Science of Science and Reflexivity by Pierre Bourdieu

By Pierre Bourdieu

During the last 4 a long time, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced the most innovative and refined our bodies of social idea of the postwar period. while he died in 2002, he was once thought of to be a philosopher on a par with Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan—a public highbrow as influential to his new release as Sartre used to be to his.

Science of technological know-how and Reflexivity may be welcomed as a spouse quantity to Bourdieu's now seminal An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. during this posthumous paintings, Bourdieu announces that technology is at risk of turning into a handmaiden to biotechnology, drugs, genetic engineering, and army research—that it hazards falling below the keep watch over of commercial businesses that search to use it for monopolies and profit.

Science therefore endangered can develop into harmful to mankind. the road among natural and utilized technology, accordingly, has to be subjected to extreme theoretical scrutiny. Bourdieu's targets in Science of technology and Reflexivity are to spot the social stipulations within which technology develops on the way to reclaim its objectivity and to rescue it from relativism and the forces that may take advantage of it. within the grand culture of medical reflections on technological know-how, Bourdieu presents a sociological research of the self-discipline as anything able to generating transhistorical truths; he offers an incisive critique of the most currents within the research of technological know-how during the prior part century; and he bargains a lively safety of technological know-how opposed to encroaching political and fiscal forces.

A masterful summation of the foundations underlying Bourdieu's oeuvre and a memoir of his personal clinical trip, Science of technological know-how and Reflexivity is a capstone to 1 of an important and prodigious careers within the box of sociology.

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Making a virtue of necessity, they describe what seems to them intelligible in the laboratory: the traces, the texts, the conversa­ tions, the rituals, and the strange material (one of the high points of this work is the 'stranger's' description of a simple instrument, a pip­ ette . . - Woolgar 1988b: 85). They can thus treat natural science as a literary activity, and, to describe and interpret this circulation of scien­ tific products, they draw on a semiological model (that of A. j. Grei­ mas).

0) Of doubtful significance . . What he meant I haven't bothered to look up the reference. The experiment didn't work out, but I figured I could at least get a publication out of it. The fellow in the next lab had some already prepared. The results on the others didn't make sense and were ignored. Dropped on the floor. Not dropped on the floor. e. those that fit the dogma. Fair Poor Doubtful Imaginary Wrong. Interesting to me. I think. A couple of other guys think so too. He was my graduate student.

These constructions are imposed through the negotiation of the small groups of researchers concerned. Verification (assay) is self-verification; it creates its own truth; it is self-verifying because there is nothing to verify it with. j It is posited that the products of science are the result of a process of manufacture and that the laboratory, itself an artificial universe, cut off from the world in countless ways, physically, socially and also by the capital of instruments that is handled there, is the site of the construction, even the 'creation', of the phenomena with which we build up and test theories and which would not exist without the instrumental equipment of the laboratory.

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