Development, Diversity, and Conflict in the Sociology of ScienceAuthor(s): Randall Collins and Sal RestivoSource: The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 185-200Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Midwest Sociological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4106228Accessed: 10/06/2009 06:18

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The Sociological Quarterly 24 (Spring, 1983):185-200

Development, Diversity, and Conflict in the Sociology of Science*

Randall Collins, San Diego, California Sal Restivo, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The sociology of science has undergone considerable growth and diversification in recent years. Early sociology of science was developed within philosophical debates regarding the nature of science and the social bases of knowledge in general. Karl Mannheim and Max Scheler in the 1920s gave these discussions a specifically socio- logical bent. In the 1930s, the theme was made into an explicit sociology of science both by Marxists and by the functionalist Robert Merton, and both approaches were followed up during the next 30 years. The takeoff of the sociology of science into a flourishing research area occurred in the early 1960s, with the publication of works by Derek Price and by Thomas Kuhn, as well as important studies by Joseph Ben- David and by Warren Hagstrom. In the 1970s, sociology of science burgeoned into a variety of approaches: citation and network studies, conflict theory, social construc- tivism, ethnomethologically-influenced studies of laboratory life, and others. The ide- alized functionalist image of science has largely given way to more critical, relativ- ist, and highly empirical approaches to science.

Just ten years ago, the sociology of science was dominated by and virtually synonymous with "the Mertonian paradigm." Today, it is part of an interdisci- plinary field called "social studies of science" (Spiegel-Rising and Price, 1977). Some of the newer research specialties in the field include ethnographic studies (Knorr, 1981a), discourse analysis (Mulkay, 1980), the study of "rejected knowledge" (Wallis, 1979), relativistic studies of modern natural science (Col- lins, 1981), and ethnomethodology and science (Woolgar, 1981). Citation and network analyses of specialties, sample surveys of various disciplines, and studies in the comparative history of science and mathematics are also in progress. Heated debates have emerged over philosophical and metatheoretical issues. Sig- nificant, though still modest, advances are being made by theorists. The ties be- tween sociology of science and science policy, reflected in works as ideologically distinct and separated in time as J. D. Bernal's (1939) The Social Functions of Science and D. K. Price's (1965) The Scientific Estate, are being refashioned and strengthened. Radical science studies (see, for example, Radical Science Journal), cognitive studies, sociology of mathematics, and the reunification of sociology of science and sociology of knowledge are other important features of the contemporary scene. There are no signs that a unified "paradigm" is emerg- ing that will bring "order" to the field. Rather, diversity and conflict are indica- tors of intellectual vitality and keys to future developments in the sociology of science.

Our objective in this paper is to briefly sketch the development of the sociology of science and to describe some of the major areas of research and theory being cultivated today. The history of the sociology of science from about 1850 to

?1983 by The Sociological Quarterly. All rights reserved. 0038-0253/83/1300-0185$00.75 * Randall Collins' address is 4243 Altamirano Way, San Diego, California 92103.

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1940 is inextricably linked to the development of the sociology of knowledge and philosophical debates about the nature of science. The field grew steadily, but slowly, from 1940 to 1960. A specifically sociological research tradition crys- tallized in the early 1960s. By 1970, the Mertonian hegemony was being chal- lenged by programmatic alternatives that soon blossomed into active research programs. Our review follows this rough sequence of "stages" in the develop- ment of the sociology of science: we begin by examining the period of emergence and growth from 1850 to 1960, then describe the "takeoff" of the field in the 1960s, and conclude with a discussion of diversity and conflict during the past decade.

Emergence and Growth: Positivism, Marxism, and Functionalism The term positivist, interpreted broadly, identifies scientists and students of sci- ence who claim that scientific facts (1) are about the real external world, (2) are mediated only to some extent by noninductive logical and mathematical forms of knowledge, and (3) are not, in any significant sense, dependent on or reflections of social realities. Early forms of opposition to positivism are found in the idealist philosophies of Kant and Hegel. Kant, however, was intent on establishing a sound foundation for empirical science by identifying a priori cate- gories of understanding. He imagined that this would give scientific laws the same sort of certainty he associated with mathematics. Hegel, on the other hand, was one of the first major philosophers to express open hostility to modern sci- ence. He depicted the scientific world view as an alienation of the Spirit from its true self. His historically oriented critique opened the way for Marx's materialist argument that ideas are socially determined. Marx (Marx and Engels, 1846/ 1946:39-41) viewed the ideas of an epoch as consequences of the organization of the means of intellectual production. Although he (along with Engels) helped found the sociology of knowledge, his only extended study of a knowledge system was his conceptual analysis of calculus (Marx, 1974). His remarks on the ma- terial bases of knowledge were primarily aimed at showing how ideas function as political ideologies.

It is interesting to note that Max Weber (1920/1946) discussed modern sci- ence in materialist terms in his essay, "Science as a Vocation." This essay focuses on the shifts in early twentieth century German academic life caused by the cen- tralization and monopolization of laboratory equipment. The promise of this type of materialist sociology of science has not yet been fully realized. It suggests looking at the actual machinery of intellectual production-parchment, printing presses, microscopes, cyclotrons, biochemical laboratories, and so on-and at the organizational forms and property relations associated with it. The explana- tory objective is to (1) show that certain material and organizational conditions can be expected to produce certain ideas (or types of ideas) and (2) reveal the historical patterns of change in the means of intellectual production.

This aspect of Marxism has not been as influential in the sociology of science as the idea that forms of knowledge are direct reflections of economic organiza- tions or the interests and outlooks of particular social classes. Recent Marxist- oriented sociology of science has continued to stress this approach. Sohn-Rethel (1978), for example, attributes the rise of ancient Greek mathematics to the de-

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velopment of a monetary economy in Ionian society. Habermas (1971) similarly interprets modern science and technology as part of the ideological sphere of class domination. Such arguments have a tendency to adulterate materialism with idealism. That is, the ideas associated with certain economic activities or class interests come to be viewed as the major influences on or causes of scientific ideas. One reason for the popularity of this form of argument may be that it is relatively simple and cheap. It can be made independent of empirical verification and comparative historical evidence. One can simply fit an interpretation onto an historical epoch because it "makes sense" intellectually to do so.

Max Scheler (1925) and Karl Mannheim (1929/1936) were among the first scholars in the post-World War I period to take up the idea that knowledge re- flects social structure. Neither was a Marxist, but both were influenced by an intellectual atmosphere in which Marxism had recently and rapidly achieved con- siderable prominence. Mannheim in particular addressed the relativistic implica- tions of the Marxist argument elegantly articulated by Lukacs (1923/1971): the Mannheimian problem involved associating degrees of false consciousness with different social classes. Mannheim viewed all political ideas, including those of the Marxists, as class phenomena. If an objective approach to truth was possi- ble, it had to be rooted in a specific social foundation. For Mannheim, objective truth was the peculiar product of the "free floating intelligentsia."

Lukacs, Scheler, and Mannheim were not specifically interested in science; their work reflected the development of the sociology of knowledge rather than the sociology of science. Another product of their intellectual milieu, Oswald Spengler (1918/1926, 1922/1928), did treat science and mathematics as cul- turally related outgrowths of the historical ethos ("soul") of each civilization. But he had little influence on the emerging sociology of knowledge, in part be- cause he did not link ideas to specific social classes or institutions.

Mannheim actually exempted science and mathematics from sociological ex- planation. The distinction he made between social or political ideas and scientific ideas may well have derived from the traditional assumption (Platonic and Kantian) that mathematics is a self-evident exemplar of pure knowledge. Em- pirical knowledge, by contrast, was considered to be subject to the problems of induction.

But only a couple of years after Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia appeared in 1929, the Marxists counterattacked by intruding on the sacrosanct territory of science itself. Boris Hessen (1931), a member of the Soviet delegation to the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology held in London in 1931, presented a paper on the social, economic, and technological foundations of Newton's Principia. Hessen returned to Stalin's Russia and was never heard from again. But an "invisible college" of British scientists carried on the program for a socialistic reconstruction of science and the sociology of sci- ence (Bernal, 1939). Similar ideas were defended in the United States by the Columbia sociologist Bernard Stern.

It is possible to argue that the sociology of science had "emerged" by the early 1930s. But the more familiar, and academically successful, conventional sociol- ogy of science actually is rooted in subsequent responses to the Marxist threat to the purity of science. Among philosophers, one reaction was to promote positiv- ism all the more vehemently. Karl Popper (1934/1959) linked his falsifiability

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thesis to an attack on the manifestly unscientific "extremisms" of his day (includ- ing Marxism). The history of science was coming to life and to the aid of science, guided by George Sarton at Harvard and Lynn Thorndike at Columbia.

It was in this atmosphere that Robert Merton began his graduate studies at Harvard. There, under the influence of Sorokin, Sarton, Parsons and others, Merton began his work in the sociology of science. During this period, he began to disengage himself from leftist political influences that had affected his earlier intellectual growth. In his 1935 doctoral dissertation, Merton (1938, 1970) em- phasized the famous thesis that the development of modern science was facili- tated by the Puritan ethos, rather than the commercial ethos of the rising bour- geoisie. The anti-Marxist theme here, as in Weber's original study of capitalism and the Protestant ethic, is obvious. But there is some commonality between the Marxist and the Merton/Weber theses. Both stress "external influence": science reflects or is facilitated by the interests or ethos of "outsiders." The difference between the two theses is that they identify capitalists in one case and Puritans in the other as the "external influence."

The conflicts between Marxism and functionalism, and other ideological strug- gles characteristic of the later history of the sociology of science, are already visible in the 1930s. But empirical research on the subject remained at a premium during the following twenty years.

Merton's pioneering efforts were followed up in the early 1950s by Bernard Barber (1952) and Talcott Parsons (1951). Both accounts idealized science and scientists. In his 1959 presidential address to the American Sociological As- sociation, Merton (1959) turned the sociology of science in a more empirical direction by focusing attention on some of the paradoxical aspects of science, notably multiple discoveries and priority disputes. The theme of multiple discov- eries was not new in sociology; Ogburn, for example, had discussed it in the early 1920s (and scientists and historians of science had remarked on it even earlier). But Merton's aim was not merely to demonstrate supra-individual patterns in sci- entific discovery. (In any case, such patterns might be attributed to the sheer logic of the development of ideas rather than to social factors). Rather, he wanted to show that behavior that could be considered selfish and individual- istic-priority struggles, for example-represented a disinterested defense by the institution of science of the value it assigns to originality.

The functionalists have consistently defended science against charges of unfair- ness or inefficiency. In his essay on the "Matthew effect," for example, Merton (1968) claimed that any inequities on the individual level (where the achieve- ments of established scientists are more readily recognized than those of obscure scientists) are compensated for by the gains to science as a whole that results from keeping research well organized around clearly defined goals. His students

Stephen and Jonathan Cole (1973) have argued that the reward system in sci- ence is consistent with the achievements of individual scientists. They have also defended the peer review system in American science (Cole, Rubin, and Cole, 1978; for a counterattack see Chubin (1982). Most recently, Jonathan Cole (1979) has argued in Fair Science that merit, not discrimination, accounts for the inequalities that give men a decided advantage over women in science.

This sort of sociology is guided by a static conception of and commitment to

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science as a social institution, and is not conducive to theory building. Generat- ing theories would require comparing different types of scientific work and insti- tutions and the conditions under which they emerge, grow, change, and disappear.

Functionalist sociology of science steers clear of any implication that scientific knowledge itself can be explained sociologically. (This may be part of the legacy of combatting Marxism and various relativisms in the period between the two World Wars.) It is, in any case, a sociology of science that does not linger on the human face of science; rather, it uncritically affirms modern science as the standard for objective inquiry. In consort with orthodox history and philosophy of science, it tends to function as an ideology, even an apology, for science as it is, with all its social trappings.

While Merton and other functionalist sociologists were establishing their in- tellectual dominance in United States academia during the 1940s and 1950s, Marxist scholarship neither declined nor deteriorated. This period witnessed the publication of Benjamin Farrington's (1953) analysis of science in ancient Greece, and Dirk Struik's (1942) pioneering essays on the sociology of mathe- matics. In 1954, Joseph Needham published the first volume of his monumental Science and Civilization in China, a project that is still in progress. There is a great deal of detailed historiography in Needham's work of considerable impor- tance to sociologists of science, because Needham considers social conditions to be responsible both for the early prominence of China in many areas of science and technology and its subsequent displacement on the international scene by the European development of "world science" (Needham, 1954ff.). (For a criti- cal appraisal of Needham's work written especially for sociologists, see Restivo, 1979). This type of comparative civilization analysis of science has been further developed by sociologists such as Karp and Restivo (1974) and Restivo and Collins (1982).

We cannot conclude our discussion of this period without mentioning the work of Edgar Zilsel. Zilsel (1941) argued that it was possible to sociologically ex- plain the West's "Scientific Revolution." In particular, he stressed the significance of linking the previously separated roles of the scholar and the artisan.

The Take-Off in the Sociology of Science Two "outsiders" played crucial roles in stimulating the takeoff of the sociology of science in the 1960's: Derek Price, author of Science Since Babylon (1961), and Little Science, Big Science (1963), and Thomas Kuhn, whose The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appeared in 1962. Price and Kuhn were trained as physi- cal scientists but made their careers in the history of science. Price's goal was to move beyond the conventional history of science to a "science of science" that would generate laws of scientific growth. His pioneering efforts in quantitative history led him to propose an exponential model for long-term scientific growth and to issue warnings about the "saturation" of "Big Science." He also showed that there are different growth patterns in scientific and technological literatures. He attributed publication structures to underlying social networks he called (adopting Robert Boyle's term) "invisible colleges."

Price also analyzed citation patterns, and showed that articles in different dis-

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ciplines have different "half-lives." Some disciplines are tightly clustered around a rapidly moving research front; others continually recite their classics. Citations also reveal clusters of interrelated researchers; they indicate, for example, that the network patterns for the sciences and for technological fields are quite distinct.

Citation analysis has become an industry. New techniques have been invented; co-citation analysis, for example, has been used to study competition and the suc- cession of dominant schools in various disciplines (Small and Griffith, 1974; Sul- livan et al., 1977). Citation methods have not yet produced generalizations of the sort envisioned by Price in his program for a science of science. Such gen- eralizations, however, might be generated if citation analysis can be better inte- grated with other approaches (Cozzens, 1981). Inevitably, the citation industry has provoked attacks and counterattacks (Porter, 1977; Edge, 1979; Morman, 1980).

Price's work has provided sociologists of science with techniques for empiri- cally and quantitatively studying trends and variations in science. His concept of invisible colleges has also stimulated some research. Diana Crane (1972), for example, identified invisible colleges of scientists in various disciplines. Ben- David and Collins (1966) used a related method-tracing master-pupil chains- to analyze the social conditions behind the development of experimental psychol- ogy. Mullins (1968, 1972) identified the network structure underlying the mo- lecular biology revolution of the 1950s, and later proposed a structural model of the transformations in network structure that coincide with different stages of sci- entific revolutions (Griffith and Mullins, 1972; Mullins, 1973). Mullins' model synthesizes elements from Price, Ben-David and Collins, and Kuhn.

Kuhn is undoubtedly the best known "external influence" on the post-1960 sociology of science. His model of scientific change is widely known, and his terms "paradigm" and "paradigm revolution" have entered the common aca- demic vocabulary. Some of his popularity probably stems from the reawakening of the Left in science and politics in the 1960s and early 1970s. His work was interpreted by some readers as an indictment of science as a fundamentally con- servative institution whose resources were mainly devoted to defending arbitrary paradigms. Furthermore, Kuhn seemed to show that conservatism in science could occasionally be broken down by "scientific revolutions." But Kuhn (1970: 174-210) has not been favorably disposed to leftist and relativistic interpreta- tions of his work. In his most recent work, he (1978) has left behind any preten- sions to sociological history and returned to traditional historiography.

Kuhn's influence was greatest, initially, among British sociologists of science.

Barry Barnes was, and continues to be, one of the strongest advocates of Kuhn's work as a point of departure for a non-Mertonian sociology of scientific knowl-

edge. But he writes about Kuhn with a zeal that subordinates critical exegesis to

hagiography (Barnes, 1982). It requires a Procrustean effort to press Kuhn into service in the struggle against Merton. Kuhn is not only a Mertonian, but he is a Mertonian sans sociology. One of the few students of science who seems to have recognized this is Mary Hesse (1980:32).

For Kuhn, like Merton, paradigm consensus is necessary for sustaining sci- ence. The paradigm Establishment is like a benevolent oligarchy that maintains

The Sociology of Science 191

order to insure progress. When paradigms break down, it is due to the accumu- lation of empirical anomalies rather than to social causes. Kuhn views science as a well-functioning institution, albeit one characterized by a "jumping pattern" of lags and revolutions in which theory eventually catches up with empirical find- ings. Kuhn gives us a portrait of science that leaves out or whitewashes such fea- tures as elitism, the long-term dysfunctions of institutional and organizational rigidity, social control over creativity, and the human consequences of scientific progress. As Restivo (1982) has pointed out, there is a "myth of the Kuhnian revolution in the sociology of science."

A debate has emerged between followers of Kuhn and Popper over the extent to which Kuhn shows that the actual process of science is independent of empiri- cal falsification. Lakatos, Feyerabend, and others have questioned the unity of the different dimensions of "paradigm" which Kuhn articulated and have argued that science is actually a battleground of competing paradigms (Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970). Few sociologists have taken up Kuhn's ideas and subjected them to empirical tests. Our own research indicates that the patterns of change in mathematics are substantially different from those identified by Kuhn and rooted in paradigm conservatism (Collins and Restivo, 1983). Kuhn's own exam- ples of scientific revolutions are open to alternative interpretations. The empirical flaws in Ptolemaic astronomy, for example, were well-known for centuries be- fore Copernicus, and can hardly be said to have finally accumulated to an un- bearable point. Collins' (1979) model of intellectual change, which allows room for only a limited number of major positions in a given intellectual arena, draws attention to the rearrangements in the institutional and political foundations of the European intellectual world in the early 1500s. New sources of external sup- port provided opportunities for strengthening new, weak, or peripheral intellec- tual factions. The Aristotelian-Ptolemaic orthodoxy of the late medieval univer- sities became vulnerable to displacement. It was in this setting of competing world pictures that the Copernican model was proposed and won acceptance.

Two further developments in the 1960s fostered the emergence of the sociol- ogy of science as a discipline in its own right. Joseph Ben-David launched the comparative historical study of science as a social institution. For Ben-David, the social bases of science are not located so much in the surrounding society as in the places where scientists work. Immediate roles and institutions influence the amount and type of scientific creations. Thus Ben-David (1960a) showed how innovations such as Freud's psychoanalysis and Pasteur's bacteriology were the results of "role hybrids" that developed when career pressures pushed scien- tists from high-status research roles into low-status practical roles. Ben-David and Collins (1966) later demonstrated that patterns of vacancies in a stagnant academic field (philosophy) combined with a shortage of positions for scientists in the new, highly competitive field of psychology led to career migrations that created experimental psychology in the nineteenth-century German universities. Political and organizational vicissitudes affecting the number of university posi- tions in various specialties have been crucial factors in determining where scien- tific production is going to occur in different times and places (Ben-David, 1960b; Ben-David and Zloczower, 1962). Ben-David (1971) went on to give a full-scale, but highly compressed, overview of the historical variations in scien-

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tific roles over the past two thousand years. Some theoretical generalizations based on the historical, institutional studies of Ben-David and others have been formulated by Collins (1975:470-523).

A second important research tradition was established by Warren Hagstrom's The Scientific Community (1965). Hagstrom used a variety of methods, espe- cially in-depth interviews, to produce a description and theory of the actual be- havior of scientists in various fields. He (1) showed that competition was an im- portant correlate of originality, (2) illustrated patterns of information exchange and recognition, and (3) pointed out the pathologies of secretiveness and frag- mented communication that can arise in science. In spite of some methodological and conceptual limitations, Hagstrom's study produced the first general sociolog- ical theory of the scientific community; other works before and since generally concentrated on specific areas of science.

A number of later scholars were influenced to varying degrees by Hagstrom's work. One was Lowell Hargens (1975), who did an analysis of organizational differences among scientific disciplines. Another was Jerry Gaston (1973), who studied competition and recognition among theorists and experimentalists in the British high-energy physics community. There is some theoretical convergence between these works and the studies by Ben-David. They show the influence of the amount of competition and of patterns of recognition on the rates and types of scientific production in different fields. The theoretical limitations of these studies can be traced to their authors' uncritical views of science as the "best" mode of inquiry and a well-functioning social system.

Hagstrom's theoretical model drew to a certain extent on Marcel Mauss' (1925/1967) analysis of gift-exchange networks in primitive societies. Mauss, of course, was part of a classical tradition in sociology established by Emile Durkheim. Durkheim and Mauss (1903/1963; Durkheim, 1913/1954) initiated an independent tradition in the sociology of knowledge by attempting to show that ideas in primitive societies arise from and reflect social structures. This line of analysis remained isolated, for the most part, from the philosophical and po- litical themes in German (Scheler and Mannheim) and Marxist sociology of

knowledge. For many decades, the Durkheimians confined their analyses to ideas in primitive societies and ignored specialized idea systems in modern societies. Claude L6vi-Strauss (1958/1962; 1962/1966), for example, elaborated a quasi- Durkheimian structuralist theory of primitive modes of thought. In the 1960s, the Durkheimian model was applied to modern cultures by Basil Bernstein (1971) and Mary Douglas (1970). Their analyses, however, were confined to the differ- ent cultural codes of social classes and other stratified systems, and were not ap- plied to science. Georges Gurvitch (1966/1971) modified Durkheim and Mauss, using ideas from Marxism, intuitionism, and phenomenology, to produce a very general dialectical sociology of knowledge.

It was not until the mid-1970s that a full-fledged Durkheimian sociology of science appeared. David Bloor (1976) very neatly illustrated that scientists, like religious persons, divide the world into sacred and secular realms. Along with science advocates, they treat science as a sacred object (one consequence of this being that they are resistant to sociological and other explanatory analyses of sci- ence). Bloor argues that just as Durkheim's analysis of rituals enables us to

The Sociology of Science 193

understand religion as a social product, a Durkheimian analysis of the sacred status of science can help us explain science (including scientific and mathemati- cal knowledge) as a social product. Durkheim himself formulated some general propositions regarding what sorts of ideas are produced under different condi- tions of social density and ritual interaction; these are formally stated by Collins (1975:153-54).

Other signs of and influences on the growth of the sociology of science in the 1960s include the publication of readers by Barber and Hirsch (1962) and Nor- man Kaplan (1965) and Norman Storer's (1966) essay on The Social System of Science. Much of this growth can be traced to the efforts of Merton (who even had a hand in the "Kuhnian revolution" (Merton, 1977:71ff.). The 1970s wit- nessed the end of the Mertonian hegemony and the emergence of a diversified, rapidly growing, and rapidly changing sociology of science.

The End of the Mertonian Hegemony The 1970s began with the publication of two books summarizing, in one case, a decade and, in the other, four decades of research in the sociology of science. They were, respectively, Ben-David's 1971 volume and the 1973 collection of Robert Merton's papers. We have already discussed Ben-David's ideas. In order to appreciate developments in the sociology of science during the past decade or so, it is important to recognize the limitations of Ben-David's work. One of his major theses is that decentralized authority systems are more conducive to vari- ety in ideas and experiments than centralized systems. This is a viable thesis, but one that Ben-David, like many other orthodox sociologists of science, applies quite readily to the "external" setting for science and rarely to the "internal" or- ganization of science. Ben-David's conception of science is biased in favor of an idealistic notion of rational intellectual activity. He nowhere gives a satisfactory sociological definition of scientific knowledge. He also has very little to say about conflicts in contemporary science and their potential effects on knowledge pro- duction, or the human consequences and value implications of the social organi- zation of science.

The appearance of the Merton (1973) collection underscored the fact that he had given the field its "major paradigm." This was acknowledged, as Norman Storer pointed out in his introduction to the volume, by friends and foes alike. The book appeared at a time when several important works, including one by Merton's students, the Coles (Cole and Cole, 1973), were signalling the coming of age of the Mertonian sociology of science. But alternative sociologies of sci- ence began to emerge at this time too (Rose and Rose, 1970; Sklair, 1973; Barnes, 1974). There were strains of neo-functionalism in some of the new lit- erature, but this was less a reflection of Merton's omnipresence than of the per- nicious influence of the idea that science is a privileged mode of inquiry. At first, the Mertonian "foes" were a shadowy presence. Their main weapons were criti- cisms and alternative programmatic statements. But they very quickly established viable research centers, programs, and journals. The journal Science Studies debuted in 1971 under the joint editorship of David Edge of Edinburgh and Roy MacLeod of Sussex; a few years later, the name of the journal was changed to

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Social Studies of Science. This became the name for a new interdisciplinary spe- cialty. Merton himself stayed close to these developments; indeed, he became the first president of the Society for Social Studies of Science, founded in 1975.

Increasingly, students of science were being drawn from a variety of interdis- ciplinary programs; many of them came-and continue to come-to social studies of science with degrees, advanced preparation, and even professional experience in the physical and natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering. This helps account for the most notable change in the sociology of science during the past decade: the development of studies of scientific and mathematical knowledge.

The Mertonian legacy has historical and quantitative dimensions. While these two dimensions have always been fused to some extent in Merton's work, the quantitative dimension has gained in prominence over the years. Merton, Derek Price, and Eugene Garfield (the entrepreneur who started the citation industry in the 1960s) have been key figures in the development of "scientometrics" (El- kana et al., 1977). The European, and especially the eastern European, science of science is most closely tied to the broader community of social studies of sci- ence through the scientometric connection. A new journal, Scientometrics, has strengthened that connection. The stress on prediction and the statistical present in this specialty reflects its function in the state's policy apparatus. Government bureaucrats, business leaders, and other elites require (or perhaps have been convinced by scientific entrepreneurs that they require) information on science for directing and defending science policy, stimulating scientific progress, and increasing scientific productivity-primarily in service to the interests of elite scientists and the ruling classes (Chubin and Restivo, 1982).

The Mertonian paradigm continues to guide a great deal of research and the- ory in contemporary sociology of science. But the center of the field is now on an axis linking European centers such as Edinburgh, Bath, and Bielefeld to some- what more diffuse North American settings, including a number of colleges and universities with science, technology, and society programs. There is a decidedly non- or anti-Mertonian bias in much of the work being published in the field today. But, as we will note in the following sections, close inspection of this lit- erature reveals lingering traces of the Mertonian legacy.

Revising the customary view. Michael Mulkay's (1979) "revision" of the "customary view" (i.e., the Mertonian paradigm) in the sociology of science il- lustrates both the promise and the shortcomings of much post-Mertonian re- search. Mulkay's sociology of science and knowledge takes account of a "new" view of nature and science developed in the works of, for example, N. Hanson and T. S. Kuhn: (1) the uniformity of nature is an artifact of scientific accounts, (2) facts are theory-dependent and variable in meaning, (3) observation is an active interpretive process, and (4) knowledge claims are negotiated. Mulkay concludes that physical reality constrains, but does not uniquely determine, the conclusions of scientists. Even though Mulkay argues that scientific knowledge is a product of cultural contingencies, he adopts several "customary" ideas: (1) science is an autonomous research community (Richter, 1980), (2) physical and social realities can be demarcated, and (3) there are internal and external as- pects of and influences on science. Mulkay's revisionism stresses negotiation and has no central place for alienation, elitism, exploitation, or conflict. His descrip-

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tion of scientific culture as a pluralistic arena of shared interpretive positions based on flexible symbolic resources rings a Parsonian bell.

The problem, in part, is that Mulkay relies too heavily on scholars (notably Kuhn) whose allegedly heretical notions disguise a commitment to modern sci- ence and its social apparatus. In more radical sociologies of science, context and cognition are inseparable; contingencies are conceived to be constitutive of knowledge; the focus is on "local historicity" (to borrow Harold Garfinkel's term), rather than the mythical "scientific community"; and struggles for power and privilege come into view as central features of the intellectual strategy known as "research." While Mulkay and other post-Mertonians are clearly sympathetic to some of these ideas, their revisionism inhibits their attempts to formulate a radical alternative to the Mertonian-Kuhnian approach. The difficulty may arise because constructing sociologies of science is the work of academics, for the most part, and academics are supported by institutions that sustain and are sus- tained by a scientific or quasi-scientific world view. Thus, it is not merely the "necessary truths" of science that compel loyalty, but the fact that the social roles of sociologists of science are usually embedded in a network of power and privi- lege that overlaps or is one with the social apparatus of science. Under such cir- cumstances, it is not surprising that sociologists of science tend to detach science from its social apparatus before studying "it," and that their studies so often seem to turn into functionalist accounts. It is not so mysterious, then, to find that some sociologists of science can imagine alternative interpretations of science as a well- functioning institution, but that very few can imagine a critique of and alternative to the social institution that is science.

Marxism, conflict theory, and constructivism. Earlier, we noted a consensus among friends and foes alike that, as of the early 1970s, Merton had authored the "major paradigm" in the sociology of science. This is a valid observation only if we restrict ourselves to mainstream sociology. A Marxist alternative has al- ways existed within the wider sociology of science and knowledge community. It is within this alternative tradition that virtually all of the research in the sociol- ogy of mathematics was carried out prior to 1970. During the past decade, Marx- ists and, more generally, materialist sociologists have played prominent roles in the renaissance of mathematics studies and wider developments in cognitive sci- ence studies (Restivo, 1983). Marxism is limited as an explanatory theory be- cause it tends to be reductionist (in part because of a commitment to modern science that is akin to the commitment of Mertonism) and because it brings idealisic elements into its central materialist arguments. By a consistent material- ism, we mean an approach that eschews all purist, transcendental, idealist and idealistic, individualistic-heroic, and religio-theological interpretations, perspec- tives, and arguments. In this sense, Spengler (specifically in his study of numbers and culture) is, in some ways, a more consistent materialist than the Marxists. Spengler also anticipates (if he doesn't actually introduce) the notion of "the social construction of knowledge" in the radical sense, which is associated with contemporary social studies of science and was first realized empirically in Fleck's (1935/1979) monograph on the Wasserman test.

Conflict sociology of science is an alternative to the Mertonian and other structural-functional approaches (Collins, 1975). It builds on the "crude" efforts

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of the Marxists to construct an explanatory sociology and stresses political pro- cesses operating in "career spaces." Social contingencies are viewed as determi- nants of the course of knowledge, and facts are conceived to be socially con- structed. These two ideas have been most fully articulated theoretically in the so-called "laboratory life" studies.

The challenge of studying the cognitive aspects of science has recently led some sociologists of science to undertake on-site analyses of knowledge produc- tion (Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Zenzen and Restivo, 1982). The resulting ethnographic accounts converge to picture science as a constructive, socially-situated, and socially-contingent discoursive enterprise. These studies have fed the fires of the perennial debates over relativism and real- ism in the sociology of knowledge. But the idea that facts are "socially con- structed" and "contingent" is compatible with common sense realism if, by that term, we understand not that facts mirror, mimic, or otherwise reflect a one-and- only real world in a one-to-one way, but rather that facts earn their status by helping people solve problems ("truth equals success"), and are sustained through social interaction (conversationally). One way of resolving the relativism- realism confict, then, is to deny the distinction between necessary and contingent truths. This may be easier to do if you are persuaded by Rorty (1979) that this distinction is rooted in the intellectual games of professional philosophers from Plato to Kant.

Mathematics: the last frontier. All of the perennial problems of the sociol- ogy of knowledge-from realism vs. relativism to rationality vs. non-rationality -emerge in their most challenging forms in the sociology of mathematics. The renewed and determined concern some sociologists have shown with fashioning a sociology of mathematics may eventually alter not only our understanding of mathematics, but our basic views of inquiry, society, and reality as well.

Some of the most promising theoretical work in social studies of science is being done by sociologists of mathematics. Donald MacKenzie (1981), for ex- ample, has shown how the social interests of a rising professional middle class in late nineteenth-century British society influenced, indeed were constitutive of, the form, content, and development of the statistical theory fashioned by Galton, Parson, and Fisher. Unlike some contemporary Mertonian alternatives, this one is free of neo-functionalism. Power and conflict are central elements of MacKen- zie's account; and he doesn't whitewash elitism and racism in science. Like other constructivists, however, MacKenzie jettisons the distinction between necessary and contingent truths easily enough in his analysis, only to have it find its way back into the assumptions underlying his ability to construct "an account." This may be a vestigial problem rooted in the rhetoric of analysis. In any case, Rorty (1979) is refreshingly therapeutic on this problem.

Bloor (1979) is currently fashioning Durkheim and Mauss' classification the- ory into a crucial theoretical tool for science studies. He has added depth and

explanatory power to the theory by linking it to Mary Douglas' grid-group theory and Mary Hesse's network model of scientific theory. The theory can, in our view, be broadened to encompass the constructivist paradigm formulated by Knorr-Cetina (1981), and conflict theory (Collins and Restivo, 1983; Restivo, 1983).

The Sociology of Science 197

Conclusion: A Three-Ring Circus

Contemporary sociology of science (or social studies of science) has been com- pared to a three-ring circus (Chubin and Restivo, 1982). The three rings are the strong program, laboratory studies, and scientometrics. Another way of carving out the main arenas is: strong, moderate, and weak programs. This set of categories focuses attention on the fact that studies of science are guided by dif- ferent assumptions, values, and more or less hidden agendas. The strong program (Bloor, 1976) is based on the conviction that the best way to study science is to use the proven methods of science. The moderate program (a variety of the strong program) is distinguished by a dynamic and explicit picture of science as a dialectical process (Campbell, 1979). These programs tend to bring almost everything into question except the scientific method; this takes on an almost worshipful form in the moderate program. The weak program tries to remedy this. It is based on the conjecture that all modes of inquiry can be construed as world views and as value-laden (Restivo and Zenzen, 1978; Chubin and Restivo, 1982). Unlike the strong and moderate program (from each of which it bor- rows), the weak program is explicitly a political program, first, and a program in theory and research, second. It stresses the study of process and product, con- textualism, evolutionary epistemology, a future-orientation that highlights con- cern for the potential human and environmental consequences of given courses of social action, and criticism and reconstruction of science and social policies. Values, policy, and a concern for the quality of individual and social life are cen- tral, indeed constitutive, ingredients of the weak program. In this program, sci- ence-like all other modes of inquiry-is considered both a potentially useful tool and an object of criticism subject to changes even in its fundamental structure.

Another way of viewing the current scene is in terms of the historical interplay of two basic themes: scientist as worker (Marx)and scientist as professional or elite (Weber). The theme of "scientist as worker" seems to be on the ascen- dancy today. If this continues, power and conflict will come to center stage as theoretical tools for explaining science and scientific knowledge as social pro- cesses. If this happens, we can expect that the sociology of science-through its radical science, scientometrics, and science policy connections-will provide sub- stantial intellectual resources for conservatives and radicals alike in fin de siecle politics. On the intellectual side, the confluence of the various developments we have charted-especially conflict theory, constructivism, and neo-Durkheimian theory-may transform the field at its very core into one dominated by the spirit and the methods of comparative history and anthropology.

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