The “reproducibility crisis” has been one of the most significant stories in science in the past 15 years and has led to significant policy changes across the research landscape. Yet, scandals, irreproducible studies, and cries of crisis have occurred for decades in science. This article seeks to explain why the reproducibility crisis has taken root and become a force in science policy in ways previous crises have not. In short, we argue that it was through the scientific, institutional, and cultural (...) efforts of a group of scientific activists we are calling metascientists. Metascience is a scientific social movement that seeks to use quantification and experimentation to diagnose problems in research practice and improve efficiency. It draws together data scientists, experimental and statistical methodologists, and open science activists into a project with both intellectual and policy dimensions. Metascientists have been remarkably successful at winning grants, motivating news coverage, and changing policies at science agencies, journals, and universities. The social movement lens is useful for understanding the popularization and impact of the reproducibility crisis narrative and suggests ways the institutions of science are adapting to meet a changing political and technological landscape. (shrink)

Research on economization processes is increasingly taking seriously the social and material processes through which various policy domains are transformed into economic problems and solutions. This article engages “Value Added Modeling” (VAM) in teacher evaluation systems as a case study in economization. VAM is a statistical technology for evaluating the effectiveness of schoolteachers using student test scores, which wrests authority for the determination of quality teaching away from education professionals and toward quantitative economic modelers. Mobilizing field theory, we trace a (...) half century of changing relationships among economists, other academics, and various policy audiences (from media to philanthropists to state and federal government) in struggles to define education policy concerning teacher quality. We show that economization is a set of overlapping, sometimes contradictory processes that can take different forms: in this case, the spread of an “economic style of reasoning” or the establishment of “economic policy devices.” The case of VAM shows stages of economization in which processes first proceeded independently of one another, then interacted in contradictory ways, and finally, mutually reinforced one another. What primarily drove these interactions was the struggle for scientific capital within the economics discipline and the changing place of education policy and VAM within it. Ultimately, VAM’s original role as a policy device for evaluating and selecting individual teachers has foundered even as it has become an important tool for economists to accrue scientific capital and expand their style of reasoning to broader audiences. (shrink)

This paper uses Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to develop tools for analyzing interdisciplinary scientific fields. Interdisciplinary fields are scientific spaces where no single form of scientific capital has a monopoly and therefore multiple forms of scientific capital constitute the structures and stakes of scientific competition. Scientists compete to accumulate and define forms of scientific capital and also to set the rates of exchange between them. The paper illustrates this framework by applying it to the interdisciplinary field of behavior genetics. Most (...) behavior geneticists envision their participation in the field as a means to compete for scientific capital in other fields. However, the scientific capital of behavior genetics has different values for scientists attempting to deploy it in different neighboring fields. These values depend on situations in each field and the ways behavior genetics mediates relationships among them. The pattern of relationships of exchange helps explain the social hierarchy and several features of knowledge production within behavior genetics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:A wide range of research uses patterns of genetic variation to infer genetic similarity between individuals, typically referred to as genetic ancestry. This research includes inference of human demographic history, understanding the genetic architecture of traits, and predicting disease risk. Researchers are not just structuring an intellectual inquiry when using genetic ancestry, they are also creating analytical frameworks with broader societal ramifications. This essay presents an ethics framework in the spirit of virtue ethics for these researchers: rather than focus on (...) rule following, the framework is designed to build researchers’ capacities to react to the ethical dimensions of their work. The authors identify one overarching principle of intellectual freedom and responsibility, noting that freedom in all its guises comes with responsibility, and they identify and define four principles that collectively uphold researchers’ intellectual responsibility: truthfulness, justice and fairness, anti-racism, and public beneficence. Researchers should bring their practices into alignment with these principles, and to aid this, the authors name three common ways research practices infringe these principles, suggest a step-by-step process for aligning research choices with the principles, provide rules of thumb for achieving alignment, and give a worked case. The essay concludes by identifying support needed by researchers to act in accord with the proposed framework. (shrink)

For much of its history, behavioral genetics, or research into the influence genetics has on human behavior, has been associated with a pessimistic view of educational reforms’ potential to make much difference in improving educational outcomes or reducing inequality. Recently, however, some behavioral geneticists have begun to speak in more optimistic terms about the promise of genetically informed education to improve learning for all children, especially those who are socially or economically disadvantaged. This shift in emphasis should be welcome news (...) for everyone interested in promoting educational improvement who worried that behavioral genetics offered support for the status quo. However, I think it amounts to little more than a shift in tone. Behavioral genetics, I will argue, does not advance educational reform: its proposed solutions are rooted in the limits, not the strength, of behavioral genetics knowledge; repeat the ideas of earlier U.S. educational reform efforts; and rely on a naive optimism about the power of choice and personalization. (shrink)

When studying science contexts, scholars typically position charismatic authority as an adjunct or something that provides a meaning-laden boost to rational authority. In this paper, we re-theorize these relationships. We re-center charismatic authority as an interpretive resource that allows scientists and onlookers to recast a professional conflict in terms of a public drama. In this mode, both professionals and lay enthusiasts portray involvement in the scientific process as a story of suppression and persecution, in which only a few remarkable figures (...) can withstand scrutiny and take on challengers with dignity. Description and elaboration of these figures and the folklore surrounding them sets in motion the interpretive processes by which some actors become charismatic leaders and others charismatic followers within science, ultimately providing alternative symbolic resources for an embattled research agenda to accrue legitimacy. To illustrate, we use the case of Arthur Jensen – a deceased intelligence researcher and the intellectual father to contemporary texts like The Bell Curve – and the circles of hero worship that admirers inside and outside academia have created to praise him. Using this perspective to study Jensen and his admirers demonstrates how the perennial race and intelligence debates gain a kind of symbolic power, unrelated to their scientific merit or racist appeal, which enables such debates to thrive and persist in the public sphere. More generally, our approach identifies contemporary processes by which scientific ideas can gain public authority even when their intellectual merit has been deemed dubious. (shrink)

This article argues that the sociology of knowledge as a critical subfield of sociology and the artist Marcel Duchamp are engaged in epistemologically analogous projects. Two sets of claims demonstrate the analogy: that Duchamp and the sociology of knowledge both have the same conception of and attitude toward their objects, and that they both mount similar critiques of the institutions they occupy. A set of similar practices leads both to adopt an attitude of reflexivity which courts self-refutation by changing the (...) ontological status of their objects and the epistemological status of their own practices. The analogy implies some new ways of thinking about the institutional role of the sociology of knowledge, the practice and epistemology of sociology, and perhaps the epistemic character of modernism. (shrink)