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III. Science, Research (Science Legislation, Research Structure, Research Organisations, Research Funding)
B. Essays, Commentaries, Statements
Author ALBERT, Mathieu
Title Bringing Pierre Bordieu to science and technology studies / Mathieu Albert ; Daniel Lee Kleinman
Publication year 2011
Source/Footnote In: Minerva. - 49 (2011) 3, S. 263 - 273
Inventory number 30927
Keywords Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft ; Wissenschaft : allgemein
Abstract For many years, the most high profile work in science and technology studies (STS) did not theorize the place of power in the scientific field. Scholars were not inclined to explore the extent to which the social organization of science affects who the winners and losers are in technoscientific struggles. This began to change in the 1990s and recent years have seen a wide array of scholarship which explicitly or implicitly treats the scientific field, to paraphrase Pierre Bourdieu, as a field like any other, with its struggles, interests and distributions of power (e.g., Frickel and Moore 2006; Kleinman 2003). Despite this growing attention to power, struggle, and inequality in science, relatively few scholars have integrated the conceptual tools developed by Pierre Bourdieu into their work (but see Albert et al. 2008, 2009; Cooper 2009; Fourcade 2009; Hong, 2008; Kim 2009). The essays in this volume explicitly engage Bourdieu in their STS scholarship and set a provocative foundation for further work in the area. In this introductory essay, we explore how major figures in STS conceptualize the scientific field and power within it. We point to what we believe are some of the limitations in that work. Finally, we outline a Bourdieusian perspective on technoscience and suggest how Bourdieu?s concepts might be profitably drawn on in STS scholarship. (HRK / Abstract übernommen)