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At the Policy Lunchbox in London on Wednesday

Announcement! I will be giving a talk this Wednesday the 12th at the Biochemical Society and British Ecological Society’s “Policy Lunchbox” series from 12:30 to 2pm. It will be at Charles Darwin House near Russell Square in London. If you plan to come, you should let the organizers know. Details here.

The title of my talk is “Science Policy History: Data Points, Morality Tale, or Precedent?” Spoiler alert: I’m going to be talking up the precedent angle. (Also, I’m generally sympathetic to data points, rather less so to morality tales.)

Here’s a quick preview of some common morality tales from history:

Update: Slides here. (5.3 MB)

The H Word

Not too long ago, the Royal Museums Greenwich historian and curator (and Imperial College PhD), Becky Higgitt, decided to undertake the occasional post for the Whewell’s Ghost blog. Then, she became a key contributor to the Board of Longitude project blog, and then became the proprietor of her own blog, Teleskopos. (All are on the blogroll.) Now, I think we can safely crown her the History of Science Blog Empress with the opening of “The H Word”, which she runs with Cambridge HPS historian Vanessa Heggie, at the Guardian’s — yes, the Guardian’s — website. The comments there already show a thirst for history of science, so good luck to Becky and Vanessa!

As for the lack of activity around here, I have some good excuses: an article revision deadline, a self-imposed article submission deadline, a grant application deadline, and the birth of my daughter Claire (our first!) all coincided on August 1st. I’ve got some good things in store blog-wise, though, so stay tuned!

The Search for a Mature View of Industrial Research

At the moment there is an interesting — if scattered — set of arguments about, proffered by senior historians, concerning what an appropriately mature handling of industrial research might look like.

In his essay “Time, Money, and History” (pdf, free) in the latest Isis, my colleague David Edgerton refers to the influence of the “spontaneous economics of academic research scientists,” which unduly privileges discussions of the importance of university-based research amid the much wider world of R&D, while also fixating on a more longstanding concern with how patronage might influence the course of research work (“filthy lucre”). Most of the concerns still regularly expressed about the funding, independence, and broader importance of academic research were, by the 1960s, already widely circulated by purveyors of this spontaneous economics.

Amid particular ’60s-era concerns that science was being perverted by tighter connections to national defense and the economy, and stifled by more structured administration, some historians and sociologists of science were eager to dispel oft-voiced beliefs that science’s strange, new institutional situation represented a fundamental change in how science was done. On this blog we have seen how Robert Merton was eager to argue that the competitive behaviors chronicled in James Watson’s The Double Helix (1968) were a longstanding feature of science, and not some twentieth-century pathology. Similarly, in their 2007 essay, “The Commercialization of Science and the Response of STS,”¹ Philip Mirowski and Esther-Mirjam Sent detect a nothing-new-to-see-here attitude as early as a 1960 commentary by Thomas Kuhn highlighting the history of the science-technology relation.

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“Discipline & Ontology” vs. “Projects” in Reconstructing Histories of Ideas

I am gearing up to review the recently published Cold War Social Science (2012) volume on this blog, and this post was written with that task in mind. But, before I get to the review, I’d like to sharpen up a critical tool I’ve been working on.*

I propose that within the historiographies of science, technology, and ideas in general — but politically and socially relevant twentieth-century work (be it scientific, engineering, intellectual, architectural, etc…) in particular — we can identify a common interpretive approach. This approach supposes that historical contests between different disciplines over politically and socially significant “ontologies” are important foci for historians’ attention, because society is taken to grant disciplines, particularly “scientific” ones, the intellectual authority to dictate those ontologies’ form and implications. Some important ontologies include: the structure of the just polity and the prosperous economy, modernity, human nature, mind, normality, disease, nature and “the natural”, and aspects of personal identity such as gender, sexuality, and race.

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Bycroft on “Will’s Picture” at Double Réfraction

Michael Bycroft, an HPS PhD student at Cambridge and an occasional commenter on this blog, has started up a new (bilingual!) blog called Double Réfraction, which will run at least through this summer. I offer as proof of my lack of insanity the fact that he has successfully absorbed many, or even most of the historiographical ideas articulated on this blog, and is distilling them into a series of posts over there. (He was even kind enough to dig up my hubristic gauntlet-laying-down of New Years 2010!) That project will ultimately lead into what I gather will be a sympathetic critique of EWP’s “house” position, or “Will’s Picture” as he terms it. I have to say, I’m really floored by the seriousness with which he’s studied the ideas presented on this blog: these ideas are scattered over 4+ years of posts that have often been overly dense, poorly articulated, under-supported through examples, and doubtless repetitive. I hope anyone with a serious interest in how the communal craftsmanship of history-writing and historiography-building operates will have a look.

New posts soon: I’ve been wanting to talk about a new journal article I have coming out any day now, but I want the article itself to exist in the public sphere before I do.

Sociology, Science Indexing, and Science Indicators in the ’60s and ’70s

Simultaneously reading a recent Guardian article on the issue of open-access scientific publication, and Robert K. Merton’s “The Sociology of Science: An Episodic Memoir” (in The Sociology of Science in Europe, 1977, pp. 3-141) spurred me to wonder whether science studies could aid scientists to transition to a new model of scientific publication that is up-to-date with technology, but that also retains the intellectual and institutional virtues of present models. My answer to this question is: probably not.

The thought occurred to me because of Merton’s consideration of whether or not his 1940s-era understanding of how and why scientific credit is assigned the way it is could have led to the establishment of something like the Science Citation Index (SCI) prior to its actual appearance in 1963. Merton speculated on why it didn’t, but he also marked a growing contact in the 1960s and ’70s between the historians and sociologists of science, publication indexing, and the rising tide of “science indicators”. He reckoned this contact would grow as both the sociology of science and science metrics matured. Unfortunately, the 1970s actually seems to have been its high-water mark.

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Merton, the DSB, and the Failed Digital Humanities of the 1960s

Following up on a reference in Gieryn 1982, I’ve been reading over Robert K. Merton’s long essay, “The Sociology of Science: An Episodic Memoir,” in The Sociology of Science in Europe (1977), pp. 3-141. I’ll post more on it soon in the context of other recent posts on this blog. For the moment, I’ll just say that the essay is thin on “norms”, “counter-norms”, “ambivalence”, etc. It is mainly about the intellectual influences on the sociology of science that developed in the 1960s and ’70s. It is also about the methods, ambitions, and projects of what Merton still regarded as a nascent discipline. It turns out these projects are well worth a tangential post, or two.

In this post, I want to focus on Merton’s account of his involvement with the planning of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (DSB), and the computerized “data bank” that didn’t accompany it.

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Thomas Gieryn’s Criticism of Post-Mertonian Science Studies

This post is about: Thomas Gieryn, “Relativist/Constructivist Programmes in the Sociology of Science: Redundance and Retreat” Social Studies of Science 12 (1982): 279-297.

The richness, honesty, and critical depth of many of the debates in the social studies of science in the late ’70s and early ’80s continues to surprise me, since their full contours were not very well preserved in later rehearsals. In this blog’s most recent swing through this history, we noted Harry Collins’s early-’80s articulation of a “methodological relativism” which sought to develop a pure sociology of scientific knowledge unburdened by epistemological baggage. This program contrasted with Karin Knorr Cetina’s belief that the pursuit of general sociological knowledge was unlikely to turn up much, and that the way forward was in localized ethnographic studies.

Now, I have always just assumed that the sociologist Thomas Gieryn identified with such radical (if divergent) postures. Gieryn pretty much initiated the still-popular strategy of analyzing “boundaries” in science studies. And, in the 1983 article in which he did so, he made explicit use of Michael Mulkay’s argument that science’s Mertonian “norms” were mainly rhetoric that scientists used to establish an “ideology” around themselves. Although I did not suppose Gieryn so radical as Mulkay, I did not expect what I found in Gieryn 1982 — an energetic criticism of Collins’s “relativism”, of Knorr Cetina’s “constructivism”, and of any pretensions that sociology was making a radical escape from the program of Robert Merton.

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Charles Weiner and the Oral History of Physics

Having just submitted an article in which oral histories conducted by Charles Weiner play a major role, I was surprised and saddened this morning to learn of his death a few days ago at the age of 80. I did not know Weiner personally — for an overview of his life, and personal recollections of him, please see this very good post written by his son-in-law, Scott Underwood. I would, however, like to take a moment to reflect on his work in the oral history of physics.

Weiner was the director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics from 1965 to 1974, before moving to MIT where he spent the rest of his career. I was a postdoctoral historian at the Center from 2007 to 2010 (albeit at a new facility in College Park, Maryland; not the New York City offices where Weiner worked). During my time there, the co-located Niels Bohr Library and Archives began putting its oral history collections online, and I was asked to pick out some audio samples to complement these. Spencer Weart, Weiner’s successor and still the director of the Center at that time, suggested that Weiner’s interviews were engaging, and would certainly provide good material. And indeed they were, and they did.

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Edward A. Ross on Urbanization and the “Country Soul”

Edward Alsworth Ross (December 12, 1866–July 22, 1951) was a professor at Stanford and University of Wisconsin, founder of the sociology of “social control,” and a forefather of the sociology of deviance and criminality systematized by Robert K. Merton. Ross was also an important author of sociological introductions and textbooks, of which Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess’ Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921) and W. I. Thomas’ Source-book for Social Origins (1909) were two important examples.

Although the function of the textbook in the standardization of social scientific knowledge and methodology is an important topic and has, in my opinion, not attracted significant scholarly attention, what I am most concerned with here is what I call the persistence of gemeinschaft in the American social sciences. What I mean by this is the construction of a dichotomous relationship between city and country. Ferdinand Tonnies in the nineteenth century believed peasants and the countryside to be dominated by tradition, kinship, and custom. The cities, on the other hand, were determined by the workings of capitalism and the market. It was in the cities, as Georg Simmel observed later, that individuals achieved an immense individual freedom, but consequently, remained strangers to one another.

This was one of the latent ideas in my post on Robert Redfield and has since become a more important element of my research. The persistence of gemeinschaft also serves to shed a light on the relatively unknown historical presence of rural sociology. As importantly, the the persistence of gemeinschaft concept also dovetails nicely with discussions of “urban selection” among social theorists.

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