. This article traces the intellectual history of scientific studies of intercessory prayer published in English between 1965 and the present by focusing on the conflict and discussion they prompted in the medical literature. I analyze these debates with attention to how researchers articulate the possibilities and limits medical science has for studying intercessory prayer over time. I delineate three groups of researchers and commentators: those who think intercessory prayer can and should be studied scientifically, those who are more skeptical (...) and articulate the limits of science around this topic, and those who focus primarily on the pragmatic applications of this knowledge. I analyze these contests as examples of what Thomas Gieryn calls “epistemic authority” as medical researchers engage in what he describes as “boundary‐work” or “the discursive attribution of selected qualities to scientists, scientific methods, and scientific claims for the purposes of drawing a rhetorical boundary between science and some less authoritative residual non‐science.” ). (shrink)

This paper is interested in the interdisciplinary characteristics of European integration studies. It explores how the institutional and intellectual, internal and external boundaries of this interdisciplinary field are shaped. For this purpose, it discusses two interlocking dynamics that are most important: on the one hand, the European Union actively attempts to mobilise European integration studies to contribute to building a united Europe by providing specific spaces, resources, and infrastructures for academic research and the public dissemination of results. On the other (...) hand, the external and internal boundaries of this interdisciplinary field are shaped by the movements and interactions of scholars from different academic backgrounds. Together, the different academic strands and policies coproduce the interdisciplinary field of European integration studies. Suggesting avenues for future research, the conclusion recommends analysing key debates in the context of European integration in terms of boundary objects around which academics, policy-makers, and publics can engage with each other and points to specific sites for further observations of these processes of coproduction. (shrink)

In Search of Immortality: The Political Economy of Anti-aging Medicine Content Type Journal Article Category Original Paper Pages 267-279 DOI 10.1007/s12376-009-0020-x Authors Alan Petersen, Monash University Sociology Program, School of Political and Social Inquiry Clayton VIC 3800 Australia Kate Seear, Monash University Sociology Program, School of Political and Social Inquiry Clayton VIC 3800 Australia Journal Medicine Studies Online ISSN 1876-4541 Print ISSN 1876-4533 Journal Volume Volume 1 Journal Issue Volume 1, Number 3.

This essay is a historical–geographical account of how scientists and public health officials conceptualized and assessed northern radioactive exposures in the late 1950s and 1960s. The detection of radionuclides in caribou bodies in northern Canada both demonstrated the global reach of nuclear fallout and revealed the unevenness of toxic relations and radioactive exposures. Following the documentation of the lichen–caribou–human pathway of exposure, Canadian public health officials became increasingly concerned about the possibility of heightened radioactive exposures among Indigenous northerners. Between 1963 (...) and 1969, scientists and officials with Canada’s Radiation Protection Division coordinated an interdepartmental monitoring program through which they sought to determine whether the consumption of contaminated caribou meat had caused radioactive exposure levels in northern communities to exceed the officially recognized “safe limits.” In 1969, the northern monitoring program was suspended after officials determined that radionuclide body burdens had not exceeded the threshold for radioactive exposures. While the RPD emphasized its development of a technoscientific approach to measuring radioactive body burdens, the legitimacy of the monitoring program was linked directly to interdepartmental relations within Canada’s colonial northern administration. I situate the northern monitoring program within broader shifts in public health approaches to radiation protection and use Gabrielle Hecht’s concept of nuclearity to demonstrate how RPD officials employed the logic of the threshold in their assessment of radioactive exposures. (shrink)

This article examines whether and how a particular research practice is overseen and supervised, and by whom. This investigation fills notable gaps in the literature on science, including a lack of emphasis on larger sociopolitical structures, a neglect of regulation, and indifference toward ethics. The author focuses on the oversight of a particular research practice; data editing; which embodies qualities that are intriguing to sociologists of science: invisibility, uncertainty, heterogeneity, and reliance on tacit knowledge. These characteristics pose unique challenges to (...) oversight efforts. An analysis of in-depth interviews with gatekeepers reveals that although the methodological and ethical implications of data editing strategies can be substantial, oversight of such practices falls outside the stages and domains of current gatekeeping activity. These findings serve as the basis for recommendations to ensure data integrity while maintaining the professional autonomy of researchers. (shrink)

Reputation is often seen as central to the coordination of transactions in sharing economy platforms. Participants perform a double role regarding reputation management: while engaging in exchanges with other peers, they build their individual ‘reputation capital’ and simultaneously execute community oversight. In Couchsurfing (CS), a network often cited as paradigmatic of the sharing economy, there is, however, a clear bias for positive references. In the digital economy literature, participants’ friendly behaviour is understood as motivated by self-interest and an incentive to (...) maintain a positive reputation. Social research on reputation in CS attributes the bias to fear of retaliation, but also hints at norms of reciprocity leading travellers to require positive feedback for hospitality. This article analyses the lived experience of reputation management in CS and argues that participants seek to reconcile direct and general reciprocity. It proposes breaking these practices down into boundary-work and creative avoidance and argues these result in insufficient protection of inexperienced participants against problematic members. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the growing social science scholarship on organic agriculture in the global South. A “boundary” framework is used to understand how negotiation among socially and geographically disparate social worlds (e.g., non-governmental organizations (NGOs), foreign donors, agricultural researchers, and small-scale farmers) has resulted in the diffusion of non-certified organic agriculture in Kenya. National and local NGOs dedicated to organic agriculture promotion, training, research, and outreach are conceptualized as “boundary organizations.” Situated at the intersection of multiple social worlds, these (...) NGOs engage in “strategic bridge building” and “strategic boundary-work.” Strategic bridge building involves the creation and use of “boundary objects” and “hybrid forms” that serve as meeting grounds for otherwise disconnected social worlds. Strategic boundary-work involves efforts to “scientize,” and thereby legitimize, organic agriculture in the eyes of foreign donors, potential research collaborators, the Kenyan state, and farmers. Examples of strategic bridge building and boundary-work are presented in the paper. The Kenyan case illustrates that different social actors can unite around a shared objective – namely, the promotion and legitimization of organic agriculture as an alternative to the Green Revolution (GR) technological package. (shrink)

This article contributes to the development of a rhetorical approach to the public understanding of science or science literacy. It is argued that rhetoric promises an alternative approach to deficit models that treat people as faulty scientists. Some tensions in the relevant rhetorical literature need resolution. These center on the application to science of an Aristotelian conception of rhetorical reasoning as enthymematic, without breaking from the Platonic/aristotelian division between technical and public spheres. The former opens science to the potential of (...) public critique; the latter closes this, effectively reinstating a deficit model. Gross’s writings are used to bring this point out sharply. A resolution is proposed, building on a view of rhetoric as socially constitutive and leading to a conception of public understanding as witcraft. Here, Billig’s rhetorical psychology provides the basis for reconfiguring the enthymeme in a manner that construes the division between spheres as itself rhetorically constituted. Creationism is used to provide brief illustration. (shrink)

The measurement of science and technology is now fifty years old. It owes a large part of its existence to the work of the National Science Foundation and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in the 1950s and 1960s. Given the centrality of S&T statistics in science studies, it is surprising that no history of the measurement exists in the literature. This article outlines such a history. The history is cast in the light of social statistics. Like social statistics, (...) S&T indicators are produced mainly by governments but differ in a number of aspects. First, they have not been developed to control individuals. Second, they have taken shape from the start at the international level. Third, they reflect a consensus among states and their organizations. This article shows that this specificity is due to the sociopolitics that drives S&T measurement. (shrink)

The theory of boundary organizations was developed to address an important group of institutions in American society neglected by scholarship in science studies and political science. The long-term stability of scientific and political institutions in the United States has enabled a new class of institutions to grow and thrive as mediators between the two. As originally developed, this structural feature of these new institutions—that is, their location on the boundary between science and politics—dominated theoretical frame-works for explaining their behavior. Applying (...) the theory of boundary organizations to international society requires a refocusing of some of the theory’s central features, however. In this article, I introduce a new framework—hybrid management—to explain the activities of boundary organizations in the more complex, contingent, and contested settings of global politics. I develop the framework of hybrid management using the specific example of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice. (shrink)

Many efforts to establish concepts and theories of the middle range have sought to find an appropriate balance between theoretical abstraction and the desire to remain faithful to the empirical complexity of phenomenon. As with other forms of expertise, those analyzing socio-technical life face acute tensions in attempting to reconcile the general and the specific in a manner which is regarded as credible. Through a consideration of the self-referential implications of STS critiques of traditional notions of science as well as (...) attempts to establish rules for the acceptability of coercive force, this article develops a sense of what is at stake in attempts by actors and analysts to grasp the general and the specific together. Instead of seeking to identify a point of resolution for the two, it advocates and exemplifies the need to attend to the dilemmas associated with the movement between the general and the specific. The middle range concept of “disposal strategies” is offered both as an aid to the study of socio-technical life and as an example of attending to the movement between the general and specific. (shrink)

This article analyses the discursive practices of scientists engaged in controversial science in their narrated accounts of encounters with activists. It explores what happens when scientific credibility and authority are challenged in a public debate on the benefits and risks of such science. The aim is to understand how scientists discursively negotiate and make sense of their encounters with activists, the range of subject positions they claim, and how power is implicated in identification with the public. The article shows how (...) scientists counter emotional appeals, utilizing both scientific and public identities respectively to legitimate the epistemic and moral authority of science and to marginalize opposing activists. It is argued that a unitary view of scientific identity is inadequate. Rather, in times of public challenge and controversy, scientists may utilize a multiplicity of subject positions to achieve identification with public interests. The discursive construct, public interest, is interpreted as a contested discursive space and a discursive resource for influencing public opinion. (shrink)

Dominant forms of contemporary big-data based digital citizen science do not question the institutional divide between qualified experts and lay-persons. In our paper, we turn to the historical case of a large-scale amateur project on biogeographical birdwatching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to show that networked amateur research can operate in a more autonomous mode. This mode depends on certain cultural values, the constitution of specific knowledge objects, and the design of self-governed infrastructures. We conclude by arguing (...) that the contemporary quest for autonomous citizen science is part of a broader discourse on the autonomy of scientific research in general. Just as the actors in our historical case positioned themselves against the elitism of gentlemen scientists, avant-garde groups of the twenty first century like biohackers and civic tech enthusiasts position themselves against the system of professional science—while “digital citizen science” remains to oscillate between claims for autonomy and realities of heteronomy, constantly reaffirming the classic lay-expert divide. (shrink)

“Ancient DNA Research” is the practice of extracting, sequencing, and analyzing degraded DNA from dead organisms that are hundreds to thousands of years old. Today, many researchers are interested in adapting state-of-the-art molecular biological techniques and high-throughput sequencing technologies to optimize the recovery of DNA from fossils, then use it for studying evolutionary history. However, the recovery of DNA from fossils has also fueled the idea of resurrecting extinct species, especially as its emergence corresponded with the book and movie Jurassic (...) Park in the 1990s. In this paper, I use historical material, interviews with scientists, and philosophical literature to argue that the search for DNA from fossils can be characterized as a data-driven and celebrity-driven practice. Philosophers have recently argued the need to seriously consider the role of data-driven inquiry in the sciences, and likewise, this history highlights the need to seriously consider the role of celebrity in shaping the kind of research that gets pursued, funded, and ultimately completed. On this point, this history highlights that the traditional philosophical and scientific distinctions between data-driven and hypothesis-driven research are not always useful for understanding the process and practice of science. Consequently, I argue that the celebrity status of a particular research practice can be considered as a “serious epistemic strategy” that researchers, as well as editors and funders, employ when making choices about their research and publication processes. This interplay between celebrity and methodology matters for the epistemology of science. (shrink)

This article presents a case study of a recent controversy over the use of computed tomography as a diagnostic technology in South Korean hospitals. The controversy occurred in the wake of a series of conflicts in the late twentieth century over the legitimate placement of healing practices, medicinal substances, and medical technologies within Korea’s separate “Western Medicine” and “Korean Medicine” systems of health care and pharmaceutical distribution. The controversy concerned an attempt to use hi-tech imaging technology—the epitome of modern medicine—in (...) a clinic that maintains a strong ideological attachment to Korean healing traditions. A close study of this dispute, based on interviews, participant observation, and documentary analysis, showed that discursive positions taken about the translatability of medical technologies changed with the context of dispute, and did not reflect a stable epistemic boundary between rival medical paradigms. (shrink)

Drawing on interviews and observational work with practicing U.K. plant scientists, this article uses Michel Callon's work as a tool to explore the issue of collaboration between academic science and business, in particular, calls by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council for a return to “public good” plant science. In an article titled “Is Science a Public Good?” Callon contributed to the debate about the commercialization of science by suggesting that commercialization and the public good need not be incompatible. (...) Moving away from arguments that center on the effects of business involvement in science, he suggested that analysts use another model, centered on “diversity.” This model allows us to ask what society might want from science, what public good science might look like, and how public good science can be ensured while also recognizing that science cannot be easily separated from the market. (shrink)

The sociology of science seeks to theorize the social conditioning of science. This theorizing seems to undermine the validity of scientific knowledge and lead to relativism. Bourdieu and Latour both attempt to develop a sociology of science that overcomes relativism but stipulate opposite conditions for the production of scientific truths: while Bourdieu emphasizes autonomy, Latour emphasizes associations. This is because they work with oppositional epistemological and ontological assumptions. In both theories, the notion of truth lacks an independent definition; it is (...) derived from the theorist’s position on rationalism and defined with reference to how it is produced. This interdependence creates a different problem in each case. Bourdieu’s assertion that truths produced in relatively autonomous scientific fields are “trans-historical” remains an epistemological assertion. Latour’s argument that truths are produced through associations fails to capture the different resources, distinctions and boundarie.. (shrink)

Over the past decade, stem cell science has generated considerable public and political debate. These debates tend to focus on issues concerning the protection of nascent human life and the need to generate medical and therapeutic treatments for the sick and vulnerable. The framing of the public debate around these issues not only dichotomises and oversimplifies the issues at stake, but tends to marginalise certain types of voices, such as the women who donate their eggs and/or embryos to stem cell (...) research and the patients who might benefit from its potential clinical outcomes. This paper draws on empirical research conducted on a recent stem cell policy episode in Australia. From the qualitative examination of 109 newspaper opinion editorials and twenty-three in-depth interviews, it is argued that these voices are marginalised because they are based on discourses that have less epistemological status in public debate. Our results suggest that the personal experiences of women and patients are marginalised by the alliances that form between more powerful discourse communities that use science as a source of authority and legitimation. It is argued that members of these communities establish legitimacy and assert authority in public debate by discursively deploying science in claims that marginalise other epistemologies. Implications are discussed along with suggestions for a more enriched and inclusive public debate. (shrink)

The growing role of universities in the knowledge economy as well as technology transfer has increasingly been conceptualized in terms of the hybridization of public academic work and private business activity. In this article, we examine the difficulties and prospects of this kind of intermingling by studying the long-term trajectories of two research groups operating in the fields of plant biotechnology and language technology. In both cases, the attempts to simultaneously pursue academic and commercial activities led to complicated boundary maintenance, (...) which arose from the conflicting procedures and requirements of the two activities as well as from the double roles assumed by the actors involved. We, thus, argue that the construction of boundaries is not as contingent and strategic as has often been assumed but is built, instead, on the characteristic goals and tasks of the activities in question. Moreover, we suggest that the discussion on university—industry relationships and the entrepreneurial university has by and large neglected the fact that most universities are either public sector entities or tax-exempt organizations thereby being subject to strict rules and regulations that govern the ways in which they may become engaged in commercial activities. Furthermore, several other enduring cultural features, such as the university’s commitment to open scholarly communication, make the boundary between university and commerce relatively stable. As a consequence, the results of this study lend support to the thesis according to which boundaries in science are not always created at will but reflect the long history and multifaceted societal relevance of this particular institution. This in turn implies that the commodification of university research is bound to be more difficult than what the proponents of the entrepreneurial university seem to assume. (shrink)

Many research-intensive universities have moved into the business of promoting technology development that promises revenue, impact, and legitimacy. While the scholarship on academic capitalism has documented the general dynamics of this institutional shift, we know less about the ground-level challenges of research priority and scientific problem choice. This paper unites the practice tradition in science and technology studies with an organizational analysis of decision-making to compare how two university artificial intelligence labs manage ambiguities at the edge of scientific knowledge. One (...) lab focuses on garnering funding through commercialization schemes, while the other is oriented to federal science agencies. The ethnographic comparison identifies the mechanisms through which an industry-oriented lab can be highly adventurous yet produce a research program that is thin and erratic due to a priority placed on commercialization. However, the comparison does not yield an implicit nostalgia for federalized science; it reveals the mechanisms through which agency-oriented labs can pursue a thick and consistent research portfolio but in a strikingly myopic fashion. (shrink)

If any nature of science perspective is to be incorporated in science-related curricula, it is hard to imagine a satisfactory didactic toolkit that neglects the social studies of science, the academic field of study of the institutional structures and networks of science. Knowledge production takes place in a world populated by actors, instruments, and ideas, and various epistemic cultures are responsible for providing the concepts, abstractions, and techniques that slowly trickle down the information pathways to become stabilized in university curricula (...) or ossified in high-school science, losing much of the tacit knowledge along the way that enabled the production of knowledge in the first place. The discussion of the sociology of science and the sociology of scientific knowledge is followed by a short overview of recent approaches in science studies and the studies of expertise. (shrink)

In recent years, in the UK and elsewhere, scientists and science policymakers have grappled with the question of how to reap the benefits of nanotechnologies while minimising the risks. Having recognised the importance of public support for future innovations, they have placed increasing emphasis on ‘engaging’ ‘the public’ during the early phase of technology development. Meaningful engagement suggests some common ground between experts and lay publics in relation to the definition of nanotechnologies and of their benefits and risks. However, views (...) on nanotechnologies are likely to vary according to where actors stand in the technology production/consumption/assessment cycle. Drawing on data from a recent UK-based study, this article examines how scientists (‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’) and policymakers portray the benefits and risks of nanotechnologies, particularly as they relate to two major areas of predicted application, namely medicine/public health and environmental sustainability. The findings reveal that, in the main, scientists and science policymakers held a positive conception of nanotechnologies and see imminent applications, although they acknowledged particular risks, including adverse public reaction. While definitions of ‘benefit’ and ‘risk’ varied, most saw the benefits as outweighing the risks and believed that the risks could be adequately regulated once they were assessed. The difficulties of assessing risk, however, were acknowledged. The study raises a number of questions that will need to be addressed if regulations are to be developed that not only protect people’s heath and wellbeing and the environment but also engender public trust in nanotechnologies. (shrink)

The Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences (FWS) graduate program at Virginia Tech held a student-led, discussion-based, 9-week seminar in the philosophy of science during the fall 1999 semester. This seminar presented the sociologist of science with the opportunity to investigate questions such as, How does a contemporary scientific discipline use the philosophy of science? What do scientists hope to gain from an understanding of demarcation issues? And how do they perceive themselves as a science? Issues of demarcation between science (...) and pseudo-science are prevalent in FWS. The role of public funding is at the forefront of the department’s concerns, as governmental agencies are responsible, to a dominant degree, for funding research that the public assumes will benefit them. Thus, the concerns of the department are of utility, or the perception thereof. An investigation of the sort proposed here is practical yet restrictive. The topics are preselected and noncomprehensive because the seminar organizers in FWS chose select readings pertinent to their discipline. Discussions revolved around such topics as the definition of science, methodology, credibility, specialization within FWS, the value (or lack thereof) of theory in FWS, the manager-scientist distinction, and the use of models. The intent of this article is to provide a brief ethnographic view of the seminar. It will review some of the seminar topics and relate them to the broader issue of scientific self-definition and the concept of science as a social mechanism. It is not an evaluative article about FWS but a descriptive article about how a scientific discipline regards itself. (shrink)

This article traces the historical development of the boundaries around computer software and hardware. On one hand, the author documents ongoing discussions about the technical equivalence of hardware and software. On the other hand, he accounts for the stubborn persistence of these terms as markers for two distinct spheres of technology, knowledge, and practice. By using theoretical concepts such as “boundary work” and “coproduction,” the author argues that ongoing efforts to negotiate the boundaries between hardware and software are significantly “sociotechnical” (...) in that they involve both social and technical considerations. The analysis culminates with a discussion of the more recent rise of the “hardware/software codesign” movement. Particular emphasis is placed on the conditions that led to the emergence of codesign and the ongoing challenges faced by its proponents. The article concludes by describing how codesign points toward a more reflexive and socially responsible culture of computer design and use. (shrink)

This article examines the main approaches to public understanding of science in light of recent developments in social and cultural theory. While traditional and critical perspectives on PUS differ in terms of their models of the public, science, and understanding, they nevertheless share a number of commonalities, which are humanism, incorporeality, and discrete sites. These are contrasted, respectively, to versions of the person as hybridic, to treatments of embodiment drawing especially on Whitehead’s notion of prehension, and to a rhizomic view (...) of science and public as interwoven. Throughout, it is stressed that the alternatives posed do not constitute an accusation of deficit on the part of traditional and critical PUS. Some research and political implications of interweaving these three perspectives are presented. (shrink)

The paper provides a deeper insight into institutionally given opportunities for and limitations to reflexive, dialogue-centered, and risk-sensitive knowledge exchange between scientific experts and agro-political decision makers, especially under the conditions of a significant degree of complexity, far-reaching uncertainties and potential impacts. It focuses on the practical orientations, guiding expectations and selection criteria shaping expertise in processes of science policy consulting. In doing so, two perspectives will be discussed: first the orientation of the knowledge production process by different concepts of (...) ‘‘usable knowledge.’’ Second, the influence of specific constellations on different stages of the political process, which shape the institutional conditions for the transfer and the use of scientific knowledge within the policy consulting process. Both perspectives help to come to a closer understanding of the demanding and very heterogeneous process of science policy consulting, which - if successful - leads to the interactive production of a very special form of ‘‘orientational knowledge.’’. (shrink)

This article examines how the authorization of scientific discourses in the US Endangered Species Act of 1973 has influenced the ways people make claims about culturally significant animals. In it, I focus on struggles over the management of two endangered fish species among a federally recognized Native American tribe, state resource managers, and other actors. I discuss how the requirements of the ESA, namely that decisions regarding the protection of endangered species must be made based “solely on the basis of (...) the best scientific…data available,” have pushed people to reframe their cultural claims about the environment as scientific claims in order to gain legal authority. I argue that these animals span the social worlds of indigenous hunters and fishers, regulators, and ecological scientists. As such, they offer the opportunity to interrogate the relationships among ways of knowing the environment. I suggest that strict divisions among “types” of knowledge as well as hard-and-fast bonds between groups and “their” knowledge become problematic. Instead, people assemble eclectic articulations of knowledge to make the most authoritative claim possible in a given context, contradicting the assumption that certain people know the world only, or primarily, in a particular way. (shrink)

Science and technology studies is famous for questioning conceptual and material boundaries by following controversies that cut across them. However, it has recently been argued that in research involving online platforms, there are also more practical boundaries to negotiate that are created by the variable availability, visibility, and structuring of data. In this paper, I highlight a potential tension between our inclination toward following controversies and “following the medium” and suggest that sometimes following controversies might involve going “against platforms” as (...) well as with them. I will illustrate this dilemma through an analysis of the controversy over the coverage of the Fukushima disaster on English language Wikipedia, which concerns boundaries between expert and lay knowledge but also the social and technical functioning of Wikipedia itself. For this reason, I show that following the controversy might mean making use of less formatted and less obvious data than Wikipedia normally provides. While this is not an argument against the use of automated digital research tools such as scrapers, I suggest that both quantitative and qualitative researchers need to be more willing to tweak their approaches based on the specificities of the case. (shrink)

The article focuses on the analysis of curriculum documents from Taiwan to investigate how benchmarks for learning nature of science are positioned in different versions of the science curricula. Following a review of different approaches to the conceptualization of NOS and the role of NOS in promoting scientific literacy, an empirical study is reported to illustrate how the science curriculum documents represent different aspects of NOS. The article uses the family resemblance approach as the account of NOS and adapts it (...) for analysis of the curriculum documents. The FRA defines NOS as cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional systems that serve as constructs of knowledge categories with a high level of interconnectedness. The FRA was used as an analytical tool for investigating two sets of Taiwanese curriculum guidelines published 10 years apart, providing an opportunity to discuss how NOS is addressed in the curriculum reforms. The findings show a shift away from the excessive centralization of the cognitive-epistemic system to a consideration of the social-institutional system. Modifications to the benchmarks are proposed in order to achieve a more holistic and progressive approach to NOS. The article contributes to studies on NOS in science education by illustrating how the FRA can act as a tool for exploring interconnectedness of NOS ideas in the curriculum. (shrink)

Research institutions and universities are positioned in a state of inherent struggle to reconcile the pressures and demands of the external environment with those of the scientific community. This paper is focused on one contested area, the division between basic and applied research, and explores how universities work to balance organizational legitimacy and scientific reputation. Building on an in-depth case study of the Weizmann Institute of Science, established as an institute of basic research in the context of the new Israeli (...) state, I explore how managers and scientists at the Institute engaged in organizational experimentation to demarcate basic and applied research during the 1950s–1970s. In analyzing the case of the Weizmann Institute, the paper draws on the concept of boundary-work and explores organizational strategies of boundary-work focused on the demarcation of activities and units and creation of new organizational forms. (shrink)

ArgumentIn the late 1960s, in the midst of campus unrest, a group of young economists calling themselves “radicals” challenged the boundaries of economics. In the radicals' cultural cartography, economic science and politics were represented as overlapping. These claims were scandalous because they were voiced from Harvard University, drawing on its authority. With radicals' claims the subject of increasing media attention, the economics mainstream sought to re-assert the longstanding cultural map of economic science, where objectivity and advocacy were distinguishable. The resolution (...) of the contest of credibility came with a string of cases of dismissals and denial of tenure for radicals. The American Economic Association's investigations of these cases, imposing the conventional cultural map, concluded that personnel decisions had not been politically motivated. Radicals were forced to migrate from the elite institutions from which they had emerged to less prestigious ones. “Place” became a marker of their marginalization within the profession. (shrink)

The existence of conflicting messages on the role and status of the university is linked to a wider paradox of values about science in society. Value is attributed to science and assumed by the university in the context of the move to knowledge-based economies and societies, yet this has not been accompanied by a systematic and balanced debate about the values that should underpin socio-economic change. Questions are then raised about both the effectiveness of public policy and the role of (...) universities in society. A reconnection between the application and production of knowledge is needed, as well as the reinsertion of a normative framework for guiding and shaping change within universities. Only under such conditions can a meaningful debate on the roles of universities as places of expectation and spaces for reflection be realized. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 Normal 0 21 This paper presents a discourse analysis of 30 popular science books and 40 semi-structured interviews with scientists on their views of Occam's razor and simplicity. It finds that there are many different interpretations and thoughts about the precise meaning of the principle as well as many scientists who reject it outright, or only a very limited version. In light of the variation of scientists' opinions, the paper asks what use it has as a rhetorical (...) device and how scientists' interpretation of Occam's razor impacts on the study of popular science and affects the communication between philosophy and science. (shrink)

Following the successful cloning of genes for mostly rare genetic diseases in the early 1990s, there was a nearly universal enthusiasm that similar approaches could be employed to hunt down genes predisposing people to complex diseases. Around 1996, several well-funded international gene-hunting teams, enticed by the low cost of collecting biological samples and China’s enormous population, and ushered in by some well-connected Chinese intermediaries, came to China to hunt down disease susceptibility genes. This alarmed and, in some cases, enraged many (...) poorly funded Chinese scientists, who perceived them as formidable competitors. Some depicted foreign gene-hunters as greedy pilferers of the vast Chinese genetic gold mine, comparing it to the plundering of national treasures from China by invaders in the past, and called upon the government and their fellow countrymen to rise up and protect China’s genetic gold mine. Media uproar ensued, proclaiming the imminent “gene war of the century.” This article chronicles the key events surrounding this “war” and its aftermath, exposes some inherent complexities in identifying susceptibility genes for complex diseases, highlights some issues obscured or completely overlooked in the passionate and patriotic rhetoric, and debunks some misconceptions embedded in this conflict. In addition, it argues that during the entire course of this “war,” the public’s interest went conspicuously unmentioned. Finally, it articulates several lessons that can be learned from this conflict, and outlines challenges facing human genetics researchers. (shrink)

We argue that for scientists and science communicators to build usable knowledge for various publics, they require social and political capital, skills in boundary work, and ethical acuity. Drawing on the context of communicating seasonal climate predictions to farmers in Australia, we detail four key issues that scientists and science communicators would do well to reflect upon in order to become effective and ethical intermediaries. These issues relate to the boundary work used to link science and values and thereby construct (...) public identities, emplacement, that is, the importance of situating knowledge in relation to the places with which people identify, personal and organizational processes of reflexivity, and the challenges of developing and maintaining the social and political capital necessary to simultaneously represent people’s identities and lifeworlds and the climate systems that affect them. Through a discourse analysis of in-depth interviews with Australian agro-climatologists, we suggest that three distinct “modes of extension” are apparent, namely, discursive, conceptual, and contextual. Our participants used these three modes interdependently to create knowledge that has salience, credibility, and legitimacy. They thereby generated new narratives of place, practice, and identity for Australian agriculture. (shrink)

This article explores some of the most significant questions in feminist epistemology: how do academics demarcate what constitutes ‘proper’ academic knowledge? And to what extent is feminist theory and research recognised as such? I draw on material from an ethnographic study of academia in Portugal to examine the claims that non-feminist scholars make in classrooms and conferences about the epistemic status of feminist scholarship. I observed that feminist work was very commonly described as capable of generating credible and valuable knowledge, (...) but only in some instances and in limited ways. I present examples of these adversative claims (i.e. propositions that express opposition or discrepancy through a ‘but’ or equivalent adversative conjunction) and analyse their structure, content and uses of caricature and humour, showing how epistemic boundaries are drawn in them and how feminist scholarship is positioned in relation to those boundaries. I argue that this boundary-work produces a representation of feminist scholarship as being located partly within, and partly outside, the realm of proper knowledge, a move which I designate as an epistemic splitting of that scholarship. I suggest that this splitting enables and legitimates a selective engagement with feminist work, because it provides non-feminist scholars with a recognised epistemological rationale for taking into account the feminist insights which broadly fit mainstream frameworks, while simultaneously rejecting as epistemologically unsound the feminist critiques of those frameworks. (shrink)

Ideologies having roots in the legal structure of the system of wildlife protection characterize the work culture of the Pennsylvania wilderness officer. This paper examines these ideologies and the characteristically strong social solidarity of the community of wilderness officers. Wilderness officers are both law enforcement agents and conservationists. They mediate between human and animal as well as between what is considered scientific management and what is considered unenlightened and even lawless behavior. In performing this boundary work, wilderness officers participate in (...) the social construction of the science of land management, which views animals as renewable resources. The wilderness officer's job is to insure the continuation of this resource as a part of the natural heritage of Pennsylvania and the United States. The wilderness officer's concept of "animal" becomes a byproduct of this social construction and of the culture of hunting that supports it. The rural upbringing common to many officers suits them ideally to their task. (shrink)

“Basic research” is often used in science policy. It is commonly thought to refer to research that is directed solely toward acquiring new knowledge rather than any more practical objective. Recently, there has been considerable concern about the future of basic research because of purported changes in the nature of knowledge production and increasing pressures on scientists to demonstrate the social and economic benefits of their work. But is there really something special about basic research? The author argues here that (...) “basic research” is a flexible and ambiguous concept that is drawn on by scientists to acquire prestige and resources. She shows that it is used for boundary work and gives examples of the work it does in different situations by drawing on interviews with scientists and policy makers on the category of basic research and the changes they have seen in it over time. (shrink)

As a worldwide social movement, skepticism aims to promote science and critical thinking. However, by analyzing texts published in the magazine of the Finnish skepticism movement between 1988 and 2017, we find that the movement carries out its mission in a way that maintains and produces gendered hierarchies. We identify six forms of gendered boundary-work in the data: science as masculine, questioning women, complementary and alternative medicine as feminine, debating the status of gender studies, gender within the skepticism movement, and (...) supporting equality. Gender is an important aspect of the boundary-work undertaken by the movement to establish boundaries between science and nonscience. The forms of gendered boundary-work contribute to the idea of “true” science as a masculine and male-dominated domain, excluding women from both science and the skepticism movement. Even when the exclusions are subtle, hidden, or humorous, they nevertheless produce gendered inequalities by excluding women, belittling women’s knowledge production, or granting women-only dismissive recognition. Indeed, our analysis indicates that there is a need to look deeply into science-based social movements: exclusive structural tactics are part and parcel of such movements’ mundane activities, as our examples from Skepsis ry’s popular magazine demonstrate. (shrink)

Growing expectation that research addresses problems in the context of application has spurred theorization about a ‘‘new mode’’ of production, Mode 2, which contrasts with Mode 1 or discipline-based research production in terms of animating questions, organization, and evaluation criteria. This article examines how the proposed Mode 2 form of research production and the practical role of the intellectual that it promotes align with the career trajectories and identities of academics who simultaneously engage in Mode 1 work. It focuses on (...) a setting that is particularly susceptible to global shifts in knowledge production: a developing country and longtime object of external intervention, Malawi. Numerous contradictions are found between Mode 1 and 2 production as well as impediments to the conversion of products generated in Mode 2 into scholarly contributions to Mode 1 development. The evidence draws from 42 interviews conducted with academics and independent researchers in Malawi during 2003 and 2004 as well as historical documents. (shrink)

The paper examines the introduction of the so-called professor’s privilege in Sweden in the 1940s and shows how this legal principle for university patents emerged out of reforms of techno-science and the patent law around World War II. These political processes prompted questions concerning the nature and functions of university research: How is academic science different than other forms of knowledge production? What are the contributions of universities for economy and welfare? Who is the rightful owner of scientific findings? Is (...) academic science “work”? By following the introduction of the professor’s privilege, the paper shows how spokespersons for the academic profession addressed such questions and contributed to a new definition of university science through boundary-setting, normative descriptions, and by producing symbolic relationships between science and the economy. The totality of those positions is here referred to as a “nomos” – that is: a generic and durable set of seemingly axiomatic claims about universities. This Swedish nomos, as it took shape in the 1940s, amalgamated classical notions of academic science as exceptional and autonomous with emerging ideas of inventiveness and close connections between academics and business. Crucially, though, the academic-industrial relations embedded in this nomos were private and individual, thus in sharp conflict with the ideas of entrepreneurial universities evolving globally by the end of the 20th century. (shrink)

This article argues that modern finance should be an important object of attention. Particularly worthy of study are three demarcations: the changing disciplinary boundary of economics, the distinction between private and public knowledge, and the legal and cultural demarcation between legitimate trading and gambling. The balance between what Barnes calls N-type and S-type terms in finance is different from, for example, that in physics, but that is no criticism of finance theory: the activities of those who disbelieve finance theory’s efficient (...) market hypothesis probably make the hypothesis more true. The case of Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing theory is drawn on to argue that the loops of self-reference intrinsic to S-terms seem predominantly performative: they increase the truth of finance theory’s typical assumptions. S-loops in the financial markets do not always promote stability, however, as is shown here by a case study of the fate of the hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management. (shrink)

For decades, debates over medical curriculum reform have centred on the role of science in medical education, but the meaning of ‘science’ in this domain is vague and the persistence of the debate has not been explained. Following Bourdieu, this paper examines struggles over legitimate knowledge and the forms of capital associated with science in contemporary UK medical education. Data are presented from a study of two UK medical schools, one with a traditional, science-oriented curriculum, another with an integrated curriculum. (...) Constructions of legitimate knowledge were explored at both schools through six months participant observation, interviews with faculty members (n=15) and students (n=37) and documentary analysis. Findings show that medical schools compete for both scientific and clinical capital, but ultimately science has greater legitimacy. ‘Science’ is defined in accordance with the structure of the traditional curriculum and has become a symbolic resource – a mark of distinction for both medical schools and medical students – which is equated with clinical competence. The significance of science is circumscribed by the medical education field, yet the struggles for scientific capital there have ramifications beyond medical education itself. It is argued that Bourdieu’s concepts are particularly useful tools for studying the meanings that science takes on outside of the scientific field. (shrink)

About a decade ago, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency unwittingly embarked on a transition from a technocratic model of science advising to the paradigm of ‘‘post-normal science’’. In response to a scandal around uncertainty management in 1999, a Guidance for ‘‘Uncertainty Assessment and Communication’’ was developed with advice from the initiators of the PNS concept and was introduced in 2003. This was followed in 2007 by a ‘‘Stakeholder Participation’’ Guidance. In this article, the authors provide a combined insider/outsider perspective on (...) the transition process. The authors assess the extent to which the PNS paradigm has delivered new approaches in the agency’s practice and analyze two projects—on long-term options for Dutch sustainable development policy and for urban development policy—the latter in somewhat more detail. The authors identify several paradoxes PBL encounters when putting the PNS concept into practice. It is concluded that an openness to other styles of work than the technocratic model has become visible, but that the introduction of the PNS paradigm is still in its early stage. (shrink)

A new approach in science policy making named the innovation system approach has been developed during the past three decades. Its primary goal is to better understand the processes through which scientific knowledge is produced and transferred to businesses to improve their competitiveness and develop national and/or regional economies. This approach has been adopted as an analytical framework and guideline for science policy making by numerous public sector organizations around the world. Using a case study of the Canadian and Québec (...) public sectors, our research seeks to understand why the IS approach has gained the adherence of government employees and how it has been disseminated from international organizations down to regional civil servants. Findings show that adherence to the IS approach stems from the prestige of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and its associated epistemic community, and from the cultural authority science exerts on government employees; these two factors bestow cultural authority onto the IS approach. The perceived scientific validity of the IS approach also leads government employees to consider its underlying economistic worldview as an unquestionable reality. (shrink)