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2011 5: 83 originally published online 31 January 2011Cultural SociologySergio Sismondo

Bourdieu's Rationalist Science of Science: Some Promises and Limitations

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Bourdieus Rationalist Scienceof Science: Some Promisesand Limitations

Sergio SismondoQueens University, Canada

AbstractAt several points over his career, Pierre Bourdieu articulated a framework for a sociology

of science, derived mostly from a priori reasoning about scientific actors in competition for

capital. This article offers a brief overview of Bourdieus framework, placing it in the context of

dominant trends in Science and Technology Studies. Bourdieu provides an excellent justification

for the project of the sociology of science, and some starting points for analysis. However,

his framework suffers from his commitment to a vague evolutionary epistemology, and from

his correlative and surprising neglect of sciences habituses, with their particular practices,boundaries, and political economies. To be productive, Bourdieus sociology of science would

have to abandon its narrow rationalism and embrace the material complexity of the sciences.

KeywordsBourdieu, evolutionary epistemology, political economies of knowledge, Science and Technology

Studies, sociology of science

Introduction

Pierre Bourdieus last course of lectures at the Collge de France, published in English

as Science of Science and Reflexivity (2004), returned him to the sociology of science.

This is a topic he had addressed most prominently and directly in a substantial theoretical

paper, The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress

of Reason, published in both French and English in 1975. Sociology of science is also

in the background of many of Bourdieus works on knowledge and forms of capital,

works such asDistinction (1984), andHomo Academicus (1988); or perhaps more accu-

rately, we can see Bourdieus sociology of science as closely related to his sociology of

education, which was already well developed by the early 1970s (e.g. Bourdieu, 1971;

Bourdieu and Passeron, 1973). But Science of Science is a direct reprise of Specificity,

Article

Corresponding author:

Sergio Sismondo, Department of Philosophy, Queens University, Kingston, K7L 3N6, Canada.

Email: [email protected]

Cultural Sociology

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84 Cultural Sociology 5(1)

both in the theoretical framework it provides and the themes it explores. Bourdieus

sociology of science remained remarkably consistent over 30 years.

What Bourdieu offers by way of a framework for a sociological approach to science

is useful, I argue, but limited. Its central idea, which is also one of his central sociological

ideas, provides an excellent justification for the project of the sociology of science, andalso provides a starting point for an analysis of some phenomena in science. However,

it does not achieve the marriage of naturalistic sociology and a normative account of

sciences objectivity that Bourdieu believes it does, nor is it nearly as broad as we should

want a sociological account of science to be.

A Rationalist Sociology of Science

Bourdieus work in the area contains some anecdotes and a few observations, but nobody of empirical data. As such his statements neatly lay out some of his central social

theoretical ideas, as well as his sociology of science, which is almost entirely driven by

them. In fact, Bourdieus early (1975) foray into sociology of science could serve as an

introduction to his social theory more generally, as it is (relatively) concise, and not

worked out in a deeply empirical context, unlike those later works that also articulate his

developed social theory, like Homo Academicus (1988) orDistinction (1984). This

explains the constancy of his thinking on science between Specificity and Science of

Science, given the constancy of his social theory over this period (Jenkins, 2002).

Running parallel with his accounts of other domains (e.g. Bourdieu, 1981), Bourdieu

argues that we can understand scientific achievements as resulting from the interplay

of researchers on a field. Actors come to a field with less or more cultural, social,

symbolic, and economiccapital and we could usefully subdivide the categories fur-

ther. In the context of the sociology of science, Bourdieu generally lumps all of these

together asscientific capital, to some extent downplaying insights that the systematic

articulation of their differences allows: capital can be converted from one form to

another, and the accumulation of capital depends upon the conversion not being

transparent (e.g. Bourdieu, 1991).

Actors self-interestedly develop and deploy their capital to change their relative

statuses within the field. Although Bourdieusfields often map roughly onto scientificfields, the former is not defined in disciplinary terms, but is rather a space of engage-

ment, or a structure of relationships that bounds the practices relevant to somebody

interested in contributing. The fields habitus is the set of dispositions that actors in it

can or should have, defining a space of problems and possibilities, governing the accept-

able moves an actor can make. The habitus itself is the result of previous actions in the

social field. These concepts will be very familiar from all of Bourdieus other works.

Scientific authority [is] a particular kind of capital, which can be accumulated, trans-

mitted, and even reconverted into other kinds of capital under certain conditions

(Bourdieu, 1975: 23). This symbolic capital enables an actor to make noticed achieve-ments. Symbolic capital thus can increase itself, as it enables claims and arguments to

be recognized, and recognition is itself a key element of scientific capital. Meanwhile,

sciences versions of cultural and economic capital provide the resources that enable

people to make claims and arguments.



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Sismondo 85

There is no escaping such a social structure and remaining within the sciences: The

pure universe of even the purest science is a social field like any other, with its distri-

bution of power and its monopolies, its struggles and strategies, interests and profits

(Bourdieu, 1975: 19). Even the production of objective truth requires social conditions.

Moreover, claims Bourdieu, action in a field is agonistic, a struggle for limited capitalamong its members: The structure of the scientific field at any given moment is defined

by the state of the power distribution between the protagonists in the struggle (Bourdieu,

1975: 27).

All scientific moves of an actor are simultaneously moves on the field: Because all

scientific practices are directed toward the acquisition of scientific authority . . . what

is generally called interest in a particular scientific activity . . . is always two-sided

(Bourdieu, 1975: 21). Every scientific intervention is also a move to increase capital,

and vice versa: In the struggle in which every agent must engage in order to force

recognition of the value of his products and his own authority as a legitimate producer,what is at stake is in fact the power to impose the definition of science (Bourdieu,

1975: 23). It is, therefore, artificial to separate the pursuit of ideas from the social world.

Bourdieu derives a number of insights from his simple starting points. Probably most

interesting is his discussion of the conditions of entry into a field. The price of entry into

a scientific field is scientific competence on the one hand, and a belief in the game, a

libido scientifica (Bourdieu, 2004: 50), on the other. The participant needs both in

order to succeed, and indeed, even to be a participant. Once playing the game of science,

there are many different strategies for increasing capital.

Depending on the position they occupy in the structure of the field . . . the new entrants may

find themselves oriented either towards the risk-free investments of succession strategies . . . or

towards subversion strategies, infinitely more costly and more hazardous investments which

will not bring them the profits . . . unless they can achieve a complete redefinition of the

principles legitimating domination. (Bourdieu, 1975: 30)

Even established actors can adopt a wide variety of strategies and positions, given differ-

ent levels and kinds of capital that they might possess. Bourdieus discussions on these

issues nicely illustrate the possibilities (and in their narrowness also the limitations) of a

rationalist sociology of science.Interest models have the immediate attraction of being grounded in objects, i.e. inter-

ests, which are widely and pre-theoretically accepted to prompt and perhaps guide human

action. But Bourdieus is a sophisticated interest model, accepting that actors interests

and the dispositions they have to follow them depend on the habitus of the field in which

they are acting. There can be no explanation of human actions without reference to the

culture in which they occur. Thus Bourdieus framework demands work by anthropolo-

gists and cultural historians to make sense of actual interplays of interests.

Prior to that work of displaying particular cultures, though, the structural feature that

distinguishes science from other, similar, activities, Bourdieu argues, is the fact that it isso closed (I will take issue with this claim in several different ways): The struggle for

scientific authority, a particular kind of social capital, . . . owes its specificity to the fact

that the producers tend to have no possible clients other than their competitors (Bourdieu,

1975: 23). No external forces pull science in one direction or another. The scientific field

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only has to deal with its own internal structure, its own distributions of scientific capital.

But capital is distributed through recognition, which is given only by people who are

themselves seeking recognition. As a result, every scientific intervention is scrutinized

for its weaknesses, more than interventions in more open kinds of fields, fields that draw

capital from outside.Thus Bourdieu thinks that he has a solution to the problem of finding ahistorical

value in historical products, or getting non-relativized reason out of particular origins.

If the scientific field is organized so as to isolate itself from its historical and social

origins, then it can progress toward ahistorical reason. Severe competition achieves this,

Bourdieu believes. This liberal solution (a version of evolutionary epistemologies seen

in John Stuart Mill and Karl Popper, among others) to the problem is attractive, but as

presented in both Specificity and Science of Science,it is too sketchy or simplistic to

survive criticism. I will turn to this below.

Science of Science Against STS

In Science of Science, Bourdieu (2004) objects to postmodern rantings that threaten

confidence in science, and threaten the walls that serve to insulate science from out-

side pressures. As he announces early in the book, his concern is the problem of pro-

tecting science from economic, political, and religious interests while recognizing

sciences social and historical nature. The postmodern ranters against whom

Bourdieu writes are mostly those researchers who staked out radical claims for the

sociology of science in the 1970s: Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Harry Collins, NigelGilbert and Michael Mulkay, Karin Knorr-Cetina, and especially Bruno Latour and

Steve Woolgar. Their work developed into the broader field of Science and Technology

Studies (STS). Most of these sociologists and philosophers do not now look particu-

larly postmodern.

At the same time that he denounces their postmodernity, Bourdieu complains in a

somewhat contrary vein that these sociologists and philosophers were overly anxious to

appear radical. Their strategies for achieving distinction were to emphasize their differ-

ences from previous generations, and to emphasize the dramatic and surprising elements

in their findings. For example, they were quick to announce the demise of the old soci-ology of science exemplified in the work of Robert Merton (e.g. 1973), demanding

attention for the novel positions they were staking out, perhaps without appreciating the

possibility of evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, movement in the field. Or, they

took well-worn insights and perspectives and transformed them into philosophical

scandals, in the form of claims that scientific facts are made rather than discovered. For

the most part I think that Bourdieu is right in his observations: STS got off the ground

by trumpeting its own radicality. It is not obvious, though, that these observations

should underpin criticism of, rather than praise for, the field.

Not all Bourdieus observations are right. He complains, for example, that there is

little empirical data in STS, authors referring repeatedly to the same studies. A textbook

of STS that I recently authored contains more than 500 references, the majority of them

to empirical studies, and makes no claim to be more than a set of entry points to the field

(Sismondo, 2010). In this, at least, Bourdieu is not a trustworthy guide to STS.



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Sismondo 87

Perhaps the loudest of Bourdieus complaints is that STS did not pick up on

Specificity and the concepts it offered. Indeed, his concepts of different capitals, the

habitus, and the fieldhave had little impact on STS (Breslau, 2002). Despite the fact

that Specificity has been very much cited, is widely taught, and is reprinted in the

most prominent general anthology in the field (Biagioli, 1999), there is only a modestamount of explicitly Bourdieusian work in the field. Perhaps this is because Bourdieu

himself never worked out his concepts in the context of sociology of science, and in

particular never in the context of empirical case studies of the creation of scientific

knowledge, which have generally been the vehicles of theoretical ideas in STS.

Bourdieus contribution is isolated from other work in STS, and has been picked up

and used by relatively few researchers.

The member of the field who has most often used Bourdieusian concepts is probably

the historian of physics Yves Gingras (e.g. Gingras and Trpanier, 2001). Arguably,

though, Bourdieus theoretical framework is typically only a backdrop to Gingrassimpressive and diverse charting of the ways that historical actors develop and follow

interests: for example, the historians finely tuned description of local disciplinary

cultures becomes for Gingras a description of a habitus, but does not depend upon the

definition ofhabitus.

There are a few works that depend more directly on Bourdieus social theory. For

example, Wei Hongs recent study, Domination in a Scientific Field (2008), describes

competition within a Chinese isotope laboratory, where the struggle for authority is

played out in terms of competition between two forms of scientific capital: theoretical

capital and technological capital. The laboratory in question had become a researchlaboratory not too long before Hongs study, and in that time, those members with the

most theoretical capital had become dominant over those with the most technological

capital (just as theory tends to dominate empirical work across the sciences). Competition

continued, however, because operation of difficult equipment was essential to the work-

ing of the lab, and those people who were skilled with the equipment were constantly

attempting to use their capital to subvert the hierarchy.

Randall Collinss monumental TheSociology of Philosophies (1998) also deserves

mention in this context. It is not, of course, a work directly on the sociology of science,

but it has been recognized as a part of the field as a potential model for other work. Thebook also does not explicitly draw on Bourdieu other than to make cultural capital one

of its key theoretical concepts. But regardless of the extent to which Collins draws on

it, his internalist account of philosophical actors jockeying for prestige nicely mirrors

the account of science that Bourdieu gives in Specificity. Actors can employ low- or

high-risk strategies, either allying themselves with or placing themselves in opposition

to established positions. Because of a limited attention space within the field, positions

end up clustering, so that there are always between three and six recognized philosophi-

cal schools within a community. On the basis of this framework, Collins provides

explanations of episodes and extraordinary sweeps of the history of philosophy. (It is

interesting to note that Collins describes a fully theoretical discipline, philosophy;

Bourdieu appears to treat theoretical sociology as the exemplary science.)

Despite the distance Bourdieu tries to put between himself and STS, the field model of

science instantiates the tenets of the strong programme in the sociology of knowledge as



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laid out by Barry Barnes (e.g. 1974) and David Bloor (e.g. 1976), a key methodological

framework for STS. We can see Bourdieus agonistic theory of science as respecting the

principles of the strong programme in an individualistic way, explaining the content of

science as resulting from individual researchers actions. Bloor (1976) writes of sociology

of scientific knowledge, as opposed to mere sociology of scientists, that

1. It would be causal, that is, concerned with the conditions which bring about belief or states

of knowledge . . .

2. It would be impartial with respect to truth and falsity, rationality or irrationality, success or

failure. Both sides of these dichotomies will require explanation.

3. It would be symmetrical in its style of explanation. The same types of cause would explain,

say, true and false beliefs.

4. It would be reflexive. In principle its patterns of explanation would have to be applicable

to sociology itself. (p. 5)

The central structure of Bourdieus sociology of science is, or could easily be, all of

these. The agonistic struggle for the accumulation of capital, the mechanism Bourdieu

invokes for the production of knowledge, is eminently causal, impartial, and symmetric,

and could be applied reflexively to the sociology of science. That there should be some

consonance between Bourdieus work and the strong programme is to be expected, given

the opening statement of Specificity: The sociology of science rests on the postulate

that the objective truth of the product even in the case of that very particular product,

scientific truth lies in a particular type of social condition of production (1975: 19).

Scientific knowledge can be explained socially. Or, more helpfully, Bourdieus attentionto different forms of capital makes clear that scientific work is always simultaneously

intellectual and social: every intellectual gambit is also a move on the social field, and

vice versa. Thus one of the strengths of Bourdieus framework is that it immediately

justifies the project of the sociology of science.

Evolutionary Epistemology and Its Problems

The statement quoted in the last paragraph, with its focus on objective truth, also sug-

gests a point of difference with STS. Overlaid onto Bourdieus symmetric rationalistmodel is a simple evolutionary epistemology that is less symmetric. Some social con-

ditions, Bourdieu claims, allow true ideas to be stronger than false ones:

the scientific field always includes a measure of social arbitrariness, inasmuch as it serves the

interests of those who are in a position, inside or outside the field, to gather in the profits; but

this does not prevent the inherent logic of the field, and in particular, the struggle between the

dominant and the new entrants, with the resultant cross-control, from bringing about, under

certain conditions, a systematic diversion of ends whereby the pursuit of private scientific

interests . . . continuously operates to the advantage of the progress of science. (1975: 32)

Just as natural selection produces well-adapted organisms, the intense selection of the

scientific field produces well-adapted beliefs. On Bourdieus thinking, in the long run

these well-adapted ideas will be true when there are no outside interests to systematically



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Sismondo 89

skew them or the environments in which they must survive. Essentially the same point is

made in Science of Science; insulating science from outside interests is central to

Bourdieus project in both of his major forays into the sociology of science, despite the

30 years separating them. Again, one of his complaints about the field of STS is that it

fails to appreciate this solution to the problem of objectivity.There are a number of standard problems for evolutionary epistemology.

Evolutionary epistemology, like natural selection, is capable of explaining truth and

beauty, but also like natural selection it is capable of explaining falsity and ugliness. It

can explain, for example, a scientific communitys circling in on supposed esoteric

truths of astrophysics, but it can also explain the popular acceptance of the esoteric

claims of astrology.

A version of this difficulty affects Bourdieus use of evolutionary epistemology,

which we can see in the observation that competing with the obvious argument for the

insulation of the sciences is an equally obvious argument for their non-insulation. Purelyacademic science is ivory tower science. Without the check of practical application,

without the intrusion of material interests, science can find itself un-tethered to the

material world, and investigating unreal objects. To decide which one of these norma-

tive arguments is right, and in what circumstances, requires attention to actual cases and

empirical data. Evolutionary epistemology tends to be most attractive at a structural

level, relatively distanced from empirical data. To explain particular ideas, though, we

look to their actual histories. These may be consonant with the broad patterns that

evolutionary epistemology predicts, but that is unimportant, because causal histories

provide the more satisfying explanations. Bourdieu needs to turn to actual habituses toexplore whether subjectivity can produce objectivity.

More philosophically troubling for evolutionary epistemology is the difficulty of

defining truth as fully distinct from all forms of adaptedness. When Bourdieu says that

objective truth and the progress of science require specific social configurations, he

appears to be assuming that the truth can be specifiable completely independent of the

social world. Bourdieu adopts a Gods-eye notion of truth, a correspondence notion of

truth where correspondence is a relation that stands on its own. While I have some

sympathies with the correspondence notion of truth, there are strong reasons to believe

that it cannot be sufficient as a theory of scientific truth (Sismondo and Chrisman,2001). Let me set out two sets of concerns.

First, scientific knowledge most directly describes situations that are distinctly non-

natural, standing apart from nature in their purity and artificiality. Nature is systemati-

cally excluded from the laboratory (Knorr Cetina, 1981), and therefore, scientific

knowledge that depends upon experimentation is not true in the sense of straightfor-

wardly corresponding to nature, following the contours of nature (Latour and Woolgar,

1986). Just as importantly, the world of theory also tends to be several steps removed

from nature, crucially depending on abstractions, idealizations, generalizations, and/or

counter-factual situations. Explanatory and conceptual success for a theory demands a

certain amount of abstraction away from the particularities of the real world. Even for

theories that have a good claim to truth, close correspondence to ordinary empirical

facts is only one virtue among many. In a strict sense then, scientists rarely study nature.

Thus in some contexts we should adopt a kind of constructivism, a view that



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emphasizes the contribution we make to knowledge and presents problems for the

Gods-eye notion of truth. While truth may still be a correspondence to the facts, the facts

are to some extent human products. And to the extent that the facts are independent, what

counts as correspondence will cease to be; what can be considered an acceptable abstrac-

tion or idealization is a human decision.As a second way to see such difficulties with the correspondence theory of truth, let

us take a candidate scientific sentence like scientific authority is . . . a particular kind of

capital, which can be accumulated, transmitted, and even reconverted into other kinds of

capital under certain conditions (Bourdieu, 1975: 25) after all, Bourdieu is clear that

sociology is a science, and that the sociology of science should apply to itself reflexively.

If this sentence is true, is it true because it corresponds to some independent fact? Can

that fact be specified independently of the interests that guide the sociology of science?

Evaluations of the truth of this candidate sentence depend among other things on evalu-

ations of the adequacy of the capitalmetaphor. Its adequacy, though, surely also dependson interests. We can make cases for and against such a sentence, making it more or less

plausible, and ultimately its truth is tied at least to some degree to the cases that can be

made for and against it.

While it is straightforward to separate truth from some forms of adaptedness the features

of astrology that make them so widely attractive it seems impossible to separate truth

from all forms of adaptedness. What comes to count as truth, even in purely scientific

contexts, must fit into disciplinary matrices, established material contexts, and the struc-

tures that establish statements as plausible. Again, Bourdieus argument founders on his

not paying sufficient attention to habitus.

Another Approach to Legitimate and Illegitimate Interests: A

Pharmaceutical Example

Yet Bourdieu is right about the importance of the issue of the insulation of science, a

point that can be illustrated by the current political economy of pharmaceutical knowl-

edge. It should come as no surprise that pharmaceutical companies create and shape

much of the medical knowledge about drugs. The industry funds 70 per cent or more of

clinical trials. Most of this industry-sponsored clinical trial research is handled by con-tract research organizations, the data they produce is typically analyzed by pharmaceu-

tical company statisticians, papers are written by hired medical writers, academics are

given the opportunity to serve as authors of these papers, and professional publication

planners submit the papers to medical journals (Sismondo, 2009). When a potentially

major new drug is launched, its maker will flood the medical literature with articles on

the drug and the conditions it might be used to treat. For example, Pfizers launch of the

anti-depressant Zoloft (sertraline) was accompanied by one publication plan involv-

ing 85 articles in major medical journals, and Mercks launch of the pain reliever Vioxx

was accompanied by 96 articles (Healy and Cattell, 2003; Ross et al., 2008). These

company-produced articles (and there may have been others) accounted for roughly

40 per cent of the medical literature on those respective drugs in the years immediately

following their launch. The pharmaceutical industry markets its products via core

scientific media (Sismondo, 2009).



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Sismondo 91

Pharmaceutical companies narrow set of interests has been demonstrated to shape the

knowledge they produce. All science is laden with choices, of course, as has been shown

by canonical studies in STS (e.g. Collins, 1991; Knorr Cetina, 1981; Pickering, 1984).

Thus, the work of pharmaceutical companies to produce research and prominently place

it in medical journals is not merely a corporate use of the patina of science. It is sciencedone in a new corporate mode, and to market products. Pharmaceutical company

research, analysis, and writing is, though, different from other medical research, analy-

sis, and writing in being driven by a very important and well-defined set of commercial

interests. We can reasonably treat material interests in this arena as establishing some-

thing akin to pervasive conflicts of interest.

I would argue that the central issue here is not so much truth as control. Certainly the

pharmaceutical industrys control over the medical literature produces some distortions

(e.g. Melander et al., 2003; Turner et al., 2008). However, industry-produced manu-

scripts fare very well in peer review at medical journals, and industry-sponsored manu-scripts tend to score better on standardized methodological tests than do independent

trials (Lexchin et al., 2003). The industry produces at least some objective knowledge.

Yet the pharmaceutical industrys control over so much clinical trial knowledge pro-

foundly shapes that knowledge. It shapes the questions that are asked, and that its clinical

trials answer. It shapes the kinds of answers that are valued, replacing, for example, clini-

cal significance with statistical significance. And most obviously, the industry creates

interest in certain conditions and products, as it affects centres of gravity. There are more

than a thousand articles in medicines core clinical journals with the keyword omepra-

zole, a proton-pump inhibitor for acid-related gastrointestinal problems; surely heartburnand its more serious but uncommon cousins would not merit such medical attention were

they not immensely profitable to treat. One way of seeing the problem is that the phar-

maceutical industrys control over clinical trial knowledge affects the habitus of clinical

research to make knowledge serve corporate interests, rather than public ones.

Pharmaceutical industry science may still be science, but it is profit-driven science.

The effects of that should give the general public reason enough to object. Such a claim

produces a very different reason for insulating science from interests than does Bourdieus

evolutionary epistemology. A normative epistemology needs to understand much more

about political economies of knowledge in order to deal with the complicated fields thatare sciences today, a point to which I return in my conclusion.

Habitus and the Neglect of Material Sociality

Bourdieus exemplary sciences are theoretical ones, and perhaps the prototype of them

all is theoretical sociology, allowing reflexivity to be an easy consequence. Unfortunately,

this allows him almost entirely to neglect the materiality of scientific work. Despite

Bourdieus attention to the material dimensions of habituses in other contexts, his science

is almost entirely ideal.

The habitus of a field is its set of practices or dispositions, including dispositions of

thought. STS, from its Wittgensteinian roots, also attends to sets of practices, and these

can be roughly subsumed underhabitus. Moreover, since the work of Michael Polanyi

(1958), STS has closely attended to the tacit dimensions of scientific knowledge and



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practice, showing the unformalizable bases of what is taken to be formal (e.g. Collins,

1991). Again in parallel to his work in other areas, Bourdieu accepts and incorporates

this into his notion of the scientific habitus: science contains irreducible elements of

connoisseurship, craft, and art (2004: 3840). But Bourdieus sociology is entirely

human.STS has increasingly incorporated non-humans into its accounts of the social world,

as a part of the social environment that must be taken into account before one can make

sense of human actions, or even as full participants in scientific and technical work.

Scientific and technical practices crucially involve tools and materials, and make no

sense without them. Yet tools and materials are developed and chosen in the context of

practices, and are made to accommodate existing structures and interests. In this way,

scientific knowledge is partly materialized, and a scientific habitus cannot be thought

of as a purely human object. Thus, almost all work in STS pays close attention to the

materials or objects with which scientists and other technical workers interact.Actor-network theory (ANT) makes non-humans full participants in the social world

of science and technology, which consists in the building of networks (Callon, 1986;

Latour, 1987). The actors, and thus also the networks, of ANT include both human and

non-human entities, with no methodologically significant distinction between them. Both

humans and non-humans form associations, linking with other actors to form networks.

Both humans and non-humans have interests (or dispositions that can usefully be thought

of as interests) that cause them to act, that need to be accommodated, and that can be man-

aged and used. We can chart networks by putting either particular humans or particular

non-humans at their centers. ANT even reduces the social to the material, both insideand outside of science (Latour, 2005): science and technology work by translating mate-

rial actions and forces from one form into another. Scientific representations are the result

of material manipulations, and are solid precisely to the extent that they are mechanized.

Theorists working outside the ANT tradition have developed similar views without

assuming symmetry between humans and non-humans. For example, Karen Barad

(2007) articulates a position she calls agential realism: human encounters with the

world take the form of phenomena, which are ontologically basic. Material-discursive

practices create intra-actions within these phenomena, parceling out features of the world

and defining them as natural or human. Similarly, Andrew Pickerings pragmatic realism(1995) describes a mangle of practice in which humans encounter resistances to which

they respond. Technologies and facts about nature result from a dialectic of resistance

and accommodation.

Material objects are interpreted by people, of course, and some in STS have argued

that this can allow sociology to remain entirely within the human realm (e.g. Collins and

Yearley, 1992). However, even on the most modest accounts of the agency of material

objects, once interpreted they can be treated as having properties with which people inter-

act. For example, interpretations can create technological frames (Bijker, 1995) or

scripts (Akrich, 1992), the set of practices and the material and social infrastructure built

up around an artifact or collection of similar artifacts. Sociality is a material sociality.

An opportunity for Bourdieusian theorizing, then, is to articulate science as a set of

material practices, and its habituses as simultaneously human and non-human domains.

Particular non-humans are part of the habituses, and their shapes and dispositions have



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been to some extent historically formed. This point, of course, applies to non-scientific

domains as well, though it gets its initial importance from the impossibility of analyzing

science without reference to scientists interactions with the material world.

Boundaries of Knowledge Production

Bourdieus neglect of the material world of science suggests further neglected elements:

non-scientists. Bourdieus sociology of science, while it aims to explain scientific knowl-

edge, is a sociology of scientists. It takes as given the boundaries between field and non-

field, and between scientist contributors and non-scientist presumed non-contributors.

But these are fascinating topics for a broader sociology of science.

Boundary work is the work of developing, maintaining, and attacking a fields epis-

temic authority, the potential to make respected claims (e.g. Gieryn, 1999). The study of

boundary work is thus a localized, historical, or anti-foundational approach to under-standing authority. Boundary work occurs in the context of conflicts over claims,

approaches, resources, or external issues. In particular, when broad disputes over epis-

temic authority arise, people attempt to draw boundaries: for members of a discipline to

have authority on any contentious issue requires that at least some other people do not

have it, or have less of it. Maintenance of a currency of epistemic authority requires

maintenance of a boundary inside of which other currencies have only limited value, or

whose value depends on a conversion.

Moreover, a challenge to the distribution of authority should be as important as a

challenge to particular limits, if not more so. That is, holders of authority may havemore to lose from a threat to revalue their social capital, for example in a challenge to

an important doctrine or method, than from another epistemic fields appropriation of

subject matter. Thus we can expect boundary work to be one response to doctrinal dis-

putes. This has been the case in much of the response of philosophy of science to STS

(e.g. Brown, 2001; Kitcher, 2001). STS takes on the problem of understanding how

scientific reasoning derives from particular and often local social and material contexts,

and in so doing challenges philosophys claim that science is straightforwardly an

exemplar of rationality.

A slightly different version of boundary work establishes who can be a member of afield. As for almost all other fields, membership in scientific fields demands appropriate

training and credentials, the clearing of key hurdles, and may even require personal

characteristics that are more difficult to justify: through much of the history of science,

it was very difficult for women to participate. To be a contributor to a science typically

requires lengthy periods of student training in a discipline, successful participation in a

research group, passing exams, particular types of high-level student achievements, a

period of post-doctoral service, and more (Campbell, 2003; Delamont and Atkinson,

2001). The subject matter does not dictate the specific contours of any of these require-

ments. Thus it is useful to see the establishment of membership requirements as the

result of boundary work.

Membership in a scientific field is denied to various technicians, who may have as

much knowledge and experimental ability as junior members of a field, and who on some

criteria might look as though they are making contributions to knowledge (Doing, 2004;



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Hong, 2008; Shapin, 1994). The difference in status between scientist and technician is

one that has to be established and continually negotiated in the laboratory.

Issues about boundaries become particularly interesting sociologically where science

meets non-science. The standard model of expertise assumes that science trumps all

other knowledge traditions, ignoring claims to knowledge that come out of non-sciencetraditions. Yet, for many problems of public import, non-scientists have relevant knowl-

edge (Wynne, 1996; Yearley, 1999). For example, applied scientific knowledge contains

implicit normative assumptions, or assumptions about the social world, which members

of the public can recognize and with which they may disagree.

When scientists find opposition to their claims, they tend to see that opposition as

misinformed or even irrational. Moreover, controversies between experts and non-experts

may not be resolved in the way that controversies among experts are: mechanisms of

closure that are effective within scientific communities may not be effective outside

of them. How societies manage the production and application of scientific knowledgecreates a set of questions, some of them normative questions, that a sociology of science

should address.

For example, Sheila Jasanoff (2005) describes civic epistemologies in Germany, the

United Kingdom, and the United States that have shaped biotechnology, its institutional

structures, its regulation, and public responses to it. Civic epistemologies contain a vari-

ety of related components, including such things as: styles of knowledge making;

approaches to and levels of trust; practices of demonstration; accepted foundations of

expertise; and assumptions about the accessibility of experts. This approach demands

and identifies only local solutions to the political issue of expertise. Each culture arrivesat its own civic epistemology, which becomes a locally legitimate response to the issue.

That may involve deference to scientific and technical expertise, but it will be a politi-

cally generated deference.

Sociology of science thus needs to take account of the constructed boundaries of sci-

ence, what lies outside of them, and interactions across those boundaries. Restricting

attention to what recognized scientists say and do is to fail to understand the precondi-

tions of what they say and do. Bourdieus sociology of science, with its exclusive focus

on bounded fields, leaves little room to address these issues. Rather than seeing this as

simply a failing, we might recognize an opportunity. A Bourdieusian sociology of scienceshould drop its commitment to strong boundaries of scientific fields, and understand

ways in which forms of capital do and do not move across those boundaries, affecting the

scientific knowledge that results.

Conclusion

Bourdieus contributions to the sociology of science contain many local insights, as one

would expect of a work by someone as talented as he was. His later work is burdened,

though, by his sense that STS took a wrong turn in the 1970s. This is a claim for which

he does not mount a convincing and sustained argument, but rather a set of isolated

complaints, only some of which are convincing. His later work is also burdened by his

sense that his own work in the area was never valued as much as he thought it should

have been. Bourdieu made an effort to re-articulate his perspective, but without properly



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responding to and learning from STS, it resulted in a narrow view of what the science

of science can be.

Let me close by suggesting a further missed opportunity for a Bourdieusian contribu-

tion to STS, that might be made to link my above concerns about material sociality and

the boundaries of science. As I mentioned earlier, in the context of the sociology ofscience Bourdieu combines different forms of capital cultural, social, symbolic and

economic and terms them scientific capital, which he sees as residing wholly within

individual scientists. However, cultural capital is simply knowledge, which does not

reside wholly within individual scientists: sometimes it can be embodied in technolo-

gies, and sometimes it can be formalized and put in printed and electronic media.

Bourdieus attention to knowledge as a kind of capital should lead us to thinking in

terms ofpolitical economies of knowledge: the production, distribution and consump-

tion of knowledge. This concept has an easy application to the new economies of knowl-

edge of the 20th and 21st centuries, in which actors treat technical knowledge as aresource, and attempt to own or control it using mechanisms of intellectual property law.

For this reason, business schools have created the discipline of knowledge management,

studying how to shape the creation and flow of knowledge so that institutions can use it

most efficiently and effectively.

We might find value in exploring economies of knowledge, even when they are non-

market ones, relying on gift exchanges or efforts aimed at communal goods. Because it

does not separate epistemic and political processes, STS can genuinely study scientific

and technological societies, rather than treating science and technology as externalities

to political processes. I think, then, that Bourdieus work contains unused resources forthinking about science and technology, which can considerably broaden his narrow

rationalism.

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Sergio Sismondo is Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at Queens University, Kingston,

Canada. His current research is on the political economy of pharmaceutical knowledge, focusing

particularly on industry sponsorship of clinical trials. He is also the author ofAn Introduction to

Science and Technology Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and a number of other general and

philosophical works in STS. See www.sismondo.ca