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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: The authors provide an overview of the common origins of qualitative and quantitative forms of STS, offering a discursive account of this history, and demonstrate how scientometric techniques can be used to address substantive research questions.
Abstract: We provide an overview of the common origins of qualitative and quantitative forms of STS, offering a discursive account of this history. We then demonstrate how scientometric techniques can be used to address substantive research questions, and we provide examples relevant both to the origins of STS and its state of the art. Our purpose is not to provide an exhaustive review of either qualitative or quantitative methods, as there exist many methods textbooks for both (e.g. Moed et al. 2004; Franklin 2012), although contemporary STS has tended to neglect methods. The final substantive section picks up the themes of “big data” and “reflexivity”, and also provides some reflection on the current use of indicators. We argue for greater conciliation between qualitative and quantitative methods within STS, broadly defined. We suggest that such collaboration, by enriching the repertoire of methods available to STS scholars, provides opportunities for exploring new and old research questions. There are also two more pragmatic reasons for this plea for further integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches in STS. The first is the growing attention for “big data”, computational methods, and digital forms of representation of data and knowledge in the humanities and the social sciences (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier 2013; Borgman 2015). The second reason, especially for those STS scholars based in the academy, is that a deeper understanding of scientometrics is necessary for making sense of and for formulating informed criticism about university rankings, evaluations and the audit culture within which academics work (Dahler-Larsen 2011; Hicks et al. 2015 (also known as ‘Leiden Manifesto’); Halffman and Radder 2015; Strathern 2000).
13 citations
01 Jan 2013
13 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the current calls for a practice turn in International Relations (IR) while positive in many respects, are problematic and potentially limiting because they are premised on a confused understanding of the role of philosophy and realist philosophy in particular and a restricted view of sociological investigation, and suggest that the problems that practice theorists point to should lead not to knee-jerk anti-realism but rather can motivate a reinvigorated conversation with realism.
Abstract: This paper argues that the current calls for a practice turn in International Relations (IR) while positive in many respects, are problematic and potentially limiting because they are premised on a confused understanding of the role of philosophy and realist philosophy in particular and a restricted view of the role of sociological investigation. This arises from the problematic tendency to lapse into advocacy of an anti-realist philosophical and sociological imagination. We suggest that the problems that practice theorists point to should lead not to knee-jerk anti-realism but rather can motivate a reinvigorated conversation with realism. This entails revisiting the role of philosophy, realism, and sociology in the study of practices. We argue that far from being antithetical to practice theory, a reconsideration of realist philosophy helps make sense of the role of practice and provides those advocating practice theory with better tools to deal with the challenges which motivated the development of these theoretical stances. Reconsidering realism entails, however, a reconsideration of a wider social ontology within which practice takes place, and openness to the role of philosophical and theoretical abstractions in teasing out the role of practice.
13 citations
Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"
...Certainly, there is a tendency to ignore the rather complicated equivocations on the question of realism and abstraction of Bourdieu [and Latour (2010, ch 1); and their differences on these questions (Bourdieu 2004, 28)]....
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TL;DR: The authors argued that social science requires the friendly-hostile cooperation of many, as Popper (1962, 217) put it, if it is to work toward objectivity and improve its models of the world.
Abstract: Social science requires the ‘friendly–hostile cooperation of many’, as Popper (1962, 217) put it, if it is to work toward objectivity and improve its models of the world. I am, therefore, pleased t...
13 citations
Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"
...Moreover, while Bourdieu (1988, 2004) did indeed later underscore the productivity of the clash of orthodoxies and heterodoxies in the struggle to describe the world scientifically, he certainly did not argue that heterodoxies are automatically sounder models of reality or that openly declaring…...
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...…Emmerich, and Ingram’s paper.8 Rather, so long as the field retains relative autonomy, the players’ ‘social construction[s] of social constructions’ (Bourdieu 2004, 88) only attain legitimacy in this particular game if they come equipped with reason (Bourdieu 1990b, 32), and given that the…...
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TL;DR: Antonsich as discussed by the authors discusses the need to more fully contextualize concepts and practices in human geographic research and examine more closely the role played by internationalizing (and English language-dominated) publishing markets in the review and publication of papers that increasingly cross the borders of linguistic contexts.
Abstract: A prominent political geographer adds to the exchange of views presented in the two preceding papers in this issue of Eurasian Geography and Economics (Antonsich, 2006; Moisio and Harle, 2006). His comments extend beyond the debate on geopolitical remote sensing (a term originated by the author) to the need to more fully contextualize concepts and practices in human geographic research and to examine more closely the role played by internationalizing (and English language-dominated) publishing markets in the review and publication of papers that increasingly cross the borders of linguistic contexts. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O52, Z13.
13 citations
Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"
...Language plays a special role in science, because facts, arguments, and theories are constructed, communicated, and evaluated in the form of written statements—that is, scientific work is largely a literary and interpretative activity (Bourdieu, 2004, p. 27)....
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