Contract Shop Epistemology: Credibility and Problem Construction in Applied Social Science

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 27, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 363-394

  Breslau, Daniel ^a  

^a TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992838825     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631297027003001     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Jiirgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1970), 81–122
2. Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
3. The studies of social science in policymaking are too numerous to mention here, but they include several distinct bodies of literature: (1) the knowledge utilization tradition, including works such as Carol Weiss and Michael Bucuvalas, Social Science Research and Decision-Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980)
4. (2) comparative-historical research on the welfare state which treats the institutionalization of social scientific policy advisors as a source of state autonomy, as, for example, in Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, ‘State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 97 (1982), 255–78)
5. the theoretical literature on the ideological or depoliticizing role of science as used in policy formation, such as Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism: Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
6. Since the 1960s, professional social scientists have increasingly found research careers outside of traditional academic departments. In the US this process followed on the heels of an expansion of welfare state activities that extended state intervention into many new domains. Between 1965 and 1985, the proportion of social science PhDs who found academic employment slipped from 85% to 68%, indicating that the growth in number of doctorates awarded far outstripped the growth in academic faculty positions: see Alan Cartter, PhDs and the Academic Labor Market (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976)
7. Lewis C. Solmon, Laura Kent, Nancy Ochsner and Margo-Lea Hurwicz, Underemployed PhDs (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1981)
8. National Science Foundation, Science and Engineering Doctorates: 1960–1990 (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1991), 207–08).
9. The rising demand for scientific evaluation of state interventions was thus met by a surplus of academically-trained social scientists with a reduced expectation of advancement within university-based disciplines: see Henry Aaron, Politics and the Professors (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1978).
10. Increasingly, this work has been carried out in consulting firms and non-profit independent research organizations, all hiring academically-trained social scientists: see Irene N. Bernstein and Howard Freeman, Academic and Entrepreneurial Research: The Consequences of Diversity in Federal Evaluation Studies (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1975).
11. Bruno Latour (trans. Catherine Porter), We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 51–55.
12. See G. Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay, Opening Pandora's Box (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
13. Michael Lynch, Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).
14. Andrew Pickering, ‘The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 99, No. 3 (1993), 559–589.
15. Michael Lynch, Technical Work and Critical Inquiry: Investigations in a Scientific Labouratory’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 15 (1985), 37–66.
16. Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, ‘Don't Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley’, Andrew Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 343–368.
17. Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
18. Steve Woolgar, Science: The Very Idea (London: Tavistock, 1988)
19. Malcolm Ashmore, The Reflexive Thesis: Wrighting Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989).
20. Although Woolgar and Latour explicitly ruled out any identification of their ‘credibility’ with Bourdieu's ‘capital’, the two concepts are quite similar in spirit, particularly if one considers Bourdieu's fragmentary writings on the scientific field. In fact, Latour and Woolgar proceed to use ‘credibility’ and ‘capital’ interchangeably, or to refer to a ‘capital of credibility’ as I have done here. Most importantly, both concepts are opposed to traditional conceptions of scientific ‘rewards’: see Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2nd edn, 1986 [1979]).
21. Richard Whitley, ‘The Establishment and Structure of the Sciences as Reputational Organizations’, in Norbert Elias, Herminio Martins and Whitley (eds), Scientific Establishments and Hierarchies (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982), 313–57, at 325.
22. Robert Lalonde, ‘Evaluating the Econometric Evaluations of Training Programs with Experimental Data’, American Economic Review, Vol. 76 (1986), 604–620.
23. Thomas Fraker and Rebecca Maynard, ‘The Adequacy of Comparison Group Designs for Evaluations of Employment-Related Programs’, Journal of Human Resources, Vol, 22, No. 2 (1987), 194–227.
24. James Heckman, V. Joseph Hotz and Marcelo Dabos, ‘Do We Need Experimental Data to Evaluate the Impact of Manpower Training on Earnings?’, Evaluation Review, Vol. 11, No. 4 (1987), 395–427, at 421.
25. Orley Ashenfelter, ‘The Case for Evaluating Training Programs with Randomized Trials’, Economics of Education Review, Vol. 6 (1987), 333–338.
26. JTLS Advisory Panel, Recommendations of the Job Training Longitudinal Survey Research Advisory Panel (Washington, DC: US Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Development, 1985).
27. See Michael Greenacre, Theory and Applications of Correspondence Analysis (London: Academic Press, 1984)
28. Ludovic Lebart, Alain Morineau and Kenneth Warwick, Multivariate Descriptive Statistical Analysis: Correspondence Analysis and Related Techniques for Large Matrices (New York: Wiley, 1984). In more technical terms, the analysis locates the two-dimensional subspace that maximizes the total chi-square distances among rows and columns – that is, the degree that they depart from complete independence.
29. The technique is also known as ‘homogeneity analysis’ or HOMALS: see Michel Tenenhaus and Forrest Young, ‘An Analysis and Synthesis of Multiple Correspondence Analysis, Optimal Scaling, Dual Scaling, Homogeneity Analysis, and Other Methods for Quantifying Categorical Multivariate Data’, Psychometrica, Vol. 50 (1985), 91–119.
30. Orley Ashenfelter, ‘Estimating the Effect of Training Programs on Earnings’, Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 67 (1978), 47–57, at 47.
31. James J. Heckman, ‘Randomization and Social Policy Evaluation’, in Charles Manski and Irwin Garfinkel (eds), Evaluating Welfare and Training Programs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 201–230.
32. Gary Burtless and Larry Orr, ‘Are Classical Experiments Needed for Manpower Policy?’, Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 21 (1986), 606–639.
33. Katherine Dickinson, Terry Johnson and Richard West, ‘An Analysis of the Impact of CETA Programs on Participants’ Earnings’, Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 21 (1986), 64–91, at 64.
34. Robert Merton, The Sociology of Science (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), 267–278.
35. The National Health Insurance Experiment was carried out by Rand Corporation, contracted by the Federal Government, in the 1970s. It was designed to estimate the effect of a national health insurance policy on the demand for health services. But rather than simply testing a specific intervention experimentally, it randomly assigned participants to a set of theoretically derived and carefully calibrated ‘plans’ defined by different co-payment rates and different deductibles. The result was not a test of the effect of a specific policy, but a structural model that would allow a prediction of the demand response to any policy. The Negative Income Tax Experiments, similarly, sought to estimate a ‘response surface’ for the relationship between level of benefit and labour supply, rather than the effect of a specific programme. See David N. Kershaw and Jerilyn Fair, The New Jersey Income-Maintenance Experiment, Vol. 1: Operations, Survey, and Administration (New York: Academic Press, 1976).
36. Daniel Breslau, ‘The Scientific Appropriation of Social Research: Robert Park's Human Ecology and American Sociology’, Theory and Society, Vol. 9 (1990), 417–446.
37. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 332.