power (Bourdieu, 2004: 18–21)....
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Science of Science and Reflexivity

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Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"

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