Topic:  Sociology of Science

To make science the object of sociological analysis directs
attention to the production and consumption of scientific knowledge
in diverse cultural contexts, institutional structures, local
organizations and immediate settings.  The sociology of science
divides into three broad lines of inquiry, each distinguished by a
particular mix of theories and methods.  The earliest systematic
studies (mostly from the 1950s to the early 1970s) focus on the
structural contexts of scientists’ behavior: what rules govern the
pursuit of scientific knowledge, how are scientists judged and
rewarded, how is scientific research broken up into dense networks
of specialists?  In the 1980s, sociologists shift their attention to
the practices through which scientific knowledge is constructed--at
the laboratory bench or in the rhetoric of professional papers.
Starting in the 1990s, science is put in more encompassing societal
contexts, as sociologists examine scientists as purveyors of
cognitive authority, and explore their linkages to power, politics
and the economy.

1.  Precursors

It is remarkable how much the literature in sociology of science is
bunched into the last third of the twentieth century.  Perhaps only
after the deployment of nuclear weapons, or only after genetic
engineering raised eugenic nightmares, could sociologists begin to
think about science as a social problem rather than as a consistent
solution.  Or maybe earlier generations of sociologists were guided
by epistemological assumptions that rendered true scientific
knowledge immune from social causes--thus putting it outside the
orbit of sociological explanation.

1.1  Classical Anticipations

“Science” is nowhere indexed in Max Weber’s encyclopedic Economy and
Society, a measure of his unwillingness or inability to see it as a
consequential factor in human behavior or social change.  Weber’s
interest in science was largely methodological and political.  Could
the causal models employed so effectively in the natural sciences be
used as well to study social action?  Does the objectivity and
neutrality of the social scientist preclude involvement in political
activity?

Emile Durkheim also sought to institutionalize sociology by making
its methods appear scientifically precise, but at the same time
considered scientific knowledge as an object of sociological study.
Durkheim suggested that basic categories of thought and logic (such
as time and space) are social in origin, in that they correspond to
fundamental social categories (such as the division of a society by
family or gender).  However, as human societies grew in size and as
their institutions became functionally differentiated, a
distinctively scientific pursuit of knowledge was gradually
insulated from such social causes.   The observable facts of modern
science, Durkheim concluded, were in accord with the reality of the
physical world--a position that forestalled examinations of how
observable facts are also shaped by the culture and communities in
which they arise.

Karl Marx’s materialism would seem to commit him to the idea that
all beliefs arise amid historically-specific conditions of
production, as they are shaped by the goals and interests of a
ruling class.  The rise of science in seventeenth century Europe is
intimately bound with the rise of industrial capitalism and, for
Marx, can be explained in terms of the utilities of science-based
technologies for improving productivity and enlarging surplus
value.  But although the rate of scientific growth may be explained
by its congruence with the interests of the bourgeoisie, Marx seems
to suggest that the content of scientific claims inside
professionalized research networks is non-ideological- that is, an
objective account of natural reality.

1.2  Science in the Sociology of Knowledge

Even more surprising is the failure of systematic sociological
studies of science to emerge from a blossoming sociology of
knowledge in the 1920s and 1930s.  Neither Max Scheler nor Karl
Mannheim, authors of foundational treatises on the social
determinants of knowledge, inspired sustained inquiry into the
social determinants of science--probably because both distinguished
scientific knowledge from other kinds in a way that truncated what
sociology could say about it.  Scheler isolated the content of
scientific knowledge--and the criteria for ascertaining validity--by
describing these as absolute and timeless essences, not shaped by
social interests.  The effects of social structure (specifically,
the power of ruling elites) is limited to selections of problems and
beliefs from that self-contained and essential realm of ideas.

Mannheim sustained the neo-Kantian distinction between formal
knowledge of the exact sciences and socio-historical knowledge of
culture.  Phenomena of the natural world are invariant, Mannheim
suggests, and so therefore are criteria for deciding truth (i.e.,
impartial observations based on accurate measurements).  In
contrast, cultural phenomena become meaningful only as they are
constructed through interest-laden judgments of significance, which
are neither impartial nor invariant, and thus they are amenable to
sociological explanation.

Robert K. Merton’s 1938 classic Science, Technology and Society in
Seventeenth Century England tackles a fundamental problem:  why did
modern science emerge with a flourish in seventeenth-century
England?  His answer has become known as the “Merton Thesis:”  an
ethos of Puritanism provided both the motivating force and
legitimating authority for the pursuit of scientific inquiry.
Certain religious values--e.g., God is glorified by an appreciation
of his handiwork in Nature, or Blessed Reason separates human from
beast--created a cultural context fertile for the rise of science.
Merton also explains shifts in the foci of research attention among
the early modern “natural philosophers” by connecting empirical
inquiry to the search for technological solutions to practical
problems in mining, navigation and ballistics.

2.  Social Organization of the Scientific Community

When concerted sociological studies of science began in the late
1950s and 1960s, research centered on the institutions or social
structures of science--with relatively less attention given to the
routine practices involved in making knowledge or to the wider
settings in which science was conducted.  This work was largely
inspired by theories of structural-functional analysis, which ask
how the community of scientists is organized in order to satisfy
modern society’s need for certified, reliable knowledge.  One
distinctive feature of this first phase is a reliance on
quantitative methods of analysis.  With statistical data drawn from
surveys of scientists and from the Science Citation Index (and other
bibliometric sources), sociologists developed causal models to
explain individual variations in research productivity and used
topographical techniques such as multidimensional scaling to map the
dense networks of scientists working at a research front.

2.1  Norms of Science

The shift from analyzing science in society to analyzing its
internal social organization was effected in Merton’s 1942 paper on
the normative structure of science.  Written under the shadow of
Nazism, Merton argues that the success of scientists in extending
certified knowledge depends, at once, on a salutary political
context (namely democracy, which allows science a measure of
autonomy from political intrusions and whose values are said to be
congruent with those of science--quite unlike fascism) and on an
internal institutionalized ethos of values held to be binding upon
the behavior of scientists.  This ethos comprised the famous norms
of science:  scientists should evaluate claims impersonally
(universalism), share all findings (communism), never sacrifice
truth for personal gain (disinterestedness) and always question
authority (organized skepticism).  Behavior consonant with these
moral expectations is functional for the growth of reliable
knowledge, and for that reason young scientists learn through
precept how they are expected to behave, conformity is rewarded, and
transgressions are met with outrage.

Subsequent work ignored Merton’s conjectures about science and
democracy, as sociologists instead pursued implications of the four
social norms.  Studies of behavioral departures from these norms--
ethnocentrism, secrecy, fraud, plagiarism, dogmatism- precipitated
debates over whether such deviance is best explained by
idiosyncratic characteristics of a few bad apples or changing
structural circumstances (such as commercialization of research)
that might trigger increases in such behavior.  Sociologists
continue to debate the possibility that Merton’s norms are better
explained as useful ideological justifications of scientists’
autonomy and cognitive authority.  Other research suggests that the
norms guiding scientific conduct vary historically, vary among
disciplines, vary among organizational contexts (university research
vs. military or corporate research), and vary even in their
situational interpretation, negotiation and deployment--raising
questions about whether the norms identified by Merton are
functionally necessary for enlarging scientific knowledge.

2.2  Stratification and Scientific Careers

The norm of universalism in particular has elicited much empirical
research, perhaps because it raises questions of generic
sociological interest:  how is scientific performance judged, and
how are inequalities in the allocation of rewards and resources best
described and explained?  With effective quantitative measures of
individual productivity (number of publications or citations to
one’s work), resources (grant dollars) and rewards (prizes, like the
Nobel), sociologists have examined with considerable precision the
determinants of individual career success or failure.  Competition
among scientists is intense, and the extent of inequality high: the
distribution of resources and rewards in science is highly skewed.
A small proportion of scientists publish most research papers (and
those papers collect most citations), compete successfully for
research grants and prestigious teaching posts, achieve
international visibility and recognition, and win cherished prizes.

Debate centers on whether these observed inequalities in the reward
system of science are compatible with the norm of universalism--
which demands that contributions to knowledge be judged on their
scientific merit, with resources and opportunities meted out in
accordance with those judgments.   The apparent elitism of science
may result from an “accumulation of advantage”:  work by relatively
more eminent or well-positioned scientists is simply noticed more
and thus tends to receive disproportional credit--which (over time)
enlarges the gap between the few very successful scientists and
everybody else.  Such a process may still be universalistic because
it is functional for the institutional goal of science:  giving
greater attention to research of those with accomplished track-
records may be an efficient triage of the overwhelming number of new
candidate theories or findings.  Others suggest that particularism
contributes to the stratification of scientists--old boy networks
that protect turf and career reputations by rewarding sycophants.
The under-representation of women in the higher echelons of science
has called attention to sometimes subtle sexism that occurs early in
the scientific career (restricted access to well-connected mentors
or essential research equipment or opportunities to collaborate, and
assignment to trivial problems or mind-numbing tasks).

2.3  Institutionalization of the Scientific Role

A separate line of sociological inquiry (exemplified in work by
Joseph Ben-David and Edward Shils) seeks an explanation for how
science first became a remunerable occupation--and later, a
profession.  How did the role of the scientist emerge from
historically antecedent patterns of amateurs who explored nature
part-time and generally at their own expense?  The arrival of
the “scientist” as an occupational self identification with
distinctive obligations and prerogatives is inseparable from the
institutionalization of the modern university (itself dependent upon
government patronage).  Universities provided the organizational
form in which the practice of science could become a full-time
career--by fusing research with teaching, by allowing (ironically)
the historic prestige of universities as centers of theology and
scholasticism to valorize the new science, and by providing a
bureaucratic means of paying wages and advancing careers.

The scientific role has also been institutionalized in corporate and
government labs.  The difficulties of transporting a “pure science”
ideal of university-based research into these very different
organizational settings have been the object of considerable
sociological attention.  Scientists in industry or government face a
variety of competing demands:  their research is often directed to
projects linked to potential profits or policy issues rather than
steered by the agenda of their discipline or specialty; the need to
maintain trade secrets or national security hampers the ability of
scientists in these settings to publicize their work and receive
recognition for it.  And, as Jerome Ravetz suggests, the intrusion
of “bureaucratic rationality” into corporate and state science
compromises the craft character of scientific work:  largely
implicit understandings and skills shared by the community of
scientists and vital for the sustained accumulation of scientific
wisdom have little place in accountabilities driven by the bottom-
line or policy relevance.
2.4  Disciplines and Specialties

Sociologists use a variety of empirical indicators to measure the
social and cognitive connections among scientists:  self-reports of
those with whom a scientist exchanges ideas or preprints, subject-
classifications of publications in topical indexes or abstract
journals, lineages of mentor-student relationships or
collaborations, patterns of who cites whom or is cited with whom
(“co-citation”).  The networks formed by such linkages show
occasional dense clusters of small numbers of scientists whose
informal communications are frequent, who typically cite each
others’ very recent papers, and whose research focuses on some new
theory, innovative method or breakthrough problem.  Emergence of
these clusters--for example, the birth of radio astronomy in England
after WWII, as described by David Edge and Michael Mulkay--is a
signal that science has changed, both cognitively and socially:  new
beliefs and practices are ensconced in new centers for training or
research with different leaders and rafts of graduate students.
Over time, these specialties evolve in a patterned way: the number
of scientists in the network becomes much larger and connections
among them more diffuse, the field gets institutionalized with the
creation of its own journals and professional associations,
shattering innovations become less common as scientists work more on
filling in details or adding precision to the now-aging research
framework.  As one specialty matures, another dense cluster of
scientists emerges elsewhere, as the research front or cutting edge
moves on.

3.  Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

A sea-change in sociological studies of science began in the 1970s
with a growing awareness that studies of the institutional and
organizational contexts shaping scientists’ behavior could not
illuminate sufficiently the processes that make science science:
experimental tinkering, sifting of evidence, negotiation of claims,
replacement of old beliefs about nature with new ones, achievement
of consensus over the truth.  All of these processes--observation,
getting instruments and research materials (e.g., mice) to work,
logic, criteria for justifying a finding as worthy of assent,
choices among theories, putting arguments into words or pictures,
persuading other scientists that you are correct--are
uncompromisingly social, cultural and historical phenomena, and so
sociologists set about to explain and interpret the content of
scientific knowledge by studying the routine practices of scientific
work.

This research is guided by constructivist theories (and, less often,
ethnomethodology), which center attention on the practically
accomplished character of social life.  Rather than allow a priori
nature or given social structures to explain behavior or belief,
constructivist sociologists examine how actors incessantly make and
remake the structural conditions in which they work.  Such research
relies methodologically on historical case studies of scientific
debate, up-close ethnographic observations of scientific practices,
and on interpretative analysis of scientific texts.

3.1  Sociology of Discovery

Diverse studies of scientific discovery illustrate the range of
sociological perspectives brought to bear on these consequential
events.  An early line of inquiry focuses on the social and
cognitive contexts that cause the timing and placing of
discoveries:  why did these scientists achieve a breakthrough then
and there?  Historical evidence points to a pattern of simultaneous,
multiple and independent discoveries- that is, it is rare for a
discovery to be made by a scientist (or a local team) who are the
only ones in the world doing research on that specific question.
Because honor and recognition are greatest for solutions to
the “hottest” problems in a discipline, the best scientists are
encouraged by the reward system of science to tackle similar lines
of research.  But these same social structures can also forestall
discovery or engender resistance to novel claims.   Cognitive
commitments to a long-established way of seeing the natural world
(reinforced by reputations and resources dependent upon those
traditional perspectives) can make it difficult for scientists to
see the worthiness of a new paradigm.  Resistance to new ideas seems
to be greatest among older scientists, and in cases where the
proposed discovery comes from scientists with little visibility or
stature within the specialty or discipline that would be transformed.

More recent sociological research considers the very idea
of “discovery” as a practical accomplishment of scientists.  Studies
inspired by ethnomethodology offer detailed descriptions of
scientific work “first-time-through,” taking note of how scientists
at the lab bench decide whether a particular observation (among the
myriad observations) constitutes a discovery.  Other sociologists
locate the “moment” of discovery in downstream interpretative work,
as scientists narrate first-time-through research work with labels
such as "breakthrough."  Such discovery accounts are often sites of
dissension, as scientists dispute the timing or implications of an
alleged discovery amid ongoing judgments of its significance for
subsequent research initiatives or allocations of resources. These
themes--interests, changing beliefs, ordinary scientific work, post-
hoc accountings, dissent, persuasion--have become hallmarks of the
sociology of scientific knowledge.

3.2  Interests and Knowledge-Change

In the mid-1970s to the 1980s, sociology of science took root at the
Science Studies Unit in Edinburgh, as philosopher David Bloor
developed the “strong program,” while Barry Barnes, Steven Shapin,
Donald MacKenzie and Andrew Pickering developed its sociological
analog--the “interest model.”  The goal is to provide causal
explanations for changes in knowledge--say, the shift from one
scientific understanding of nature to a different one.  Scientists
themselves might account for such changes in terms of greater
evidence, coherence, robustness, promise, parsimony, predictive
power or utility of the new framework.  Sociologists, in turn,
account for those judgments in terms of social interests of
scientists that are either extended or compromised by a decision to
shift to the new perspective.  What becomes knowledge is thus
contingent upon the criteria used by a particular community of
inquirers to judge competing understandings of nature, and also upon
the goals and interests that shape their interpretation and
deployment of those criteria.  Several caveats are noted: interests
are not connected to social positions (class, for example, or
nationality, discipline, specialty) in a rigidly deterministic way;
social interests may change along with changes in knowledge; choices
among candidate knowledge-claims are not merely strategic--that is,
calculations of material or symbolic gains are bounded by
considerable uncertainty and by a shared culture of inquiry that
provides standards for logical or evidential adequacy and for the
proper use of an apparatus or concept.

Drawing on historical case studies of theoretical disputes in
science--nineteenth century debates over phrenology and statistical
theory, twentieth century debates among high-energy physicists over
quarks--two different kinds of interests are causally connected to
knowledge-change.  Political or ideological commitments can shape
scientists’ judgments about candidate knowledge claims: the
development of statistical theories of correlation and regression by
Francis Galton, Karl Pearson and R. A. Fisher depended vitally on
the utility of such measures for eugenic objectives.  Different
social interests arise from the accumulated expertise in working
with certain instruments or procedures, which incline scientists to
prefer theories or models that allow them to capitalize on those
skills.

3.3  Laboratory Practices and Scientific Discourse

As sociologists moved ever closer to the actual processes of “doing
science,” their research divided into two lines of inquiry:  some
went directly to the laboratory bench seeking ethnographic
observations of scientists’ practices in situ;  others examined
scientists’ discourse in talk and texts--that is, their accounting
practices.  These studies together point to an inescapable
conclusion:  there is nothing not-social about science.  From the
step-by-step procedures of an experiment to writing-up discovered
facts for journal publication, what scientists do is describable and
explicable only as social action--meaningful choices contingent on
technical, cognitive, cultural and material circumstances that are
immediate, transient and largely of the scientists’ own making.

Laboratory ethnographies by Karin Knorr Cetina, Michael Lynch and
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar reveal a science whose order is not
to be found in transcendent timeless rules of “scientific method”
or “good lab procedures,” but in the circumstantial, pragmatic,
revisable and iterative choices and projects that constitute
scientific work.  These naturalistic studies emphasize the local
character of scientific practice, the idea that knowledge-making is
a process situated in particular places with only these pieces of
equipment or research materials or colleagues immediately
available.  Never sure about how things will turn out in the end,
scientists incessantly revise the tasks at hand as they try to get
machines to perform properly, control wild nature, interpret
results, placate doubting collaborators, and rationalize failures.
Even methodical procedures widely assumed to be responsible for the
objective, definitive and impersonal character of scientific claims--
experimental replication, for instance--are found to be shot-through
with negotiated, often implicit and potentially endless judgments
about the competence of other experimentalists and the fidelity of
their replication-attempts to the original (as Harry Collins has
suggested).

Ethnographic studies of how scientists construct knowledge in
laboratories compelled sociologists then to figure out how the
outcomes of those mundane contextual practices (hard facts,
established theories) could paradoxically appear so un-constructed--
as if they were given in nature all along, and now just found (not
made).  Attention turned to the succession of “inscriptions” through
which observations become knowledge--from machine-output to lab
notebook to draft manuscript to published report.  Scientists’
sequenced accounts of their fact-making rhetorically erase the messy
indeterminacy and opportunism that sociologists have observed at the
lab bench, and substitute a story of logic, method and inevitability
in which nature is externalized as waiting to be discovered.  Such
studies of scientific discourse have opened up an enduring debate
among constructivist sociologists of science:  those seeking causal
explanations for scientists’ beliefs treat interests as definitively
describable by the analyst, while others (Michael Mulkay, Steve
Woolgar) suggest that sociologists must respect the diversity of
participants’ discursive accounts of their interests, actions or
beliefs--and thus treat actors’ talk and text not as mediating the
phenomena of study but as constituting them.

3.4 Actor-Networks and Social Worlds

After sociologists worked to show how science is a thoroughly social
thing, Bruno Latour and Michel Callon then retrieve and reinsert the
material: science is not only about facts, theories, interests,
rhetoric and power but also about nature and machines.  Scientists
accomplish facts and theories by building "heterogeneous networks"
consisting of experimental devices, research materials, images and
descriptive statistics, abstract concepts and theories, the findings
of other scientists, persuasive texts--and, importantly, none of
these are reducible to any one of them, nor to social interests.
Things, machines, humans, and interests are, in the practices of
scientists, unendingly inter-defined in and through these networks.
They take on meanings via their linkages to other "actants" (a
semiotic term for anything that has "force" or consequence,
regardless of substance or form).  In reporting their results,
scientists buttress claims by connecting them to as many different
actants as they can, in hopes of defending the putative fact or
theory against the assault of real or potential dissenters. From
this perspective, length makes strength, that is, the more allies
enrolled and aligned into a network--especially if that network is
then stabilized or "black boxed"--the less likely it is that
dissenters will succeed in disentangling the actants and thereby
weaken or kill the claim.  Importantly for this sociology of
science, the human and the social are de-centered, in an ontology
that also ascribes agency to objects of nature or experimental
apparatuses.

Actor-network theory moved the sociological study of science back
outside the laboratory and professional journal--or, rather,
reframed the very idea of inside and outside.  Scientists and their
allies "change the world" in the course of making secure their
claims about nature, and in the same manner.  In Latourian
vernacular, not only are other scientists, bits of nature or
empirical data enlisted and regimented, but also political bodies,
protest movements, the media, laws and hoi polloi.  When Louis
Pasteur transformed French society by linking together microbes,
anthrax, microscopes, laboratories, sick livestock, angry farmers,
nervous Parisian milk drinkers, public health officials, lawmakers
and journalists into what becomes a "momentous discovery," the
boundary between science and the rest of society is impossible to
locate.  Scientists are able to work autonomously at their benches
precisely because so many others outside the lab are also "doing
science," providing the life support (money, epistemic acquiescence)
on which science depends.

The boundaries of science also emerge as theoretically interesting
in related studies derived from the brand of symbolic interactionism
developed by Everett Hughes, Herbert Blumer, Anselm Strauss and
Howard Becker (and extended into research on science by Adele
Clarke, Joan Fujimura and Susan Leigh Star).  On this score, science
is work--and, instructively, not unlike work of any other kind.
Scientists (like plumbers) pursue doable problems, where "doability"
involves the articulation of tasks across various levels of work
organization: the experiment (disciplining research subjects), the
laboratory (dividing labor among lab technicians, grad students and
post-docs) and "social worlds" (the wider discipline, funding
agencies or maybe animal rights activists).  Scientific problems
become increasingly doable if "boundary objects" allow for
cooperative intersections of those working on discrete projects in
different social worlds.  For example, success in building
California's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in the early twentieth
century depended upon the standardization of collection and
preparation practices (here, the specimens themselves become
boundary objects) that enabled biologists to align their work with
trappers, farmers and amateur naturalists in different social
worlds.  As in actor-network theory, sociologists working in
the "social worlds" tradition make no assumption about where science
leaves off and the rest of society begins--those boundaries get
settled only provisionally, and remain open to challenge from those
inside and out.

4.  Science as Cultural Authority

It is less easy to discern exactly what the sociology of science is
just now, and where it is headed.  Much research centers on the
position of science, scientists and scientific knowledge in the
wider society and culture.  Science is often examined as a cognitive
or epistemic authority; scientists are said to have the legitimate
power to define facts and assess claims to truth.  This authority is
not treated as an inevitable result of the character or virtue of
those who become scientists, the institutional organization of
science (norms, for example) or of the "scientific method."  It is,
rather, an accomplished resource pursued strategically by a
profession committed not only to extending knowledge but also to the
preservation and expansion of its power, patronage, prestige and
autonomy.

No single theoretical orientation or methodological program now
prevails.  Constructivism remains appealing as a means to render
contingent and negotiable (rather than "essential") those features
of scientific practice said to justify its epistemic authority.  But
as the agenda in the sociology of science shifts from
epistemological issues (how is knowledge made?) to political issues
(whose knowledge counts, and for what purposes?), constructivism has
yielded to a variety of critical theories (Marxism, feminism and
postmodernism) that connect science to structures of domination,
hierarchy and hegemony.  A popular research site among sociologists
of science is the set of occasions where scientists find their
authority challenged by those whose claims to knowledge lack
institutional legitimacy.

4.1  Credibility and Expertise

Steven Shapin (among others) has identified credibility as a
constitutive problem for the sociology of science.  Whose knowledge-
claims are accepted as believable, trustworthy, true or reliably
useful--and on what grounds?  Plainly, contingent judgments of the
validity of  claims depend upon judgments of the credibility of the
claimants--which has focused sociological attention on how people
use (as they define) qualities such as objectivity, expertise,
competence, personal familiarity, propriety and sincerity to decide
which candidate universe becomes provisionally "real."  A long
established line of sociological research examines those public
controversies that hinge, in part, on "technical" issues.  Case
studies of disputes over environmental and health risks find a
profound ambivalence: the desire for public policy to be decided by
appropriate legislative or judicial bodies in a way that is both
understandable and accountable to the populace runs up against the
need for expert skills and knowledge monopolized by scientific,
medical or engineering professionals.  Especially when interested
publics are mobilized, such disputes often become "credibility
struggles" (as Steven Epstein calls them).  In his study of AIDS
politics, Epstein traces out a shift from activists' denunciation of
scientists doing research on the disease to their gaining a "seat at
the table" by learning enough about clinical trials and drug
development to participate alongside scientists in policy
decisions.  In this controversy, as in many others, the cultural
boundaries of science are redrawn to assign (or, alternatively, to
deny) epistemic authority to scientists, would-be scientists,
citizens, legislators, jurists and journalists.

4.2  Critique of Science

Recent sociological studies have themselves blurred the boundaries
between social science and politics by examining the diverse costs
and benefits of science.  Whose agenda does science serve--its own?
global capital?  political and military elites?  colonialism?
patriarchy?  the Earth's?  Studies of molecular biology and
biotechnology show how the topics chosen for scientific research--
and the pace at which they are pursued--are driven by corporate
ambitions for patents, profits and market-share.  Related studies of
the Green Revolution in agricultural research connect science to
imperialist efforts to replace indigenous practices in less
developed countries with "advanced technologies" more consonant with
the demands of global food markets.  Feminist researchers are
equally interested in the kinds of knowledge that science brings
into being--and, even more, the potential knowledge not sought or
valorized.   In the nineteenth century, when social and natural
science offered logic and evidence to legitimate patriarchal
structures, other styles of inquiry and learning practiced among
women (Parisian salons, home economics, midwifery and cookery) are
denounced as unscientific and, thus, suspect.  Other feminists
challenge the hegemony of scientific method, as a way of knowing
incapable of seeing its own inevitable situatedness and partiality;
some suggest that women's position in a gender-stratified society
offers distinctive epistemic resources that enable fuller and richer
understandings of nature and culture.

These critical studies share an interest in exposing another side of
science:  its historical complicity with projects judged to be
inimical to goals of equality, human rights, participatory
democracy, community and sustainable ecologies.  They seek to
fashion a restructured "science" (or some successor knowledge-maker)
that would be more inclusive in its practitioners, more diverse in
its methods, and less tightly coupled to power.

See also:  Actor network theory; Cultural studies of science;
Epistemology and the sociology of science;  Ethnomethodology, in
science and technology studies;  Laboratory studies; Norms in
science; Organization of scientific research;  Science and
rhetoric;  Scientific controversies;  Scientific culture; Social
construction of science; Social history of the sciences; Strong
programme, in science; Truth and credibility, history and
sociology.

Bibliography
Barber B, Hirsch W (eds.) 1962  The Sociology of Science.  Free
Press, Glencoe, IL
Barnes B, Bloor D, Henry J 1996  Scientific Knowledge: A
Sociological Analysis.  University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Barnes B, Edge D (eds.) 1982  Science in Context.  MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA
Ben-David J  1991  Scientific Growth.  University of California
Press, Berkeley
Clarke A E, Fujimura J H (eds.)  1992  The Right Tools for the Job:
At Work in Twentieth Century Life Sciences.  Princeton University
Press, Princeton
Collins H M  1992  Changing Order: Replication and Induction in
Scientific Practice.  University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Edge D O, Mulkay M J  1976  Astronomy Transformed.  Wiley, New York
Epstein S  1998  Impure Science: AIDS, Activism , and the Politics
of Knowledge.  University of California Press, Berkeley
Gieryn T F  1999  Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility On the
Line.  University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Gilbert G N, Mulkay M  1984  Opening Pandora's Box: A Sociological
Analysis of Scientists' Discourse.  Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge
Hagstrom W O  1965  The Scientific Community.  Basic Books, New York
Harding S  1986  The Science Question in Feminism.  Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, NY
Jasanoff S, Markle G E, Petersen J C, Pinch T (eds.) 1995  Handbook
of Science and Technology Studies.  Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA
Kloppenburg J R Jr.  1988  First the Seed: The Political Economy of
Plant Biotechnology 1492 2000.  Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Knorr-Cetina K  1999  Epistemic Cultures.  Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA
Knorr-Cetina K, Mulkay M J (eds.) 1983  Science Observed.  Sage,
Beverly Hills, CA
Latour B  1988  Science in Action.  Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA
Latour B, Woolgar S  1986  Laboratory Life: The Construction of
Scientific Facts.  Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Long J S, Fox M F  1995  Scientific careers: Universalism and
particularism.  Annual Review of Sociology 21: 45-71
Lynch M  1993  Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action.  Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge
Merton R K  1973  The Sociology of Science.  University of Chicago
Press, Chicago
Mulkay M  1979  Science and the Sociology of Knowledge.  George
Allen & Unwin, London
Mulkay M J  1980  Sociology of science in the West. Current
Sociology. 28:1 -184.
Nelkin D (ed.) 1984  Controversy: The Politics of Technical
Decisions.  Sage, Beverly Hills, CA
Ravetz J R  1971  Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems.
Oxford University Press, Oxford
Shapin S  1995   Here and everywhere: Sociology of scientific
knowledge. Annual Review of Sociology.  21: 289-321
Shapin S   1995  A Social History of Truth.  University of Chicago
Press, Chicago
Zuckerman H  1988   The sociology of science. In: Smelser N (ed.)
Handbook of Sociology. 	Sage, Newbury Park, CA