Abstract
An emergent social science of knowledge applications, drawing on a substantial multidisciplinary literature published over the past twenty-five years, signals an inversion of typical scholarly reasoning about the knowledge-society nexus. Whereas most scholarly research thus far has concentrated on conditions believed to affect the production of scientific and professional knowledge, we pose a new problematic: What must we examine in order to comprehend and consciously shape applications of scientific and professional knowledge to the manifold problems facing contemporary societies? To date, approaches to this problematic have proceeded on the basis of four broadly accepted if abstract theses about the nature of contemporary knowledge systems: subjectivity, corrigibility, sociality, and complexity. Within the boundaries supplied by these commonly accepted theses are unresolved controversies expressed in competing visions of complexity, alternative perspectives of causation, rival images of progress, and conflicting criteria of application.
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He has authored and edited books, articles, and government reports in the areas of public policy analysis, science policy, planned social change, and research utilization. His recent publications includePublic Policy Analysis, Values, Ethics and the Practice of Policy Analysis, andPolicy Analysis: Perspectives, Concepts and Methods, and (with Burkart Holzner)Impacts of Science on American Society. He is presently serving as president of the Policy Studies Organization. Dr. Dunn is editor ofKnowledge in Society: The International Journal of Knowledge Transfer.
Currently he is co-principal investigator (with William N. Dunn) of an NSF sponsored grant “The Impacts of Science on American Society.” Dr. Holzner is known for such works asReality Construction in Society andThe Knowledge System: The Sociology of Knowledge Applications (with John Marx). He is co-editor and the chair of the Editorial Advisory Board ofKnowledge in Society: The International Journal of Knowledge Transfer.
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Dunn, W.N., Holzner, B. Knowledge in society: anatomy of an emergent field. Knowledge in Society 1, 3 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03177545
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03177545