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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: This paper examined academic knowledge production in three local fields of research with different national languages (English, Finnish and French) and found that publication patterns are still largely tied to the respective national languages.
Abstract: The worth of academic knowledge tends to be tested against global metrics of citations and articles published in high-ranking English language academic journals. This paper examines academic knowledge production in three local fields of research with different national languages (English, Finnish and French). It focuses on knowledge production on the topic of apprenticeship where there are distinctive differences in the three local research fields and the associated patterns of academic publication over a 15-year period. The findings suggest that publication patterns are still largely tied to the respective national languages. Concerns are raised about the limited visibility of non-Anglophone local contexts and conceptual frameworks as filtered through global academic knowledge production processes. The language practices in the production of academic knowledge need to be challenged to ensure that knowledge from these sources is not lost in translation or in the re-contextualisation for global aud...
19 citations
Cites background or methods from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"
...He defined the field as ‘a structured field of forces, and also as a field of struggles to conserve or transform this field of forces’ (Bourdieu 2004, 33)....
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...In his account of the scientific field, Bourdieu (2004) highlights how an individual researcher’s quest for legitimacy within the field is about a struggle to accrue scientific capital that may subsequently be converted to other kinds of capital, for example economic capital through grants and…...
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...Global and local dimensions of knowledge production To examine the role of language and geopolitics in the production of academic knowledge, this paper draws on three important concepts from Bourdieu: the concepts of scientific field, scientific capital and linguistic capital (Bourdieu 1991, 2004)....
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01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: Lukacs as mentioned in this paper pointed out that the problem of why and with what justification we should view this human-created world as constitutive of human reason never arises, and pointed out the connection between the fundamental problems of this philosophy and the basis in existence from which these problems spring.
Abstract: forms of life characteristic of its (capitalist) context, while remaining bound to the immediacy of the forms of appearance of that context” (Postone, 2002: 79). Regarding modern Western science, Lukacs asserts: The more highly developed it [modern science] becomes and the more scientific, the more it will become a formally closed system of partial laws. It will then find that the world lying beyond its confines, and in particular the material base which it is its task to understand, its own concrete underlying reality lies, methodologically and in principle, beyond its grasp. (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 104) Lukacs here criticizes the economist Tugan-Baranovsky’s attempts to explain production in purely quantitative terms. The formalism of bourgeois thought, according to Lukacs, has political implications: The reified world appears henceforth quite definitively—and in philosophy, under the spotlight of ‘criticism it is potentiated still further—as the only possible world, the only conceptually accessible, comprehensible world vouchsafed for us humans (...) By confining itself to the study of the ‘possible conditions’ of the validity of the forms in which its underlying existence is manifested, modern bourgeois thought bars its own way to a clear view of the problems bearing on the birth and death of these forms, and on their real essence and substratum. (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 110) Lukacs then works through the antinomies of bourgeois thought, as indicated by the problems and contradictions of modern Western philosophy. Here Lukacs focuses on Kant’s concept of the thing-in-itself and the more general notion that the world can be known to us to the degree to which it is created by us. Lukacs (1971 [1923]: 112) regards the latter as the defining problem of modern Western philosophy. However, Lukacs is not simply interested in the intellectual history of Western philosophy. Rather, his aim is to 90 Tugan-Baranovsky’s student, Nikolai Kondratiev, would later become well known for his theory of longterm cycles of economic expansion and contraction. It is interesting to note here the connection to Arrighi (1994), whose theory of structural transformation within the capitalist world-system, which draws heavily from Kondratiev, I critique in chapter four along lines similar to, yet distinct from, Lukacs’s critique of Tugan-Baranovsky. 85 grasp “the connection between the fundamental problems of this philosophy and the basis in existence from which these problems spring and to which they strive to return by the road of the understanding” (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 112). When writing about the idea that the world can be known to us to the degree to which it is created by us, Lukacs (1971 [1923]: 112) indicates that the question of “why and with what justification” we should view this human-created world as constitutive of human reason never arises. According to Lukacs, the reason this basic question never arises can be explained with reference to the intrinsic relationship between social structure and subjectivity. To put it another way, Lukacs explains that bourgeois thought exhibits a “double tendency,” which is also characteristic of bourgeois society, and that it expresses this opposition between an objective material world and subjective consciousness: On the one hand, it [bourgeois thought] acquires increasing control over the details of its social existence, subjecting them to its needs. On the other hand it loses—likewise progressively—the possibility of gaining intellectual control of society as a whole and with that it loses its own qualification for leadership. (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 121) Lukacs (1971 [1923]: 122) believes this problem is ultimately rooted in the division between theory and practice. Lukacs’s theory of praxis seeks to move beyond traditional subject-object epistemology. He indicates that both subject and object develop simultaneously through practice—and that this process is thoroughly dialectical. In other words, through praxis the subject both constitutes and is constituted by social structure. This practical activity, according to Lukacs, is also historically determinate. It is on this basis that Lukacs is able ground his explanation of the antinomies of bourgeois thought, particularly the opposition between objective matter and subjective consciousness, in the relationship between social structure and subjectivity, a relationship reflective of the contradictory nature of modern capitalist society: [M]an in capitalist society confronts a reality ‘made’ by himself (as a class) which appears to him to be a natural phenomenon alien to himself; he is wholly at the mercy of its ‘laws’, his activity is confined to the exploitation of the inexorable fulfillment of certain individual laws for his own (egoistic) interests. But even while ‘acting’ he remains, in the nature of the case, the object and not the subject of events. The field of his activity thus becomes wholly internalized: it consists on the one hand of the awareness of the laws which he uses and, on the other, of his awareness of his inner reactions to the course taken by events. (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 135)
19 citations
Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"
...…seen as “being structured by ideas of reason or regulative ideas that operate simultaneously as immanent moral obligations and transcendent guidelines or critical standards for autonomous agents’ ethically informed orientations and actions” (Strydom, 2011: 9; cf. Boltanski, 2011; Bourdieu, 2004)....
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...reason or regulative ideas that operate simultaneously as immanent moral obligations and transcendent guidelines or critical standards for autonomous agents’ ethically informed orientations and actions” (Strydom, 2011: 9; cf. Boltanski, 2011; Bourdieu, 2004)....
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01 Jan 2014
TL;DR: The authors explored the role of values in assessing the overall effects of organic food systems as a basis for discussing the implications of combining multiple perspectives in overall sustainability assessments of the food system and found that value has various meanings according to different scientific perspectives.
Abstract: Assessing the overall effects of organic food systems is important, but also a challenge because organic food systems cannot be fully assessed from one single research perspective. The aim of our research was to determine the role of values in assessments of organic food systems as a basis for discussing the implications of combining multiple perspectives in overall sustainability assessments of the food system. We explored how values were embedded in five research perspectives: (1) food science, (2) discourse analysis, (3) phenomenology, (4) neoclassical welfare economics, and (5) actor-network theory. Value has various meanings according to different scientific perspectives. A strategy for including and balancing different forms of knowledge in overall assessments of the effects of food systems is needed. Based on the analysis, we recommend four courses of action: (1) elucidate values as a necessary foundation for research assessment across perspectives; (2) openly discuss the choice of perspective, because it is decisive; (3) formulate common goals that can be translated into the different perspectives; and (4) consider assessment of food system sustainability a learning process and design it as such.
19 citations
TL;DR: The authors locates Bourdieu's sociology within the lasting controversy concerning the nature of causal explanation and interpretative understanding in the social sciences, with a special focus on social sciences with a particular focus on...
Abstract: This article locates Bourdieu’s sociology within the lasting controversy concerning the nature of causal explanation and interpretative understanding in the social sciences, with a special focus on...
19 citations
Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"
...…of reason’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 190), could therefore escape any asociological transcendentalism while also avoiding, say, Foucault’s epistemological agnosticism or the ‘nihilistic subjectivism’ of Latour and Woolgar’s ethnographies of science (Bourdieu, 1998: 94; Bourdieu, 2004: 26–31)....
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TL;DR: The authors argued that rather than a problem to be resolved, plurality functions as an organizing principle regulating social power relations in the field of International Relations. And they explored five different strategies for "saving the discipline" and showed how they relate to different kinds of scientific capital and power relations.
Abstract: For several decades, the field of International Relations theory has been preoccupied with its own methodological and theoretical plurality. As a consequence, IR scholars have proposed a range of different solutions to this “problem.” In doing so, they have drawn from different sources of social capital in the field, allowing them to base their legitimacy on the ways they relate to “progress” and the status quo. Drawing from Bourdieu's sociology, this article will explore five different strategies for “saving the discipline” and show how they relate to different kinds of scientific capital and power relations in the field. It will also explore the ways in which social conventions (such as politesse) can be used as tools for symbolic violence. The article will finish by arguing that rather than a problem to be resolved, plurality functions as an organizing principle regulating social power relations in the field.
19 citations