The turn to biology

This article firstly discusses social science reference to animal studies. The latter remain important in engagement with life science because of their frequent deployment and because of increased calls to re-examine animal research among sociologists and other social scientists. Extending from this discussion, it is argued that social scientists still tend to exhibit a questionable selectivity in their treatment of life-science research. In addition, it is suggested that insufficient attention is paid to epistemological differences between life and social science. The article concludes by outlining an approach to interdisciplinary endeavour that combines ‘parallelism’ with mutually reflexive scrutiny of social and life science assumption.     

Scientist and non-scientists share a diversity of dimensions in their relations to urban nature

In the current biodiversity crisis, conservation scientists are urgently asked to involve themselves in education and communication initiatives toward non-scientists, who are considered as lacking knowledge to correctly value biodiversity. This is particularly argued in urban areas.In this paper, we showed however with an anthropological survey that urban citizens do express a variety of relations toward surrounding urban nature. Then, in an independent survey, we showed that these ways of being connected with nature were shared by students in conservation sciences. Conservation scientists and non-scientific city dwellers have therefore much more in common than is taken for granted in their relations and perceptions of urban nature, notably concerning emotional, sensorial and memorial relationships. Acknowledging these common features in the scientific community could improve the communication between science and the general public about urban nature, help bridge the gap between science and the society and eventually participate to build a new social contract on nature.     

Conservative Apostles of Objectivity and the Myth of a “Liberal Bias” in Science

An article recently published in The American Sociologist argued that social scientists are biased because of their liberal views, and that this social activism might in turn explain the growing distrust of conservatives in the scientific community observed in the General Social Survey. Although I do agree that social scientists in the United States are mostly liberal, which is hard to contest given the accumulated evidence, this does not necessarily mean that liberal scientists are biased. It is one thing to adopt liberal views, but it is quite another to let these views distort scientific productions to the point that they are not scientific anymore. Since no systematic evidence currently exists to support this claim, the “liberal bias” remains a myth. Moreover, the authors do not report any statistical correlation between the purported increase in social scientists’ activism and conservatives’ growing distrust in science, let alone a causal relationship. I hypothesize that the authors, as conservatives, are more concerned with liberalism than with the politicization of science per se, and that their critics are aimed at challenging liberals’ domination within academia by depicting liberal scholars as pseudo-scientists.     

Exceptionalism and Internationalism: The Origins of American Social Science Reconsidered

This paper examines the international context in which American social science was institutionalized in the generation after the Civil War, following the foundation of the American Social Science Association in 1865. The ASSA was modelled on an influential British forum, founded eight years previously, the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. A comparison of these two organisations from the 1860s to the 1880s allows consideration of British intellectual and political influences on the first American social scientists. It also helps in the identification of the social and political attitudes of the well-born, cosmopolitan, and high-minded American reformers attracted to social science at this time. The theme of American exceptionalism has recently been emphasized when considering the motives and intentions of early social science in the United States. It is argued here that the replication in America of models of the new discipline which were first developed in Britain, is indicative also of a self-conscious internationalism among the American social-scientific community of this period. In addition to an institutional comparison, the article examines the careers and ideas of several representative figures in this process of Anglo-American liberal transference, among them the physician Dr. Edward Jarvis, the feminist Caroline Healey Dall, the jurist David Dudley Field, and the famed British interpreter of American experience, James Bryce.     

Science and the Mass Media –‘Medialization’ as a New Perspective on an Intricate Relationship

This survey article discusses a recently proposed perspective on the science–media interface the concept of medialization. The medialization approach assumes that there is mutual resonance between science and the mass media. Medialization research systematically investigates structural transformation in science: What are the implications of high media attention for science funding, for research agendas, for universities and the professional self‐understanding of scientists? And how do these developments relate to the production of scientific knowledge? For detailed empirical studies of these processes, the medialization approach separates the role of mass media, but its grounding in general social theory contextualises this research with social science studies on sciences relation to other spheres such as politics and the economy.     

The future of the social sciences and humanities in the science of complex systems

The modern world is characterized by problems that involve systems with social and physical subsystems. They are entangled systems of system of systems with multilevel dynamics. There is no methodology able to combine the partial micro-, meso- and macrotheories that focus on subsystems into a coherent representation of the dynamics of the whole. Policy requires prediction, but the traditional definitions of prediction are not appropriate for multilevel socio-complex systems. Heterogeneous multilevel systems have subsystems that may behave with great regularity over long periods of time, and then suddenly change their behavior due to weak coupling with other subsystems. Thus systems that are usually highly predictable may be subject to rare but extreme events, and this is highly relevant to policy-makers. New ways of thinking are needed that transcend the confines of the traditional humanities, social and physical sciences. Of necessity, this science will be embedded in the design, implementation and management of systems, and therefore the new science will be entwined with policy. Much policy is interventionist experiment. By themselves scientists cannot conduct experiments on socio-complex systems because they have neither the mandate nor the money to design and instrument experiments on the large scale. Policy-makers – elected politicians and their officers – design the future, making it as they believe it ought to be. New kinds of scientific predictions can inform policy but can only be instrumented and tested if there is goodwill between policy-makers and scientists, where scientists are junior partners. Scientists offer policy-makers theories and predictions of social systems based on logical-deductive methods. Policy is generally made on the basis of rhetoric, with the best possible arguments being deployed to support favored conclusions. To convince policy-makers that a particular scientific theory should be used, scientists move from the logical-deductive to the rhetorical. Thus the full theory of a science of complex systems has to provide a logical-deductive metatheory of the rhetorical and logical-deductive systems that make decisions and implement them. Traditional natural and physical science has avoided rhetoric, which is much better understood in the humanities and social sciences. Thus it is concluded that the science of complex systems must embrace the humanities and social sciences not just because their domains of study are relevant but also because their methods are necessary to understand how science and policy work together in complex social systems.     

Cultures of care? Animals and science in Britain

It is becoming increasingly common to hear life scientists say that high quality life science research relies upon high quality laboratory animal care. However, the idea that animal care is a crucial part of scientific knowledge production is at odds with previous social science and historical scholarship regarding laboratory animals. How are we to understand this discrepancy? To begin to address this question, this paper seeks to disentangle the values of scientists in identifying animal care as important to the production of high quality scientific research. To do this, we conducted a survey of scientists working in the United Kingdom who use animals in their research. The survey found that being British is associated with thinking that animal care is a crucial part of conducting high quality science. To understand this finding, we draw upon the concept of ‘civic epistemologies’ (Jasanoff 2005; Prainsack 2006) and argue that ‘animals’ and ‘care’ in Britain may converge in taken‐for‐granted assumptions about what constitutes good scientific knowledge. These ideas travel through things like state regulations or the editorial policies of science journals, but do not necessarily carry the embodied civic epistemology of ‘animals’ and ‘science’ from which such modes of regulating laboratory animal welfare comes.     

From consensus to credibility

The development of consensual science has greatly influenced the international environmental negotiation processes. This is not least the case for the Convention on Long‐range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP). Negotiators as well as regime analysts regard CLRTAP as a successful example of how scientists have succeeded in influencing international policy making through consensus‐building strategies. Drawing on Ulrich Beck's work on reflexive scientization and the concept of ‘stage management’ from the field of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), this paper critically analyzes the role of science in the regulation of transboundary air pollution. It discusses the consensus‐building strategies developed by scientists as well as contemporary strategies for making science matter in regulative work. It is argued that scientific credibility is crucial for attracting political and public attention, but that credibility does not necessarily have to be based on scientific consensus. The challenge for science is not so much to create consensus but to strengthen its credibility by elaborating new relations with its stakeholders.     

Paradigm wars: Some thoughts on a personal and public trajectory

It is often said that research methods are a matter of rational choice: it is the research question, or problem, which ought to dictate the method to be used. This may be true to some extent, but there are other more powerful reasons why social scientists choose the research methods they do. Underlying philosophies of social science and long-held and much cherished tenets about epistemology are prime among these. Moreover, such an interplay between epistemological position and methodological decision is enormously affected by social context. We pay attention to what other social scientists are doing, to fashions in both methodology and topic - the things it is considered proper for social scientists to study; we are affected by research funding and publishing opportunities, by the material resources available to support our work, by intraprofessional rivalries and difference, and by politics - both in its commonly understood sense and as applied to power relations between academics and those who take part in research. Apart from what we do, there is the whole issue of how others construct our work. And this is only some of what goes on. In short, it is a very complicated business.     

Government Influence on the Social Science Paradigm*

A scientific paradigm includes a set of widely shared understandings that specify a discipline's research methodologies and substantive priorities. The impact of government sponsorship of academic social research on the paradigms of four social science disciplines is evaluated using a probability sample of 1,079 faculty members in the fields of anthropology, economics, political science, and psychology. The results indicate that federal government funding is allocated according to topical and methodological priorities that are distinct from the disciplines' self-defined priorities. It is also found that: (1) federal support of academic research has a significant impact on the substantive and methodological plans of social scientists; (2) social scientists who are financially dependent on government assistance are particularly responsive to government influence; (3) the condition of financial dependency on government funding is in part a product of prior federal investment in social research. An “externalist” thesis holds that the scientific paradigm is not autonomous and is significantly shaped by such outside factors as the political system, and these findings provide support for this thesis.     

Conflating Apples and Oranges: Understanding Modern Forms of Racism

Social scientists generally agree that the post‐Civil Rights form of racism is different from that which existed in the Jim Crow‐era in the United States. However, beyond this agreement, what exactly modern racism is and “looks like” is debatable. With this in mind, a surprising and somewhat disturbing trend frequently occurs among social scientists that can have real consequences within academia and the general public: conflation. In naming a newly developed concept as “racism”, social scientists often conflate three interrelated concepts: racial prejudice, racial discrimination, and racism. This paper clarifies these three interrelated concepts and the problems with conflating them. Additionally, this paper describes many of the alternative conceptions of racism in the post‐Civil Rights era, identifying where conflation exists in each concept. In closing, the paper describes the implications of conflation for social science research and the American public.     

A tale of two ontologies: an immanent critique of critical realism

In this article is it argued that critical realism has two mutually exclusive definitions of ontology. Ontology is defined as both a fallible interpretation of reality and as a definitive definition of a reality beyond our knowledge claims. A slippage in meaning occurs from the former to the latter, as critical realists try to justify the claim that their ontology ought to supply the terms of reference for all scientific research. Rather than defend an alternative ontology, it is argued that ontology needs to be defined in terms of fallible interpretations of social reality. This necessitates the revision and replacement of ontological theories in the course of an on‐going critical dialogue about reality, and precludes the use of one fixed ontology to supply the terms of reference for the sciences. ²     

Critical Materialism: Science,Technology, and Environmental Sustainability*

There are widely divergent views on how science and technology are connected to environmental problems. A view commonly held among natural scientists and policy makers is that environmental problems are primarily technical problems that can be solved via the development and implementation of technological innovations. This technologically optimistic view tends to ignore power relationships in society and the political‐economic order that drives environmental degradation. An opposed view, common among postmodernist and poststructuralist scholars, is that the emergence of the scientific worldview is one of the fundamental causes of human oppression. This postmodernist view rejects scientific epistemology and often is associated with an anti‐realist stance, which ultimately serves to deny the reality of environmental problems, thus (unintentionally) abetting right‐wing efforts to scuttle environmental protection. We argue that both the technologically optimistic and the postmodernist views are misguided, and both undermine our ability to address environmental crises. We advocate the adoption of a critical materialist stance, which recognizes the importance of natural science for helping us to understand the world while also recognizing the social embeddedness of the scientific establishment and the need to challenge the manipulation of science by the elite.     

The question of mathematical social theory revisited: Some methodological considerations

Methodologically, the most advanced social science discipline is considered economics, especially its neoclassical version. A number of practitioners in the other social sciences, especially sociology and political science, perceive economics as a scientific exemplar in methodological (and theoretical) terms. This methodological exemplar has been, particularly in the last decades, attempted to emulate by some of these social scientists. The outcome of this emulation, by adopting and extending its methods, of neoclassical economics in parts (but not all) of sociology, political science, and elsewhere has been rational choice theory as a general social paradigm. This paper tries to show that many misapplications of the methodology of neoclassical economics in rational choice theory have ensued from such methodological emulation. That neoclassical economics does not necessarily contain or lead to a mathematical rational choice model is the core argument of this paper. The paper fills in a gap created by the current literature’s focus on the methodological bases of mathematical rational choice theory in neoclassical economics.     

Race‐gender variations in the demographic characteristics of doctoral scientists

Most of the research literature has given little or no attention to the social backgrounds and traits of black scientists and female scientists. The present study, based on survey findings on a national sample of American scientists, helps to fill this gap. Female scientists are compared with their male colleagues, and black scientists with their white colleagues. Race is a better predictor than gender of certain demographic characteristics. However, a clearer picture of variations in social background and current family patterns is derived from an analysis which controls for both race and gender. This analysis includes data on social status of parents, marital status of scientist, number of siblings and number of offspring, religious identity, and region of origin. The implications of these survey findings for the future development of scientific talent are explored, including some implications for researchers, sociologists of science, and social planners.     

Prometheus bound: The limits of social science professionalization in the progressive period

Conclusions The problem with professionalization theory is that it stops where we think it should begin. In the case of the new social scientists, we have argued that their need for massive resources opened them to collaborative cooptation by resource controllers. The two central principles to be drawn from our analysis are that during a crisis of ideology intellectual workers seeking to create new roles must worry about resources, and align themselves accordingly, and that resource holders, for their part, will support intellectuals who deliver something of value to them. Table I outlines how those principles might be applied to three likely knowledge and power alliances that might have occurred during the post-Civil War ideology crisis. The traditional social scientist role shown there reflects our understanding of the model American one existing before the influence of the German Historical School. The radical-populist role represents one of several routes not taken. It is presented to make clearer that significant alternatives did exist.How does role complementarity sum up how the new social science aligned itself with corporate capital? The new social scientists rejected the role content and alliances established by the traditionals; instead, they saw themselves offering a competitive expertise to the public. When the new social scientists under AEA auspices entered a resource exchange relationship with the nascent, national corporate leadership supporting the Spanish American War and the trust as a form of economic organization, they chose to ally themselves with the same resource controllers the traditionals were explicitly opposing in their anti-war, anti-monopolist stance. Indeed, the domestic and foreign positions secured by the new social scientists in the wake of the war provided a significant and large scale opportunity for exercising their expert role. In choosing an alliance with national capital and its managers, the new social scientists clearly differentiated themselves from the traditionals. They identified the strategic value of the resource rich corporate center, eschewing, as AEA President E. R. A. Seligman put it, the extremes of laissez-faire and socialism. Their analysis of the opportunity structure presented by the war and the trust question proved correct, as their version of professionalization informs us today.Of course, some new social scientists had at first been willing to align themselves with left of center and populist groups. However, the early academic freedom cases seem to have offered a powerful lesson. In particular, the new social scientists seem to have learned that even mildly popular actions were severely sanctioned and academics engaging in such actions would have extreme difficulty practicing their profession. These cases also made clear that left of centerists did not have many resources to exchange for new social scientific role performance in their causes. Economic radicals did not usually control the jobs or funds required for academic careers and professional development. As a result, the new social scientists did not create roles that complemented the radical popular movements. The few that did were not leaders of the associations. Having rejected the traditional and the radical expert roles for lack of sufficient complementary resources, the leaders of the new social scientists sought instead the indirect influence of expert advisers to businessmen, public figures, the new federal agencies, and national policy forums. From their collective biography as expert advisers, we may identify four aspects of their roles that seem to complement those of the new, nationally based corporate leaders. We see in the complementarity of the roles of the new social science leaders and the new corporate elite a significant shaping of modern social science expertise.The four aspects of the expert adviser role are these of technician, policy adviser, legitimator, and independent policy maker. Technicians solved problems, especially data problems, set by others. They gained access, or an opportunity to show their competence to those higher in the role system. The corporate leaders gained an opportunity to look over, and socialize new boys. Policy advisers had the ear of decision makers in the corporate sectors and in government, and managed technicians. The advisers gained prestige and some influence, while decision makers gained reliable management in the policy and reform sectors of an emerging state capitalism. Legitimators were often recruited from the ranks of well-published policy managers. They lent their greater public prestige as well as their reputations for non-partisan impartiality to particular policies or reforms. The corporate leaders gained public approval for policies in their perceived interests. Finally, a few new social scientists achieved positions of independent policy making after long years of expert service. Corporate leaders gained policy making congruent with their needs, often developed without their active participation. In short, when the new social scientists looked outside of academics to find the resources required to institutionalize their new skills as social scientists, they found at least two groups willing to complement their role performances. The left of centerists did not have sufficient resources to help establish the new social scientists' role performances within academics. But the new corporate leaders did, and they had the resources to act as social and political sponsors for the new social scientists' roles as expert advisers. In return, the new social scientists accepted as socially necessary the task of rationalizing the turn of the century economy and defusing social unrest.Our analysis of these cases — the Spanish American War and the trust (the Chicago Conference, the ICC, the NCF) — raises almost as many questions as are answered. These queries fall into two sets. The first involves theoretical issues, particularly the utilitarian assumptions implicit in our exchange analysis, and methodological issues, especially concerning the limits of available data. The second set of problems is substantive. Were the new social scientists the creatures of corporate capital, collaborative partners, or social actors with some independence? If they were willing and able to act independently, what defined the parameters of their action — professional interests, their own class interests or a commitment to the truth? If they were forced to act opportunistically to meet some constellation of class and professional interests, was opportunism confined to establishing a firmer resource base for the new social science? Were they later able to use their then established fields and positions to assert independent views of what was in the best interests of the nation as a whole? And, finally, was the expert role established by economists and political scientists accepted fully by sociologists? Our use of an exchange framework to organize the data in this paper might be read as bordering on a radical utilitarianism that assumes both individual and collective actors have a fulsome sense of their objective situation and its exigencies. Accordingly, there is little possibility for symbolic mediation of perceptions and motivations to intervene between social science leaders and their environments. At the risk of being thought unfashionable, reductionistic, and even economistic, we take a utilitarian position. Indeed, we stop short of radical utilitarianism only since perfect knowledge and information are inherently unattainable, especially in a world of rapid social and economic transition such as that occupied by the new social scientists.Rather than radical utilitarianism, we take a position of reasonable utilitarianism, viewing the collective efforts of social scientists assembled in their associations as often compensating for all manner of informational and behavioral imperfections at the individual level. We take this position for several reasons rooted in the detail of the period. (1) Organizing occupations (like the new social scientists in the AEA) have the clear possibility and capability for creating more nearly rational plans for collective action than do their individual members. This occurs when occupational associations gather together experiences and analysis from all their members and then, through full, frank, and candid discussion discern the proper joint actions required for success in their common enterprise. This is precisely what the new social scientists did. They used the AEA as an occupational forum to define collectively the expert role required to procure professionalizing resources from the industralizing American political economy. Thus, Hadley's speech quoted in the Spanish American War study is not an isolated exercise in role exploration. Instead, it is part of twenty years' detailed discussion on the expert social scientist's role. (2) As a group, the new social scientists themselves subscribed to and articulated a utilitarian or pragmatic view of their role and their science. In this they upheld and, in turn, were supported by the dominant American business ideology which, although varying with economic development, and regional and industrial interest, espoused a materialistic approach to contemporary problems. Indeed, AEA leaders usually presented a pragmatic, materialistic interpretation of the growth of economics as a science. As E. R. A. Seligman said in a presidential address: Economic science is an outgrowth of economic conditions ... of social unrest... of an attempt to unravel the tangled skein of actual conditions, and an effort to solve the difficulties of existing industrial society. Although the new social scientists worked collectively to develop their occupation along rational lines, there were, of course, all manner of cognative informational and behavioral imperfections at the individual level. Thus, the young Carter Adams saw Marx as a Christ-like figure, J. R. Commons and R. T. Ely early worked with the social gospel movement, and AEA leader Jacob Hollander accepted an investment bank's commission of $100,000 for placing a Santa Domingan bond issue while on the island for imperial duty. But all eventually came to accept and act on the associations' collective definition of the expert adviser role, finally perceiving theoretical Communism, militant Christianity and ad hoc greed as hinderances to sustained resource procurement and career development. Thus, rather than a radical utilitarianism assuming perfect knowledge and information on objective situation and environment, we posit imperfect individual knowledge and action with the reasonable possibility of collective utilitarian action by occupational associations acting after considered discussion.If we accept in principle the possibility of a reasonably utilitarian exchange analysis, what data limits do we encounter when we consider the professionalizing new social scientists in their associations? Following the Bernards' methodological imperative of reading the associations' own texts fully and carefully, we find the AEA, APSA and ASS's dusty tomes filled with heat and light on the substantive questions before us: What is the proper role of the social science expert? Who and how should he serve? In contrast with the fullness of organizational tests, our principle data limit is the thinness of historical analysis both of the period and the central actors. For example, there is no schematic synthesis of social structure for the period; nothing like Jackson Turner Maine's work on pre-Revolutionary America or Sidney Aronsen's on the Age of Jackson. There is, of course, a richly contested historiography of the period with Hofstader, Weibe, Williams (and their followers and critics) providing insightful chronological commentaries from center and leftist positions. But these chronicles rest more on sound judgments and intuitive leaps rather than on the details of sufficient biographical and organizational analysis. For example, there is one solid, historical treatment of the ASSA, and Sanborn, its most important figure, has no full biography and only a half-done autobiography. The new social scientists' lives are better recorded, but the coverage is still incomplete. These data limits make difficult precise and comprehensive answers to questions about the exact social mechanism — such as class, mobility and occupational status — working to create social scientists' biographical intersection with their associations' rich records. For example, A. T. Hadley's father was a Yale Classics professor, the father of fellow Yale economist Henry Farnam was a railroad president, and E. R. A. Seligman's father was a German-born New York investment banker. Are these professors upper class by social origins or by occupation? What is the direction of their mobility in an expanding, industrializing society? And what of the many professors on whom there is less detailed information, whose fathers were merchants, or publicists? Since neither the social structure at the time of their birth nor their entry into career is clearly agreed upon by scholars, we must answer our substantive questions somewhat more provisionally than we prefer.First, what was the relationship between resource holders and intellectual workers, particularly between new social scientists and corporate capital? Was there much room for independent action? Comparison of old and new social scientists gives some indication of the latitude possible in the period. Both sets of social scientists provided hegemonic idea systems for different sets of capitalist elites. The old were linked by sponsorship to New England capital throughout the nineteenth century. Sharply regional in composition and social base, they opposed many of the other social alternatives available, most notably the Southern sociologies legitimating slavebased agrarian capitalism, and the protective-tariff economics produced in the more industrial mid-Atlantic states. Tied to regional resources and definitions of social and economic problems through well-established cohort, friendship, and kinship networks, the old social science was faced with crisis when its region was. The rise of the mid-Atlantic states, especially New York, as a center for emerging national industrial finance capital made ASSAers face the choice of supporting relatively immobile New England merchant industrial capital or forging a new extra-regional alliance. By maintaining their original networks, as did much of their region's business elite, ASSA leaders effectively cut themselves off from acting as intellectual guides and legitimators for those rising national industrial finance capitalists creating the present social order. While ASSA leaders were tied to their region's resources, they seem relatively independent when compared to discipline association leaders. Their social science required fewer resources; they seem, on the average, much less dependent on academically contained careers and the favor of university managers for their livelihood. Their generalist training and experience, combined with their familiarity with the material and cultural allocation apparatus of New England meant they were not confined to the academy for the exercise of specialized skills. Sanborn, for example, translated classics, wrote biographies, founded secondary schools, and taught at Boston University when not directly serving New England capital as ASSA secretary. In contrast, new social scientists were most often located permanently in the academy. Even after incurring the displeasure of university managers, they invariably sought other specialized positions, preferably in emerging graduate centers, although this sometimes meant holding their tongues and changing their location. In short, given their institutionally based, specialized social science, the newer, national academics seem to have had less room for independent action than the old.Yet, the new had some room to maneuver because they had something to exchange for resources: the technical capacity both to create a new corporate ideology justifying monopoly capital (witness the Jenks address and the Chicago conference) and the skill to organize production efficiently (recall Adams on railroad accounting procedures and new social scientists' participation in the ICC). The nascent industrial finance corporate sector well understood its objective need for these skills. Widespread popular agitation and unstable pooling arrangements had taught them — and indeed, the nation — the dangers of centralizing capital without specialized academic assistance. And if the rising elite's instruction in its need for social science was direct, the nation's was no less detailed. Beyond its own participation and observations of industrialization, a wide range of extra-academic cultural workers offered lessons. For example, Daniel DeLeon's The People offered a continuous commentary countering the new social scientists' ideological positions. And the readers of Frank Norris' The Octopus (1901) found Lyman Derrick, a representative of newer social arrangements, advising his father, an older agrarian capitalist, on the technical accounting problems of monopolistic integration.The man who, even after twenty years' training in the operation of railroads, can draw an equitable, smoothly working schedule of freight rates between shipping point and common point, is capable of governing the United States. What with main lines, and leased lines, and points of transfer, and the laws governing common carriers, and the rulings of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the whole matter has become so confused that Vanderbilt himself couldn't straighten it out.... Cut rates; yes... any fool can write one dollar instead of two, but if you cut too low by a fraction of one percent, and if the Railroad can get out an injunction, tie you up and show that your new rate prevents the road being operated at a profit, how are you better off?Clearly in the increasingly complex American situation, the new social scientists had important ideological and technical skills to exchange for the resources held within the rising monopoly capital center. And they had, thereby, some degree of freedom in their negotiations with its leading figures. Their latitude for independent action becomes clearer when we ask, given the emerging corporate center's need for intellectual support and their willingness to supply resources, why didn't they employ established New England practitioners? In part, as previously indicated, the ASSAers were unavailable, being integrated into their own region and tied to their own sustaining, if relatively immobile, elite. Further, the older social scientists offered a slightly different intellectual product. Although both new and old social scientists were ideologues of state intervention designed to conserve capitalism, they differed on where regulation should occur. In the main, ASSAers worked for government intervention at the state level, while AEAers called for state solutions at the national level out of their shared German Historical experience. Finally, even though old social scientists often possessed much the same technical skills and used the same rhetoric of science as the new, they usually lacked graduate degrees, the prestige of university employment, and the growing authority of specialization in a society where credentials were increasingly seen as critical to success. These differences between old and new — availability, product, and certification—in all probability expanded AEAers' capacity to drive a harder bargain with capital.Given the ASSA's reluctance to break sustaining regional ties, the unsuitability of populist and socialist intellectual workers, and their own certified technical and ideological skills, the new social scientists had some latitude in their negotiations with national corporate capital. Yet they chose to serve power, fundamentally since this maximized their own career and professional interests while meeting the objective demand for resources outlined above. In this, academics were probably no more greedy or selfish than lawyers in the ABA or doctors in the AMA, but neither were they less so. We see the new social scientists' decision to serve power most clearly in their careful and collective clarification of opportunity, identifying and seeking service in that sector of the economy most likely to deliver sustained resource support — national corporate capital's leadership. Thus, new social scientists generally accepted corporate capitalism per se as the framework indispensable to conditions of human progress. Then all other social issues (labor unrest, urban crowding, plutocracy) became technical problems defused of interestladen content, and they could perform latent ideological and legitimation functions while correctly claiming a manifest value neutrality. That they understood the implications of grounding social and economic theory on acceptance of modern monopoly capital is made clear in Hadley's presidential address following his Spanish American War speech; it focused on the relation between Economic Theory and Political Morality. The address and following debate stressed the inadvisability of economic theory's acknowledging questions of class if social scientists were to have a role in public affairs. Instead, the impartial pursuit of an empirically artificial construct, the common interest, was deliberately substituted for any consideration of specific class interests. Thus, disinterested objectivity, the cornerstone of professionalization theory, became an artifact of career.With fashioning the expert role in the AEA's forum, the new social science became a collaborative partner in creating monopoly capitalism in the Progressive period. In return for their work in ideology production and technical amelioration, the economists insured the continued procurement of the resources required to industrialize US social science. What happened afterwards? After acting opportunistically to meet their professional and career interests, did establishing a firm resource base liberate the new social science from future opportunistic behavior? And could the established social science in time become resource independent, enough so to act in its own right; for example, participating in counter-hegemonic ideological and technical enterprises? In order to address these questions, we must move beyond our available data, guiding our speculations by the outline of our exchange analysis and our incomplete reading of the years following the fashioning of the new social scientists' expert role. We think that once accepted into collaborative partnership, opportunism was curbed by an emerging strategy for enhancing the long term interests of the profession. Consider, for example, the foundations then being invented by corporate capital. Russell Sage was lauded at birth by social science leaders, some of whom sought its funding, as did the American Political Science Association's leadership for their work rationalizing urban police forces. The Rockefeller Foundation, however, failed to attract the new social scientist leaderships' participation when it set up offices to offset the ideological cost of its victory in the Colorado Coal Wars. Seeking resources to perfect urban social control was professionally acceptable; justifying the Ludlow Massacre was not. Resource procurement continued to be crucial, but the new social science was not simply for hire to any corporate capitalist offering a subsidy. The critical point of distinction was perhaps whether or not accepting resources and projects made a mockery of professional claims to serve the public good.If opportunism declined with the institutionalization of new social scientists' expert role and the stabilized exchanges it created, did the new social science find within its ranks the voices and actions of independent, even counter-hegemonic views, speakers and agitators against monopoly capitalism? In the Progessive period there were few, and they either left the academy out of a sense that active opposition was not permitted (as was the case with Daniel DeLeon) or were forced out (as was the case with Scott Nearing). We cannot answer this question exactly for the several decades since the expert's role was put in place, but we have listened hard for oppositional voices and have failed to hear them. As sociologists, we were somewhat surprised, in part since our sense of the radical timbre of our field was heightened by repeated and well-reported surveys of faculty opinion placing this specialty at the left margin of academic attitudes. We have no particular quarrel with the survey results and know that individual sociologists have on occasion spoken forcefully against the established center of the American political economy. Still, sociology as a profession seems to have fully accepted the expert role and exchanges created long ago by the new social scientists, if organized counter-hegemonic activity is accepted as a fair index. Even if we accept sociology's somewhat self-conscious claim to be the left wing of academia, it is difficult to hear much counter-hegemonic (as opposed to countercultural) flapping going on. Perhaps the matter will be clarified by a more detailed analysis of resources and role for this later period.We would like to re-emphasize that the burden of this paper is the inadequacy of professionalization theory as an explanation for the modern social scientist's role. Although using an exchange framework, one in which disinterested technical expertise is offered in return for a monopoly of knowledge, it fails to explore fully its own implications. The resource demands of intellectual workers dependent on institutions for occupation are not considered; neither is the intent, function, and location of resource suppliers. By pointing to the importance of role resources through locating abstract entities (the profession, the community-at-large) in concrete groups (the leadership of social science organizations, specific groups of resource holders contributing to institutionalizing knowledge), we hope to focus professional attention on the material conditions for role emergence and the way in which complementarity can be negotiated. By continuing this examination of resource transactions surrounding role development, perhaps we will more fully understand the possibilities and limitations of the career structures in which we labor.     

Larregue’s Critique of Cofnas et al. (2017): A Rejoinder

Data from the General Social Survey indicate that conservatives’ self-reported trust in scientists has steadily decreased since 1974. In Cofnas et al. (The American Sociologist, 2017), we suggested that this trend may have been partly driven by the increasing tendency of scientific institutions, and the representatives of such institutions, to distort social science for the sake of liberal activism. Larregue (The American Sociologist, 2017) makes three opposing arguments: (1) It is “very hard” to establish the charge of bias, especially since we did “not state what [we] mean by ‘bias.’” (2) We did not establish a causal relationship between scientists’ (alleged) liberal activism and conservatives’ distrust of science, and we ignored activism by conservative scientists. (3) We were wrong to advocate “affirmative action” for conservatives in academia. We address these arguments in turn: (1) Larregue does not engage with our main arguments that liberal bias exists in social science. (2) In recent years, prominent scientific organizations have, with great publicity, intervened in policy debates, always supporting the liberal side without exception. It is not unreasonable to assume that this would diminish conservatives’ trust in these organizations. Contra Larregue, in Cofnas et al. (The American Sociologist, 2017) we explicitly acknowledged that conservative scientists can also be biased. (3) We never advocated “affirmative action” for conservatives, and in fact we object to such a proposal.     

Ecological metaphors as scientific boundary work: innovation and authority in interwar sociology and biology

The development of human ecology during the interwar period was a significant scientific innovation enabled by the sociological use of biological concepts as tropes for social organization. This examination of the connections between biology and sociology illuminates a process whereby new scientific knowledge is generated, new scientific communities are formed, and individuals become scientists. These relationships were arranged around the negotiable boundaries between the social and the natural in 20th-century science. This process is examined through an analysis of scientific texts, metaphor transaction in science, and mentoring practices that reveal the transmission and bounding of knowledge and authority.     

Attitudes,accounts and impact assessment

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the sociological study of environmental issues. One area in which this is evident is in the application of social scientific methods in social impact assessment (SIA): the study of the anticipated social impact of proposed changes to the environment. This paper addresses one aspect of the debate about appropriate methods for SIA; whether, and how, to include the expressed views and perceptions of those who will be affected. It is argued first that although SIA ostensibly deals with the social effects of projects there is a tendency for assessments to avoid any detailed consideration of the ways in which people are affected. Instead there is an emphasis upon technical and economic considerations. When assessments do attempt to incorporate the perceptions of local people they typically do so through some form of attitude research. However if language is viewed as a form of social action rather than as a detached commentary on reality there are radical implications for the methods traditionally used in SIA to gauge people's views and attitudes. I conclude by outlining an alternative to the traditional practice of viewing peoples' accounts as a repository of their attitudes, arguing that they might be more profitably used to explore how social impacts are socially constructed.