The practice of social studies continues to be a complicated scientific endeavor. From an epistemological point of view, the social sciences, unlike the natural sciences, do not conform to the predominant definition of science. The existing differences among expositions of “science,” “inquiry,” and “studies” lie with the contested role of the intellectual who is embarked on understanding the social realm. The “maturity” of the social sciences is usually discussed in the context of objectivity and rationality. But continuing epistemological debates would (...) be insufficient without reference to the scholar as a human studying humans. The philosophy of science has focused mainly on the procedures of knowledge accumulation, neglecting social context and its implications for inquiry. To address this neglect, this essay sets out first to retrace doubts about the role of the scholar that emerged with the institutionalization of the social sciences at the outset of the twentieth century and then to rethink these issues in terms of recent scientific developments. What surfaces is a new, participatory role for scholars that demands responsible contextualization and a broader conception of causal stories. (shrink)

This article offers an approach that combines, on the one hand, the philosophical notion of reflexivity, which is related to the ideas of self-reference and paradox, and, on the other hand, the sociological discussion of epistemic reflexivity as a problem of coherence, which was mainly initiated by certain branches of ethnomethodology and social constructionism. This combinatory approach argues for reflexivity as an epistemic criterion of ontological coherence, which suggests that social ontologies should account for the possibility of self-reflective subjectivity – (...) for otherwise they result in a paradoxical conclusion according to which a social scientist reflects on her or his ontological commitments even though these commitments deny her or him the capacity for self-reflection. This analysis presupposes that all human sciences are categorically premised on social ontologies; and it argues for an analytical distinction between self-reflection, which refers to the agential capacity for reflecting on one’s own commitments, and the epistemic criterion of reflexivity hereby proposed. These two analytically distinct though interdependent socio-theoretical concepts are frequently conflated in the literature; thus, this article also aims at a ‘clearing of the ground’ that can be of categorical use to the human sciences. (shrink)

The object of this paper is two-fold: first, to show that contrary to what seem to have become a widely accepted view among historians of biology, the famous 1953 first Nature paper of Watson and Crick on the structure of DNA was widely cited — as compared to the average paper of the time — on a continuous basis from the very year of its publication and over the period 1953–1970 and that the citations came from a wide array of (...) scientific journals. A systematic analysis of the bibliometric data thus shows that Watson's and Crick's paper did in fact have immediate and long term impact if we define "impact" in terms of comparative citations with other papers of the time. In this precise sense it did not fall into "relative oblivion" in the scientific community. The second aim of this paper is to show, using the case of the reception of the Watson—Crick and Jacob—Monod papers as concrete examples, how large scale bibliometric data can be used in a sophisticated manner to provide information about the dynamic of the scientific field as a whole instead of limiting the analysis to a few major actors and generalizing the result to the whole community without further ado. (shrink)

As a system of knowledge, nursing has utilized a range of subjects and reconstituted them to reflect the thinking and practice of health care. Often drawn to a holistic model, nursing finds it difficult to resist the reductionist tendencies in biological and medical thinking. In this paper I will propose a relational approach to knowledge that is able to address this issue. The paper argues that biology is not characterized by one stable theory but is often a contentious topic and (...) employs philosophically diverse models in its scientific research. Biology need not be seen as a reductionist science, but reductionism is nonetheless an important current within biological thinking. These reductionist currents can undermine nursing knowledge in four main ways. Firstly, that the conclusions drawn from reductionism go far beyond their data based on an approach that prioritizes biological explanations and eliminates others. Secondly, that the methods employed by biologists are sometimes weak, and the limitations are insufficiently acknowledged. Thirdly, that the assumptions that drive the research agenda are problematic, and finally that uncritical application of these ideas can be potentially disastrous for nursing practice. These issues are explored through an examination of the problems reductionism poses for the issue of gender, mental health, and altruism. I then propose an approach based on critical realism that adopts an anti‐reductionist philosophy that utilizes the conceptual tools of emergence and a relational ontology. (shrink)

In this contribution, I comment on Raffaella Campaner’s defense of explanatory pluralism in psychiatry (in this volume). In her paper, Campaner focuses primarily on explanatory pluralism in contrast to explanatory reductionism. Furthermore, she distinguishes between pluralists who consider pluralism to be a temporary state on the one hand and pluralists who consider it to be a persisting state on the other hand. I suggest that it would be helpful to distinguish more than those two versions of pluralism – different understandings (...) of explanatory pluralism both within philosophy of science and psychiatry – namely moderate/temporary pluralism, anything goes pluralism, isolationist pluralism, integrative pluralism and interactive pluralism. Next, I discuss the pros and cons of these different understandings of explanatory pluralism. Finally, I raise the question of how to implement or operationalize explanatory pluralism in scientific practice; how to structure the “genuine dialogue” or shape “the pluralistic attitude” Campaner is referring to. As tentative answers, I explore a question-based framework for explanatory pluralism as well as social-epistemological procedures for interaction among competing approaches and explanations. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article offers a social history of the “Galois Affair,” which arose in 1831 when the French Academy of Sciences decided to reject a paper presented by an aspiring mathematician, Évariste Galois. In order to historicize the meaning of Galois's work at the time he tried to earn recognition for his research on the algebraic solution of equations, this paper explores two interrelated questions. First, it analyzes scholarly algebraic practices and the way mathematicians were trained in the nineteenth century to (...) reconstruct the scientific meaning of Galois's research. By emphasizing the historically contingent nature of scientific debates, the paper argues that to historicize the work of a mathematician, we must historicize the scientific world as well. The second part of this article goes further to seek a fresh perspective on Galois's short career by analyzing the cultural, social, and institutional dynamics that governed how the mathematical community came to recognize an aspiring mathematician as one of its own. (shrink)

This article sets out to go beyond those criticisms that claim Bourdieu’s theory is structuralist determinism and identifies how change can be realized within a Bourdieusian framework. Starting with Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the first part of this article aims to develop an understanding of the interlocking relationship between capital, habitus and field. The review shows that the inability to anticipate change is arguably the most crucial weakness of the Bourdieusian framework. The second part examines Bourdieu’s attempts that seemingly challenge (...) the determinist criticism: ‘reproduction strategy’, ‘reflexivity’ and ‘hysteresis effect’. By relocating these concepts in Bourdieu's grand social theory, it then becomes clear that change is attainable in Bourdieusian theory if we can successfully identify the ‘mismatch’ between the field and habitus that can trigger the awakening of consciousness, fully recognize the neglected, but equally important, methodical mode of habitus formation, which is ‘explicit pedagogy’, and strategically engage with an open system that provides new possibilities. By scrutinizing Bourdieu in his original texts, with an eye to finding the ‘hidden essence’, this article hopes to show the need to take a certain theoretical innovation, one that is clearly outside the habitual use of Bourdieu’s theory. (shrink)

A new open science culture is emerging within the current system of the life sciences. This culture mixes an ethic of sharing with features such as anti-bureaucracy rebellion, hedonism, search for profit. It is a recombination of an old culture, the Mertonian ethos of modern open science, and a new one: the hacker ethic. This new culture has an important role in the evolving relationship between science and society. And it maintains a political ambivalence. Biohackers are rebel scientists and open (...) access advocates who challenge today’s Big Bio’s concentration of power. But at the same time they live in a new territory of accumulation that never excludes entrepreneurship and profit. (shrink)

Jeffrey Alexander’s recent book on cultural sociology argues that sociologists must grant the realm of ideas autonomy to determine behavior, unencumbered by interference from instrumental or material factors. He criticizes the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as “weak” for failing to give autonomy to culture by reducing it to self-interested behavior that immediately reflects class position. However, Alexander’s arguments seriously distort and misstate Bourdieu’s theory, which provides for the relative autonomy of culture through the concepts of habitus and field. Because habitus (...) is a set of durable dispositions conditioned by past structures, it may contradict the changed structures of the present. Further, the influence of the habitus is always mediated by the structure and strategies of the field of contest in which it is deployed, so that the same habitus may motivate different actions in different circumstances. However, Alexander is correct to argue that in Bourdieu’s theory culture generally serves to reproduce, not contradict social structures. Yet Bourdieu addresses this and other problems in his later work, in which he argues for the existence of certain cultural universals transcending particular structures. (shrink)

This paper takes as its starting point the fact that Bourdieu’s views on sociology as a science have not been sufficiently and adequately understood and discussed. It traces the links between his conception and that of the French tradition of historical epistemology which is critical of positivism. How Bourdieu extends their views, and those of Bachelard especially, beyond the realm of the natural sciences, to the social sciences and sociology in particular, is discussed. In the process he introduces new concepts (...) and methods, such as that of participant objectivation. His perspective reveals a convergence between the natural sciences and the social sciences as human endeavours striving for universal truths. This is reinforced and widened to include the humanities as well as demonstrated by his analysis of the literary field. The paper concludes with the observation that Bourdieu’s post-positivist science is a salutary alternative to the postmodern critique of science. (shrink)

In this article, I examine Luhmann’s, Bunge’s and others’ views on emergence, and argue that Luhmann’s epistemological construal of emergence in terms of Totalausschluss (total exclusion) is both ontologically flawed and detrimental to an appropriate understanding of the distinctive features of social emergence. By contrast, Bunge’s rational emergentism, his CESM model, and Wimsatt’s characterization of emergence as nonaggregativity provide a useful framework to investigate emergence. While researchers in the field of social theory and sociology tend to regard Luhmann as the (...) sole representative of systems theory, the latter has been characterized by its diversity, and the writings of such systems theorists as Mario Bunge deserve more (critical) attention from social researchers than they receive at present. Finally, this article suggests that the perennial debate over methodological individualism and holism in social science may make real progress if such ambiguous terms as reduction and reductionism are elucidated before they are employed. (shrink)

In this article, I revisit Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and contrast it with Herbert Simon's notion of bounded rationality. Through a discussion of the literature of economic sociology on status and Fligstein's political-cultural approach, I argue that this concept can be a source of fresh insights into empirical problems. I find that the greater the change in the social environment, the more salient the benefits of using habitus as a tool to analyze agents' behavior.

Globalization, with its undisputed benefits, also presents complex moral challenges that business leaders cannot ignore. Some of this moral complexity is attributable to the scope and nature of specific issues like climate change, intellectual property rights, economic inequity, and human rights. More difficult aspects of moral complexity are the structure and dynamics of human moral judgment and the amplified universe of global stakeholders with competing value claims and value systems whose interests must be considered and often included in the decision-making (...) process. While managing moral challenges is considered in management literature to be a legitimate and crucial function of business leadership, the complexity of moral challenges in a globalized business culture stretches the managerial capacities of individuals who rely on a personal moral compass and their own wisdom traditions of philosophy or religion for guidance. The Global Moral Compass introduces an expanded epistemic value framework as an aid to understanding and managing moral complexity in a globalized business culture. (shrink)

Departing from Bourdieu's collective habitus, this essay develops a theory of the subjectivity of habitus, meaning the social-psychological processes comprising the agent and fueling deliberation. By incorporating George Ainslie's theory of the will and deliberation as the intertemporal bargaining of a population of interests, I theorize the “saturated agent” composed of an economy of interests, analogous to Bourdieu's “economy of practices” invested and saturated with cultural capital. Here culturally saturated interests negotiate strategically within the agent, with the ending balance constituting (...) the habitus. Additionally, reflexivity becomes amenable to habitus as “desaturation” or suspending the commitment to a set of culturally saturated interests as a result of a crisis, followed by “resaturation”, the restructuring of the economy of interests. (shrink)

Many authors have argued that all studies of socially specific modalities of human action and experience depend on some form of “philosophical anthropology”, i.e. on a set of general assumptions about what human beings are like, assumptions without which the very diagnoses of the cultural and historical variability of concrete agents' practices would become impossible. Bourdieu was sensitive to that argument and, especially in the later phase of his career, attempted to make explicit how his historical-sociological investigations presupposed and, at (...) the same time, contributed to the elaboration of an “idea of the human being”. The article reconstructs Bourdieu's philosophical anthropology, starting with his genetic sociology of symbolic power, conceived as a form of critical theory, and concluding with an account of the conditio humana in which recognition appears as both the fundamental existential goal through which human agents strive to confer meaning on their lives and the source of the endless symbolic competition that keeps society moving. The agonistic vision of the social universe that grounds his sociological studies returns in his philosophical anthropology under the guise of a singular synthesis between Durkheim's thesis that “Society is God” and Sartre's idea that “hell is other people”. (shrink)

Social scientists have traditionally attempted to avoid extending strategies for acquiring experimental knowledge to the sphere of the social. Bruno Latour, however, has introduced a notion of the collective experiment, an experiment conducted by and with us all. In this short paper I seek to explore, by way of elucidating the talk of collective experiments, that Latour's notion has long since existed in the theory and practice of ecological design and restoration. Practitioners in ecological restoration projects find themselves in a (...) situation of double contingency, since neither do they know how nature will respond to their intervention nor is their interpretation of these responses already certain. Experimental practice in society then becomes the proceduralization of this contingency. (shrink)

In health sciences, technical contributions may be undervalued and excluded in the author byline. In this paper, I demonstrate how authorship is a historical construct which perpetuates systemic injustices including technical undervaluation. I make use of Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual work to demonstrate how the power dynamics at play in academia make it very challenging to change the habitual state or “habitus”. To counter this, I argue that we must reconceive technical contributions to not be a priori less important based on (...) its nature when assigning roles and opportunities leading to authorship. I make this argument based on two premises. First, science has evolved due to major information and biotechnological innovation; this requires ‘technicians’ to acquire and exercise a commensurate high degree of both technical and intellectual expertise which in turn increases the value of their contribution. I will illustrate this by providing a brief historical view of work statisticians, computer programmers/data scientists and laboratory technicians. Second, excluding or undervaluing this type of work is contrary to norms of responsibility, fairness and trustworthiness of the individual researchers and of teams in science. Although such norms are continuously tested because of power dynamics, their importance is central to ethical authorship practice and research integrity. While it may be argued that detailed disclosure of contributions (known as contributorship) increases accountability by clearly identifying who did what in the publication, I contend that this may unintentionally legitimize undervaluation of technical roles and may decrease integrity of science. Finally, this paper offers recommendations to promote ethical inclusion of technical contributors. (shrink)

The article builds on a recent literature that has sought to underscore the relevance of Bourdieu’s field theory for historical-sociological analysis. It draws attention to symbolic revolutions, a concept that has been given short shrift in this literature and even in Bourdieu’s own expositions of his field-theoretical apparatus. The article argues that symbolic revolutions denote a universal mechanism of field-internal change which extends and complements a conceptual battery of mostly structural universals of fields. In a synoptic reading of Bourdieu’s field-theoretical (...) work, the article fleshes out an ideal type of symbolic revolutions, with special regard to its dialectical features. It adds further analytical purchase to the concept by highlighting continuities and parallels with the work of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Mannheim. Finally, it argues that more recent studies by other authors on transformations in the psychiatric field, the field of social and human sciences, and the political field are in fact discussing instances of symbolic revolutions. It thus shows how the concept can help identify common properties among highly heterogeneous phenomena, opening up new avenues for historical-sociological investigations that can more systematically relate the general and the particular. (shrink)

The Hippocratic Oath is a code of ethics defining correct behaviour by physicians they are required to commit themselves to before being accepted into the profession. It was the first code of ethics for any profession. While originating in Ancient Greece, it subsequently evolved, but the current code still embodies many of the core injunctions of the original code. The most widely accepted current form is the 2006 The Declaration of Geneva by the World Medical Association to be taken before (...) being admitted as a member of the medical profession. The most important of its injunctions are: ‘The health of my patient will be my first consideration’ and ‘I will maintain the utmost respect for human life’. The first is a rewording of the injunction from Epidemics, Book I, of the Hippocratic school: ‘Practice two things in your dealings with disease: either help or do not harm the patient.’ This was later simplified to the most basic precept of the Hippocratic Oath: ‘First, do no harm.’ It is one of the principal precepts of bioethics that all students in healthcare that, given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good. The development of neurotechnology could be subsumed with little modification under the Geneva formulation of the Hippocratic Oath, extending this precept to a commitment not to damage people’s psychological health. (shrink)

Essay “Meaning and Mentalism” is translated from Hilary Putnam’s book: Represen tation and Reality. Chapter 1. Meaning and Mentalism. The MIT Press, 1998. pp.1-18.

Massimiliano Simons provides the first systematic study of Serres' work in the context of late 20th-century French philosophy of science. By proposing new readings of Serres' philosophy, Simons creates a synthesis between his predecessors, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Louis Althusser as well as contemporary Francophone philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Simons situates Serres' unique contribution through his notion of the quasi-object, a concept, he argues, organizes great parts of Serres' work into a promising philosophy (...) of science as well as a challenge to the narrower field of French epistemology, to which it has often been limited. Simons highlights how the concept encompasses Serres' commitment to positive relations between science and culture and his rejection of pleas to purify the scientific self from imaginative and cultural elements. It helps to situate Serres between the distinct traditions of Bachelard and Latour as well as progressing the innovative aspects of Serres' philosophy for current debates in the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. Showing how Serres' philosophy can serve as a normative approach to science and technology, Michel Serres and French Philosophy of Science takes in themes of materiality, religiosity, modernity and ecology to advance a timely alternative to philosophy of science for contemporary life. (shrink)

The paper addresses an understudied but highly relevant group of people within corporate organizations and society in general—the marginalized—as well as their narration, and criticism, of personal lived experiences of marginalization in business. They are conventionally perceived to lack traditional forms of power such as public influence, formal authority, education, money, and political positions; however, they still possess the resources to impact their situations, their circumstances, and the structures that determine their situations. Business ethics researchers seldom consider marginalized people’s voices (...) and experiences as resources to understand their lives, as demonstrated through a review of 7500 articles published in the Journal of Business Ethics and Business Ethics Quarterly (2000–2019). Only 78 studies included aspects of marginalized groups. 69 of those studies discussed the topic of marginalized groups of people, but without integrating their explicit voices into the text. Only 9 of the 78 articles featured marginalized people’s explicit voices about their marginalization experiences incorporated into the text as a source for exploration. None of the identified studies discussed the potential for theorizing based on such voices. This paper contributes to business ethics theory by developing four theoretical possibilities vis-à-vis the critical voices of marginalized people’s experiences in business: (a) marginalized theory on critical agency and freedom of speech; (b) the gatekeeping role of academia; (c) primary sources; and (d) a participative perspective. Discussing the theoretical potential of quoting the above voices can enrich business ethics research in terms of the theoretical understanding of marginalized groups in business. (shrink)

Bernard Lahire’s critique of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology aims to establish a ‘dispositionalist-contextualist’ vision of human agency capable of fully sociologising biography and individuality. While accepting the utility of the notion of field, Lahire emphasises the plurality of non-field entities – including games, worlds and figurations – shaping people’s dispositions and the contexts in which they come to act, leading him to downgrade the notion of habitus and cast fields as only a small part of the picture. While appreciating the motivation (...) underpinning Lahire’s project and the usefulness of some of his research-led insights, this article argues that his skewed and partial reading of Bourdieu blinds him to the fact that solutions to some of the problems he identifies are already there in Bourdieu’s framework and, indeed, that these are more coherent and comprehensive than some of the conceptual suggestions Lahire offers. (shrink)

It is possible to draw upon Marx’s thinking without emphasizing an automatic relationship between an economic ‘base’ and a political ‘superstructure’. The development of capitalism must then be understood as resulting from the ‘conceptual separation’ of the economic and political issues. However, the research that favours this approach fails to provide the tools for a precise and systematic study of the political work which makes this separation possible. For his part, through the development of field theory and the emphasis on (...) the notion of symbolic power, Pierre Bourdieu offers the means to analyse the political work of multiple agents, but he does not formulate a theory of capitalism tailored to his findings. It seems worthwhile to take up and extend some of his proposals to open up avenues of thought in this direction. It is then about considering that different fields coexist, each of which lends itself to a political struggle based on the assertion of symbolic power; each field contributes to a ‘conceptual separation’ of the economic and political issues, which is itself constitutive of capitalism. As a result, production and trade operations seem to be part of a natural and autonomous process. Capital can thus be accumulated without necessitating the direct use of force. The combination of fields can lend itself to certain variations. It always shapes the political structures of accumulation. (shrink)

This article presents the notions of ethos and eidos as field level concepts for the sociology of morality and the anthropology of ethics. This is accomplished in the context of Bourdieuan social theory and, therefore, from the broad standpoint of practice theory. In the first instance these terms are used to refer to the normative structures of social fields and are conceived so as to represent the way in which such structures fall between two planes, that of the implicit and (...) the explicit. Subsequently, they are used to further understand a distinction between morality—roughly, the implicit moral order of a social field—and ethics—the more explicit and often codified elements of a social field’s normative structure. When presented in relation to academic philosophical inquiries into the ethical issues in healthcare and the life sciences—meaning the disciplines of applied ethics in general and applied ethics in particular—the analytic perspective these terms facilitate enables us to represent the fundamental conditions required for academic enquiry; taken together the ethos and eidos of an intellectual field constitute the requisite background of its normative epistemic and methodological commitments, thereby providing the structures of disciplined intellectual practices. Seen in this light it not only becomes possible to grasp applied ethics as a socially structured practice but to understand it in terms that can also be used to frame our everyday moral practices. In this way applied ethics can be acknowledged as a relatively unique part of our contemporary moral culture. (shrink)

This article uses participant objectivation in sociology and philosophy as two knowledge fields to provide a reflexive comparison of their synced field effect in historical circumstances. Drawing on the philosopher and historian of science Gaston Bachelard, I theorize fielded knowledge as a social relation that combines the prior presence of folk knowledge with a socioanalytic exchange between field and folk that includes positions of either defense, replacement or critique. A comparison of post-Wittgenstein Anglophone philosophy and post-sixties American sociology describes their (...) mutual confrontation with folk psychology as an “epistemological obstacle” that generates a remarkable concern with action as a position-taking on the folk relation. A reflexive objectivation of folk knowledge is therefore necessary for a revised understanding of action that correlates with the distinction of sociology’s knowledge capital and how it fares as an explanatory resource in competitive circumstances. The article concludes by leveraging the synced field effect even further to make a recommendation that sociologists can increase the distinction of their knowledge capital by producing discourse that can recognize, legitimate and officialize experiences that otherwise remain obscure, nameless or impossible within the bounded universe of folk psychology. (shrink)

‘‘Undone science’’ refers to areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored but that social movements or civil society organizations often identify as worthy of more research. This study mobilizes four recent studies to further elaborate the concept of undone science as it relates to the political construction of research agendas. Using these cases, we develop the argument that undone science is part of a broader politics of knowledge, wherein multiple and competing groups struggle over the construction (...) and implementation of alternative research agendas. Overall, the study demonstrates the analytic potential of the concept of undone science to deepen understanding of the systematic nonproduction of knowledge in the institutional matrix of state, industry, and social movements that is characteristic of recent calls for a ‘‘new political sociology of science.’’. (shrink)

By referring to mundane practices as well as to more systematic or theoretical discourses (those of Krishnamurti and Buber), this article shows the utility of focusing on the negatory, apophatic aspects of reflexivity, i.e. on attempts at removing obstacles (mainly thinking, decision-making processes) which prevent the spontaneous emergence of open-ended self—self and self—other relationships.

Universities are subject to considerable changes as environmental pressures increasingly place their futures in question. As core sites of social scientific activity, it is important to understand not only why these changes are occurring, but their consequences for practices within universities. Without this and a concern with the future, their distinction and value as sites of activity are left to those whose instrumental practices are short-term and act according to apparent economic necessities. Frequently, explanations for this state of affairs focus (...) upon the problems of increasing management and bureaucracy, but remain relatively silent concerning the activities of academics. This article argues that there is an affinity between forms of academic professionalism and the managerialism we find in universities as an answer to the changing pressures to which they are subject. Both exhibit an individualism and separate knowledge from knowing. Overall, this detracts from the cultures of universities and how these contexts relate to the content of the work that is produced within them. (shrink)

This article investigates Loïc Wacquant’s suggestion that ‘thinking is a deeply corporeal activity’ by showing how theoretical activities mobilize different bodies in practice, in both the natural and social sciences. It argues that knowledge is about exchanges of properties between different entities or bodies by drawing a parallel here between the sociologist (Loïc Wacquant) becoming his object of study and scientists becoming the objects they study. It also examines the reverse movement; that is, we have to invent devices to escape (...) the hic et nunc of the body to project ourselves into other times and spaces. The article concludes by questioning Wacquant’s conception of ‘scientific knowledge’ by tracing a number of dichotomies present in his work: mind/body, subject/object, theory/practice. An alternative conception of the knowing subject is then formulated, one that is neither a transcendental subject nor a ‘socialized body’; I call this the distributed centered subject. (shrink)

In this response to my critics, I amplify the conceptual clarification and methodological stipulation of habitus begun in ‘Homines in extremis’ to help us move from a sociology of the body as socially construc-ted object to a sociology from the body as socially construc-ting vector of knowledge, power, and practice. The specification of habitus by membership in collectives, attachment to institutions, and analytic purpose makes it a flexible multi-scalar notion with which to construct the epistemic individual and account for both (...) reproduction and change, conformity and creativity, as well as self-revision. For this, we must reject theological interpretations that rigidly lock habitus into Bourdieu’s framework; avoid conflating the formal properties of the notion with its concrete features in specific settings and cases; and distinguish between the rhetorical invocation of his concepts (‘speaking Bourdieuese’) and their effective deployment in the construction of the empirical object. As embodied and embedded capacity, habitus brings temporality, depth, and desire to the analytic epicenter. It reminds us that the social world is not transparent, open-ended, and instantaneous, but endowed with gravity, opacity, and asymmetry. Treating the sentient and skilled organism as fount of both social intelligence and sociological acumen can help historical social science connect with enactive psychology and recover the carnality of action that conventional accounts of social life routinely erase. (shrink)

Science is fundamentally devoted to generating original knowledge, and therefore concepts of scientific originality are keys to understanding its very essence. Scientific originality has long been thought of as discovery, but new studies of the humanities and social sciences have shown that other, discipline-specific concepts of originality are used in these fields of study. Does this finding also hold for disciplines in the natural science, medicine, and engineering? Are concepts of originality scientifically grounded or do they instead reflect extrascientific modes (...) of originality? These questions lie at the heart of research proposals responding to an initiative explicitly calling for original scientific projects. The proposals undergo a two-step analysis based on grounded theory[Per style, reference citation is not allowed in abstract section. Hence, we have deleted Charmaz, 2006. Please approve.]. First, three empirically identified modes of scientific originality are described: temporal, partially different, and revolutionary. The three modes of originality are consistent with extrascientific ones such as those in art and fashion. Second, six disciplines—two each in the natural science, medical, and engineering—are analyzed for ways the three modes of originality are used and for their associated disciplinary characteristics in order to identify discipline-specific concepts of originality. (shrink)

Luc Boltanski’s programme of pragmatic sociology, now gaining substantial attention among English-speaking sociologists, was forged in opposition to the supposed excesses and blind spots of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’. After outlining the main lines of development of Boltanski’s project and emphasizing the major points of difference with Bourdieu, the article offers a critical Bourdieusian response to pragmatic sociology. It highlights a number of ways in which Boltanski’s position is based on a misreading or distortion of Bourdieu’s ideas, is less unlike (...) Bourdieu’s position than he claims and suffers from analytical shortcomings. This is not to say there is nothing of value in Boltanski’s work, but overall it offers useful pointers to be accommodated rather than a thoroughgoing conceptual revolution. (shrink)

The intellectual trajectories of social scientists Robert N. Bellah and Clifford Geertz are compared as a case study in the production of successful interdisciplinary work. Geertz and Bellah started from a similar position, in terms of scholarly habits, network centrality, and symbolic capital. However, while Geertz became an interdisciplinary star and left his mark in disciplines as diverse as history, sociology, and cultural studies, Bellah’s interdisciplinary appeal was more limited, while his ability to speak to the general public as a (...) public intellectual was unmatched by Geertz. We thus review Bellah’s and Geertz’s parallel careers using a multidimensional analytical model intended to complete current field-based and performative-pragmatist models of intellectual success, arguing that interdisciplinary success can be accounted for by a combination of local ecological factors, images of intellectual work, and texts showing a high degree of cross-disciplinary fluency. (shrink)

We describe some of the ways that the field of content analysis is being transformed in an Era of Big Data. We argue that content analysis, from its beginning, has been concerned with extracting the main meanings of a text and mapping those meanings onto the space of a textual corpus. In contrast, we suggest that the emergence of new styles of text mining tools is creating an opportunity to develop a different kind of content analysis that we describe as (...) a computational hermeneutics. Here the goal is to go beyond a mapping of the main meaning of a text to mimic the kinds of questions and concerns that have traditionally been the focus of a hermeneutically grounded close reading, a reading that focuses on what Kenneth Burke described as the poetic meanings of a text. We illustrate this approach by referring to our own work concerning the rhetorical character of US National Security Strategy documents. (shrink)

Research on economization processes is increasingly taking seriously the social and material processes through which various policy domains are transformed into economic problems and solutions. This article engages “Value Added Modeling” (VAM) in teacher evaluation systems as a case study in economization. VAM is a statistical technology for evaluating the effectiveness of schoolteachers using student test scores, which wrests authority for the determination of quality teaching away from education professionals and toward quantitative economic modelers. Mobilizing field theory, we trace a (...) half century of changing relationships among economists, other academics, and various policy audiences (from media to philanthropists to state and federal government) in struggles to define education policy concerning teacher quality. We show that economization is a set of overlapping, sometimes contradictory processes that can take different forms: in this case, the spread of an “economic style of reasoning” or the establishment of “economic policy devices.” The case of VAM shows stages of economization in which processes first proceeded independently of one another, then interacted in contradictory ways, and finally, mutually reinforced one another. What primarily drove these interactions was the struggle for scientific capital within the economics discipline and the changing place of education policy and VAM within it. Ultimately, VAM’s original role as a policy device for evaluating and selecting individual teachers has foundered even as it has become an important tool for economists to accrue scientific capital and expand their style of reasoning to broader audiences. (shrink)

Most of the existing studies on Bourdieu and the digital regards the social and class distinctions in the use of digital technologies, thus presupposing a certain transparency of technologies themselves. Our proposal is to refer to this attitude as “Bourdieu outside the digital.” Yet in this paper, another perspective called “Bourdieu inside the digital” is developed, which moves the focus on the effects of some emerging technologies on social distinctions and discrimination. The main hypothesis is that algorithms of machine learning (...) are producers and reproducers of habitus. Although their results present a greater granularity with respect to the standard techniques of the past, these algorithms still reduce individuals to categories, general trends, classes, and behaviors. Such a reduction has flattening effects on the individuals’ self-understanding, especially in terms of identity and interaction with the social world. This is the phenomenon described in the article as the “personalization without personality,” whose consequences are both existential and social-political. This idea will be illustrated through qualitative and comparative analysis between the correspondence analysis and the multiple correspondence analysis used by Bourdieu in his works and some of those techniques that are performed today in big data analytics. (shrink)

This article challenges what is now the orthodoxy concerning the heritage of Bourdieu (1930–2002): namely, the judgement that his distinctive sociological innovation has been his theory of social reproduction, and that he has failed to provide a necessary theory of social change. Yet Bourdieu consistently claimed to offer a theory of social transformation as well as accounting for continuities of power. Indeed, he provides two substantive keys for an understanding of historical transformation—first, a theory of prophets (religious or secular) as (...) the authors of heresies or “symbolic revolutions” that dispel current doxa; second, a theory of the “corporatism of the universal”: the role of intellectuals or other educated professionals in pursuit of social justice and other universalistic goals. Moreover, Bourdieu fuses his theories of “symbolic revolutions” with a materialist analysis of their social preconditions, including a fresh account of social crises. Crises—war, famine, recession, and especially the intensified precarity of the educated—have, for him, a profound impact, both within differentiated fields and across fields. Conflicts that become effectivelysynchronizedacross fields acquire great resonance within the wider field of power, particularly due to hysteresis or “maladjusted habitus.” Indeed, the appearance of crises, together with new prophetic heresies, leads the subordinate classes to question the taken-for-granted order of things and to orchestrate their resistance. Alongside his corpus of published writings, this article draws widely on Bourdieu’s posthumously published lectures. These cast a distinctive new light on how his well-known conceptual instruments can aid us in the study of historical change. They also expand on how social science itself might be used to facilitate progressive social movements. (shrink)

Much has been said about the need for improving the current definitions of scientific authorship, but an aspect that is often overlooked is how to formulate and communicate these definitions to ensure that they are comprehensible and useful for researchers, notably researchers active in international research consortia. In light of a rapid increase in international collaborations within natural sciences, this article uses authorship of this branch of sciences as an example and provides suggestions to improve the comprehensibility of the definitions (...) of authorship in natural sciences. It assesses whether the definition of authorship provided by the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity can deal with current issues and problems of scientific authorship. Notably, problems that are experienced in project groups with researchers coming from multiple countries. Using theories developed by Jürgen Habermas and Robert Merton, a normative framework is developed to articulate ethical authorship in natural sciences. Accordingly, enriching the current definition of authorship with normative elements and using discipline-specific metaphors to communicate them are introduced as possible ways of improving the comprehensibility of the definition of authorship in international environments. Finally, this article provides a proposal to be considered in the future revisions of the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. (shrink)

Bourdieu carved out a distinctive analytical niche for his reflexive sociology. His epistemological tool of field analysis, sometimes coupled with statistical correspondence analysis, is particular...

The existential insecurity of human beings has induced them to create protective spheres of symbols: myths, religions, values, belief systems, theories, etc. Rationality is one of the key factors contributing to the construction of civilisation in technical and symbolic terms. As Hankiss (2001) has emphasised, protective spheres of symbols may collapse – thus causing a profound social crisis. Social and political transformations had a tremendous impact at the end of the 20th century. As a result, management theories have been revised (...) in order to deal with transition and uncertainty. Francis Fukuyama's (2000) approach is supportive of hierarchical organisation as the best solution when facing a 'disruption'. The notion of Homo Hierarchicus has been based on, allegedly, rational presumptions. This paper contributes to the discussion on hierarchy within contemporary organisations. It criticises so-called 'natural' and 'rational' necessities justifying hierarchy. A key issue identified by the paper is the formalisation of language in claiming value-free knowledge and 'detached' observation as the basis for neutral rationality and aspired efficiency. This should be seriously reconsidered as hindering rather than aiding understanding of social complexity. All in all, Homo Hierarchicus appears to be misleading rather than helping symbolic sphere or construct. (shrink)

There is a diversity of ‘ethical practices’ within medicine as an institutionalised profession as well as a need for ethical specialists both in practice as well as in institutionalised roles. This Brief offers a social perspective on medical ethics education. It discusses a range of concepts relevant to educational theory and thus provides a basic illumination of the subject. Recent research in the sociology of medical education and the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu are covered. In the end, the themes (...) of Bourdieuan Social Theory, socio-cultural apprenticeships and the ‘characterological turn’ in medical education are draw together the context of medical ethics education. ​. (shrink)

Authorship is commonly used as the basis for the measurement of research productivity. It influences career progression and rewards, making it a valued commodity in a competitive scientific environment. To better understand authorship practices amongst collaborative teams, this study surveyed authors on collaborative journal articles published between 2011 and 2015. Of the 8364 respondents, 1408 responded to the final open-ended question, which solicited additional comments or remarks regarding the fair distribution of authorship in research teams. This paper presents the analysis (...) of these comments, categorized into four main themes: disagreements, questionable behavior, external influences regarding authorship, and values promoted by researchers. Results suggest that some respondents find ways to effectively manage disagreements in a collegial fashion. Conversely, others explain how distribution of authorship can become a “blood sport” or a “horror story” which can negatively affect researchers’ wellbeing, scientific productivity and integrity. Researchers fear authorship discussions and often try to avoid openly discussing the situation which can strain team interactions. Unethical conduct is more likely to result from deceit, favoritism, and questionable mentorship and may become more egregious when there is constant bullying and discrimination. Although values of collegiality, transparency and fairness were promoted by researchers, rank and need for success often overpowered ethical decision-making. This research provides new insight into contextual specificities related to fair authorship distribution that can be instrumental in developing applicable training tools to identify, prevent, and mitigate authorship disagreement. (shrink)

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. Of the 6673 who completed the main questions pertaining to authorship disagreement and misbehavior, nearly half 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, undermining of a colleague’s work during meetings/talks, cutting corners on research, sabotaging a colleague’s research, or producing fraudulent work to be more competitive. These findings suggest that authorship disputes may contribute to an unhealthy competitive dynamic that can undermine researchers’ wellbeing, team cohesion, and scientific integrity. (shrink)

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate around sustainability by proposing the need for an ecocentric stance to sustainability that reflexively embeds humans in—rather than detached from—nature. We argue that this requires a different way of thinking about our relationship with our world, necessitating a engagement with the sociomaterial world in which we live. We develop the notion of ecocentrism by drawing on insights from sociomateriality studies, and show how radical-reflexivity enables us to appreciate our embeddedness and responsibility for (...) sustainability by bringing attention to the interrelationship between values, actions and our social and material world. We examine the implications of an ecocentric radically reflexive approach to sustainability for management education. (shrink)