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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.
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."
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a context-sensitive discursive analysis of 99 stand-alone reports produced by companies participating in the UK Emissions Trading Scheme (UK ETS) and the UK Government's mandatory Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme is presented.
Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore corporate communications related to climate change in both a voluntary and mandatory setting. Adopting a critical perspective, the paper examines how companies who participated in the voluntary UK Emissions Trading Scheme (UK ETS) and the UK Government’s mandatory Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme positioned themselves within the climate change debate. In particular, the analysis draws attention to how companies, through their communicative practice, helped to constitute and reproduce the structure of the field in which they operate. Design/methodology/approach – A context-sensitive discursive analysis of 99 stand-alone reports produced by companies participating in the UK ETS and CRC over a nine-year period. The analysis is informed by Thompson’s (1990) depth-hermeneutic framework, which mediates the connection between linguistic strategies and the institutional field. Findings – The analysis suggests that companies tended to adop...

36 citations


Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"

  • ...Cultural capital may take an embodied form, such as linguistic competence or dispositions, or may take an instutionalized form, such as educational qualifications (Bourdieu, 2004b; p.16)....

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  • ...Bourdieu (2004b) acknowledges that both cultural and symbolic capital have the potential, in certain instances, to be converted into financial capital....

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  • ...…suggested that the participation in the UK ETS was driven by symbolic politics (or a range of symbolic motives), which included the establishment of a network to influence legislation – perhaps indicative of the power and symbolic capital of industry and industry lobby groups (Bourdieu, 2004a)....

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  • ...“mould and shape” the field of interaction (Lodhia and Jacobs, 2013; p.599; see also, Bourdieu, 2004a; Thompson, 1990)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article identifies this problematic situation as one of a significantly ‘decoupled’ and ‘dysfunctional’ condition of the Australian socio-technological wind farm development and siting system and suggests remedies including those of a deliberative nature that also respond to the Habermas–Mouffe debate.
Abstract: In work in science, technology, and society social conflict around wind farms has a growing profile, not least because it draws our attention to two key interrelated themes: 'science, technology and governance' and 'socio-technological systems'. In this article on Australian wind farm development and siting, these themes are highlighted in contexts of sustainability, legitimacy, and competency for policy effectiveness. There is enduring social conflict around wind farms at the local community level, but little government understanding of this conflict or willingness to respond adequately to resolve it. This article examines the conflict through the lens of print media analysis. A key finding of the five identified is that people seeing wind farms as spoiling a sense of place is a primary cause of enduring social conflict at the local community level around wind farms, alongside significant environmental issues and inadequate community engagement; this finding also indicates a central reason for the highly problematic state of Australian wind energy transitions. In turn, by identifying this problematic situation as one of a significantly 'decoupled' and 'dysfunctional' condition of the Australian socio-technological wind farm development and siting system, I suggest remedies including those of a deliberative nature that also respond to the Habermas-Mouffe debate. These inform a socio-technical siting approach or pathway to better respect and navigate contested landscapes for enhanced renewable energy transitions at the local level.

36 citations


Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"

  • ...These narratives not only presented yet another practical service to society but also could be seen to present high symbolic capital to attract policy and investment support (Bourdieu, 2004: 55–61; Swofford and Slattery, 2010: 2515)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is suggested that authorship disputes may contribute to an unhealthy competitive dynamic that can undermine researchers’ wellbeing, team cohesion, and scientific integrity.
Abstract: Scientific authorship serves to identify and acknowledge individuals who “contribute significantly” to published research. However, specific authorship norms and practices often differ within and across disciplines, labs, and cultures. As a consequence, authorship disagreements are commonplace in team research. This study aims to better understand the prevalence of authorship disagreements, those factors that may lead to disagreements, as well as the extent and nature of resulting misbehavior. Methods include an international online survey of researchers who had published from 2011 to 2015 (8364 respondents). Of the 6673 who completed the main questions pertaining to authorship disagreement and misbehavior, nearly half (46.6%) reported disagreements regarding authorship naming; and discipline, rank, and gender had significant effects on disagreement rates. Paradoxically, researchers in multidisciplinary teams that typically reflect a range of norms and values, were less likely to have faced disagreements regarding authorship. Respondents reported having witnessed a wide range of misbehavior including: instances of hostility (24.6%), undermining of a colleague’s work during meetings/talks (16.4%), cutting corners on research (8.3%), sabotaging a colleague’s research (6.4%), or producing fraudulent work to be more competitive (3.3%). These findings suggest that authorship disputes may contribute to an unhealthy competitive dynamic that can undermine researchers’ wellbeing, team cohesion, and scientific integrity.

36 citations

01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the development of digital curation as an academic field by conducting an in-depth analysis of how this area is evolving, and find that it has not emerged as an autonomous discipline, but does meet several of the criteria to indicate its potential for emergence.
Abstract: Digital curation is both maturing within the information disciplines and becoming increasingly embedded in practice. We are observing an increase in employment opportunities, education and training, and research in the area of digital curation. However, it is still unclear how and where the transmission of this knowledge and skills set fits within higher education. The purpose of this study was to explore the development of digital curation as an academic field by conducting an in-depth analysis of how this area is evolving. The research questions addressed were: Is digital curation emerging as an autonomous discipline? Where does digital curation fit within the educational landscape? The methodologies employed were scoping the literature, content analysis of published literature in the area of digital curation, and interviews with individuals engaged in the area. In this dissertation, the conceptual model put forth by D’Agostino (2012), which views a discipline as the interaction of ten elements that characterize a discipline interpreted within a framework of “shallow consensus” was used. Five key themes emerged from the data analysis: terminology, collaboration, multiple discipline engagement, education, and areas of professional and scholarly focus. Findings suggest that digital curation has not emerged as an autonomous discipline, but does meet several of the criteria to indicate its potential for emergence. Although education for this area fits well in coordination with the information disciplines, skill development is important across all domains. This study provided markers for gauging the progress of digital curation as

36 citations

Dissertation
01 Jan 2009
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors address mobility as a social practice and use an ethnographic approach to explore the way mobility is experienced daily by selected individuals in Santiago de Chile, and they argue that an urban daily mobility approach captures an ontological shift in the way the urban spaces are experienced.
Abstract: The 'mobility turn' in social sciences (Cresswell 2006; Hannam, Sheller et al. 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006) is based on the inevitable impacts all types of mobility currently have on contemporary living and "examines how social relations necessitate the intermittent and intersecting movement of people, objects, information and images across distance" (Urry 2007: 54 ). Mobility studies include research on migration, tourism, residential mobility and urban daily mobility - the latter is the central interest of this thesis. Urban daily mobility refers to all the ways people relate experientially to change of place on a daily basis, which means that it encompasses more than the sum of journeys made or the time it takes to make them. This understanding of mobility as a social practice requires methodological access to the social meaning invested in movement, whether that movement is physical, imaginative, virtual, or a combination of these. How do practices of urban daily mobility shape the way urban living is experienced in contemporary cities. This thesis addresses mobility as a social practice and uses an ethnographic approach to explore the way mobility is experienced daily by selected individuals in Santiago de Chile. It argues that an urban daily mobility approach captures an ontological shift in the way the urban spaces are experienced. This shift has implications for the way urban relations and urban structures are observed; that is, from fixed physical entities to moving and dynamic relations. Moreover, this shift has significant implications in various areas of urban analysis, each of which is examined by this thesis. First, it requires adopting methodologies that can reveal daily mobility experiences and find adequate ways of representing these experiences. Second, it incorporates mobility into the notion of place, by introducing the concepts of mobile places and transient places it discusses the possibility of mobile place making. Third, it questions the static way of analysing urban inequality and expands the notion of urban social exclusion to incorporate differentiated mobility as another one of its causes, consequences and manifestations. Fourth, it provides a way of looking at spatial relations in the city by understanding the implications of urban daily mobility in terms of place confinement and enlargement. Finally, it affects the way urban policy interventions are understood, analysed here in terms of the implementation of the Transantiago transport system. Mobility in these terms becomes not only a practice through which daily living can be observed, it may also be a locus for encounter, conflict, negotiation and transformation, thus requiring further research as a space of socialisation.

35 citations