Abstract
The paper examines Pierre Bourdieu’s extensive writings on the production of scientific knowledge. The study shows that Bourdieu offered not one but two - significantly different - approaches to scientific knowledge production, one formulated in his theoretical, or programmatic, writings on the subject, the other developed in his empirical writings. Addressing the question as to the relevance of Bourdieu’s work for science studies, the analysis argues that the former of these two approaches is at once very visible in Bourdieu’s work but characterized by limitations from the standpoint of scholarship in STS, whereas the latter approach is less conspicuous but of broader empirical value.
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Notes
Written for a festschrift for Robert Merton, this passage begins “Merton has established furthermore that.” I omit these words above because, as the context makes clear, Bourdieu is here not only describing Merton’s position, but also praising Merton for anticipating Bourdieu’s own emphasis on the centrality this “two-fold relation” in the study of science.
In a roughly equivalent version of this definition, Bourdieu writes: “The scientific field is a field of forces whose structure is defined by the continuous distribution of the specific capital possessed, at the given moment, by various agents or institutions operative in the field” (1991, p. 6).
As previous commentators have observed, Bourdieu’s general definition of autonomy is problematic in that it neglects to provide a way to identify the autonomy of a field apart from the presence of the effects that Bourdieu asserts that autonomy will produce – a tautology that Pels (1995, p. 90) pinpoints when he criticizes Bourdieu for furnishing a “performative” rather than an “ostensive” definition of autonomy. Fortunately, when analyzing specifically scientific fields, Bourdieu avoids this circularity in the manner indicated in footnote 4 below.
In the modern university, according to Bourdieu, field “autonomization … takes place … through the creation of disciplines,” where “a discipline is a relatively stable and delimited field [which is] easy to recognize: it has an academically and socially recognized name (… such as sociology as opposed to ‘mediology,’ for example); it is inscribed in institutions, laboratories, university departments, journals, national and international fora (conferences), procedures for the certification of competencies,” etc. (2001, pp. 49, 64–65).
This is not to say that, from Bourdieu’s point of view, the differently-positioned players in a field have nothing in common. Rather, he holds: “each scientific universe has its specific doxa, a list of inseparably cognitive and evaluative presuppositions whose acceptance is implied in membership itself; these include the major obligatory pairs of opposites which … unite those whom they divide, since agents have to share a common acceptance of them to be able to fight over them or through them, and so to produce [their] position takings” (1997, p. 100).
As a check on my personal impressions as to how STS scholars have used of Bourdieu’s work, I examined all articles that refer to Bourdieu in Social Studies of Science (from its inception in 1975 to 2006) and in Science, Technology, and Human Values (from its beginning in 1978 to 2006). My comments in the text are based on the analysis of these articles.
Bourdieu (2001, p. 70) actually goes so far as to suggest that in “very autonomous scientific field[s],” habitus makes a smaller “contribution” than in other fields.
I cite Knorr-Cetina because her critique, focused specifically on Bourdieu’s analysis of scientific knowledge production, proved influential among STS scholars. Viewing Bourdieu’s work through wider lenses, Swartz’s also draws attention to “the priority given [by Bourdieu] to the internal analysis of fields” (1997, p. 128). See also Pels (1995) and Benson (1999).
This is not to claim that STS scholars dissented from Bourdieu over this particular point (except as noted in footnote 10). Insofar as they have raised specific criticisms of his work, their target has tended to be his internalist approach – and that seems to have sufficed to dampen interest in his model of scientific knowledge production. The suggestion in the text is that, had dissatisfaction with Bourdieu’s internalism not already dissuaded STS scholars from making use of his theory, related objections would likely have arisen.
These processes have, of course, been much considered in the work of scholars associated with the social world approach and actor-network theory, among many other perspectives. That Bourdieu sidelines such processes has been observed by Calvert who remarks that, although Bourdieu is right to emphasize divisive struggles within scientific fields, under certain circumstances “it does appear that scientists pull together” (2006, p. 217).
I would caution against what would seem to be the obvious explanation as to why Bourdieu’s approach shifts when he addresses the social sciences – namely, that the social sciences lack the property of autonomy which he associates with fields in the natural sciences. Returning to the point made in footnote 4 above: Bourdieu equates academic field autonomy with status as a discipline, as indicated by the markers listed in the cited quotation. By these indicators, the social scientific fields that Bourdieu writes about do meet his criteria of relative autonomy (if, in some instances, with lower scores than certain the natural sciences). Moreover, as the text will indicate, many of the empirical observations that Bourdieu introduces when discussing the social sciences, he extends to the natural sciences.
Bourdieu remarks that, in theorizing about science, “I have constantly been thinking of the social sciences” in the conviction that “the social sciences are sciences like others, except that they encounter particular difficulty in being sciences like others” (2001, p. 85).
One will notice that, according to Bourdieu’s depiction, any particular scientific or social-scientific field is likely to be located inside several of these nested hierarchies at once. That this is so may well explain why, when writing of these hierarchies, Bourdieu eschews the language of his duplex model, which presents a scientific field as having simply an internal and an external dimension.
In elaborating this point, Bourdieu notes how fields that were better positioned in these hierarchies than was sociology also came to be intellectually affected by their position, as a result of “the circular structure of domination, which allows disciplines that are doubly subordinate according to traditional criteria simultaneously to dominate from another angle” – by negative more than by positive modeling – “the disciplines that dominate them” (1984a, pp. 121–22).
It is true that, under some circumstance, eclecticism might serve as yet another fractionalized position-taking in a polarized field struggle. As the quotations above indicate, however, this is not Bourdieu’s own typical view, which depicts eclecticism, instead, as a more unifying intellectual stance.
The above quotation that characterizes controversy a “blot on the face of science” is from a passage, often cited by contemporaries, in J.S. Mill’s System of Logic (1856, pp. 406–07). The latter three quotations are from economists Simon Patten (1896, p. 50), W. J. Ashley (1892, pp. ix–xii), and Jacob Hollander (1899, p. 123).
This is not to posit a one-to-one correspondence according to which an enclosed duplex field necessarily assumes an agonistic logic, whereas an open field in a multiplex space exhibits a non-agonistic logic. Insofar as Bourdieu’s on-the-ground approach is correct, the extent to which such a correspondence obtains empirically would appear to depend (inter alia) on the focal field’s positioning (and, by extension, its relative autonomy) in the larger hierarchical space where it is located. (I thank one of the journal’s anonymous reviewers for raising this point.)
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Camic, C. Bourdieu’s Cleft Sociology of Science. Minerva 49, 275–293 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-011-9176-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-011-9176-0