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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."
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate how different modes of training are incentivized and how they affect junior scientists' performance and career prospects, and find that autonomy granted to PhD students under apprenticeship improves their long-term performance but decreases short-term performances.
32 citations
TL;DR: This article explored the application of the concept of habitus as both theory and method across two sub-fields of educational research: graduate employment and digital scholarship practices, and found that bridging the theory-method comes with its own set of challenges for the researcher.
Abstract: Bourdieu’s career long endeavour was to devise both theoretical and methodological tools that could apprehend and explain the social world and its mechanisms of cultural (re)production and related forms of domination. Amongst the several key concepts developed by Bourdieu, habitus has gained prominence as both a research lens and a research instrument useful to enter individuals’ trajectories and ‘histories’ of practices. While much attention has been paid to the theoretical significance of habitus, less emphasis has been placed on its methodological implications. This paper explores the application of the concept of habitus as both theory and method across two sub-fields of educational research: graduate employment and digital scholarship practices. The findings of this reflexive testing of habitus suggest that bridging the theory-method comes with its own set of challenges for the researcher; challenges which reveal the importance of taking the work of application seriously in research settings.
32 citations
Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"
...Even then – and Bourdieu would agree (see Bourdieu 2004, 111) – it is not easy to identity the dispositions that lay underneath the practices we aim to study....
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose to engage the "problem of values" in International Relations (IR) as a composite question whose cognitive treatment requires the objectivation of the more profoundly institutional and social processes that subtend its emergence and evolution within the discipline.
Abstract: In light of recent discussions of cognitive and ethical dilemmas related to International Relations (IR) scholarship, this paper proposes to engage the “problem of values” in IR as a composite question whose cognitive treatment requires the objectivation of the more profoundly institutional and social processes that subtend its emergence and evolution within the discipline. This analysis is hereby offered as an exercise in reflexive scholarship. Insofar as the question of values constitutes a defining cognitive and moral concern for reflexive knowledge itself, the paper also points to the need for its reformulation within an epistemic framework that is capable of moving beyond reflexivity to Reflexivism proper, understood as a systematic socio-cognitive practice of reflexivity.
32 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the development of discursive knowledge presumes the communication of meaning as analytically different from communication of information, and knowledge can then be considered as a meaning which ma...
Abstract: The development of discursive knowledge presumes the communication of meaning as analytically different from the communication of information. Knowledge can then be considered as a meaning which ma...
32 citations
TL;DR: This article examined how the configuration of adult education research has been evolving, particularly over the last decade, and found that the fragmentation of the map of the territory that was noticed at the end of the 1990s, has continued and seems to have intensified.
Abstract: Against the background of internal developments of adult education as a field of study, and new external conditions for research, this article examines how the configuration of adult education research has been evolving, particularly over the last decade. Our analysis draws on a two-pronged approach: a reading of four seminal articles written by adult education scholars who have conducted bibliometric analyses of selected adult education journals; as well as our own review of 75 articles, covering a one-year period (2012‐2013), in five adult education journals that were chosen to provide a greater variety of the field of adult education in terms of their thematic orientation and geographical scope than has been the case in previous reviews. Our findings suggest that the field is facing two main challenges. First, the fragmentation of the map of the territory that was noticed at the end of the 1990s, has continued and seems to have intensified. Second, not only practitioners, but also the policy community voice their disappointment with adult education research, and we note a disconnect between academic adult education research and policy-related research. We provide a couple of speculations as to the future map of adult education as a field of study and point to the danger of shifting the research agenda away from classical adult education concerns about democracy and social rights. 1
31 citations
Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"
...Our discussion builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical understanding of a scientific field (e.g., Bourdieu, 1984, 2004; Camic, 2011)....
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