The specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions of the progress of reason

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Volumn 14, Issue 6, 1975, Pages 19-47

  Bourdieu, Pierre ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84977233757     PISSN: 05390184     EISSN: 14617412     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/053901847501400602     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. Cf. P. Bourdieu, “Une interprétation de la sociologie religieuse de Max Weber”, Archives européennes de sociologie 12 (1), 1971, pp. 3-21.
2. An excellent example of this is the conflict described by Sapolsky, between the advocates of fluoridation, i.e. the holders of official authority, the “health officials” who regard themselves as the sole competent judges in matters of public health, and the opponents of the project, including many scientists who, in official eyes, had stepped outside “the limits of their own area of competence”. The social truth of competence can here be clearly perceived as the right to authorised, authoritative discourse which is at stake in the struggle between groups (cf. H.M. Sapolsky, “Science, voters and the fluoridation controversy”. Science 162, (3852) 25 October 1968, pp. 427-433). The problem of competence emerges in its acutest and clearest form in the relationship with “laymen” (cf. S.B. Barnes, “On the reception of scientific beliefs”, in B. Barnes (ed.), Sociology of science, London, Penguin, 1972, pp. 269-291
3. L. Boltanski et P. Maldidier, “Carrière scientifique, morale scientifique et vulgarisation”, Information sur les sciences sociales 9 (3), 1970, pp. 99-118).
4. Cf. F. Reif, “The competitive world of the pure scientist”, Science 134 (3494), 15 December, 1961, pp. 1957-1962.
5. Here is just one example, for those who might doubt the existence and recognition of this hierarchy: “Kuhn's influence on the sociology of science has proved to be so profound that he has all but attained the rank of Merton”, P. Weingart, “On a sociological theory of scientific change”, in R. Whitley (ed.). Social processes of scientific development, London and Boston, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974, pp. 45-68.
6. Cf. R.K. Merton, The sociology of science. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1973, p. 55.
7. and most profound issue in the application of the concept of professionalisation to sociology and especially in the period of university activism since 1965 (Ben David, 1972). Many sociologists, since the initial organisation of sociology as a discipline, have had strong personal ideologies which have pressed them to seek to make their knowledge relevant or effective for social change; yet as academics they have had to face or have been attracted to the norms of the teacher-researcher” (M. Janowitz, American journal of sociology 78 (1), July 1972, pp. 105-135).
8. W.D. Hagstrom, The scientific community, New York, Basic Books, 1965, p. 100.
9. On this point, see P. Bourdieu, “Le marché des biens symboliques”, L'année sociologique 22, 1971, pp. 49-126 (the numerous self-references in this text should be seen as a form of shorthand).
10. At any given moment, there is a social hierarchy of the scientific fields - the disciplines - which strongly orientates practices and especially the “choices” of “vocation” - and within each field, there is a social hierarchy of objects and methods of treatment. (On this point, see P. Bourdieu, “Méthode scientifique et hiérarchie sociale des objets”, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 1, 1975, pp. 4-6.)
11. Like “Durkheimian” social philosophy, which describes conflict in terms of marginality, deviance or anomie, this philosophy of science tends to reduce the relations of competition between the dominant and the dominated to relations between a “centre” and a “periphery”, reviving the emanatist metaphor dear to Halbwachs of distance from the “hearth” of the central values (cf, for example, J. Ben David, The scientist's role in society, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1971, and E. Shils, “Center and periphery”, in The logic of personal knowledge: Essays presented to Michael Polanyi on his seventieth birthday, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961, pp. 117-130).
12. T. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions, Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 168.
13. Behind the experts’ problematics on the relative worth of different university systems there inevitably lurks the question of the optimum conditions for the development of science, and hence the question of the best political system, the American sociologists tending to make American-style “liberal democracy” the precondition of “scientific democracy”. Cf. for example R.K. Merton, “Science and technology in a democratic order”, Journal of legal and political sociology 1, 1942, republished in revised edition, R.K. Merton, Social theory and social structure, Glencoe, Ill., Free Press, 1967, pp. 550-561, under the title “Science and democratic social structure”, B. Barber, Science and the social order, Glencoe, Ill., Free Press, 1952, pp. 73 and 83.
14. Glaser lists “eponymy, prizes, awards, fellowships, scholarships, honorary memberships and committee work in scientific organizations, editorships, honorary degrees, professorships, chairs, lectureships, consultantships, mention by historians of science, publication, acknowledgements in others’ work, evaluations by colleagues” (B.G. Glaser, Organisational scientists: Their professional careers, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1964, p. 2). According to Glaser, “average recognition” is shown in the “supervisor's favorable evaluation of the quality of the scientist's current research, and proper credit, through publication and through acknowledgement
15. in publications of others for his contribution to the cumulative knowledge in his field”. The high-prestige honours, “awards, prizes, grants, lectureships, professorships, etc.,” are the signs of recognition reserved for “great men” (B.G. Glaser “Comparative failure in science”. Science 143 (3610), March 6, 1961, pp. 1012-1014).
16. This explains researchers’ very different strategies in the diffusion of preprints and reprints. It would be easy to show how all the differences observed according to the discipline and age of the researchers or the institution to which they belong can be understood in terms of the very different functions performed by these two forms of scientific communication. Preprints enable the scientist to avoid the usual delays involved in scientific publication, by the rapid diffusion among a small number of readers who are also his most competent competitors, of products which are not protected against fraudulent appropriation but are likely to be improved by being put into circulation. Reprints permit the wider circulation of “patented” products, socially imputed to a particular name, among ali the writer's colleagues or all those interested (cf. W. Hagstrom, “Factors related to the use of different modes of publishing research in four scientific fields”, in C.E. Nelson and D.K. Pollock teds). Communication among scientists and engineers, Lexington, Mass., Heath Lexington Books, 1970).
17. Hence the difficulty that is met with in research on intellectuals, be they scientists or artists, both in the inquiry itself and in publishing the results: if people who spend their lives trying to make a name for themselves are offered anonymity, this destroys their principal motivation to take part in an inquiry (cf. the model of the literary survey or the interview); if anonymity is not offered, one cannot ask “indiscreet” - i.e. objectifying, reductive - questions. The publication of the results raises similar problems, if only because anonymity has the effect of rendering the discourse unintelligible or transparent depending on how well-informed the readers are (all the more so because certain positions may contain only one element, a name).
18. H.A. Zuckerman, “Patterns of name ordering among authors of scientific papers: a study of social symbolism and its ambiguity”, American journal of sociology 74 (3), November 1968, pp. 276-291.
19. Cf. for example L.L. Hargens and W.O. Hagstrom, “Sponsored and contest mobility of American academic scientists”. Sociology of education 40 (1), Winter 1967, pp. 24-38.
20. Cf. P. Bourdieu, L. Boltanski and P. Maldidier, “La defense du corps”, Infirmation sur les sciences sociales 10 (4), 1969, pp. 45-86.
21. Statistical analysis shows, for example, that in past generations as a whole, the age of maximum scientific productivity was between 26 and 30 for chemists, between 30 and 34 for physicists and mathematicians, and between 35 and 39 for bacteriologists, geologists and physiologists (H.C. Lehman, Age and achievment, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1953).
22. Cf. F. Reif and A. Strauss, “The impact of rapid discovery upon the scientist's career”, Social problems 12 (3), 1965, pp. 297-311. Systematic comparison of this article - for which the physicist collaborated with the sociologist - with the article that the physicist wrote a few years earlier would cast a great deal of light on the functioning of American sociological thought. I shall do no more than point out that the price of “conceptualisation” (i.e. the translation of naive native concepts into official jargon) is the total disappearance of any reference to the field as a whole, and in particular, to the system of trajectories (or careers) from which each career derives its most important properties.
23. Cf. B.G. Glaser, “Variations in the importance of recognition in scientist's careers”, Social problems 10 (3), Winter 1963, pp. 268-276.
24. P. Bourdieu, “Les catégories de l'entendement professoral”, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (3), 1975, pp. 68-93.
25. On the “filtering” action of social science journal editorial committees, see D. Crane, “The gate-keepers of science: some factors affecting the selection of articles for scientific journals”, American sociologist 73 (2), 1967, pp. 195-201. There is every reason to think that, in scientific as in literary production, authors consciously or unconsciously choose places of publication on the basis of what they take to be their “norms”. Self-disqualification, which is naturally less perceptible, is probably at least as important a factor as overt elimination (quite apart from the effect of imposing a norm for publishable material).
26. “Einstein's high interval of original thought was sustained by a strange little circle of young intellectuals, filled with emotions of social and scientific generational rebellion, a counter-community of scientists outside the official scientific establishment, a group of cosmopolitan bohemians, moved in a revolutionary time to see the world in a new way” (L.S. Feuer, “The social roots of Einstein's theory of relativity”, Annals of science 27 (3), September 1971, pp. 277-298 and 27 (4), December 1971, pp. 313-344). Transcending the naive opposition between individual habitus and the social conditions in which they are realised, Feuer suggests the hypothesis, corroborated by recent work on the science education system in France (cf. M. de Saint Martin, Les fonctions sociales de l'enseignement scientifique, Paris-La Haye, Mouton 1971, Coll.: Cahiers du Centre de sociologie européenne, n°. 8, and P. Bourdieu and M. de Saint Martin, Le système des grandes écoles et la reproduction de la classe dominante, forthcoming), that the rapid and easy access to administrative responsibilities which was available in France for pupils of the science grandes écoles tended to discourage revolutionary dispositions, whereas they flourish among groups of marginal intellectuals halfway between the educational system and the revolutionary bohemian community: “One might indeed venture the hypothesis that precisely because France was a ‘republic’ of professors, precisely because the ablest talent of the École Polytechnique was promptly absorbed into the military and engineering cadres, that it was less likely that a very fundamental break with the received principles would take place there. A scientific revolution evidently finds its most fertile soil in a counter-community. Where administrative responsibilities soon beckoned the young scientist, his energies were less available for sublimation in radical research curiosity. As far as revolutionary creativity was concerned, the very openness of the French administration to scientific talent was perhaps more important for explaining its scientific conservatism than other factors that have usually been emphasized.”
27. There is no doubt that the philosophy of the history of science offered by Kuhn, with its alternation of monopolistic concentration (the paradigm) and revolution, owes a great deal to the particular case of the “Copernician revolution” which he analyses and considers “typical of any major upheaval in science” (T. Kuhn, The Copernician revolution. New York, Vintage Books, 1957): when science still has relatively little autonomy in relation to social power and especially the church, scientific revolution (in mathematical astronomy) involves political revolution and implies a revolution in all scientific disciplines, which may have political effects.
28. As well as Bachelard and Reif (already quoted), D. Bloor has seen that transformations in the social organisation of science have determined a transformation of the nature of scientific revolutions (cf. D. Bloor, “Essay review: Two paradigms for scientific knowledge?”, Science studies 1, 1971, pp. 101-115).
29. G. Bachelard, Le matérialisme rationnel, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1953, p. 41.
30. We know that the inaugural revolutions which give rise to a new field by making a break which sets up a new domain of objectivity, are themselves almost always the work of the holders of a large specific capital who, as a result of secondary variables (such as belonging to a social class or ethnic group improbable in that universe), find themselves in an unstable position which favours revolutionary inclinations: such is the case, for example, with new entrants who bring into the field capital they have accumulated in a socially superior scientific field (cf. J. BenDavid, “Roles and innovation in medicine, American journal of sociology 65, 1960, pp. 557-568
31. J. BenDavid and R. Collins, “Social factors in the origins of a new science: the case of psychology”, American sociological review 31, 1966, pp. 451-465).
32. It is generally agreed that disputes over priority become more and more frequent as the scientific struggle becomes more and more intense (despite the effect of a continuous differentiation of the field, which limits the competitors’ universe) i.e., more precisely, as accumulated scientific resources grow and the capital needed in order to innovate becomes more widely and more uniformly spread among the competitors, as a result of the rise in the cost of entry to the field.
33. One sees what ethnomethodology might become (but would it still be ethnomethodology?) if it realised that what it takes as its object, Schutz's “taken for granted”, is pre-reflexive adherence to the established order.
34. In the case of the field of ideological production (to which the field of the social sciences still belongs) the basis of the consensus in dissensus which defines doxa lies, as we shall see, in the censored relationship of the field of production as a whole with the field of power (i.e. the field's hidden function in the class struggle).
35. This is why social systems of classification (taxonomies), which are one of the issues at stake in the ideological struggle between classes (cf. P. Bourdieu and L. Boltanski, “Le titre et le poste: rapports entre le système de production et le système de reproduction”. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 2, 1975, pp 95-107) also constitute - through the positions adopted as to the existence or non-existence of social classes - one of the major principles of division of the sociological field (cf. P. Bourdieu, “Classes et classements”, Minuit 5, 1973, pp. 22-24, and A.P.A. Coxon and C.L. Jones, Occupational categorization and images of society, Project on occupational cognition, Working Paper n” 4, Edinburgh University Press, 1974).
36. Cf. P. Bourdieu, “La théorie”, VH 1012, Summer 1970, pp. 13-21.
37. A. Gerschenkron, Economic backwardness in historical perspective, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1962, p. 7.
38. The philosophy of history pervading this social history of social science achieves paradigmatic expression in Terry Clark's book, which Paul Vogt sociologically characterises in two adjectives: “Terry N. Clark's long-awaited, much circulated in manuscript, Prophets and patrons“(cf. T. Clark, Prophets and patrons, The French university and the emergence of the social sciences, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1973, and J.C. Chamboredon, “Sociologie de la sociologie et intérêts sociaux des sociologues”. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 2, 1975, pp. 2-17).
39. J. Ben David deserves credit for presenting this thesis in its most direct form: for him the high degree of competition which characterises the American university explains its higher scientific productivity and greater flexibility (J. BenDavid, “Scientific productivity and academic organization in nineteenth century medicine”, American sociological review 25, 1960, pp. 828-843; Fundamental research and the universities, Paris, OCDE, 1968
40. J. Ben David and A. Zloczower, “Universities and academic systems in modern societies”, European journal of sociology 3, 1962, pp. 45-84).
41. And correlatively, this soft theory of competition, shared by all American writers, constitutes the subtlest obstacle to the construction of the scientific field as such, i.e. as the locus of a struggle.
42. J. Gaston “The reward system in British science”, American sociological review 35 (4), August 1970.
43. On the distortion to which sociological methodology subjects the epistemological reality of scientific practice in the natural sciences, see P. Bourdieu, J.C. Chamboredon and J.C. Passeron, Le metier de sociologue, Paris, Mouton-Bordas, 1968, 430 p.
44. Cf. for example, R.W. Friedrichs, A sociology of sociology, New York, Free Press, 1970.
45. E. Gellner, “Myth, ideology and revolution”, in B. Crick and W.A. Robson (ed), Protest and discontent, London, Penguin, 1970, pp. 204-220.
46. The purely social importance of a journal like Theory and society, which allows it to remain in existence without any substantive content beyond the sort of vague anti-positivist humanism with which “critical sociologists” (another native concept) identify, lies in the fact that it gives a strictly negative unity to all the currents outside the American sociological establishment, from ethnomethodology, the heir of phenomenology, to neo-Marxism, via psychohistory. (A fairly accurate synoptic table of this constellation is to be found in P. Bandyapadhyav, “One sociology or many: some issues in radical sociology”. Sociological review 19, February 1971, pp. 5-30.)
47. Cf. P. Bourdieu, “Les doxosophes”, Minuit 1, 1973, pp. 26-45 (especially the analysis of the Lipset effect).
48. owes to the need to legitimate a de facto situation and transform unavoidable limits into elective exclusions.
49. On the production of belief and fetishism in the field of haute couture, see P. Bourdieu and Y. Delsaut, “Le couturier et sa griffe: contribution à une théorie de la magie”, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 1, Janvier 1975, pp. 7-36.
50. Such epistemological couples, which are simultaneously sociological couples, may be observed in any field (cf. for example the Positivismusstreit between Habermas and Popper in Germany - a diversionary mechanism which, having proved its effectiveness in Europe, is now beginning to take hold in the USA with the importing of the Frankfurt school).
51. An analysis is needed of all the strategic uses which those dominant in a particular field may make of the ideological transfiguration of their objective position: for example, the ostentatious display of exclusion which enables the excluded to continue to make use of the institution (which they recognise sufficiently to reproach it for not having recognised them) while making exclusion a guarantee of scientific status; or the challenge to the “competence” of the dominant which is at the centre of every heretical movement (cf the contesting of the monopoly of the sacraments) which has that much less need of scientific arguments when there is less accumulated scientific authority, etc.
52. On the need to construct the intellectual field as such, so as to make possible a sociology of the intellectuals which would be something more than an exchange of insults and anathemas between “right-wing intellectuals“and”left-wing intellectuals”, see P. Bourdieu, “Les fractions de la classe dominante et les modes d'appropriation de l'œuvre d'art”, Information sur les sciences sociales 13 (3), 1974, pp. 7-32.