Sociological Knowledge and Scientific Knowledge

Some significant insights in relation to science and its claims emerged in early sociology. However, sociologies of knowledge and science remained separate until the late 1960s. Questioning scientific knowledge raised questions about career interests, language, interaction, class and gender in shaping scientific claims. Offering insights, this new sociology tended towards 'epistemological polarisation'. New waves further distanced themselves from the validity claims of 'scientists'. Insulating within a self-referential field of peers, journals, conferences and subdisciplinary norms, epistemological polarisation, emulated natural sciences, but had a marginalising effect. Attention to symmetry in the social study of scientific beliefs, such that social causation of belief is not said to invalidate such belief, was often ignored, and the sociology of scientific knowledge tended towards debunking. This article challenges this spiral and suggests a 'reflexive epistemological diversity' that recognises the value of many forms of explanation, promoting interaction between different explanations, at different levels of causation, and across the divide between natural and social sciences. Recent feminist science studies go furthest in developing this trend. In line with recent developments in the natural sciences, such an approach does not suggest that 'anything goes', yet opens up explanation beyond narrow conceptions of expertise, reductionism and relativism.     

Science,technology, and sexuality: New directions in the study of sexual knowledge

The sociology of sexualities and the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology share many areas of theoretical and empirical interest, yet engagements between the fields have been limited. Work that has spanned both fields has tended to focus on sexuality from a biomedical perspective, neglecting other forms of knowledge production. This paper critically reviews existing areas of convergence between the fields, including measurement and classification, medicalization and risk, reproduction and families, politics and the state, and social movements. I offer suggestions for new avenues of research in these areas in addition to considering how greater theoretical exchange between the two fields could enrich both. I ultimately contend that analyzing forms of social knowledge making—such as law, religion, and the humanities and social sciences—and adopting a broader understanding of STS as method can provide a fresh direction in studying the production and circulation of sexual knowledge.     

American sociology in chaos: Differentiation without integration

American sociology is a chaotic discipline. There is disagreement on foundational issues that give disciplines coherence. For example, sociologist disagree on the appropriateness of a scientific orientation, the role of activism and ideology in inquiry, the best methodologies to employ, the primacy of microversus macro-levels of analysis, the most important topics to study, and many other contentious issues. The recent call for a “public sociology” in which four wings of the discipline—policy (applied), professional (scientific), critical (ideological), and public (civic engagement) sociologies—are to be integrated is less of a remedy for what troubles sociology than an admission that we are a discipline divided (Burawoy, 2005). Among the social sciences, economics is the most coherent, with the other social sciences revealing varying degrees of incoherence or chaos. Sociology is probably the least integrated of the social sciences, although cultural anthropology has increasingly become much like sociology. In this paper, my goal is to offer an explanation for how sociology came to it present state and what, if anything, can be done to integrate the discipline. Let me begin by outlining what makes a discipline coherent. Jonathan H.Turner is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. He is primarily a theorist, and his substantive interests include the history and structure of American sociology. He can be reached at jonathan.turner@ucr.edu.     

The Structure of Scientific Fields and the Allocation of Editorships on Scientific Journals: Some Observations on the Politics of Knowledge*

This study examines editorial appointment patterns in journals representing seven scientific disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, economics, psychology, political science, sociology. Social science editors-in-chief are more likely than physical and natural science editors-in-chief to employ “particularistic” criteria in the selection of editorial appointees. In the social sciences, Columbia and Harvard editors-in-chief are significantly more likely than editors-in-chief with other doctorates to select graduates from Columbia or Harvard when making editorial appointments. In the physical and natural sciences, editors-in-chief with doctorates from schools other than Columbia and Harvard are just as likely as Columbia and Harvard editors-in-chief to select editorial appointees with Columbia or Harvard doctorates. The findings suggest that since consensus on basic paradigms does not exist in the social sciences, positions of influence are awarded and achieved on much more “particularistic” criteria than those for the physical and natural sciences.     

Editorial

Abstract

The last century has been significant in terms of the development of the social sciences. Thus for instance, sociology, social psychology, politics, education and management have all taken their own pathways to reach some level of maturity. The relatively new addition to this group is, of course, management and its associated organisational theory that arose with Taylor at the turn of the nineteenth century. He pioneered the scientific movement and argued that management should be based on well-recognised, clearly defined and fixed principles, instead of depending on more or less hazy ideas. However, it seems that a management science has only in recent decades become substantive and rich enough to be able to think in the same terms as other branches of the social sciences. It has been enriched by the other social sciences through a process that I refer to as knowledge migration, a process in which knowledge that applies to one scientific area is migrated across to another in a way that validly transforms it to its new context. Thus, knowledge that takes a particular meaning in one of these sciences may end up with a quite different, though thematically related, meaning in another. Whenever a concept is shifted in a valid way from one paradigm that underpins a particular theory in one area of social science to another, the knowledge is migrated rather than transferred.     

A CRITIQUE OF METHODOLOGICAL REASON

In this essay, we argue that, following their perception of practices in the natural sciences the social sciences have reified methodology, making it the chief imperative of social investigation and using it to ground their knowledge claims. We find this to be the case even in the work of social scientists who try to overcome or reject the dominant positivist paradigm. We argue that this obsession with method has led the social sciences to abandon thinking-beyond-the-given in favor of small, specialized studies whose justification is no longer substantive but methodology driven. After a review of the history of the role of method in traditional philosophies of science, the essay turns to the work of recent critics of social science who have become increasingly dissatisfied with modeling the social sciences after the natural ones. We distinguish between a hermeneutic and phenomenological critique of positivism, both of which, we argue, end up reproducing the scientism they reject. We identify this problem in our careful readings of some of the most influential critics of Popperian scientific philosophy. In the final section, we distinguish between contemporary social science, situated in what we term the epistemological paradigm, and our own critical science, stemming from an alternate, ontohistorical tradition in the history of ideas. Here, we begin to lay out what a critical, nonmethodology-driven, reflective and historical science might look like.     

Knowledge,boundaries, and bodies: Social construction between medical sociology and science and technology studies

Medical sociology and science and technology studies (STS) emerged from different positions, but often closely related concerns, within the broad discipline of sociology. Their interface and areas of overlap have mostly been shaped by theoretical positions broadly considered “social constructionist.” Taken together, these perspectives provide empirical and theoretical tools to analyze important questions about how social inequalities, forms of scientific knowledge, and patterns of human health come to be produced and feedback into one another. Examining their intersection enables sociological questions such as: How is medical and public health scientific knowledge produced, stabilized, and taken as fact? How are scientific facts about health and illness used, experienced, and challenged? What is the relationship between health inequalities and public health or medical knowledge? This article seeks to briefly trace the important contributions that social constructionist research has made at the interstices of medical sociology and STS, further clarifying the history, points of intersection, and areas of diversion between them. The current COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled the political struggles that constitute public health scientific knowledge and circulation. The interface between STS and medical sociology can help us to make sense of the interrelationships between politics, power inequalities, and public health scientific knowledge.     

Sur le langage et l’écriture en sociologie Brèves considérations théoriques et pratiques à partir de Bourdieu

After showing that language and writing are used as basic resources in sociology, this article seeks to identify issues raised by writing in sociology to produce the knowledge expected of this discipline as other social sciences. After considering the status of sociological knowledge and use of language that this knowledge requires, the article seeks to define the rules to be followed by sociologists in order to explain what it means in science. The arguments presented here differ from those developed in some post-modern theories, according to which sociology is after all only a matter of language, and sociologists are authors like novelists. The article is based on considerations developed in particular by Pierre Bourdieu.     

The discovery of participatory research as a new scientific paradigm: Personal and intellectual accounts

The article presents considerations for the placing of participatory research in the practice of sociology. The changing conditions in contemporary society have compelled social scientists to rethink the way social theory has been conceptualized and has been practiced in relation to social change. Modernist social theory, of which sociology is a prime example, has been imbued with the biases of the Enlightenment that privilege the essentialized male rational actor set above the ordinary people. As a consequence it has produced narratives and practices that are not in the interest of the people, especially those who have been dominated and oppressed. In order to live up to the potential of sociology as a vehicle for the improvement of social conditions, it must include the interest and the wisdom of the people in its researching and theorizing activities. It is argued that participatory research provides an opportunity to follow this course in sociology. Participatory research, it is contended, will lead to a paradigm shift in the social sciences because it is based on an expanded conception of knowledge and because it changes the relationship between the researcher and the researched and between theory and practice. Arguments are drawn from the history of science, critical theory, and postmodernist and feminist critiques. Peter Park is currently on the faculty of the Fielding Institute.     

Subjectivity in Feminist Science and Technology Studies: Implications and Applications for Sociological Research

Feminist science and technology studies calls the researcher to reconsider subjectivity in three ways. First, who or what has subjectivity? Second, is subjectivity a property of an individual being with sentience, or is it a more diffuse process? Third, who or what acts in meaningful ways to impact social relations (and are thus worthy of sociological study)? According to feminist STS, the conferral of subjectivity has been nationalized, racialized, and sexualized, and the influence of non‐human life and non‐living matter has been underemphasized. We suggest that sociological research could benefit from a more expansive understanding of subjectivity and a more interactive (or “entangled”) notion of social–material relations. Human relations and action need not just be considered in the context of the human and social but can also be considered in relation to the non‐human and material. To make the implications of feminist STS more concrete, we offer specific applications of feminist STS methodologies across a range of sociological methods and topics.     

The cultural specificity of sociological practices; the case of max Horkheimer's institut für sozialforschung in Weimar‐Germany and the United States

In this article it is argued that the cultural identity of sociology cannot be fully explained in terms of national identity or of certain characteristics inherent in the nature of social sciences (e.g. its methods or methodology), but in terms of how sociological insights are related to various social practices. To illustrate this point, the case of the ‘classical’ Frankfurt School of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno is discussed: in order to understand the contradicting ways in which Horkheimer and Adorno appreciate the role of science and liberal democracy in their philosophical and scientific work of the 1940s, one should take into account that these activities are located in different political and scientific contexts. These contexts are characterized by different ‘linkages’ of social theory with social practice. Exploring these linkages makes it possible to understand the ‘broken’ identity of the Frankfurt School, exemplified in an intellectual double‐life in which professionalism and marginality co‐existed. This identity, it is argued, is more characteristic of classical critical theory than the anti‐positivism and post‐modemism‐avant‐la‐lettre they are usually remembered by.     

Sociology as a vocation

During the 1950s, when sociology modeled itself on the natural sciences, the vocational ideals that shaped the profession were also modeled on the natural sciences; objectivity, peer review, and other such ideals were linked to the epistemological assumption that reality existed out there in the world to be discovered by the techniques of science. With postmodern and other similar philosophical challenges in the air, it is no longer possible to believe that the relationship between reality and its representations is so uncomplicated. But what do these new epistemologies have to say about professional conduct? This paper argues that it would be a mistake to practice the deconstruction one preaches. Epistemological skepticism, far from leading to an attitude toward professional conduct that “anything goes,” requires an ever-greater belief in professional responsibility.     

Bourdieu's distinction between philosophical and sociological approaches to Science Studies*

Sociological inquiry into the natural sciences has shown that they are contingent, social constructions. However, Science Studies research has been obstructed by epistemological conflicts about the nature of science and theoretical perspectives upon studying it. Bourdieu's sociology of science is under‐utilized in this field, as he addresses these obstructions and offers a way forward. Bourdieu argues that researchers have failed to distinguish between sociological and philosophical approaches in social science, thus committing the ‘scholastic fallacy’. In conjunction with this fallacy, the logic of the Science Studies field produces a tendency towards disciplinary confusion, philosophical radicalization, and crisis. These patterns were expressed in the ‘science wars’. The field has followed a philosophical path rather than a sociological one, and its progress has been obstructed. While some of Bourdieu's philosophical arguments remain problematic, his reflexive sociology allows us to differentiate philosophical from sociological approaches, providing an alternative direction for Science Studies.     

A view from above: The evolving sociological landscape

How has sociology evolved over the last 40 years? In this paper, we examine networks built on thousands of sociology-relevant papers to map sociology’s position in the wider social sciences and identify changes in the most prominent research fronts in the discipline. We find first that sociology seems to have traded centrality in the field of social sciences for internal cohesion: sociology is central, but not nearly as well bounded as neighboring disciplines such as economics or law. Internally, sociology appears to have moved away from research topics associated with fundamental social processes and toward social-problems research. We end by discussing strategies for extending this work to wider science production networks.     

Interface methods: renegotiating relations between digital social research,STS and sociology

This paper introduces a distinctive approach to methods development in digital social research called ‘interface methods’. We begin by discussing various methodological confluences between digital media, social studies of science and technology (STS) and sociology. Some authors have posited significant overlap between, on the one hand, sociological and STS concepts, and on the other hand, the ontologies of digital media. Others have emphasized the significant differences between prominent methods built into digital media and those of STS and sociology. This paper advocates a third approach, one that (a) highlights the dynamism and relative under‐determinacy of digital methods, and (b) affirms that multiple methodological traditions intersect in digital devices and research. We argue that these two circumstances enable a distinctive approach to methodology in digital social research – thinking methods as ‘interface methods’ – and the paper contextualizes this approach in two different ways. First, we show how the proliferation of online data tools or ‘digital analytics’ opens up distinctive opportunities for critical and creative engagement with methods development at the intersection of sociology, STS and digital research. Second, we discuss a digital research project in which we investigated a specific ‘interface method’, namely co‐occurrence analysis. In this digital pilot study we implemented this method in a critical and creative way to analyse and visualize ‘issue dynamics’ in the area of climate change on Twitter. We evaluate this project in the light of our principal objective, which was to test the possibilities for the modification of methods through experimental implementation and interfacing of various methodological traditions. To conclude, we discuss a major obstacle to the development of ‘interface methods’: digital media are marked by particular quantitative dynamics that seem adverse to some of the methodological commitments of sociology and STS. To address this, we argue in favour of a methodological approach in digital social research that affirms its maladjustment to the research methods that are prevalent in the medium.     

Social acceleration and the network effect: a defence of social ‘science fiction’ and network determinism

This essay is a response to Judy Wajcman's essay ‘Life in the fast lane? Towards a sociology of technology and time’ (2008: 59–77). In that article Wajcman argued that recent developments in the sociology of temporal change had been marked by a tendency in social theory towards a form of ‘science fiction’– a sociological theorizing, she maintains, that bears no real relation to actual, empirically provable developments in the field and should therefore be viewed as not contributing to ‘a richer analysis of the relationship between technology and time’ (2008: 61). This reply argues that as Wajcman suggests in her essay, there is indeed an ‘urgent need for increased dialogue to connect social theory with detailed empirical studies’ (2008: 59) but that the most fruitful way to proceed would not be through a constraining of ‘science fiction’ social theorizing but, rather, through its expansion – and more, that ‘science fiction’ should take the lead in the process. This essay suggests that the connection between social theory and empirical studies would be strengthened by a wider understanding of the function of knowledge and research in the context of what is termed ‘true originality’ and ‘routine originality’. The former is the domain of social theory and the latter resides within traditional sociological disciplines. It is argued that both need each other to advance our understanding of society, especially in the context of the fast‐changing processes of technological development. The example of ‘technological determinism’ is discussed as illustrative of how ‘routine originality’ can harden into dogma without the application of ‘true originality’ to continually question (sometimes through ideas that may appear to border on ‘science fiction’) comfortable assumptions that may have become ‘routine’ and shorn of their initial ‘originality’.     

Promoting innovation based on social sciences and technologies: the prospect of a social innovation park

Obviously Sir Francis Bacon's phrase “Knowledge is Power” refers not only to natural science and technology, aiming at understanding natural phenomena and obtaining material wealth, but also to social sciences and technologies, concerning social ideals and seeking harmonious and sustainable development in society. Innovation and entrepreneurship based on natural sciences and technologies have facilitated science and technology parks in the past; however, innovation and entrepreneurship based on social sciences and technologies are now laying the foundations for the concept of a “social innovation park”. The distinctive characteristics of social innovation parks and how social academic entrepreneurship is fostered by them through strategy and policy-making at local, national and global levels are explored in this study.     

Dreams of Pure Sociology

Unlike older sciences such as physics and biology, sociology has never had a revolution. Modern sociology is still classical—largely psychological, teleological, and individualistic—and even less scientific than classical sociology. But pure sociology is different: It predicts and explains the behavior of social life with its location and direction in social space—its geometry. Here I illustrate pure sociology with formulations about the behavior of ideas, including a theory of scienticity that predicts and explains the degree to which an idea is likely to be scientific (testable, general, simple, valid, and original). For example: Scienticity is a curvilinear function of social distance from the subject. This formulation explains numerous facts about the history and practice of science, such as why some sciences evolved earlier and faster than others and why so much sociology is so unscientific. Because scientific theory is the most scientific science, the theory of scienticity also implies a theory of theory and a methodology for the development of theory.     

Pierre Bourdieu: theorizing the digital

ABSTRACT

Pierre Bourdieu is known for his research in the areas of education and cultural stratification that led to a number of theoretical contributions informing the social sciences. Bourdieu’s interrelated concepts of field, capital, and habitus have become central in many approaches to inequality and stratification across the social sciences. In addition, we argue that Bourdieu’s ideas also feature in what is increasingly known as ‘digital sociology.’ To underscore this claim, we explore the ways in which Bourdieu’s ideas continue to have a major impact on social science research both on and with digital and Internet-based technologies. To do so, we offer a review of both Bourdieusian theorizing of the digital vis-à-vis both research on the social impacts of digital communication technologies and the application of digital technologies to social science research methods. We contend that three interconnected features of Bourdieu’s sociology have allowed his approach to flourish in the digital age: (1) his theories’ inseparability from the practice of empirical research; (2) his ontological stance combining realism and social constructionism; and (3) his familiarity with concepts developed in other disciplines and participation in interdisciplinary collaborative projects. We not only reason that these three factors go some way in accounting for Bourdieu’s influence in many sociological subfields, but we also suggest that they have been especially successful in positioning Bourdieusian sociology to take advantage of opportunities associated with digital communication technologies.     

Beyond deference and demystification in the sociology of science and technology: A reply to Otero

A response to Otero's criticism of the thesis of the nonrevolutionary character of biotechnology is developed within a larger consideration of the relatively small amount of attention high technologies have received within the sociology of science. It is argued that the new sociology of science of the past decade has been a major advance on midcentury functionalist perspectives that took an essentialist, deferential view toward science. The new sociology of science, based on the demystification of science through a relativist view of scientific knowledge production, is nonetheless limited in several respects in its applicability to contemporary issues relating to high technologies. Otero's criticisms are considered in the light of the continuing need for uniting the sociology of science and sociology of technology, and for developing a perspective on science and technology that avoids both uncritical deference and excessive relativization of these forces for social change.