MODERN SCIENCE: Institutionalization of Knowledge and Rationalization of Power

This essay explores the relationship of scientific knowledge to political and economic power. By comparing intellectual production to economic production, the author identifies three preconditions for a knowledge discourse to achieve monopoly domination or hegemony in its market sector or cognitive domain. First, the knowledge discourse must be perceived as specialized; that is, as a unique product or service. Second, it must be credently represented as useful to dominant groups. Finally, it must achieve institutionalization. Ethnographies of scientific discourse and practice, as well as social histories of science, provide data relevant to this model. Such studies reveal the rhetorically constructed character of scientific knowledge, and hence its openness to social and political influence. But these studies also show how scientists strive to standardization; that is, they seek to render their somewhat ad hoc activities in the laboratory into replicable and reputable public accounts. The norms and techniques of this locally created standardization emerged historically, mainly in the form of objectivity and numeracy. These standards in turn serve politically to demarcate legitimate scientists from amateurs and quacks, thereby satisfying the first precondition of the model—that to be successful a knowledge discourse must be perceived as specialized. Cognitive boundaries enabled social boundaries-chiefly the marking of distinctions between disciplines and the organization of their practitioners into professional guilds. Through the creation and enforcement of such distinctions, product identification, market allocation, and oligopolization were secured. These processes also required investment capital to sustain intellectual production. Thus, to institutionalize their disciplines and themselves in research universities and specialized scientific-administrative centers, practitioners sought to demonstrate their utility to potential clients and patrons. Along the way, the disciplines became more instrumentally oriented, their concepts, methods, and topics shaped to conform to the requirements of professionalization and institutionalization. The very language of science also changed in accordance with its new emphases. The close institutionalized affinity of cognitive, political, and economic interests was largely established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The new, institutionalized, scientific knowledge and the new, rationalized, statist and corporate     

Staying the Course: On the Value of Social Studies of Science in Resistance to the “Post‐Truth” Movement

Scientific knowledge has been under attack recently, especially during and from the Trump administration. This article discusses the value of research in social studies of science in relation to scientific practice and post‐truth attacks on science. This literature analyzes the expert work and social values that enter into the production of evidence, the development and testing of methods, and the construction of theoretical and epistemological frames for connecting evidence, methods, and methodologies. Although researchers in this area argue that there are politics in science, this article demonstrates that their analyses of the processes of adjudicating evidence and epistemologies contribute to science. In contrast, post‐truth attacks on scientific expertise exemplify a particular kind of politics aimed at supporting a particular group's political and economic interests.     

INFORMATIZATION AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: A POLITICAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE

In recent years, both academic and policy making circles in the UK have shown a growing interest in the potential uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the delivery of government services. Much of the academic literature has been centred around the concept of 'informatization', and it has been suggested that the new technologies are transforming public services. Key theorists in the field of Public Administration have argued that informatization is one of a number of major trends likely to shape public services in the twenty-first century. However, the dominant theoretical approaches within public administration- those rooted in political sciencesuggest that inertia and stability are the norm in the public sector; clearly there is something of a contradiction between these two broad approaches. This paper outlines three political science perspectives that might be used in analysing informatization: the policy networks approach, rational choice and the new institutionalism. Evidence is then drawn from the social security, health care and social care sectors of the British public sector and related to the political science frameworks in order to examine their utility. Not only do these frameworks rightly highlight the incremental nature of change, but they also help to explain important variations in ICT use across the three policy sectors. It is concluded that combining the study of informatization and political science offers a fruitful avenue for future research.     

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.     

The Social Aspects of Xenotransplantation

Xenotransplantation is a controversial medical science where living animal parts are transplanted into humans. While the literature on xenotransplantation is vast in regards to medical and scientific research, and ethics, it is comparatively lacking in social science. This article examines the literature on the social aspects of xenotransplantation, with a focus on public perception, ontology and identity, meat, knowledge production, animal bodies and scientific knowledge. This demonstrates that the science seeks to stabilise the understandings and social perceptions of xenotransplantation by using natural and cultural arguments, but the public exhibit significant uncertainty and ambiguity. The article concludes by suggesting future directions for the social research on xenotransplantation.     

Political Theories of Low-Wage Work

This article explores the concept of low-wage work in America as presented in the political science literature with the goal of developing a theoretical framework. Based on traditional political theory, contemporary political perspectives, and public opinion, a modern political conceptualization of low-wage work represents a balance between policies that promote work as virtuous and those that present it as a form of social control. This balance is informed by historical notions of work, contemporary issues of racism, the economic realities of single mothers, and public perceptions of welfare and income support measures, such as the federal Earned Income Tax Credit.     

A Snapshot on the Development of Social Work Education in China: A Delphi Study

Social work education in China has now been reinstated for almost two decades, after it was discontinued in the early 1950s. Due to various reasons, so far, there has not been a standardised social work curriculum in China. This article reports on the first empirical study finished in late 2001. Employing a Delphi technique, 47 social work scholars were invited to provide their opinions on the nature of social work in China, the requirements of social work graduates and the social work curriculum at the undergraduate level. The findings indicate that despite the influence of the Western model induced mainly by social work scholars in Hong Kong, social work education in China is moving towards an indigenised model within its unique social–political–cultural context. Respondents tended to adopt an expert model and the ‘helping people to help themselves’ principle. Social work is understood as being instrumental to enhancing the rapid economic changes by employing scientific knowledge and skills to resolve social and personal problems, stabilise society, and enhance social participation. To nurture its graduates with the competence to fulfil these social assignments, a broad‐base of social science knowledge, generic social work skills, special personal qualities and political sensitivity is included in the curriculum.     

Rediscovering the social question

Neoliberal policies not only privatise formerly public services but also focus one-sidedly on discourses of individual autonomy and responsibility. This makes it difficult to raise ‘the social question’ (the question what constitutes social bonds) publicly since market principles are presented as allowing no alternatives. Social work owes its professional origins however to a shift from early capitalist individualism to policies recognising the need for social reconstruction and cohesion. It was mandated to reconcile the key principles of modernity, personal freedom and equality, although its methodology, often corresponding with social policy regimes, interpreted this mandate variably. Attempts in current social work to adjust to the cancellation of the social question through techniques of ‘activation’ and individualised care further the crisis of the project of modernity which manifests itself in a split between heightened public control measures and privatised concerns for ‘care’, thereby altering its core identity. Reflections on social work's historical position within varying political contexts help to promote a renewed critical examination of the profession's political role and highlight the need to turn interventions at the personal level into occasions that affirm social citizenship, ensure rights and promote social equality.     

Commodities in action: measuring embeddedness and imposing values

Recent approaches in political economy look at the effects of technology and social values on economic action. Combining these approaches with those of economic anthropologists, this article poses that the way the economy is instituted can be understood by looking at reasons actors have for participating in actor‐networks of production, distribution and consumption. Using the author's research on American recycling, this article first shows that much of the‘making’or instituting of the economy happens outside the market, through political machinations, contracts and standards. Second, it suggests that these relationships impose value upon goods differently than do market relations. The details of the recycling‘chain’show the ways actors shape the network and demonstrate that the social values that add‘economic value’to goods are not uniform, but are highly contextual. Starting from Mark Granovetter's notion of 'social embeddedness', the article explains that the measure of social embeddedness is not as important as the values imposed upon other actors through social structure in the economy. It calls for a close observation of economic action in the locales within which production takes place to understand better the‘actions‐at‐a‐distance’where the politics of technology, social movements and power create the empirical, instituted economy.     

Framing public policy towards a public health paradigm for gambling

This paper examines the public policy value of looking at gambling from a public health perspective. The manner in which social issues are framed will either expand or curtail public policy debates. The existing and traditional frames for gambling (e.g. gambling as a matter of individual freedom, gambling as a form of recreation) fail to consider research on the social and economic impacts of gambling. Because a public health frame offers a broad viewpoint of society, it encompasses a number of social and economic impacts not considered in traditional frames. However, the existing gambling frames enjoy varying degrees of cultural, economic, and political support and, as a result, creating a higher profile for a public health framework will encounter a number of barriers. Research can play a decisive role in overcoming these barriers, as it has in a number of related fields (e.g., tobacco use, addiction and product liability, the epidemiology of AIDS). The paper concludes that research that identifies and quantifies the public health factors of gambling will substantially contribute to a public shift toward a public health frame.     

Powerlessness of older people in Hong Kong: a political economy analysis

Gerontologists agree that old age can be associated with an increase in powerlessness both in the personal domain and in the social and political fields. This paper is an attempt to understand the concept of powerlessness in old age within a political economy theoretical framework. The paper argues that the powerlessness of older people is not biologically determined. Rather, it is socially constructed. It has its roots in the social, economic, and political structure of society. For this reason, the paper argues that (a) the capitalist economic system discriminates against and marginalizes older people in the labor market. The current unfavorable economic climate will make the economic situation of older people worse. (b) The residual welfare system does not counteract the unfavorable impact of the economic system. Rather, it deprives older people of the necessary financial resources and social service supports that would enable them to lead independent and dignified lives. (c) The authoritarian political system creates adverse conditions that make it very difficult for older people to participate in the decision-making process on issues that affect their lives, as well as on broader political issues that affect the whole of society. It is the interplay among these economic, social, and political forces in Hong Kong that creates the political economy of powerlessness in old age and prevents older people from using their powers to master and control their lives.     

Political Asymmetry and Systems of Information and Social Organization: A Characterization

This article aims to develop a taxonomy and a further definition of the concept of political asymmetry for operationalization into social science research inquiry. On the one hand the article accounts the single main categories to offer a taxonomy of the concept, exposing the semantic context of symmetry and asymmetry, and depicting the idea of the political sphere from a classical Aristotelian tradition as well making use of public political science and philosophy of law. Later on, drawing on contributions of critical constructivism and particularly Habermas communicative action theory, the article depicts how political asymmetry can be found in contemporary social structures at the level of subsystems of administration such as institutions as well as at the level of individual interaction. The question this article aims to address is how political asymmetry can be represented for political science, and how it can be further operationalized for organizational and social research inquiry. The concept of political asymmetry is taken into account since it is often isolated on debates regarding the way in which institutions transforms historically, and how such settings affect normative constructions enacted and developed within contemporary governance structures. On the other hand it aims to reflect about its role over governance practices that avoid to ensure free and enough interaction within political actors with different cultural baggage and normative representations.     

ALIEN-NATION: IMMIGRATION,NATIONAL IDENTITY AND TRANSNATIONALISM

This article examines recent anti-immigration initiatives, like California's Proposition 187, in light of the contemporary processes of economic and political reorganization that seem to have undermined the viability of the nation state (i.e. the globalization of the market economy and the end of the cold war). It argues that anti-immigration discourse works on a symbolic level to recuperate a coherent sense of national identity in response to the social and psychic ‘alien-nation’ caused by the global penetration of capitalism. The study compares two similar yet distinctly different moments of mass immigration- Chinese immigration in the late nineteenth century and ‘illegal’ immigration in the late twentieth- to determine (1) why these mass migrations have elicited legal regulation when others have not, and (2) what might be done to disrupt the re-emergence of a paradigm of legislated exclusion in the current case. It concludes by examining the conditions of possibility for collective political action within a mass-mediated public sphere. Specifically, I ask how resistance to the historical paradigm of legislated exclusion might best be mobilized from within a public sphere dominated by visual media that not only personalize the political, but also exacerbate the inequalities of access to public life endemic to liberal democratic political theory.     

Science and neoliberal globalization: a political sociological approach

The political ideology of neoliberalism is widely recognized as having influenced the organization of national and global economies and public policies since the 1970s. In this article, we examine the relationship between the neoliberal variant of globalization and science. To do so, we develop a framework for sociology of science that emphasizes closer ties among political sociology, the sociology of social movements, and economic and organizational sociology and that draws attention to patterns of increasing and uneven industrial influence amid several countervailing processes. Specifically, we explore three fundamental changes since the 1970s: the advent of the knowledge economy and the increasing interchange between academic and industrial research and development signified by academic capitalism and asymmetric convergence; the increasing prominence of science-based regulation of technology in global trade liberalization, marked by the heightened role of international organizations and the convergence of scientism and neoliberalism; and the epistemic modernization of the relationship between scientists and publics, represented by the proliferation of new institutions of deliberation, participation, activism, enterprise, and social movement mobilization.     

Social Disputes over GMOs: An Overview

This review provides an overview of social research on genetically modified crops (GM crops), also known as genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Academic inquiry on the social disputes over the future of agriculture biotechnology has multiplied since the mid‐1990s, when the first seeds were approved for market commercialization. This essay identifies and describes five prominent analytical approaches to explain public controversies over GMOs: the political economy of food and agriculture, social studies on science, democracy theory, research on corporations and hegemony, and social movement and peasant studies. This overview concludes by arguing that these different strains, although each privileging one analytical dimension and one level of analysis, converge in (i) the definition of the relevant explanatory factors, (ii) in the identification of the various levels of analysis – global, transnational, national and local – involved in the issue and (iii) in the prognostic that social disputes over GMOs are likely to remain a topic of public and scholar interest in the near future.     

'What Matters to Me is not What You're Talking About' - Maintaining the Social Model of Disability in 'Public and Private' Negotiations

Moving from a medical to a social model of individual disability is a political process of change with implications for understanding of and relationship to borders between individual, social life and political participation. This process has echoes in the conceptual experience of change through movement for women's liberation and gay liberation. Conceptualisation of a public/private divide has been identified in both these movements, and can also be used productively to further the use of a social model of disability. In this way, public change in status and participation can be linked to private defeat of barriers to public and political participation. This article identifies some uses of conceptualising public and private as a way of locating service provision within a social model of disability.     

Can a Knowledge Sanctuary also be an Economic Engine? The Marketization of Higher Education as Institutional Boundary Work

Universities, particularly research‐intensive ones, have responded to a variety of external and internal influences by retooling their missions, culture, and organizational structures to generate revenue from market opportunities. This has resulted in the marketization of higher education: organizational practices that blur the boundary between knowledge‐driven and profit‐driven institutions. This blurring has spurred debates and uncertainties over the scope and boundaries of the 21st century university. We argue that these debates spring from institutional boundary work at the intersection of the three main missions of the contemporary academy: knowledge production, student learning, and satisfying the social charter. These missions can sometimes create areas of synergy, but also tensions that are particularly acute where market logics and business‐oriented practices contradict academic values. Within knowledge production, a key dilemma is the extent to which knowledge advancement should aim for transcendence versus revenue generation. Within student learning, the dilemma involves incommensurability between the ideals of democratic citizenship and demonstrable return on investment. Within the social charter mission, the dilemma is over whether the university can serve the public welfare while also facilitating the growth of local and national economies.     

欧美儿童照顾社会政策的发展及借鉴

20世纪70年代以来,儿童照顾问题在西方社会由个体家庭责任演变为普遍的社会需求,被置于国家、市场和家庭关系的政治话语中。面对新的儿童照顾安排需求,欧美国家发展出亲职假、公共儿童照顾服务和经济支持三种途径来重新分配儿童照顾的任务、成本和责任。儿童照顾政策不仅影响妇女的劳动力参与,还与儿童的福利水平高低密切相关。确立照顾权利是公民社会权利的重要组成部分,建构一个由国家、市场、志愿组织和家庭共同提供的"混合照顾"体系,改变照顾工作在家庭内部不平等的性别分工以及把儿童照顾政策作为解决其他社会问题的政策工具都是值得中国借鉴的经验。