Open AccessBook
Science of Science and Reflexivity
TLDR
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."read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Meta-Theories in Research: Positivism, Postmodernism, and Critical Realism
TL;DR: In this article, a contribution to the indispensable discussion of meta-theoretical alternatives in research and, most importantly, the strengths and shortcomings thereof, and respective implications on research questions, objectives, and findings is made.
Journal ArticleDOI
Making Sense of Persistence in Scientific Purgatory: A Multi-Institutional Analysis of Instructors in Introductory Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Courses
TL;DR: For instance, the authors points to a variety of factors that influence student persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degree programs, but little attention has been paid to these factors.
Journal ArticleDOI
‘Turning’ everywhere in IR: on the sociological underpinnings of the field's proliferating turns
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors make sense of calls for International Relations (IR) to "turn" and argue that although the turns bring about (or resuscitate) ambitious philosophical, ontological, and epistemological questions to challenge what is deemed to constitute the "mainstream" of IR, their impact is more likely to be felt at the "margins" of the discipline.
Journal ArticleDOI
Studying Culture Differently: From Quantum Physics to the Music Synthesizer: An Interview with Trevor Pinch
TL;DR: Pinch, one of the most significant scholars in contemporary Science and Technology Studies (STS), reconstructs his career from the second half of the 1970s to the early 1990s.
Journal ArticleDOI
Cultural capital theory vs. cultural policy beliefs: How Pierre Bourdieu could have become a cultural policy advisor and why he did not
TL;DR: The authors explored the possible uses of Bourdieu's cultural capital theory in the making of French state cultural policy, focusing on the following paradox: this theory had an important if not predominant impact on the intellectual background and expertise of cultural policy but only limited effects on its actual orientations.