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THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY
SOCIOLOGY OF THE SCIENCES A YEARBOOK
Editorial Board: G. B6hme, Technische Hochschule, Darmstadt N. Elias, Universities of Leicester and Bielefeld Y. Ezrahi, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem L. Graham, Massachusetts Institute of Technology T. Lenoir, University of Pennsylvania H. Martins, University of Oxford E. Mendelsohn, Harvard University H. Nowotny, European Centre for Social Welfare Training and Research, Vienna H. Rose, University of Bradford Claire Salomon-Bayet, University of Lille R. Schwartz-Cowan, State University of New York at Stony Brook T. Shinn, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris P. Weingart, University of Bielefeld R. D. Whitley, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester
Managing Editor: R. D. Whitley
VOLUME X - 1986
THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY The Growing Impact of Scientific Knowledge on Social Relations
Edited by
GERNOTBOHME Institute for Philosophy, Technical University of Darmstadt, West Germany
and
NICO STEHR Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER
ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP
DORDRECHT/BOSTON/LANCASTER/TOKYO
library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Knowledge society. (Sociology of the sciences; v. 10-1986) "The original essays collected here ... were first commissioned for a conference held in the late fall of 1984 at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, West Germany"Pref. Includes indexes. I. Science-Social aspects. 2. Knowledge, Sociology of. I. Bohme, Gernot. II. Stehr, Nico. III. Series: Sociology of the sciences; v. 10. QI75.55.K56 1986 306'.45 86-13922 ISBN-13: 978-90-277-2306-2 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-4724-5 DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-4724-5
Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Assinippi Park, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland.
All Rights Reserved © 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1986 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface Biographical Statements of the Contributors
vii ix
PART I The Design of Knowledge Society Introduction GERNOT BOHME and NICO STEHR - The Growing Impact of Scientific Knowledge on Social Relations MICHAEL HAMMOND - Finite Human Capacities and the Pattern of Social Stratification in a Knowledge Society
3 7 31
PART II The Social Role of Men of Knowledge Introduction GERNOT BOHME - Demarcation as a Strategy of Exclusion: Philosophers and Sophists THOMAS F. GIERYN and ANNE E. FIGERT - Scientists Protect Their Cognitive Authority: The Status Degradation Ceremony of Sir Cyril Burt AARON V. CICOUREL - The Reproduction of Objective Knowledge: Common Sense Reasoning in Medical Decision Making
53 57
67
87
vi
Table of Contents
PART III Processes of Scientification Introduction RICHARD V. ERICSON and CLIFFORD D. SHEARINGThe Scientification of Police Work GORAN WALLEN - The Scientification of Architecture ANGELA METROPULOS O'RAND - Knowledge Form and Scientific Community: Early Experimental Biology and the Marine Biological Laboratory
125
183
Index
203
129 161
PREFACE The original essays collected here under the general title of The Knowledge Society were first commissioned for a conference held in the late fall of 1984 at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, West Germany. The conference in Darmstadt saw a larger number of contributions presented than could be accommodated in this edition of the Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook. However, all contributions were important and affected those published in this collection. We are therefore grateful to all participants of the Darmstadt conference for their presentations and for their intense, useful as well as thoughtful discussion of all papers. Those chosen for publication in the Yearbook and those undoubtedly to be published elsewhere have all benefitted considerably from our discussions in Darmstadt which also included a number of the members of the editorial board of the Yearbook. In addition, we are pleased that the authors were able to read and comment further on each other's papers prior to publication. As is the case in every endeavor of this kind, we have incurred many debts and are only able to acknowledge these at this point publicly while expressing our sincere thanks and appreciation for all the intellectual support and the considerable labor invested by a number of persons in the realization of the collection. We have to thank Mrs Kolberg, secretary to Gernot Bohme at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, for her diligent support in organizing the conference and in seeing to it that it was able to fulfill its primary functions well. The clerical staff both in the Institut fUr Soziologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitiit Miinchen, West Germany and especially the Department of Sociology, the University of Alberta, Canada assisted us in the usual efficient manner. We owe a considerable debt for the assistance given to us in the production of the book by Mrs Laura C. vii
viii
Preface
Hargrave. Without her efficient and cheerful help we would not have been able to complete this task at all. Last but not least, we have to thank the Volkswagen Foundation for its generous support of the conference which preceded the publication of this book. The Foundation and particularly Dr. Axel Horstmann must be thanked for supporting this kind of work, which we hope will act as a promissory note for scholarly work to come, on the ever-increasing relevance of scientific knowledge in all its forms to contemporary and future social relations around the world.
BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENTS OF THE CONTRIBUTORS
GERNOT BOHME is professor of philosophy at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. His previous positions include a research fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institute in Starnberg, Germany, a visiting professorship at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, a visiting fellow at Harvard University, and at the University of Link6ping, Sweden. For the time being he is Jan-Tinbergen Professor at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam. His association with the Max-Planck-Institute resulted in the publication, in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science Series, of The Social Orientation of Scientific Progress (edited by W. Schafer). Among his other major publications are Zeit und Zahl (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1974), Alternativen der Wissenschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), Das Andere der Vernunft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983, together with H. B6hme), and Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985). Aside from classical philosophy his main interests are history, sociology, and philosophy of science. AARON CICOUREL is professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology and the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Some of his publications include Method and Measurement in Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1964); The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice (New York: Wiley, 1968); Cognitive Sociology (London: Penguin, 1973; New York: Free Press, 1974), and a series of papers on medical communication and diagnostic reasoning. His recent work attempts to link organization structure and process to cognitive and linguistic aspects of knowledge production and reproduction. RICHARD ERICSON is professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Toronto. He has been a visiting fellow at Churchill College, ·Cambridge, and the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, University IX
x
Biographical Statements of the Contributors
of Cambridge. He has also been a visiting fellow in the Faculty of Law, University of Edinburgh. He is one of the founding co-editors of the Canadian Journal of Sociology. His recent books include Making Crime (Toronto: Butterworths, 1981); Reproducing Order (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982); and The Ordering of Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). His research interests include trends in policing and social control, and news media reporting of crime and legal issues. ANNE FIGERT is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology, Indiana University at Bloomington. She is currently investigating the use and perceptions of scientific expertise in public health crises. THOMAS F. GIERYN is associate professor of sociology at Indiana University. He is currently writing a book entitled Boundaries of Science: Theoretical and Episodic Inquiries. He has recently published two papers in the American Sociological Review: "Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists" (December, 1983) and "Professionalization of American Scientists: Public Science and the Creation/Evolution Trials" (with George Bevins and Stephen Zehr; June 1985). Ongoing research includes an examination of how social science came to be part of the U.s. National Science Foundation, covering the period 1945-1960. MICHAEL HAMMOND is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. His publications focus on the social history of humanity's reconstruction of its own evolutionary past, and upon the implications for sociological theory in the evolution of human cognitive and affective processes. He is currently completing a book concerning the sociological consequences of physiological limitations in cognitive and affective capacities in different human historical contexts. In addition to his historical and theoretical writings, he is studying the social effects of new medical technologies in both hospital and non-hospital contexts. ANGELA METROPULOS O'RAND is on the faculty of the Department of Sociology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA. She was previously on the faculty of the University of Florida. Her research on scientific organization and scientific change will appear in a monograph tentatively titled: Microtubules and Macrostructure: Social Circles and Disciplinary Agency in Modern Biology. She is extending her interests in
"Biographical Statements of the Contributors
xi
these problems to the social sciences and the problems of interdisciplinary research. She has also contributed extensively to the sociology literature on age and gender stratification. CLIFFORD SHEARING is associate professor of criminology and sociology at the University of Toronto. He has published on sociological theory as well as on public and private policing. He is presently undertaking a study of private justice within the Toronto Stock Exchange and a study of resistance movements within South Africa. NICO STEHR is professor of sociology at the University of Alberta. In 1984-85 he was Eric-Voegelin-Professor at the Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversitat in Munich. His research interests center on the sociology and philosophy of the social sciences, the history of sociological thought, the use of social science knowledge and the "knowledge society". He is a founding editor of the ~anadian Journal of Sociology and has co-edited, with Rene Konig, Wissenschaftssoziologie: Studien und M aterialien (1975); with David Kettler and Volker Meja, Karl Mannheim's Structures of Thinking (1982) and Conservatism (1986); and, with Volker Meja, Society and Knowledge: Contemporary Perspectives on the Sociology of Knowledge (1984). With David Kettler and Volker Meja he is co-author of Karl Mannheim (1984). He has held visiting appointments in Europe and the United States. GORAN WALLEN is associate professor of science theory at the University of Gothenburg and is also lecturing and doing research at the Institute of Architecture, Department of Industrial Planning, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. Among his papers in English are: Jan Barmark and Goran Wallen, 'The Development of an Interdisciplinary Project' in Knorr, Krohn, and Whitley (eds.), The Social Process of Scientific Investigation, Sociology of Science Yearbook, Vol. 4, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980; GoranWallen, "Different Kinds of Knowledge in Nursing Care, Education and Research' in Gunnar Bergendal (ed.), Knowledge Policies and the Traditions of Higher Education, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1984.
PART I THE DESIGN OF KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY
INTRODUCfION
One of the major similarities of the many contenders for a theory of modern society produced in the last and during this century surely is the stress placed on science and technology as an agent of social and economic change in and of modern society. As a matter of fact, the genesis and nature of modern society itself is almost always seen to be linked to the many intellectual and social consequences of science. This is even more true for those theories of society which try to display the design of post-industrial society. However, the various theories of modern societyfor example, those by Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Max Weber or Ferdinand Tonnies - produced decades ago or those constructed more recently to replace the classical conception of the origin and the structure of modern social relations - for instance, the theories of society in the work of Daniel Bell, Talcott Parsons and Jiirgen Habermas, to mention but a few of the more influential ones produced in recent years -'- all these share a peculiar treatment, or better, non-treatment of the very resource which is seen to transform society into contemporary society and later into post-contemporary society, namely the profound and apparently irreversible effect scientific knowledge is having on all social processes in society. Whether we examine the image of modern society found in Alfred Weber's influential distinction between culture and civilization, Ferdinand Tonnies' dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft or William F. Ogburn's theory of the cultural lag, the almost irresistible force of science and technology produces virtually all of the displacements and transformations which these theories identify in modern society. Although scientific knowledge is the motor of social change, it is invariably treated as a kind of natural force which is beyond the control of all. Ultimately, these notions have given rise to conceptions of decision-making processes in modern society in which human agency has 3 G. Bohme and N. Stehr (eds.), The Knowledge Society, 3-6. © 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
4
Introduction
given way almost completely to the necessities of scientific and technological constraints. Although the German sociologist Helmut Schelsky more recently developed such a technocratic conception of society, his views are only the logical conclusion of ideas latent in many theories of society which stress science and technology as the resource in modern society and as subject to developments which are driven by a logic which is somehow built into the very process. Since the development and the application of scientific and technical knowledge is to a considerable extent beyond the control of all, it is never itself examined or made the object of sociological analysis. Such a treatment of scientific knowledge as the source of societal transformation is of course not entirely surprising because it is also consistent with the predominant treatment of scientific and technical knowledge until recently in many theories of science. However, the vigorous extension of socio-historical analysis to the analysis of the genesis and development of scientific knowledge in recent years, has not found a parallel in efforts to extend and explicate the nature of the role of scientific and technical knowledge in the transformation of social relations generally. The obvious lag in this area is, so it seems, due to the somewhat surprising lack of interest of many sociologists of science in the impact of science on society. Paradoxically, the new sociology of science has for the most part been an internalist sociology of science with a distinct agenda. Nonetheless, the growing impact of scientific and technical knowledge on all facets of social and intellectual life in modern society has not found the same degree of attention as has the somewhat narrow and in many ways necessary analysis of the social construction of scientific knowledge. The first part of this Yearbook tries to rectify this partly by attempting to draw attention to the significant role which scientific and technical knowledge plays in contemporary society and in theories of society which address the design of and the reasons for the emergence of post-industrial society. It is quite evident, in other words, that in reflections on the nature of modern society, the role of science and technology takes on a special, if not crucial and constitutive role while empirical studies into the transformation of the division of labor in society, the increasing social differentiation of social relations, or the emerging patterns of meaning generally and forms of individual identity in particular, indicate more and more that the motor and the tempo of the observed changes must be linked to science and technology.
Introduction
5
Gernot B6hme and Nico Stehr's essay on the growing impact of scientific knowledge on social relations deals with some of the most prominent efforts in recent years to transcend classical theories of society in view of the pronounced and profound impact of science and technology on many facets of everyday life. The most notable efforts in this respect are Daniel Bell's theory of emerging post-industrial society and its intellectual companion in iI1dustrialized socialist society, the thesis of the radical transformation of these societies through the scientific-technological revolution. The latter theory was developed first and foremost by a team of social scientists under the direction of the late Radovan Richta. The shift from social forces such as labor or property which were constitutive of industrial society and its social relations, to science and technology or, as Bell describes it, to theoretical knowledge, in the post-industrial society justifies a general reference to these societies as knowledge societies. However, it is a characteristic of the theories of society which are intended to analyze the extent to which scientific knowledge is not only a productive force, as was the case in the 19th century, but has become an immediate productive jorce, that they fail to examine either the nature of scientific and technical knowledge or the ways in which scientific knowledge penetrates and transforms social relations. In general, it seems to be typical that these important questions are left unanalyzed. One of the central purposes of the essay by B6hme and Stehr is therefore to set the agenda for the possibility of transcending the apparent neglect of what is ultimately the crucial question for a theory of the emerging knowledge society, namely, why and how scientific and technical knowledge comes to acquire its enormous societal relevance and force. Michael Hammond's contribution to this section on certain attributes of the knowledge society, also analyzes certain fundamental que8tions for the design of such a society: From a socio-historical perspective he explores the interrelationship between knowledge, social scale and social inequality. In particular, he asks whether there are any scale dependent principles that would explain the emergent needs in economic production and social differentiation that make knowledge a key ingredient in societal change. Hammond focuses on the role of physiologically finite human capacities in information processing as one such principle. He indicates, however, that another finite human resource, namely
6
Introduction
affectivity, has to be taken into account in this context as well. Paradoxically therefore, knowledge and affectivity which are often conceived as opposites, are examined by Hammond as central among the conditions for the possibility of a knowledge society. That is to say, the emergence of knowledge as a crucial social resource in contemporary high density and high production society is closely tied to affective allocation problems.
THE GROWING IMPACf OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE ON SOCIAL RELATIONS GERNOT BOHME AND NICO STEHR Technische Hochschule Darmstadt and University ofAlberta
Despite many insightful, sophisticated and engaged inquiries into the interrelation of science and society, particularly in the 1920s and early 1930s and again in the 1960s and early 1970s, the void of a theory of society which captures the dynamics of science, technology and society remains to a significant extent. The fundamental issues of "the modes of interplay between society, culture and science are with us still" (1). Of course, we cannot hope to significantly reduce the need for such a theory here; however, we are convinced that a new approach is required. Our effort can only be seen as preliminary rather than exhaustive. Like some previous approaches, it too is based on the assumption that social change in industrial society and therefore the make-up of its social relations are increasingly tied to "advances" in scientific knowledge. Knowledge Societies
The historical emergence of "knowledge societies" does not occur suddenly; it represents not a revolutionary development but rather a gradual process during which the defining characteristic of society changes and a new one emerges. Modern society was until recently conceived primarily in terms of property and labor. On the basis of these attributes individuals and groups were able or perhaps even constrained to define their membership in society. While these features have not disappeared, a new principle has been added that, to an extent, challenges property and labor as the constitutive mechanisms of society (2). In its course, an itself highly differentiated sector of society, namely science (3), has begun to acquire particular significance. The increased social significance of science in modern society is the reason for analyzing its knowledge structure. Knowledge has always had a function in social life; as a matter of fact, one could justifiably speak of an 7 G. Bohme and N. Stehr (eds.), The Knowledge Society, 7-29. © 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
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Gernot Bohme and Nico Stehr
anthropological constant: human action is knowledge based. Social groups of all types depend on and are mediated by knowledge. Similarly, power has frequently been based on advantages in knowledge and not only on physical strength. And, last not least, societal reproduction is not merely physical reproduction but in the case of humans always cultural, i.e. reproduction of knowledge. In retrospect, one is therefore able to describe a variety of ancient societies as knowledge societies, for example, ancient Israel as a society structured by its religious lawlike Tora-knowledge or ancient Egypt in which religious, astronomical and agrarian knowledge served as the organizational principle and as the basis of authority. Contemporary society may be described as a knowledge society based on the penetration of all its spheres of life by scientific knowledge. The advance of science into the life world is described in various terms in this collection: - as the penetration of most spheres of social action by scientific knowledge ("scientization") -as the replacement of forms of knowledge by scientific knowledge (e.g. professionalization) - as the emergence of science as an immediately productive force -as the differentiation of new forms of political action (e.g. science and educational policy) - as the development of a new sector of production (the production of knowledg~)
- as the change of structures of power (technocracy debate) - as the emergence of intellectuals as a new social class. What justifies the designation of the emergent society as a knowledge society rather than, as is at times the case, as a science society, an information society or as technological civilization? The kinds of changes we attempt to analyze in particular are developments which occur with respect to the forms and dominance of knowledge itself. The focus is not
The Growing Impact o/Scientific Knowledge on Social Relations
9
merely science but the relationships between scientific knowledge and everyday knowledge, declarative and procedural knowledge, knowledge and non-knowledge. It is only after one acquires a sense of the societal significance of such opposites and oppositions that the full sociological significance of knowledge begins to emerge. Such a perspective assures that one realizes the extent to which knowledge can form the basis for authority; that access to knowledge becomes a major societal resource and the occasion for political and social struggles. But it is only recently that scholars began to examine the structure of society and its development from the point of view of the production, distribution and reproduction of knowledge. Although knowledge has always had a social function (4), it was more generally identified as a fundamental issue of societal importance and of sociological significance only a few decades ago. Applied to contemporary society, the question becomes whether knowledge can provide the principle for social hierarchies and stratification, for the formation of class structure, for the distribution of chances of social and political influence and for the nature of personal life and, finally, whether knowledge may also prove to be a normative principle of social cohesion and integration. One of the first comprehensive sociological analyses of societies in which the knowledge producing sector attains decisive importance for the dynamics of social relations is Daniel Bell's The Coming of PostIndustrial Society. We will concentrate in our introduction on Bell's theory apart from some remarks on Radovan Richta's theory on scientific-technical revolution, the socialist counterpart to Bell's theory of society. Bell argues that post-industrial society is a knowledge society for two major reasons: I. "the sources of innovation are increasingly derivative from research and development (and more directly, there is a new relation between science and technology because of the centrality of theoretical knowledge)"; 2. "the weight of the society - measured by a larger proportion of Gross National Product and a larger share of employment - is increasingly in the knowledge field" (5). The recognition by sociologists of the social and political importance of knowledge is perhaps but another effect of the general impact of knowl-
10
Gernot Bohme and Nico Stehr
edge on the development of contemporary society and of society's consciousness of this increased influence (6). As we will have occasion to observe with respect to a number of features of the theories of society which assign "objective knowledge" such a central position, these theoretical perspectives are in important and relevant ways self-exemplifying. Since all tend to stress the tempo of social and intellectual change it is perhaps no surprise that these theories of contemporary, and in some instances even future society, are quickly superseded by events. That they are replaced so rapidly or become irrelevant has to do with the logic of their theory construction. We therefore do not primarily attempt to document let alone provide an up-to-date and detailed empirical account of trends in various societal sectors (7) which emphasize that knowledge plays increasingly an important role in modern societies (8). Such efforts are continually made but many of the now standard forms of social book-keeping cannot provide meaningful theoretical answers by itself; at best data about increases in the size of the science sector in society and the like provide challenges and, as responses to such challenges, occasions for new and more differentiated future book-keeping. Nor are we capable here of attending to many important theoretical issues which are evidently associated with any theory of society. In as much as the knowledge society can be expected to restructure many existing societal configurations and to produce new social forms, all of social science is challenged to advance theoretical and empirical inquiry into knowledge societies. We must limit ourselves to those aspects of the theoretical work which are particularly relevant to science studies. Our focus can, therefore, not directly be on such otherwise important questions as the issue of political or moral authority in knowledge societies (9), how the development of science and technology can be controlled (10), the economic issue of the factors of production in a knowledge society (11), the effect of the knowledge society on the nature of social inequality (12), or, whether a knowledge society must be a democratic society (13). Most importantly, we are impressed by the degree to which modern society is becoming an "indeterminate" social configuration. The indeterminacy of modern society is the direct outcome of the development of a highly differentiated societal institution, namely science.
The Growing Impact ofScientific Knowledge on Social Relations
11
Theories of Society: A Methodological Note
Following Alain Touraine we can identify two contradictory conceptions of society in contemporary discussions of the societal role of science and technology: According to one conception, the logic of science and technology (or scientific rationality) increasingly allows for the creation of a rationally organized and planned society which will displace and replace all irrational and particularistic forms of social power. According to the second view, scientific and technical knowledge provide economic, political and military organizations with a new, secure power base, and these apparatuses impose their technocratic interests against the will of those who oppose them. In short, are - we may ask - moral, political and economic authority and power mainly the apex of scientific rationality or will science and technology be more than ever dominated by politics and by the economy? The history of theories of society, at least since the 18th century, demonstrates that these theories have progressively lost their characteristic of utopian blueprints of society. Gradually and perhaps reluctantly, modern theories 'of society have acknowledged the overwhelming contingency of social reality and have increasingly abstained from the production of designs of society which are almost certain to be disappointed by socio-historical developments. Thus, the growing contingency of social events becomes a characteristic feature of theories of society itself. As a result, such theories are, if they are compared with their predecessors from Comte to Marx, much more ambivalent, open-ended and themselves contingent (14). To the extent to which attributes of theories of society, furthermore, become systematic attributes of theorizing, questions about the precise, exclusive and definitive role of science and technology, for example, acquire practical and theoretical irrelevance (15). Questions of this kind need to be posed but cannot be answered once and for all unless the answer can somehow be turned into a self-fulfilling prediction. The Design of Post-Industrial Society: Daniel Bell's Theory
As one of the most enduring and at least in that sense successful theories of society, Daniel Bell's theory of post-industrial society (16) identifies a particular central principle serving as the logic which imposes conceptual
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Gernot Bohme and Nico Stehr
order on the societal developments of modern (Western) society. Bell describes his theory as primarily concerned with changes in the social framework in a society, that is, the social structure which along with polity and culture comprises society. The social structure of a society refers to its "economy, technology and the occupational system" (17). The changes Bell attempts to chart in the social structure are those induced by the "axial principle" of his theory of society, namely "the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation and of policy formulation for the society" (18). However, he does not claim, and in that sense his principle lacks deterministic centrality (19), that the changing social structure produces corresponding transformations in the polity or the culture (20). In addition to the idea that post-industrial society is no longer organized around the co-ordination of individuals and machines for the production of commodities but around knowledge, post-industrial society witnesses a shift from the commodity producing to the tertiary sector and a corresponding decline in the pre-eminence of the occupations of the manufacturing sector of society. The occupational distribution shifts toward the "professional and technical class", the kind of work individuals increasingly perform requires theoretical knowledge. The chief "resource of the post-industrial society is its scientific personnel" (21). The importance of the new class of scientists and engineers has the consequence that the normative center of society shifts toward the ethos of science (22). By way of what Bell optimistically describes as "new modes of technological forecasting", post-industrial societies may be able to plan and direct technological growth (23). Finally, the modern (Western) society creates for its benefit a new "intellectual technology". In order to cope with the organized complexity of modern society, intellectual technology represents a response to this challenge, specifically, an attempt to replace intuitive judgments with algorithms or problem-solving rules (24). The axial structures of the emerging society are the university, research organizations or institutions in which intellectuals work, and where "theoretical knowledge is codified and enriched" (25). And despite many persisting political and cultural differences among post-industrial societies, a common core of problems related largely to the management of the relations between science and public policy emerges in all of these societies (26).
The Growing Impact of Scientific Knowledge on Social Relations
13
Theories of Post-Industrial Society and Their Conception of the World Daniel Bell's theory of post-industrial society as that society which is to emerge in the next twenty to forty years and, therefore, as a dominant social form of the twenty-first century in the social structures of the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, and Western Europe, is for the most part an up-beat, optimistic and in some ways hopeful image of the future of Western society. Some of humanity's age old dreams, Bell argues, are about to be realized, and social change in particular will become an almost manageable process because technological development, the motor of change and growth, may be subject to planning and control (27). Of course, Bell also hints strongly that the economic implications of the new role of theoretical knowledge assure an almost uninterrupted expansion of capitalist and socialist economics. Bell's theory itself emerged over a period of some twenty years between the 1950s and the early 1970s but mainly during the 1960s (28). The same pronounced optimism is evident in the description of the origin and consequences of massive social changes brought about by the scientific and technological revolution under socialism (29) as discussed by Radovan Richta and his colleagues (30); while the extensive and even dramatic social transformation of the present is triggered by science and technology, Richta also expresses the strong conviction that science and technology will be capable of controlling and checking their own consequences (31). As Richta stresses, "it would be difficult today to find an area of social life that remains neutral towards and unaffected by the scope and the frequency of the sweeping changes currently under way in the fields of natural science and technology. At the same time, the :-vide-ranging and most significant social consequences ensuing from the application of science today relate to the tasks of a science-based control of social development, a science-based revolutionary reconstruction of society" (32). As a matter of fact, Richta sees pessimistic assessments of the growing role of science and technology linked directly to the "conflict-ridden development of productive forces under capitalism" which frequently generates conceptions of social development in which technology is seen as the ultimate author of all ills of society (33). For Richta the problem (34) lies exactly in the opposite direction, namely in an inadequate utilization of the potential of science and technology. How-
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Gernot Bohme and Nico Stehr
ever, such limited use of the potential of science and technology in capitalist countries is itself a matter of the restricted "rationality" of capitalist society: "In a bourgeois society, technological progress and subsequently science ... adhere to their own rational principles only in so far as, in these principles, the restricted 'rationality' is a priori incorporated. As a result, the development of science and technology follows a restricted one-sided course, offering neither the feasible nor the optimal alternative of the scientific and technological revolution" (35). Under changed relations of production, the scientific and technological revolution does not continually create and suffer from structural deformities of society but contributes to the "general development of human potentialities". Somewhat more specifically, "through its practical application, science releases the potential for an all-round development of the abilities and creative activities of the working people" (36). Moreover, the collectivity on which the achievements of the scientific and technological revolution rely and depend is a collectivity in the shape of a "community of developing individuals" (37). A kind of new "free individuality" (Karl Marx) ought to develop, minimizing one's dependence on collectives of all kinds; at a certain point individualization will, therefore, dominate as the collective social force. Bell calls his theory an "essay in sociological forecasting". Richta's own conception is even more exacting because it is intended to function as a socio-political program. After more than twenty years of e(lperience with the post-industrial society, however, we have become much more skeptical and careful. Neither the technocratic predictions nor the humanistic hopes have been fulfilled, but the penetration of society by scientific knowledge has continued. We would now like to examine in greater detail what this means.
The Nature of Knowledge For Daniel Bell ... knowledge has of course been necessary in the functioning of any society. What is distinctive about the post-industrial society is the change in the character of knowledge itself. What has become decisive for the organization of decisions and the direction of change is the centrality of theoretical knowledge - the primacy of theory over empiricism and the codification of knowledge into abstract systems of symbols that, as in any axiomatic system, can be
The Growing Impact ofScientific Knowledge on Social Relations
15
used to illuminate many different and varied areas of experience. Every modern society now lives by innovation and the social control of change, and tries to anticipate the future in order to plan ahead. The commitment to social control introduces the need for social planning and forecasting into society. It is the altered awareness of the nature of innovation that makes theoretical knowledge so crucial (38).
At the same time, ... the advances in a field become increasingly dependent on the primacy of theoretical work, which codifies what is known and points the way to empirical confirmation. In effect, theoretical knowledge increasingly becomes the strategic resource, the axial principle, of a society. And the university, research organizations, and intellectual institutions, where theoretical knowledge is codified and enriched, become the axial structures of the emergent society (39).
Elsewhere in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Daniel Bell offers and discusses both more general and more restrictive conceptions of knowledge depending on the purpose at hand. If the referent is social policy, for example, Bell proposes to define knowledge as that "which is objectively known, an intellectual property, attached to a name or a group of names and certified by copyright or some other form of social recognition (e.g. publication)" (40). An even more general conception of knowledge is advanced as well; knowledge is defined as "a set of organized statements of facts or ideas, which is transmitted to others through some communication medium in some systematic form" (41). However, it is clear that Bell desires to stress with special force that the defining characteristic of post-industrial society is not merely knowledge as such but a particular form of knowledge - namely theoretical knowledge - that "can be translated into many different and varied circumstances" (42). The result is that "every society now lives by innovation and growth, and it is theoretical knowledge that has become the matrix of innovation" (43). In an essay, first presented in 1974, Radovan Richta suggests that, Once a closed, exclusive area on the margin of society, science becomes an immense organism operating in all spheres of social life. A new type of science is gradually emerging, differing considerably as to social function and theoretical and methodological principles from both ancient knowledge ... and the New-Age science originating during the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution ... The logic underlying this development is a tendency towards the integration of the process of cognition (and transformation) of the world with the process of self-cognition (and transformation) of the society - the conception of science evolved by Marx, Engels and Lenin (44).
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Similarly, ''fundamental changes are in progress in the field of technology ... a new technological basis relying on automation and cybernetics is gradually coming into being. This sets into motion the entire machinery system - thus shifting the focus of man's nature-orientated activities from the mere transformation of nature to the control over the entire process of transformation of nature by society" (45). In an earlier work, Civilization at the Crossroads, Richta and his collaborators stress that science at present is no longer primarily "a factor of social consciousness" but a "productive force," "all productive forces are being converted in one way or another into applications of science" (46). And ultimately, under the circumstances of the scientific and technological revolution, "growth of the productive forces follows a law of higher priority, that is, the prece-
dence of science over technology and of technology over industry" (47). However, Richta (48) and his collabora~ors emphasize also that there is a fundamental transformation of human activity whereby individuals assume a new position in the world of productive forces. They stress that it would be misleading to see the scientific and technological revolution merely as the result of more scientific knowledge and of more technical application. The truly relevant criterion for the revolutionary character of the impact of science and technology is, therefore, the transformation it brings about in the relation of humans to the forces of production, more specifically, the greater distance of most people from direct production (49), or the increase in the "subjective factor" of production. Nonetheless, Richta leaves the strong impression that these profound changes are in the end the outcome of a wider application of science but not necessarily of a new form of knowledge production.
Knowledge in a Knowledge Society The mere enumeration of these conceptions of knowledge already indicates that Bell (50) and others who have elevated knowledge to the new axial principle of modern society pause but briefly to consider the nature of knowledge, particularly of scientific knowledge. Various definitions of knowledge are offered but there is little theoretical effort to critically analyze the crucial phenomenon "knowledge as such" as problematic. Knowledge is essentially treated as a black box. The central question posed by those theorists of post-industrial society who, have claimed that
The Growing Impact ofScientific Knowledge on Social Relations
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knowledge has become the agent of social change, is a functionalist one: what are the consequences of objective knowledge for both society and the individual, and how can these results of knowledge be apprehended? Common to these approaches is also the observation that the tempo of social change accelerates and reaches an unprecedented pace and that the rapidity of societal change somehow parallels the growth in the scale of available objective knowledge (51). Science and technology began as a marginal enterprise of amateurs in the 17th century; but modern science, especially after World War II, has received a large proportion of the public budget and constitutes a major source of investment for private capital. Individuals trained as scientists or engineers are a growing part of the labor force in modern society. The growth in the system of modern higher education is both the result and the motor of the increased importance of science and technology. Institutions which produce, distribute or reproduce knowledge are now comparable in size to the industrial complex. Furthermore, it is now often emphasized that no area of social life will remain unaffected by the impact of natural science and technology. The discussion of knowledge in these theories of society is self-exemplifying. The logic of the society becomes the logic of the theory; both tend to represent a conception which is governed by considerations of quantity and functionality (52). Depending on how mechanistically or lawlike knowledge and knowledge about knowledge is construed in this case, there is of course the danger that the knowledge society is conceived in terms which subordinate social action to laws of absolute power beyond the control of society (53). In our view, the major change in the production of scientific knowl- . edge, in turn providing one of the foundations of the possibility of a knowledge society, is the expansion in the social function of scientific knowledge and this expansion in functions served, takes place without the elimination or a significant reduction of the earlier functions scientific knowledge has had in society: up to the end of the 18th century science had the function of enlightenment, i.e., of producing meaning or social consciousness; in the subsequent period of the emergence of industrial society, science became a productive force, and in the latter part of our century it has evolved into an immediate productive force. Science also produces knowledge which at least in the short run, serves no particular social or extra-scientific func-
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tion. Science is perhaps the only institution in modern society which in the course of its development does not lose some of its original purposes to other sectors of society, e.g. as the result of structural differentiation. On the contrary, science absorbs increasingly certain functions in society. In addition, it expands by generating new purposes or by taking them on (54). Since science became a productive force in the 19th century it has ceased to belong exclusively to the superstructure of society. The change from functioning as a producer or critic of world-views to functioning as a productive force means that important aspects of science are now part of the material basis of society. It is a productive force in as much as its knowledge is frozen into machinery. In as much as it developed as "pure" science in the 19th century, it does not become a productive force. Earlier science was not mature enough to be applied to problems of production while the material appropriation of nature in the sense of efficient control over boundary conditions or production of pure materials was not developed far enough to enable a realization of scientific results in dimensions relevant for production. In short, a change in the material and cognitive appropriation of nature in the 19th century turns science into a productive force and society into industrial society. As science becomes an immediate productive force in our century, it does not lose any of its previous possibilities but adds a decisive new possibility. Contrary to the situation in the 19th century, the production of knowledge now also becomes immediate social production unmediated by labor. In contemporary society a secondary structure on the basis of already appropriated nature is established. A considerable part of the total work within a knowledge society takes place at a meta-level, at a second level of production to which science contributes centrally. Production is to a large extent no longer metabolism with nature but presupposes that nature is already appropriated. This kind of production consists of re-arranging appropriated nature according to certain designs and programs. The rules which govern "secondary" production are social constructs rather than the laws of nature. The consequence is that new disciplines emerge whose output serves as an immediate productive force, e.g. operations research, theories of planning, decision theory, cybernetics, computer science etc. The production of data, theories, programs and systems is immediately productive because it tends to reproduce the knowl-
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edge structure of society. Production of knowledge is consequently social production. Reproduction of society means to an increasing degree reproduction of appropriated nature and of the self-appropriation of society. The outcome of these developments is also that scientific knowledge in the sense of an immediate productive force becomes a societal resource with functions comparable to those of labor in the productive process. But unlike labor under capitalism, the owners of the resource "knowledge" in a knowledge society acquire power and influence because owners of capital cannot, as was still the case for corporal labor, reduce its content in production through substitution of capital; at best, knowledge can be substituted through other knowledge. Notwithstanding the mechanization of brain work, there remains also always an irreducible rest of "personal knowledge" which can be converted into and valued as "intellectual" or "cultural" capital. On the basis of these or similar considerations, the thesis of the emergence of a new and potentially dominant class of intellectuals and scientists/engineers develops (55). The Transformation of Society into a Knowledge Society What distinguishes a knowledge society above all else from its historical predecessors is that it is a society which is to an unprecedented degree the product of its own action (56). The balance of nature and society, or of facts beyond the control of humans and those subject to their control, has shifted strikingly (57). It has shifted more and more toward capacities which are socially constructed and allow society to operate on itself. The range of social action has increased immeasurably and, therefore, has driven meta-social processes further and further into the distance. The horizon of human action and potential social action considerably expands in a knowledge society as already indicated; however, the process we have in mind is one which applies first and foremost at the collective level of action. We are not suggesting, therefore, that such an extension in the range of social action necessarily extends, and does so almost invariably, to all individual actors in a knowledge society. The principle of stratified social action does not become inoperative. In a knowledge society many groups and individuals continue to face severe constraints on their range of social action. Nor does the concept advanced here mean that nature or natural facts have had to retreat totally, although these constraints will
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now be rooted in their restricted access to knowledge. On the contrary, and perhaps paradoxically, the increasing distance from nature may mean that nature can affirm itself catastrophically in knowledge societies. We conceive of a knowledge society as a society in which science has extensively increased the capacities of society to act upon itself, its institutions and its relation to the natural environment (58). This increase in possible courses of action does not merely result from an increase in knowledge about society. The practical usefulness of natural science also did not merely result from more knowledge about processes "out there" in nature, at least not only and not most importantly. Natural scientific knowledge became useful only in technical contexts, that is, in contexts in which nature was already available materially. In an analogous sense, the growing usefulness of social science knowledge is dependent on a prior rationalization of. societal contexts which many argue already is the case in contemporary society. Societal contexts are increasingly transformed through the application of scientific knowledge. These are the processes which will be analyzed in this volume under the heading of the scientization of social action. The increase in the ability of society to act upon itself is by no means restricted to transformation in the social means of production but extends also to its relations of production. The unprecedented increase in the ability of society to transform itself should be seen as implying both emancipation and the real danger of new forms of dependencies (59). These transformations most definitely mean that "all visions of a future without conflict and struggle are doomed to disappointment" (60) unless, of course, society uses its ability to change itself as a means to restrict further change drastically. The source of the described increase in the ability of society to act upon itself is, for the most part the consequence of the expansion of scientific knowledge in the broadest sense of the term. And in this regard we agree with the observations by Richta (61) that "science does not operate solely as a factor in the production of things and as an instrument for satisfying wants; it serves equally as a source generating new types of human endeavour, as an initiator and producer of new wants. That is to say, it is a productive force that can create new demands, conflicts and outlooks" (62). Science multiplies possibilities or, "for every want satisfied and every advance in knowledge, it breeds a multitude of new questions, a spate of human dissatisfaction" (63).
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The Production, Distribution and Reproduction of Knowledge The most serious theoretical deficiency of existing theories of the knowledge society is, as we have seen, their rather undifferentiated treatment of the key ingredient, namely knowledge itself. We have tried to argue instead that the range of knowledge or forms of knowledge which science makes available, the fact that science becomes increasingly the only source of knowledge, and that the change in the available knowledge dramatically escalates available options of social action, also indicates that the process of the distribution and the reproduction of scientific knowledge under these circumstances acquires as much importance as does the production of knowledge. In order to fully appreciate the significance of the expansion of knowledge as well as the forms of knowledge produced by science for society, we have to develop more fully a sociological notion of knowledge itself. First we must distinguish between what is known, the content of knowledge, and knowing. Knowing is a relation to things and facts, but also to rules, laws and programs. Some sort of participation is therefore constitutive for knowing: knowing things, rules, program~, facts is "appropriating" them in some sense, including them into our field of orientation and competence. The intellectual appropriation of things can be made independent or objective. That is, symbolic representation of the content of knowledge eliminates the necessity to get into direct contact with the things themselves. The social significance of language, writing, printing, data storage etc. is that they represent knowledge symbolically or provide the possibility of objectified knowledge. Thus, most of what we today call knowledge and learning is not direct knowledge of facts, rules, and things directly but objectified knowledge. Objectified knowledge is the highly differentiated stock of intellectually appropriated nature and society which may also be seen to constitute the cultural resource of a society. Knowing is then grosso modo participation in the cultural resources of society. However, such participation is of course subject to stratification; the life chances, life style and social influence of individuals depend on their access to the stock of knowledge at hand. The nature of the changes we have described as changes leading to a knowledge society are, in terms of the ideas just described, above all changes in the intellectual appropriation of nature and society.
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There is now an immense stock of objectified knowledge which mediates our relation to nature and to ourselves. Nature is and can scarcely be experienced other than as a human product or within human products, and social relations are mediated by an increasing stock of arrangements of an administrative, legal, or technical kind. The material appropriation of nature means that nature as a whole has gradually been transformed into a human product by super-imposing on it a social structure. This structure is in essence objectified knowledge, namely an explication and realization of what we know to be the laws of nature extended by engineering design and construction. The self-appropriation of society occurs through an analogous process, namely by way of the production of data which are social facts and which constitute the social and political reality, the enforcement of rules which govern social conduct, the bureaucratization of community life. From the point of view of the production, distribution and reproduction of knowledge, the first characterization we are able to give of our contemporary societal condition is a mere quantitative diagnosis: the superstructure of society and nature is now so immense that the greater part of the overall social activity is not production but reproduction, in particular reproduction of knowledge itself. The Rise of Knowledge or the Dynamics of the Knowledge Society Conventional wisdom has it that the motive force of the industrial revolution "was set in motion by a set of interests engendered by the self-expansion of capital" (64) and, more precisely, the surplus value or profit generated by capital. While this is at least the motive force which holds for the owners of the means of production, others have theorized that the Protestant ethic may well have propelled the industrial revolution (65). While this debate continues, the process or factors responsible for the dynamics of knowledge production remain largely unanalyzed. Daniel Bell suggests that "a modern society, in order to avoid stagnation or 'maturity' .... has had to open up new technological frontiers in order to maintain productivity and higher standards of living .... Without new technology, how can growth be maintained?" (66). Richta's argument is quite similar, although he restricts his claims to
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socialist society and asserts a kind of pre-established harmony between scientific knowledge and "necessary" societal development. This assertion culminates in the plea and conviction that in socialist societies "there is an evergrowing need for further expansion and acceleration of scientific and technological progress" (67). Thus, the question remains, why it is that "where once science followed in the wake of industry and technology, the tendency today is for it to control industry and lead technology" (68). Both Bell's and Richta's assertions about the rise of knowledge do not really claim that there is any novel motive force, peculiar to a knowledge society which stimulates its expansion and extensive use. The rise of knowledge is at best related negatively to factors which threaten the maintenance of certain motives, desires and particularly economic (material) wants already prominent in industrial society. In this sense, the knowledge society represents an expansion of industrial society. But was it not one of the assertions of the theory of post-industrial society that society would enter into a new age propelled by an entirely new dynamic? Evidently, the matter remains uncertain and unresolved. But it is possible to assert that the dynamics of the production of knowledge are subject to the same forces which propel the productions of commodities: the increased differentiation and independence of production corresponds to the growth and differentiation of science. Similar motive forces also appear to drive the expansion of production and science. And the accumulation of production may well continue to be the leading force in the accumulation of scientific knowledge; the relation however could also very well reverse itself. Notes and References 1. Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973, p.175. 2. One of the first authors to employ the term of a "knowledgeable society" is Robert E. Lane. He justifies his use of the concept by pointing to the growing societal relevance of scientific knowledge and defines a knowledgeable society as one in which its members "(a) inquire into the basis of their beliefs about man, nature, and society; (b) are guided (perhaps unconsciously) by objective standards of veridical truth, and, at the upper levels of education, follow scientific rules of evidence and inference in inquiry; (c) devote considerable resources to this inquiry and thus have a large store of knowledge; (d) collect, organize, and interpret their knowledge in a constant effort to extract further meaning from it
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for the purposes at hand; (e) employ this knowledge to illuminate (and perhaps modify) their values and goals as well as to advance them." Robert E. Lane, 'The Decline of Politics and Ideology in a Knowledgeable Society', American Sociological Review 31 (1966) 650. 3. Cf. Norbert Elias, 'The Sciences: Towards a Theory', in Richard Whitley (ed.), Social Processes ofScientific Development, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974, pp. 21-42. 4. Cf. Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1955; Fritz Machlup, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, Princeton: Princeton Unversity Press, 1962. 5. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, New York: Basic Books, 1973, p. 212. 6. Radovan Richta, et al., Civilization at the Crossroads: Social and Human Implications of the Scientific and Technological Revolution, White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, p. 216. 7. However, the precision with which the contribution of certain factors, in this case scientific and technical knowledge, can be factored out is far from certain in most instances: For example, as the economist Heertje concludes, "e"mpirical analyses of the quantitative contribution of technical change to (economic) growth are indeterminate, partly because of the diversity of technical development and the difficulty of separating the development of technical possibilities from the expansion of technical knowledge ... Empirical observations in this field form a complex that cannot be unravelled without introducing arbitrary assumptions." Arnold Heertje, Economics and Technical Change, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977, p. 203. 8. Typical of the contributions to the discussion of the nature and the emergence of a knowledge society some 15 to 20 years ago then is an elaborate apparatus of empirical, often census type information about observable shifts and trends, e.g. in the occupational structure, which are intended to show, using the preferred means of a knowledge society that it is indeed emerging and can therefore be documented in a quantitative (rational) manner. Today, we are able to take this documentation for granted and can concentrate on what is, in our view, largely undocumented, unanalyzed in these theoretical approaches. 9. Cf. Victor Basiuk, Technology, World Politics and American Policy, New York: Columbia University Press, 1977, pp. 266-274. 10. Cf. Emil Kiing, Steuerung und Bremsung des technischen Fortschritts, Tiibingen: J .C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1976; Radovan Richta, 'The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Prospects of Social Development', in Ralf Dahrendorf, et al. (eds.), Scientific-Technological Revolution: Social Aspects, London: Sage, 1977, p. 27. 11. Heertje, op. cit., p. 1977; C. von Weizsacker, Zur 6konomischen Theorie des technischen Fortschritts, Gottigen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969. 12. Richta et al., Civilization at the Crossroads, pp. 245-252; Gyorgy Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, Die Intel/igenz auf dem Weg zur Klassenherrschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968; Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, New York: Seabury Press, 1979. 13. Lane, op. cit., p. 650; Richta et al., Civilization at the Crossroads; Merton, op. cit.; J.D. Bernal, Science in History, London: Watts, 1954; Michael Polanyi, 'The Republic of Science, its Political and Economic Theory', Chicago: Lecture at Roosevelt University.
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14. Daniel Bell's theory of post-industrial society to be discussed here in some detail exemplifies these features quite well. One of his assertions reads for example: "The decisive social change taking place in our time - because of the interdependence of man ;nd the aggregate character of economic actions, the rise of externalities and social costs, and the need to control the effects of technical change - is the subordination of the economic function to the political order." But the question of who and how the political order is managed is an open one (Bell, op. cit., p. 373; cf. p. 374). 15. Bell is correct when he observes that the cautions expressed here, represent a retreat from theory, "if by theory one means a model of social structure that specifies the determinate interaction of the crucial variables of a system, establishes empirical regularities that predict future states of relation, and provides an explanatory principle of its history and operation." (Ibid., p. 112). 16. Bell indicates that he could have substituted "knowledge society" for "post-industrial society" because either term and others are apt in describing at least some salient aspects of the emerging structure of society he attempts to describe in his study. Ibid., p. 37.
17. Ibid., p. 12. 18. Ibid. 19. In the post-industrial society, production and business decisions will be subject to or will be determined by other sectors in society; more specifically, "the crucial decisions regarding the growth of the economy and its balance will come from government, but they will be based on the government's sponsorship of research and development, of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis", and "the making of decisions, because of the intricately linked nature of their consequences, will have an increasingly technical character" (Ibid.,p. 344). The image of the role of science and technology in political decision-making is here somewhat tempered whereas in the "end of ideology" debate of the fifties and early sixties (cf. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, New York: Collier, 1960; Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960) the idea that "political criteria decline in importance relative to more universalistic scientific criteria" (Lane, op. cit., p. 659) was quite prominent as an expectation or statement about states of political affairs. 20. More specifically, we are cautioned that "there is no specific determinism between a 'base' and a 'superstructure'; on the contrary, the initiative in organizing a society these days comes largely from the political system. Just as various industrial societies - the United States, Great Britain, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, post-World-War II Japan - have distinctly different political and cultural configurations" (Bell, op. cit., p. 119). 21. Radovan Richta's response to this kind of analysis is to argue that Bell's contention about the rise of a "new class" is in essence designed to contend "with the Marxist findings concerning the crucial role of the working class in our epoch". Richta, 'The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Prospects of Social Development', p. 54. Moreover, as the size of the scientific and technical class increases under capitalism, it will in some ways at least, move closer to the working class and its interests and hence contribute to conditions which may lead to its own abolition. In short, the conditions of the scientific and technological revolution have not, at least according to Richta, diminished the leading role of the working class. Ibid., pp. 57-59.
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22. Bell, op. cit., p. 386; cf. also Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933; Lane, op. cit.; Alvin W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology, New York: Seabury Press, 1979. 23. Bell, op. cit., p. 26. Radovan Richta calls perhaps even more optimistically "for a science-based control of social development, a science-based revolutionary reconstruction of society". Richta, 'The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Prospects of Social Development', p. 26. 24. Bell, op. cit., p. 29. 25. Ibid., p. 26. 26. Ibid., p. 119; cf. Ralf Dahrendorf, 'Observations on Science and Technology in a Changing Socio-Economic Climate', in Ralf Dahrendorf, et al., op. cit., pp. 79-82. 27. As far as we can see, Bell does not mean to suggest that the process of inventing technologies may be subjected to rigorous planning and to control but only the process of implementing "technological advance" as his reference to technology assessment and the reduction of deleterious effects of the use of technologies implies. Bell, op. cit., pp. 26-27. 28. Ibid., pp. 33-40. 29. Not surprisingly, there are remarkable differences in certain crucial aspects of the political message between the so-called Richta Report (1969) or other statements of the same period (e.g. Radovan Richta, et al., Technischer Fortschritt und industrielle Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Makol Verlag, 1972, pp., 218-230). and post-1968 statements on the same set of issues (e.g. Richta, 'The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Prospects of Social Development'). However, the general expectations about the impact of the scientific and technological revolution does not change dramatically. Yet, the stress on democratic pre-conditions for a most effective implementation of the scientific and technological revolution, in particular in socialist countries (e.g. Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, pp. 220, 229) is less evident later. 30. Richta reports on the extensive disillusionment and critical assessment of social change induced by technological inventions but ascribes the evaluation of technology as a dangerous development because it tends to follow its own logic as the necessary outcome of the "blatant absence of the human aspect in specific types of technological progress in capitalist countries", presumably absent from or repaired in socialist societies. Richta, 'The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Prospects of Social Development', p. 38. 31. There is a considerable degree of ambivalence in this optimism to devise plans and programs to render the future of society transparent, "to steer the totality of society's growth" (Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, p. 271) because one of the constitutive attributes of the emerging society is that "the historical process ceases to bear the stamp of an inexorable course of civilization" and the predictability of the future is therefore diminishing (Ibid., p. 269). Perhaps it should be said that the pre-1968 statements on balance signal the conviction that any planning under the conditions of scientific and technological revolution are precarious instruments; for example, one encounters the observation that the "more we advance on to the actual ground of the scientific and technological revolution, the more diverse will be the ends to which its process lead, and the more unknown variants it will reveal" (Ibid., p. 277). The same ambivalence applies to Bell's conception of a post-industrial society.
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32. Richta, 'The Scientific and Technological Revolution and Prospects of Social Development', p. 26. While Richta claims that science and technology are capable of controlling their own consequences and development, he does suggest nevertheless that "society cannot control the scientific and technological revolution until such social relations are introduced that allow for an adequate development of man and society" (Ibid., p. 44). He therefore agrees with those critics of technology and science in capitalist countries who argue that the course of scientific and technological development is out of control. See also Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, pp. 271-273. 33. Richta, 'The Scientific and Technological Revolution and Prospects of Social Development',p.37. 34. Ibid., p. 40. 35. Ibid., p. 42. 36. Ibid., p. 47. Science may also, Richta claims, prevent "wastage of this potential in fruitless and even harmful activities." (Ibid.)
37. Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads,~. 266. 38. Bell, op. cit., p. 20. 39. Ibid., p. 26.
40. Ibid., p. 176. 41. Ibid., p. 175. 42. Ibid., p. 345.
43. Ibid., p. 344.
44. Richta, 'The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Prospects of Social Development', p. 30. 45. Ibid., pp. 30-31.
46. Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, pp. 212-213. 47. Ibid., p. 41. 48. Ibid., p. 34.
49. Compare in this regard the definitions of automation, e.g. in Georges Friedmann, Industrial Society, Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955, pp. 174-175; Herbert Marcuse One-Dimensional Man, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, pp. 34-37. 50. Bell is cognizant of the possibility to examine knowledge more comprehensively because he refers to the sociology of knowledge and the questions it typically raises. However, he immediately relegates these questions to specialists or as outside the purview of his approach. Bell, op. cit., pp. 176-177. 51. Cf. Ibid., pp. 168-174; Derek J. de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961; Derek J. de Solla Price, Big Science, Little Science, New York: Columbia University Press, 1963; Frederic Bon and M. Antoine Burnier, Les nouveaux intellectuels, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966; Ladislav Tondl, 'Stellung und Aufgabe der Wissenschaft in der wissenschaftlich-technischen Revolution' [1968], in Richta et al., Technischer Fortschritt und die industrielle Gesellschaft.
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52. E.g. Kenneth Boulding, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century: The Great Transition, London and New York: Harper & Row, 1965; Peter F. Drucker, The Future of Industrial Man [1942], New York: The John Day Company, 1965. 53. Cf. Alain Touraine, 'Science, Intellectuals and Politics', in Ralf Dahrendorf et al., op. cit., p.114. 54. Although it is quite difficult to propose novel terms for each of these categories of knowledge the scientific community, in its broadest sense, now produces, the following might be appropriate: (1) meaningful knowledge. The knowledge produced by most of the social sciences and the humanities is a form of knowledge which in its social function affects mainly the (social) consciousness of members of society (Deutungswissen). (2) Most of the traditional discipline in the natural sciences generate productive knowledge (Produktivwissen) in that such knowledge can be converted into ways of directly appropriated natural phenomena. (3) The most recent form of knowledge, as an immediate productive force, may be considered to be action knowledge (Handlungswissen) because such knowledge is already a form of action. 55. Cf. Konrad and Szelenyi, op. cit.; Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals. 56. In as much as we attempt to stress the greater ability and range of social action as a constitutive feature of knowledge society we reject of course the idea that such a society is necessarily a "technocratic" enterprise; that is, a society which witnesses helplessly the inversion oftechnical means into social ends as sketched e.g. by Helmut Schelsky (Helmut Schelsky, Der Mensch in der wissenschaftlichen Zivilisation, Cologne and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1961; Helmut Schelsky, 'Demokratischer Staat und moderne Technik', Atomzeitalter) and others (cf. Hans Freyer, Ober das Dominantwerden technischer Kategorien in der Lebenswelt der industriellen Gesellschaft, Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1960; Hans Freyer, Theorie des gegenwiirtigen Zeitalters, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1958) as the "general law of scientific civilization" (see also Sybille Kramer, Technik. Gesellschaft und Natur: Versuch iiber ihren Zusammenhang, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1982. 57. In the Richta Report certain analogous observations may be found when the authors of the report underline that "the scientific and technological revolution is essentially a part of the process of constituting the subjective factor, that is to say, the subjectivity of society, and then of man, who through its medium comes to master the processes by which the productive forces of human life are created ... these subjective factors discover that their own development offers radically new opportunities to intervene in the march of history." Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, p. 244. 58. Theoretically at least, the increased ability of society to act upon itself should minimize the convergence of knowledge societies toward some common model. But the increased capacity of social action brought about by the advances in science is filtered through social, political and economic mechanisms which may reduce the possible variety of societies. (On the issue of convergence cf. Bell, op. cit., pp. 112-115; C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958; Jan Tinbergen, 'Do Communist and Free Economics Show a Converging Pattern?' Soviet Studies 12 (1961) 333-341; Marion Levy, Modernization and the Structure of Societies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966; Alfred G. Meyer, 'Theories of Convergence', in Chalmers Johnson (ed.), Change in Communist Systems, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970.
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59. Science and technology are therefore not merely an emancipatory force as has been their prevailing romantic image throughout history but also a socially constraining force. 60 Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, p. 257. 61. Ibid., p. 213. 62. The conception about knowledge in a knowledge society advanced here does not imply therefore that the expansion of knowledge encroaches somehow on "ideology" and produces a society less affected by ideological thinking. 63. Ibid., p. 214. 64. Ibid., pp. 70-7\. 65. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Scribner's, 1958. 66. Bell, op. cit., p. 26. 67. Richta, 'The Scientific and Technological Revolution', p. 48; also Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, pp. 75-8\. 68. Ibid., p. 216.
FINITE HUMAN CAPACITIES AND THE PATTERN OF SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN A KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY MICHAEL HAMMOND University of Toronto
Many theorists considering the emergence of a knowledge society tend to share certain assumptions about human nature and the relationship between knowledge, social scale, and social inequality. For instance, despite their many other differences, writers from the functionalist tradition, such as Daniel Bell and Talcott Parsons, and writers from the structural conflict tradition, such as Gerhard Lenski, assume that there is an innately expansive need for the goods and services that only larger scale societies can provide (1). Since specialized knowledge, both instrumental and theoretical, becomes increasingly crucial at higher and higher levels of economic productivity and political organization, this expansive need tends to promote a growing role for knowledge, which is circularly reinforcing since increased knowledge makes possible in turn growing scale and productivity. Similarly, both functionalists and non-functionalists (e.g. Alvin Gouldner) (2) assume that individuals possessing such knowledge will inexorably attempt to translate this capital into an unequal share of other social resources, such as income, power, or prestige. Thus, if any historical change increases the social dependency on one or another form of knowledge, then there is something about human nature that means that this knowledge will become a part of social inequality. Such assumptions are however a fragile basis upon which to construct a theoretical model of long-term social change. As Anthony Giddens has recently argued (3), the pre-industrial historical evidence calls into question any model dependent upon a general pattern to social change. The historical variability is simply too great to be contained within the traditional assumptions about universal species characteristics that could lead to such a pattern. Many theories of the evolution of knowledge and social structures are open to the same criticism. Although contemp~rary, high 31 G. Bo/:lme and N. Stehr (eds.), The Knowledge Society, 31-50. © 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
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density industrial societies do seem to exhibit expansive and inequality producing needs, recent restudies of low scale hunting and gathering societies, both in the present and prehistoric times, directly challenge the idea that such needs are universal (4). Clearly then, to fill in the missing links at the deepest levels in the theoretical models analyzing the knowledge society, there must be some scale dependent principle that can account for the emergent needs in economic production and social differentiation that make knowledge such a key factor in social change. Rather than utilize quasi-instinctual assumptions about innate human needs, one path of analysis in this regard has focused upon the role of physiologically finite human capacities in information processing. This is a most interesting perspective, but as we shall see in the following section, it too has to utilize further assumptions which point to another finite human resource, affectivity. This is ironic of course because so often emotion and knowledge, especially in its specialized scientific form, have been considered antithetical to one another. However, it is the dynamics created by the affective problematic in our species that create the preconditions that are central to the historical emergence of knowledge as an increasingly important social resource. Thus, the historical fates of emotion and knowledge are closely bound together. To develop the logic in this linkage, we must first consider the cognitive model, and then turn to the affective alternative.
Finite Cognitive Capacities, Social Scale, and Knowledge Information theory has long been interested in the relationship between expanding knowledge and the physiologically limited capacities of individuals, either singly or in groups, to handle that information (5). As a result of these finite capacities, certain information comes to be ranked as not only different from, but more important than other data, and scarce cognitive resources can be focused upon information ranked hierarchically higher. Hierarchical classification therefore reduces information complexity, and given the existence of finite cognitive capacities, the more elaborate the information that is available or necessary, the more elaborate the hierarchical structure. This has been an appealing metaphor for social scientists, since it seems so symmetrical with the hierarchical structural differentiation so
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often seen historically tied to growing social scale. However, the logic in the leap from social differentiation, based upon growing knowledge and the limited capacities of any individual or group to master that knowledge, to social stratification, in which resources like prestige, power, and wealth are unequally distributed in terms of a knowledge hierarchy, must be explained. That is, it is easy to see how growing informational complexity can produce differentiation in which that knowledge is divided up and reduced to smaller sub-units. It is not as easy to see how this process might lead to changes in social inequality. One line of argument in this regard has been in terms of the increased social scale that a growing knowledge base makes possible. From the point of view of information theory, it is possible to look upon other human beings as bundles of capacities. After all, information may be seen in terms of other individuals who are constantly broadcasting data about themselves as part of the basic interaction process. If too many individuals are co-present and trying to interact, for instance, in a decision making process, then cognitive overload soon appears. This is the basis of the classic inverted-U curve that describes the operation of a crucial but physiologically limited resource. For a given task of some interesting degree of difficulty, if too few individuals, and hence too little information, are present, then the effective completion of the task is likely to be hindered, but if too many are present, the task performance is also compromised. Thus, as scale increases in terms of the number of individuals, stress appears, and this stress is normally handled by hierarchical differentiation. As Gregory Johnson notes in summarizing this research (6), small group studies indicate that the magic number for the emergence of a hierarchy as a response to scalar stress is about 6-7 individuals. This number is of course reminiscent of Miller's classic study of the finite human abilities to immediately handle chunks of information (7). Johnson argues that "there appear, then, to be rather severe limits on the maximum size of task-oriented groups that are organized horizontally (non-hierarchically), and these limits may be related to individual information-processing capacity" (8). The same magic number often appears also in span of control studies. In Johnson's words, "Span of control refers to the number of individuals or organizational units directly subordinate to a given individual or organizational unit within a hierarchical structure. Span is said to range from narrow, with few subordinates, to wide, with many~ Studies of
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a wide variety of organizations have produced the empirical generalization that the range of variation in observed span of control is narrow, and that an optimum span may be somewhere around the interesting figure of six" (9). Once again, as the size of a system increases, the span of control limitation leads to growing hierarchical differentiation. For our purposes, the exact numbers are not important, other than to note that they are small. The basic rule is that as information increases, because of the number of individuals present and/or because of the total amount of data available to those individuals, then a hierarchical response becomes more and more likely. However, this process generates only a temporary form of inequality in regard to information loaded processes such as decision making. As critics of these attempts to tie cognitive constraints to more permanent distribution inequalites have noted (10), simply rotating decision making roles or arranging them sequentially produces a long-term tendency towards equality. At any given point in time, cognitive limits might generate some inequality, but over time, these can be cancelled or leveled through relatively simple organizational arrangements. Why then are these alternative organizational patterns so rarely successful? What aspects of finite cognitive capacities might generate more lasting inequalities? Niklas Luhmann has made one attempt to link cognitive limitations directly to social inequalities in increasingly complex social worlds. Complexity reduction has long been the major theme in Luhmann's work. He posits that the "mirror image of the problem of complexity" is the "inadequate capacities of human beings", that is, "man's limited capacity for processing information, his limited potential for grasping and reducing complex situations" (11). As social scale begins to grow historically, gradually excluding face-to-face interaction on a regular basis among all members of a culture, patterns of stratification emerge in order to avoid the information chaos that scalar stress might produce for cognitively limited individuals. Thus, due ultimately to finite capacities, the communication of information among individuals must somehow be limited in order to avoid communication stress (12); and among other social configurations, inequality accomplishes this information reduction. For Luhmann, hierarchies become a means to limit communication chances, for these structures selectively intensify certain information and exclude informa-
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tion from other sources (13). This social distance magnifies differences among individuals, but without such aids, individuals would be overwhelmed by the avalanche of information that accompanies each increase in scale. There is of course a highly arbitrary element in this form of complexity reduction, but due to our finite capacities, it is an anthropological necessity. This analysis would seem to imply that as the total amount of knowledge in a system increases, so too would the probability of communication stress, which in turn would guarantee some degree of social inequality as a means to reduce this knowledge complexity. However, Luhmann also argues that in advanced industrial societies, the level of complexity becomes so great that it is increasingly unlikely that any cognitively finite individual, or small group of finite individuals, can control monopolistically such a system for any length of time (14). This in turn effects the unequal 'distribution of social resources, which tends to become more dispersed, reflecting the dispersal of power in such complex social worlds, although of course it is still unequally distributed. Thus, for Luhmann, the level of complexity in late industrial cultures decreases the likelihood of either radical egalitarianism or extreme inegalitarianism in the distribution of key social resources. From the complexity reduction paradigm, Luhmann can link physiological principles of cognitive limitations to social inequality. This is a most interesting argument concerning the pre-conscious operation of physiological capacities in shaping the emergence of certain social phenomena, but there remain a number of problems. For example, if information flow is the primary problem, and if a hierarchy more effectively copes with this problem, then positions on a hierarchy should be seen as essentially interchangeable. That is, it should not really make any difference to individuals whether or not they occupy higher or lower positions, as long as each position avoids information overload. However, there is little evidence that individuals actually view hierarchies in this manner, suggesting that something other than a subconscious response to cognitive constraints is operating in the formation of hierarchies. Furthermore, individuals often seem to seek higher positions in a hierarchy, even though these positions threaten information overload. Rather than reducing cognitive complexity, the pursuit of inequality seems to be tied to increasing the risk of cognitive overload, and a model of cognitive constraints cannot explain
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why individuals should press their finite capacities in such a manner. If an emphasis on finite cognitive capacities produces an interesting but incomplete model, what other human quality might add theoretical power to this type of argument? My suggestion is human affectivity, the physiological capacities to generate emotions. Like our cognitive capacities, affectivity is a crucial but finite resource that leads to the emergence of certain social phenomena under conditions of growing social complexity. However, unlike cognitive limitations, the problems in allocating affective resources can be directly linked to the emergence and development of social inequality. I have developed this position elsewhere in detail (15), but the affective allocation paradigm has the following basic logic.
Affective Arousal and Human Social Life The declining instinctual influence that marks the long evolutionary history of our species has given us much of the flexibility that has been central to our appearance as a world dominant species, at least for the moment. But this instinctual poverty does create certain problems. What quality of the species could forge the many different ties between adults of both sexes and between adults and children that would be a part of the social life of a primate so dependent upon a group for survival itself? Such behavior patterns, and many more like them, could be provided instinctually, but when combined with sophisticated cognitive skills, they could also be fabricated by weighting such bonds with affective additions. Moreover, affectivity, the physiological capacities to generate emotions, might also be central to confronting another problem rooted in instinctual poverty. Innate behavior rules provide means and ends for actions, and differentiate behaviors as more or less appropriate and important. Without instincts, what quality of our species could structure actions in this way and not expose individuals to the behavioral chaos that could accompany this paucity of instincts? The key quality is, once again, the human capacity to attach affective weight to actions. Be it in terms of attraction or repulsion, the addition of strong and repeated aff~ctive arousal to certain actions, and the denial of these additions to other possible actions, can provide a basis for ordering actions in terms of differential affective arousal. By drawing upon the wide spec-
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trum of emotions, from the negative/unpleasant ones such as fear or hatred to the positive/pleasant states of love and ecstasy, this differential arousal can give physiological authenticity to behavior that lacks the intrinsic authenticity of innately guided actions. Of course, not all arousal concerns these existential questions; but some strong arousal is the physiological substratum of meaning, which from this perspective is some sense of the relative importance of different actions among the vast spectrum of behavioral possibilities for a cognitively skilled and instinctually weak species. However, in regard to affectivity, one key problem is that the range of potential affective foci is always greater than the physiological capacities of individuals to provide affective additions. Paralleling the decline of instinctually fixed behavior was the evolutionary growth of our awesome cognitive skills, but combined with instinctual poverty, the very richness of human capabilities in memory, foresight, and imagination means that there is an almost infinite range of potentially arousing objects and situations. However, individuals have the physiological capacities to forge affective links to only a small part of this range, and hence, these scarce affective resources must be maldistributed among potential affective foci. The study of affective physiology is marked by many active controversies concerning the exact relationship between instincts, cognition, and emotions in both human and non-human species (16). However, there is little disagreement about one aspect of affective physiology that is most important sociologically, namely that strong arousal has a wide variety of physiologically debilitating consequences if prolonged or spread over too many objects in too many situations. There is a classic and ever growing literature clearly demonstrating the physiological erosion that can occur when too many interactions are too arousing (17). Emotions are a combination of evaluation and somatic change, mixing cognitive capacities with other physiological changes (18). Not all judgements are emotions, since many may occur without variations in heartbeat, pulse rate, respiratory rate, facial flush, perspiration, or any other of a host of physiological changes. Similarly, these somatic changes are not always symptomatic of emotions, since they can occur for other reasons. Nonetheless, the physiological changes linked to appraisals in emotion set parameters for the extent of affective arousal likely to occur in social interaction, because many of these physiological changes, if pre-
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sent too often, will lead to the physical deterioration of the body. Some examples of this relationship are well known. Fear involves adrenaline secretion and the sympathetic nervous system, and chronic fear has a number of undesirable effects on the body. But this physical debilitation is not simply limited to classic emergency responses such as fear and anger. Although the nature of the debilitation varies in relation to the different physiological changes that are a part of different emotions, bodily erosion occurs with emotions labelled either as positive/pleasant or negative/unpleasant. Naturally, this erosion could be eliminated by simply avoiding strong affective arousal, but as we have seen, for an instinctually poor species, some such arousal is central to the fabrication of human social worlds, and the negative consequences of avoiding arousal are far greater. Thus, human beings are constantly faced with the two-sided labor of seeking arousal and distancing alternative affective foci for which the affective resources simply do not exist. The combination of instinctual poverty and affective openness with physiologically constrained tools creates a number of dimensions along which affective difficulties can emerge. If too many ties are too arousing, there can be affective overload, which can be countered by decreasing the number of arousing linkages or the affective costs in such ties. Along another plane, there is the possibility of affective diffusion, in which so many situations involve some arousal that insufficient affective resources remain to provide strong attachments to a few affective focal points. Nonetheless, by unequally distributing their affective resources in a mixture of stronger, weaker, and even affectively neutral linkages, most individuals keep these allocation difficulties at bay. However, such potential difficulties make it clear how essential are distancing frameworks are differential affective commitments. It is also clear that not all allocation strategies will be equally preferred. Many psychological studies of attachment indicate that there is a distinct preference for an allocation pattern marked by a small number of stronger ties, even though these are affectively costly and decrease the number of less affectively laden linkages that an individual might forge. The evolutionary origin of this preference is probably rooted in the fact that strong ties provide better existential anchors for an instinctually weak species, and in the role of such differential affective commitments in the care and nurturing of infants through their long growth and maturation
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period. Most of the research in this regard has focused upon the attachment preferences of children, but this pattern continues in its general form throughout an individual's life (19). Thus, there are two basic senses in which we can speak of the unequal distribution of affective resources. First of all, for an instinctually impoverished species such as ours, there are always a greater number of potential objects for attachment than there are affective resources available. Some potential affective foci must be denied affective additions, and this denial is one sense in which affective resources are maldistributed. Secondly, even among those objects that are selected for affective additions, there is an unequal distribution, since human beings are predisposed to prefer an affective allocation pattern marked by some strong attachments, which are affectively quite costly, and which limit the affective resources available to other ties.
Affective Allocation and the Distribution of Social Resources Such as Knowledge How then to draw boundaries for affective allocation? Social hierarchies are one of the most important aids in this task. Their structure is similar to the general pattern of affective allocation, and this symmetry provides an invaluable framework for affective focusing and distancing. As we have seen, from the point of view of the individual, affective additions must be unequally distributed, with a few ties receiving a disproportionate share of affective additions. Of what social phenomena is such a distribution reminiscent? Social inequality marked by some version of the pyramidal or truncated diamond distributions of resources such as knowledge, power, prestige, or wealth. In these most common patterns of a social hierarchy, a few positions stand out by virtue of the unequal share of social resources focused in the upper reaches of the hierarchy, and many other positions are pushed some distance down the hierarchy. The symmetry between affective maldistribution and social hierarchy is more than coincidental. The emer- gence of such hierarchies is ultimately rooted in the dynamics of affective allocation, for they provide a means to facilitate allocation by setting apart some foci for affective additions and distancing alternative foci. First of all, the dynamics of affective allocation predispose individuals
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to rank affective foci. It makes little difference if the ranking proceeds and directs the allocation, or is produced afterwards as a result of the affective commitment. With such evaluative classifications, the range of affective foci that might be pursued is decreased, since some ties will be defined as more or less likely to succeed, and as more or less important, interesting, exciting, or whatever. Without such a ranking, individuals are likely to be overwhelmed by the presence of alternative foci all classified as equal in terms of their potential for affective ties. Affective scarcity is not the only source of ranking, but it is an especially important one because, as we shall see, it is sensitive to changes in social scale. A hierarchical sense of the self does not automatically translate itself into social hierarchies marked by the unequal distribution of social resources. In terms of generating social distance, individuals might use various rankings, but these need not in every case be strengthened even further by the mal distribution of social resources. For instance, differences could be highlighted and ranked, but these differences could be seen as ultimately complementary and of equal value. One person might be a better hunter, another a better healer, a third a better father, a fourth a better lover, and so on throughout the population. Each of these differences could be affectively appealing, and provide some basis to differentially distribute affective bonds. However, if all these evaluations are seen as equally important to the population as a whole, then these differences cancel each other out, and provide little basis to unequally distribute social resources. Thus, multiple complementary rankings could be paired with minimal inequality in social resource allocation. Or, non-complementary rankings might be used by an individual or group, but simply no efforts directed towards reinforcing this evaluation by the unequal distribution of social resources. The likelihood of such strategies is directly related to social scale. If the scale is small, as in foraging societies, this may well be the case, because at such a density the key measure of potential affective foci, the number of individuals in physical proximity, is so low. Also, given the degree of face-to-face interaction possible on an almost daily basis with that minimal range, individual differences and ranking classifications can be known to all without having to magnify these. However, as the scale grows, even if a small group within an expanded population might continue to use an equal allocation of social resources, this is more and more
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likely to be mixed with a hierarchical classification in regard to other groups in the population, and with unequally distributed social resources to embody this boundary. In the face of post-foraging social scales, the radical affective mal- distribution that is a part of everyday life for a species unsupported by instinctual guidelines can be most fragile without some means to give this affective inequality a visible and tangible aspect. In contrast, unequally distributed social resources can give a manifest and solid quality to a classification, and boundaries marked by social inequality are more likely to at least partially check and even disguise the precariousness at the core of human social life based upon non-instinctual bonds. In addition, embodied hierarchies are generally more effective in affective allocation because the maldistributed social resources in these hierarchies can themselves become the focus of affective attention. Hierarchies place different concentrations of social resources at different strata, and the pursuit of those resources can be affectively appealing in terms of fixing affective resources upon a specific goal, and distancing other possible considerations in the pursuit of that goal. In an extreme case, such as in the quest for a special share of unequally distributed economic resources, this pursuit might become an end in itself, reducing other individuals to means to acquire these ends. But even in less extreme cases, an attachment to such inequality can focus scarce affective resources by serving either as an affectively appealing goal in itself, or as a means to pursue some other affectively loaded goal, such as supporting other personal commitments to individuals, accumulating political power, creating new knowledge, or whatever. In any case, an individual does not have to come out on top of an embodied social hierarchy in order to be able to use its rankings for affective allocation. Many positions fall somewhere between the very top and the very bottom, and each level provides another basis for affective focusing and distancing by creating and magnifying differences among potential affective foci. Even if some hierarchies framed by social inequality are likely to emerge from the dynamics of affective allocation, there is still the possibility that such hierarchies might be limited to unequal distributions of the more benign social resources, such as status or prestige in terms of a knowledge hierarchy. Most of the historical tragedy associated with embodied hierarchies is rooted in the unequal distribution of ecop,omic and
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political resources, such as wealth and power. Why then cannot these hierarchies avoid the more dangerous inequalities, and thereby contain some of the potential negative consequences of the human attraction to embodied hierarchies? The answer to this question is found in a consideration of social density, which is an indicator of the historical differences in fhe size of one of the most important arenas for potential affective ties, the presence of other human beings.
Social Scale and the Pattern of Hierarchical Differentiation The nature of allocation hierarchies is directly related to the degree of social density, because social density is a measure of how often and how much social distance must be invoked by an individual in distributing scarce affective resources. Since different types and degrees of social distance are created by different hierarchical structures of social inequality, these inequality producing structures evolve as social densities change. The basic historical rule is that anything that increases the number of social linkages by making extended patterns of interaction more and more difficult to avoid changes the nature of the inequality systems that are likely to appear. Why precisely are changes in social density problematic in terms of affective allocation? Since other human beings are the most likely source of affective ties, the simplest definition of social density would be in terms of how many human beings are concentrated together in settlements of what size. The greater the social density, the greater the potential range of affective foci, either for an initial bond or as a replacement for a tie that is eroding or has disappeared. Thus, simply increasing the number of other individuals present in a social universe increases the potential range of both affective stimuli and foci. Affective focusing then involves distancing more and more affective alternatives. Secondly, and more importantly, growing density increases not only the number of potential associations, but also the number of actual associations. Growth in settlement size, economic differentiation, and a host of other changes generally linked to increasing social density all increase the chances that the life of anyone individual will cross paths with a wider range of other individuals, ideas, or whatever. For an instinctually weak and affectively open species, each association, be it in passing or other-
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wise, carries with it some likelihood of affective costs, either in terms of affective demands made by others or in terms of affective additions sought by an individual. This can create a number of additional problems for allocating a scarce resource like affectivity. For instance, increasing social scale means that on the average less time is spent with more people, and unless the probability and strength of arousal is altered as scale changes, then there is a drift towards affective diffusion, in which scarce affective resources are too thinly spread, or affective overload in which an attempt is made to forge an increased number of stronger ties even though there is less interaction time. Growing density therefore increases the need for social boundaries to control the affective costs of inter- action by shaping the amount of interaction time, the likelihood of arousal of interaction, and the probable strength of arousal. Since hierarchies can both increase the costs in regard to certain ties and decrease them in relation to other ties, they too spread as density grows. Thirdly, increasing density shapes affective allocation because it tends to erode the allocation usefulness of previously existent categories by increasing the number in that category, and thereby making allocation more and more problematic. For instance, in a small population, only a handful of individuals might possess a particular type of knowledge, such as the ability to read or write, and this knowledge differential could easily be used for affective focusing and distancing. But increasing density is likely to increase the number of individuals with this knowledge, and in so far as these individuals come into contact with one another, to erode its usefulness in social differentiation. The normal historical solution is of course to sub-divide the original knowledge category, for instance into those who can read or write at different levels of sophistication, and in this way reduce the sub-density in any particular category. With higher and higher densities, even sub-categories can become densely packed, and generate still more differentiation. This not only means that growing densities tend to generate more and more social boundaries for affective allocation, but also that the nature of some of these boundaries changes. For instance, with the high degree of almost daily face-to-face contact possible for a population only with extremely low social density, social boundaries can be created and recreated without requiring much external scaffolding, such as with economic re-
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sources. But in the face of growing density, subtle status boundaries that require a great deal of close contact are more and more difficult to rely upon exclusively. What is often needed are boundaries with a type of social shorthand that makes them readily visible in creating and maintaining social differences. Post-subsistence economic goods and services provide just such a shorthand in quickly outlining goods and services, as well as becoming a focus themselves for affective allocation. Thus, it is likely that growing social scale will produce a growing need for material goods and services; and this in turn increases the social dependence upon knowledge, which in both its instrumental and theoretical forms can be critical to meeting such a growing need. The historical appearance of a need for more such goods has nothing to do with an instinct for such behavior, or with the idea that human needs are somehow intrinsically elastic and always expand to meet or surpass the supply of goods available. Instead, such a need should be seen as the emergent by-product of the affective allocation dilemmas of individuals facing increasing social scale. Similarly, the dynamics of affective allocation in the face of growing density underlie the increasing appeal of boundaries marked by the differential distribution of power and formal authority. Once again, the growth of political inequality is not due to an innate expansive need for power or for more formal organizational structures, but rather to the role such inequality can play in affective allocation. It provides some quite rare concentrations of social resources that can be very attractive in themselves and as means to fabricate distancing boundaries. These walls can make possible interaction with a larger number of individuals and at the same time limit through social distance the affective costs that are likely to mark this interaction. Thus, with extremel¥ small densities, the appeal of such positions might be minimal, since at this scale, the basic allocation range represented by other individuals in the population is also at an historical minimum, but at higher density levels, boundaries fortified by the unequal distribution of political resources become more and more likely to emerge. Of course, these affective dynamics do not only make rare concentrations of unequally distributed social resources appealing, but they also make rarity in general increasingly attractive as social scale grows and creates so many problems in affective allocation. The statistically rare activities of creating a new idea, or a new cultural artifact, or a new be-
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havior pattern can also arouse and focus affective resources, while distancing alternative actions in terms of their affective appeal. Thus, increasing scale not only generates a growing need for economic and political resources to embody social boundaries, and a need for an unequal share of such resources, but also increases the appeal of the new, be it in terms of ideas or whatever. Increasing scale does not just make such creativity possible in many cases, such a density change makes it almost necessary. High density cultures cannot be static, for the underlying affective problematic makes repetition from generation to generation increasingly impossible to maintain. Affective Dynamics and the Social Structure of a Knowledge Society
What has all of this to do with a knowledge society? A great deal, because these affective dynamics effect the extrinsic and intrinsic appeal and power of highly specialized knowledge, both in its instrumental and theoretical forms. The emergence of knowledge as a major social force in contemporary high density and high production societies is inextricably tied to these affective allocation problems. For example, the likelihood that the possessor of some special technical knowledge can translate this knowledge into a significant, and even an unequal share, of social resources such as wealth or authority is directly related to the level of economic productivity of a society. The greater the per capita income for the population as a whole, the greater the leverage of those with the instrumental knowledge crucial to the higher levels of production. With physiologically finite cognitive capacities that limit the rate and amount of knowledge that anyone person can attain, the more elaborate the production system, the more difficult it is for anyone person or small group to have knowledge control of that production and the more likely their dependence upon a wider and wider number of other individuals possessing parts of production knowledge. If, because of the affective dynamics outlined here, increasing social density tends to create throughout the population a need for the products of intensified economic production, then knowledge-possessing individuals will in all likelihood seek to trade their skills for an increased share of that productive output. These individuals are after all faced with the basic allocation problematic, and will attempt to partially resolve that problematic with social boundaries
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embodied with the products of the economic system. If most or all individuals have some familiarity with the basic production knowledge, as in hunting and gathering societies, then an egalitarian distribution pattern of economic goods and services is not unlikely. If there is some degree of knowledge specialization, but it is still relatively restricted, as in agrarian cultures, we would expect the most skewed economic distributions, because of the monopolistic potential of those having special knowledge, or of the control of that knowledge bearing group by a small elite. However, as the spread of knowledge specialization expands with every increase in the complexity of the production system, so too should there emerge increasing diversity in the mal distribution of economic resources. Thus, highly knowledge dependent societies are unlikely to be either extremely egalitarian or monopolistic in terms of the distribution of key social resources such as economic goods and services, which are central to social boundary formation in affective allocation. In these conditions, knowledge specialists are unlikely to embrace radical egalitarianism, which introduces such awesome affective allocation difficulties in a high density social world, and there is a structural tendency to move away from the distribution extremes of radical equality or inequality. In addition to the external rewards likely to attach themselves to instrumental knowledBe possession, there are certain characteristics of highly specialized knowledge, both instrumental and non-instrumental, which are intrinsically appealing in terms of affective allocation. Specialized knowledge can be affectively appealing because of its rarity. Since human capacities to process and store information are also finite, even a simple competence in a complex field requires years of study for amassing statistically rare skills, that can then be transformed into social boundaries, with individuals existentially defining themselves in relation to other individuals who share or do not share a specialized vocabulary, skills, or whatever. There is also an intrinsic rarity in terms of the possibility of making a new contribution to an area. The creation of new knowledge provides again an ideal basis for hierarchical differentiation in terms of rarefied pursuits that tend to facilitate affective focusing. With this underlying affective appeal, it is no wonder that knowledge societies, and the knowledge producers within these social worlds, are so often obsessed with the generation of new knowledge. Of course, this is reflected in the massively unequal distribution of status, as well as the slightly more
Finite Human Capacities and the Pattern ofSocial Stratification
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modest mal distributions of other rewards, that are directed to those successful in this endeavor. Such a pattern is what should be expected if the affective dynamics suggested here did in fact underplay a part of the social actions of a scientific community. Indeed, the pursuit of doubly rarefied goals, such as the manufacture of new knowledge in an already elaborate and esoteric knowledge community, is useful because this is a rarity that consistently renews itself as the production of new knowledge only creates opportunities for yet more knowledge to be created. That is, there is a tangible means to pursue the new, and then to have those successful pursuits become the means to further efforts, and to the affective and other rewards that might attach themselves to these activities. In high density social worlds which tend to create a fascination with the new rooted in the problematic of affective focusing and distancing, specialized knowledge has an enormous appeal built into it. Furthermore, as noted earlier, information theorists have argued that increasingly complex knowledge systems tend to be hierarchically differentiated. Such hierarchies are an ideal vehicle for transformation through affective additions into a framework for the manufacture of social distance. Information theorists have also shown that growing information complexity in decision making processes produces at least a temporary hierarchical organizational pattern, that once again sets the stage for the transformation of such boundaries into more permanent arrangements to create social distance. Thus, affective dynamics do not have to generate hierarchical classifications de novo, because they are in part regularly provided by cognitive limitations. Elaborate knowledge bases can not only promote the intensification of economic production and the manufacture of social resources to embody social boundaries in all sectors of a society, but they can be in themselves a useful framework for social organization based upon hierarchical distancing. Not surprisingly, the shape of scientific communities comes to have a hierarchical structure symmetrical with the shape of scientific knowledge itself; and equally un surprising is that more and more groups try to emulate science, such that as social densities increase, we find the attempted and often successful scientification of more and more aspects of our culture. There is one last way in which the combination of finite cognitive and affective capacities might effect the shape of differentiation in increas-
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ingly knowledge dependent societies. It could be argued that although individual cognitive capacities are finite, they are differentially finite. If we permit the assumption that there are significant innate natural differences in individual capacities to process information, then some individuals will be able to do more such tasks in less time, and a social hierarchy that reflected these natural differences might be seen as more effective than one that did not make such a recognition. This is of course the first half of the meritocracy argument in the functionalist theory of stratification and that knowledge society theorists like Bell essentially adopt (20). The functionalist theory of stratification has generated a large critical literature, for it is an argument with a number of hidden assumptions concerning the role of unequal rewards in motivating individuals. The affective paradigm provides some more depth in regard to such assumptions, for it can at least partially specify the historical conditions under which different kinds of rewards are more or less likely to be attractive in terms of their role in affective allocation. If high density societies predispose individuals to manufacture or magnify differences among themselves, then even small natural differences in capacities to process information could become most important, and indeed come to replace traditional biological differences, such as race, or sex, that have been used for many thousands of years to provide some means of hierarchical differentiation. These differences are not in themselves sufficient to explain the appearance of inequalities in the distribution of social rewards, but combined with something like affective dynamics which make such inequalities appealing, a growing reliance on increasingly complex knowledge is likely to shift at least somewhat the unequal distribution of social rewards in terms of these differences.
Conclusion The main purpose of this article has been to try to confront some theoretical problems concerning the relationship between knowledge, social scale, and social inequality. The analysis has centered upon the possibilities of using bioconstraint principles of cognition and affectivity in an effort to direct attention to the deepest assumptions about the underlying dynamics of human social life. So much sociological theory hesitates to probe exten-
Finite Human Capacities and the Pattern ofSocial Stratification
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sively its existential scaffolding, and theories concerning the knowledge society must aspire to be an exception to this rule. The role of affectivity has been stressed because knowledge and affectivity are intimately linked in a circularly reinforcing manner. As social scale and the dependency upon specialized knowledge increase, more resources are likely to flow into the production of knowledge, which in turn makes possible growing social density and expands the double role of knowledge as an element in both hierarchical social organization and in the manufacture of other distancing social resources. Thus, the linkage between science and society tends to feed upon itself. The problems inherent in affective allocation create expansive needs for goods and services, and these needs tend to be reflected in the creation of more knowledge, which directly or indirectly increases again the production of goods and services. At the same time, the affective problematic in the face of growing social density creates a growing need for social boundaries marked by hierarchical differentiation, and specialized knowledge is an ideal veaicle for such differentiation. Although science and emotion are often viewed as antithetical, their respective historical fates are therefore closely bound together. It is still far too early to determine if as Bell suggested, knowl~dge will become the axial principle for structuring a new social world, but the underlying dynamics of affective allocation provide some push in that direction.
Notes and References I. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books, 1973;
Talcott Parsons, The Evolution of Society. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1977; Gerhard Lenski, Human Societies. New York: McGraw Hill, 1974. 2. Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. New York: Macmillan, 1979. 3. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 4. Richard Lee, The Kung San. Cambridge: University Press, 1979; Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine, 1974. 5. H. Schroder, M. Driver, and S. Streufert, Human Information Processing. New York: Rinehart, Holt, and Winston, 1967; Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969. 6. Gregory Johnson, 'Organizational Structure and Scalar Stress', in C. Renfrew (ed.), Theory and Explanation in Archaeology, New York: Academic Press, 1982, pp. 392-393.
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7. G. Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," Psychological Review 63 (1956) 81-97. 8. Johnson, op cit., note 6, p. 394.
9. Ibid., p. 410. 10. E. Gross, 'Mayhew and Levinger's Use of Random Models,' American Journal of Sociology 83 (1978) 161-163; J. Logan and G. Zeitz, 'Mathematical Models in the Study of Power,' American Journal of Sociology 83 (1978) 164-173; C. Harris, 'Comment on Oligarchy in Human Interaction,' American Journal ofSociology 83 (1978) 173-178. 11. Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power. New York: Wiley, 1979, p. 9; The Differentiation of Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 92. 12. R. Meier, 'Communication Stress,' Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3 (1972) 289-314. 13. Luhmann, op. cit., 1982, note 11, pp. 234-235. 14. Ibid., pp. xv, 353, 355.
15. Michael Hammond, 'The Sociology of Emotions and the History of Social Differentiation,' in R. Collins (ed.), Sociological Theory. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1983, pp. 90-119; 'Affectivity and Stratification,' in P. Barchas (ed.), Social Cohesion: Essays Toward a Sociophysiological Perspective. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984, pp. 121-138; 'Affective Scarcity and the Emergence of Social Stratification,' presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Antonio, 1984. 16. Theodore Kemper, A Social Interactional Theory of Emotions. New York: Wiley, 1978. 17. T. Cox, Stress. New York: Macmillan, 1978; J. Edwards and A. Gab, Physiological Correlates of Human Behavior. London: Academic Press, 1983. 18. W. Grings and M. Dawson, Emotions and Bodily Response. New York: Academic Press, 1978. 19. C. Parkes and J. Stevenson-Hinde, The Place of Attachment in Human Behavior, London: Tavistock, 1982. 20. Bell, op. cit., 1973, note 1, pp. 445-455.
Part II THE SOCIAL ROLE OF MEN OF KNOWLEDGE
INTRODUCTION
We deliberately take the title of Florian Znaniecki's classical book for this section. Znaniecki was one of the first to explicitly conceive of knowledge as a social characteristic, i.e., as something which patterned the social behavior of its carriers, constituted peculiar social relations, served as a basis of social status and a resource of living. It was he who coined the concept of a knowledge circle, a forerunner of the later concept of the "scientific" community. It goes without saying that "the social role of men of knowledge" forms one of the most important aspects of research on the knowledge society. However, one must be quite clear that it does not cover the whole problem. On the contrary, there has always been a particular social behavior and status of men of knowledge even within societies whose macrostructure was not patterned by knowledge structures. Thus one can raise the question about the social role of men of knowledge as a question about the origins of the knowledge society, seeing it as a crystal nucleus of the knowledge society of our days. In this way the knowledge society may be considered as the final success of a certain social category (men of knowledge), which has always striven for more social and political influence. This aspect 'is articulated by titles like Konrad and Szelenyi's The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (1979) and A. Gouldner's The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979). But when considering the formation of knowledge circles and their growing influence on society as a whole, one should not forget that there have been knowledge societies in history which were quite different from those discussed in this book. Hierocracies (Priesterherrschaften) are a good example of knowledge societies. Parallels between knowledge societies based on religious knowledge and modern knowledge societies have been drawn 53 G. Bijhme and N. Stehr (eds.), The Knowledge Society, 53-55. © 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
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by R. Bahro in his book Die Alternative (1977), and modern intellectuals have been accused of reestablishing a new kind of Priesterherrschaft (see Schelsky's book Die Arbeit tun die anderen, 1975). Our inability to compare and contrast hierocracies and modern knowledge societies in this volume may be a deficiency, but it should be clear that for us, men of knowledge are "intellectuals" and that th~ knowledge by which they try to establish their social status is secular knowledge. The subtheme of "the social role of men of knowledge" also has many facets. We want to mention some in order to make clear that the contributions of this section indicate a larger field of possible research. One aspect is the formation of knowledge circles. These include demarcation processes, that is, processes by which insider-outsider relations are based on participation in a certain kind of knowledge. A particular type of this relation is the expert-layman relation, although relations between carriers of different types of knowledge are included as well. The internal social reJations within a knowledge circle are also part of this aspect inasmuch as they are patterned by the respective type of knowledge. Thus invesfgations into the social function of cognitive structures - that is, parts of the cognitive sociology of science, are appropriate here. A second aspect of the problem is the formation of knowledge hierarchies and their impact on social hierarchies. A special point of interest is the social struggle between carriers of different types of knowledge, providing the internal dyn2.mics of knowledge societies and the historical line of investigation. A third aspect of the problem is the question of how it is possible to turn knowledge into a means of social power and a basis of social and political existence. What are the restrictions of knowledge diffusion, and how are they used to privatize knowledge and make it a privileged source of influence? Here investigations on knowledge as human or cultural capital, on social interests of knowledge circles, etc. would be appropriate. The following section contains three articles, which in different ways highlight one or the other of these aspects. The first one is Gernot Bohme's article on philosophers and sophists. Here he deals with the origin of European intellectual history insofar as it is the social history of intellectuals. Not until the Greek Enlightenment were there men who made their living on the basis of secular knowledge. Bohme's paper reveals that it was a particular social-historical constellation in which this birth of the European intellectual took place: the Athenean democracy
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when it led the Delian League. Then, for the first time, a political demand for higher education arose. Philosophers and sophists were competitors for the new social chances for intellectuals. In the second paper, Thomas F. Gieryn and Anne E. Figert deal with one specific aspect of demarcation processes - the demarcation between what belongs to a science, and what not only serves to methodologically and materially pattern a specific type of a science, but also to establish and maintain a cognitive authority of the science concerned. The cognitive authority of a science, that is, its general reputation as well as its established responsibilities within the realm of social action, is a very sensitive parameter for its social impact. This applies in particular to its status as expert knowledge. Gieryn and Figert choose a subject where this most clearly can be demonstrated, test-psychology, using the case of a famous psychologist, Sir Cyril Burt, who was accused of fraud and deception. The point which Gieryn and Figert make in their paper is that this case was not just taken as an affair touching the personal reputation of a scientist, but as a threat to the cognitive authority of the psychological community as a whole. Thus they study the strategies of protection adopted by the psychologists' community, which range from denial of the charges to the final excommunication of Burt. Our last paper in this section is Aaron Cicourel's which deals with structures of communication within the medical system. Seen from the point of view of this volume, the main problem at stake here is the power relation between experts and laymen, doctors and patients. The particular charm of Cicourel's investigation is that he studies a situation in which the doctor-patient relation is mediated by a training fellow, who interviews the patient and is in turn supervised by a senior doctor. This setting reveals processes of transformation and interpretation which would remain implicit otherwise. Another aspect of Cicourel's research is that the process of transformation is affected by differences of types of knowledge: everyday knowledge, procedural knowledge, declarative knowledge. Although the transformation of information stemming from the patient aims at producing declarative knowledge, it becomes clear that the expert always remains dependent on a procedural type of knowledge. The paradox is that the training fellow's task is to produce declarative knowledge against the supervisor, whose very superiority consists in his richer stock of procedural knowledge.
DEMARCATION AS A STRATEGY OF EXCLUSION: PHILOSOPHERS AND SOPHISTS GERNOT BOHME Technische Hochschule Darmstadt
I. Introduction. General Thesis For the sociologists of knowledge it is quite clear that knowledge might serve as the basic principle on which insider-outsider-relations are established, social hierarchies are legitimated, and responsibilities are claimed. Knowledge is not considered as a mere system of propositions, but as "stock," a type of cultural capital, or shared goods. In this way the degree of participation (1) in knowledge has an impact on one's social status, possibilities of political influence, and membership in social circles. Hence differences between types of knowledge will be mirrored in social differences between their carriers. Epistemologists and philosophers of science seem to have dispensed with such considerations. They draw demarcations between types of knowledge without mentioning that these demarcations mean borderlines between people; construct hierarchies in the realm of knowledge without making explicit the claims of domination which can be based on them; separate "true reality" from the merely phenomenal world of sensation and fantasy as if these differentiations were given by Truth itself and not expressions of a social struggle about what the decisive facts are. The ever growing importance of knowledge for the structure and development of modern societies has created social struggle over the ranking, responsibility, and implicit definition of reality of different types of knowledge. (One example which I have studied is the struggle between physicians and midwives concerning their respective knowledge of childbirth.) (2) The overall result of these struggles is that science is considered the most important type of knowledge. The scientific definition of reality is what counts in the final analysis. Philosophers have always been deeply engaged in these struggles, although, in general, without revealing their own interests. A case in point is Popper's demarcation principle by 57 G. B6hme and N. Stehr (eds.), The Knowledge Society, 57-66. © 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
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which he tried to keep Marxism and psychoanalysis out of science - and hence out of the hallowed halls of the university. My general thesis is that philosophical attempts to demarcate types of knowledge can be read from a social historical background as social strategies. In order to explicate this thesis and to give it some empirical content it may be best to begin with Plato and his fight against the sophists. II. Plato and the Sophists
Plato's works are full of polemics against the sophists, refuting them with partly ironical, partly bitter condemnation. A large number of his dialogues are presented as discussions between his master Socrates and the most celebrated sophists. Plato's own historical success is indicated by the pejorative sense that the word "sophist" has for us. Since their works have almost totally been lost, most of what we know about the sophists has to be taken from the writings of their outspoken enemy, Plato, making their rehabilitation (3) - a task for historiography which had to wait until the 20th century - a form of archeology in the sense of Foucault. For Plato, a sophist is a charlatan, a cheat, somebody who produces pseudo-knowledge and takes money for it. In other words, a man who makes a business out of knowledge. This definition stands in remarkable contrast to the 5th century usage of the term sophist to designate all types of men who knew something (4), including the famous seven sages, Socrates and finally Plato himself. There is good evidence that the Socratics - that is Socrates, Plato and their followers - coined the term "philosopher" (5) in order to separate themselves from the sophists, to establish a difference. This process seems peculiar, given the considerable contributions that the sophists made to the development of human knowledge, in particular to the development of a theory of language, grammar, political and social science (6). Nor does Plato withhold his respect for these achievements. The explanation of this highly ambivalent process of differentiation is (7) that the point of the quarrel was the emerging need for "higher education," the question of how this higher education was to be structured, and which roles the different groups of intellectuals had to play in it. It is true, we have to be very cautious when using such terms as "higher
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education" and "intellectuals" for that period (5th and 4th century BC in Athens). We are dealing herewith the history of the origin of what was to become "higher" education. Let us first consider the need for higher education in detail. This need was the outcome of the position of Athens as the head of an imperium (the Delian League) on the one hand, and the democratic constitution on the other. Since about 480 BC there had been a general primary school education: the sons of citizens went to teachers and were trained in gymnastics, music and grammar (that is, reading and writing) (8). But it became evident that this was not enough to allow them to effectively take part in political affairs. From the time of Pericles policy making became a sophisticated job. Founding daughter cities, administration of the imperial treasure, problems of financing war and the trophe (the care for poorer citizens), required more than some experience and common sense. It required knowledge in geography, economics, knowledge about the constitutions, way of living and laws of foreign cities, etc. It was Pericles himself who attached some of the sophists of the first generation to himself as political consultants (9). At this time the idea arose that what was needed for doing politics was not only virtue (arete), that is, just being a good man or citizen, but a certain skill or art (teehne), the po/Wee teehne. Or better, taking it from the other side, the question was whether becoming a good citizen required some technical training or whether "virtue was teachable." (10) It was the sophists who offered the training in question. Another source for the need of higher education was the democratic constitution itself. In principle this constitution opened a political career to every citizen. Political leadership no longer depended on noble birth and wealth, although in practice the political elite during the 5th and 4th centuries were still recruited mainly from those strata (11). Nevertheless society had in fact become permeable, in both directions. The old noble families had to adopt the competences of the new parvenues, and the lower classes adopted the way of life of the noble ones: leisure, sports, politics (12). In addition to policy-related training as a means of social and political ranking, there is another reason why democracy enhanced or even engendered the chance of higher education. I mean the fact th~t political
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affairs were performed through public speech, policy making was speaking. We can hardly imagine the amount to which this was the case. We have to remember that the Athenean democracy was what today we would call a grassroot democracy: almost everything was decided by the demos. Even the courts were democratic assemblies. Thus the faculty of persuasion through public speech was decisive for political and juridicial success. The consequence was that the new teachers for higher education, the sophists, provided rhetoric as the main part of their training in political skills. Their eminent interest in language and speech also was a result of these facts. Sophists were hired to speak for something or somebody in public, a practise which resulted in the vocation of rhetor - "lawyer" or "advocate" in modern terms. The general consequence of t1:te value of speech within democratic life was a gradual transformation of Athenean culture. Whereas in archaic times physical excellence had the highest value, to be educated now came to mean "being able to speak." (13) Thus rhetoric became the key discipline within the developing higher education in the 5th century. It was the rhetors (14) who in the 4th century followed the sophists as teachers of higher education. III. Discrediting the Sophists: Differentiating Types of Knowledge
One of Plato's strategies to discredit the sophists was to belittle the type of knowledge they had to offer. This strategy can be most clearly identified in his dialogue "Gorgias," where Socrates disputes the sophists' claim that they offered the required "po/Wce techne," or skillful political competence. Plato, speaking for Socrates, claims that what they offer, rhetorics, is no techne at all. (1 5) Here Plato draws a distinction between two types of knowledge, easily understood from the examples, although not from the terms he uses. Rhetorics, he says is a mere "empeiria" not a "techne." The difference as formulated with these terms is difficult to understand because we have such a high estimation of "empirical knowledge." But we have to remember that Plato did not have this estimation. In addition he uses the term "empeiria" here in the sense of "mere practice without knowledge." We already feel in this formulation the depreciation of the knowledge implied in practice. Rhetoric may be a mere practice, but it is a skillful one, and it can be taught - thus it must be a type of knowledge
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(as Plato himself concedes, see "Meno"). The very sense of Plato's distinction therefore must be that it is not true knowledge which the sophists have to offer. This becomes much clearer when the examples and knowledge interests which Plato attributes to the respective types of knowledge are considered. Thus he says that rhetorics is a "flattery" (kolakeia) and compares it to other types of flattery namely cookery and embellishment. The analogies by which Plato wants to clarify these relations are the following: there are a couple of practices by which body and soul are flattered: cookery and embellishment for the body, sophistics and rhetorics for the soul. These four practices which are directed towards what is pleasant to the body and to the soul, are confronted with four technae, which are directed towards what is good for the body and the soul: medicine and gymnastics for the body, legislation and jurisprudence for the soul (16). It goes without saying that Plato here has a point to make. The sophists themselves said that rhetorics is an art of persuasion. But the question is, whether this kind of knowledge is adequate for public affairs. Isn't the formation of the public opinion or even a volonte generale what is at stake here? Isn't the task to persuade other people in public meetings and before the court? Plato on his side says that the task is to make people better. It is one of the main purposes of the argument in the dialogue "Gorgias" to demonstrate that jurisprudence and punishment are a kind of therapy. We have to come back to this. It gives us a first hint that the struggle with the sophists is not merely a struggle between two groups of intellectuals about their share in the developing field of higher education but has its background in different conceptions of the state (polis) and of politics itself.
IV. Discrediting the Sophists: Ranking Reality We have seen that the differences in knowledge types are related to the differences between the good and the pleasant. In this section we want to follow Plato's doctrine that the differences between types of knowledge are analogous to the differences between strata of reality. This level of argument makes the struggle between sophists and philosophers even more serious. For now the question arises: which one is talking about true reality?
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It is well known that Plato, at the end of book VI of the Republic, differentiates four strata of reality which are interrelated according to the relation of original and reproduction. Four types of knowledge correspond to these four strata of reality: episteme, dianoia, pistis, and eicasia, or reason, rationality, belief, likeness. I will not proceed with this text, however, but rather follow the arguments at the beginning of book X of the Republic and the dialogue "Sophist" because these texts elucidate much better that in differentiating types of knowledge Plato is concerned with their respective carriers. The topic of the first part of Republic, book X is the exclusion of the poets from the true republic. The reason for their exclusion is that they are considered dangerous to the system of education which Plato thinks to be the best one. This text together with the dialogue "Sophist" opens a new and fruitful strand of argument for our purposes. It becomes clear that the sophists are subsumed under the larger class of imitators (mimetes). Here we find, besides the sophist, the poet, and the rhapsode (i.e. one who interprets classical poets), all playing an important role in the Athenian system of education. Plato contests their position by saying that they are mere imitators. Let us consider the argument in more detail. In book X Republic Plato differentiates three strata of reality: true being (onta), things (pragmata), representations (jantasmata), exemplified by the idea of a bed, the concrete beds and pictures of beds (17). Strictly speaking the craftsman already is an imitator, but he at least is looking towards the very original, the true being. But painters, poets, and, as we shall see, sophists (18), are imitators in the narrower sense, because they look only to the appearance of things and give mere aspects without knowing what the things really are. According to the established three strata of reality we find three kinds of makers: God is the maker of the ideas, the craftsmen are the makers of things, the imitators (sophists among them) are the makers of mere representations. It follows that the sophists get a very low ranking, lower than the craftsmen. But where is the philosopher? Plato does not miss any chance to make quite clear that it is the philosophers who care for the true being. So they come close to God, although not being sophoi (sages) but philo-sophoi; they are only approaching this highest possible position. We must stop here for a moment. Becoming aware of such a splendid harmony between Plato's main ontological doctrine anq his strongest ani-
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mosity one may ask if this harmony can be seen as merely accidental. If one wants to establish a ranking within the realm of being there is no necessity to do it in the way Plato does. The model of original and representation is not the only one which can serve as a basis for such a ranking. Even in Plato's lifetime others were used. Demokritos made use of the element/combination model: for him the elements (his atoms) were more real than the combination of them. Aristotle used the individual/universal model: for him the individual was the most real. One thing to remember is that Plato himself was a poet before he was converted by his master Socrates, who was accused (19) of being a sophist at a time in Athens when this was seen as being the dubious privilege of foreigners, of "free floating intellectuals." But a better explanation than these more private ones may be the one proposed in this paper: the competition within the field of higher education. I shall add the political reasons soon. But before that, I must add the proof that the sophist was subsumed by Plato under the class of imitators. This proof can be found in the dialogue "Sophist." (20) Here Plato distinguishes two types of imitation. One type he calls eikastike techne: it is aimed at producing a most similar copy by preserving the right proportions of the original. The other type is called Jantastike techne, which is not only guided by the original but also by the impression the copy is to make onto the spectator. Plato, in the dialogue "Sophist" puts the sophists into the latter class of imitators. The reason, again, is clear: their kind of knowledge is made to impress an audience, not only the audience in public meetings and the courts, but the audience of possible buyers of their knowledge as well. Thus of necessity their art, like the poets', is addressed to the more irrational parts of the human soul and their presentations tend to be deceptive. V. Political Differences
There is no evidence that sophists tried to be politicians, although they had some political influence as rhetors, consultants, and advocats. They were and wanted to be professional teachers. For his part, Plato most reluctantly restricted himself to the modest role of a mere "academician." He tried several times to influence the political affairs of Syracuse and in his ideal republic it is the philosophers who form the ruling class. There is no question that the sophists were the better democ;rats. Their
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relativism, their distinction between nature and convention, their interest in persuasion and their appeal to common sense implied that the human good, justice and well being had to be found through processes of consensus formation. But to be the better democrat might be a merit only in hindsight. The actual condition of the democratic republic during Plato's lifetime was not always the best. Since people were paid to attend public meetings, they were crowded by the poorer citizens who partly made their living this way. Thus these assemblies tended to become self-serving establishments (21). The general assemblies were dominated by "demagogues." "Sykophants" threatened wealthier citizens, who, with good reasons, were afraid of being drawn before a people's court. In a few words: the political reality presented numerous reasons for antidemocratic criticism. For a politically aware observer like Plato there was no evidence that the demos was able to define the human good. For him it had to be identified by wise men. Thus he patterned his ideal republic as a huge educational or even therapeutical system which had to be governed by the philosophers (22). VI. Conclusion
The case of Plato and the sophists has demonstrated that from the very beginning of European intellectual history onwards the intellectuals had some interests of their own. They tried to make a living on the basis of their knowledge, they used it to define their position in society and to get political influence. It was therefore essential for them to demarcate their knowledge from that of possible competitors, to make clear that their own type of knowledge was the most reliable, the most useful one. Insofar as they presented these demarcations on mere cognitive grounds, hiding the related social interests, they were in danger of becoming ideological. Today we can no longer afford to be unclear or unconscious about the social implications of demarcations, say, between science and technology or science and everyday knowledge. I am glad to notice that this attitude is spreading (23). It must be made an ingredient of intellectual authenticity.
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Notes and References 1. For sociological purposes I have defined knowledge as participation in the cultural wealth of society. See Bohme, 'Non-Scientific Traditions in Higher Education', in G. Bergendahl (ed.), Knowledge and Higher Education, Stockholm: National Board of Universities and Colleges, 1983, pp. 17-38, and 'Midwifery as Science: An Essay on the Relation between Scientific and Everyday Knowledge', in N. Stehr and Y. Meja (eds.), Society and Knowledge: Contemporary Perspectives in the Sociology of Knowledge, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1984. 2. See Bohme, 'Midwifery as Science,' note 1. 3. U.Y. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Platon. Sein Leben und seine Werke. Frankfurt, Berlin: Weidmannsche Yerlagsbuchhandlung, 1948, third edition; first published 1917, p. 46. I am here concerned with the modern estimation of the sophists. There have, of course, been rehabilitations ofthe sophists already in antiquity, e.g. with Cicero. 4. G.B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement. London: Cambridge University Press, 1981, Chap. 4 'The Meaning of the Term Sophist.' 5. See Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon, 1961, p. 1940. 6. See Kerferd loco cit. and C.J. Classen,Sophistik. Darmstadt: WB, 1976. 7. Cf. H.Y. Arnim, Leben und Werke des Dio von Pruza. mit einer Einleitung: Sophistik. Rhetorik. Phi/osophie in ihrem Kampf um die Jugendbi/dung. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1898. 8. See Kerferd loco cit., p. 17 and H.-I. Marrou, 'Die "Alte Erziehung" der Athener,' Geschichte der Erziehung im klassischen Altertum, Freiburg, Munich: Alber, 1957. 9. See Kerferd loco cit., pp. 17 ff. 10. See Plato's dialogue 'Protagoras.' 11. F. Gschnitzer, 'Die Oberschicht,' Griechische Sozialgeschichte von der mykenischen bis zum Ausgang der klassischen Zeit, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1981, pp. 149 ff. 12. See Gschnitzer, 'Erhaltung der Adelsethik,' op. cit., pp. 126 ff. 13. This is a main thesis of Marrou's, see above, note 9. 14. One problem concerning the controversy between Plato and the sophists, which hasn't found a satisfactory solution yet, should at least be mentioned here: All the great sophists were dead by the time in which Plato was so heavily attacking them. The most plausible explanation seems to be that by attacking the great sophists of the 5th century Plato really wanted to hurt their followers who were his contemporaries. So Isocrates, who was a student of Gorgias' was in fact Plato's most serious competitor in the development of higher education. Isocrates' school must be considered as the most effective school of political education: almost all politically important persons of the 4th century in Athens had attended Isocrates' school (See Marrou,loc. cit., note 8). 15. 'Gorgias,' p. 462b. 16. 'Gorgias,' pp. 463a-465c.
17. Republic, p. 597c.
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18. The painter is already caned a "wonderful sophist" in our present text, Republic X, p. 596d. 19. E.g. by Aristophanes in his comedy 'The Clouds'. 20. 'Sophist,' pp. 233d-237a; cf. the final definition of the sophist pp. 268c, d. 21. See E. Schiitrumpfs introduction to his edition of Xenophon's Vorschllige zur Bescha//ungvon Geldmitteln oder fiber die Staatseinkfin/te, Darmstadt: WB, 1982. 22. Another attempt to formulate a sociology of the sophists has been made by Fr. H. Tenbruck, 'Zur Soziologie der Sophistik', Neue He/te/fir Philosophie 10 (1976) 51-77. He attributes to the sophists the innovation of "public knowledge" = "Wissenscha/t." But I think this gives them too much credit. On the one hand even before the time of the sophists there had been public knowledge, namely the mythos which was transmitted by the singers and the rhapsodes. On the other hand, something like science (Wissenscha/t) did not develop until the radical demarcations drawn by Socrates and Plato. And these demarcations prevented science from being public in the modern sense. 23. See Th. G. Gieryn, 'Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists', American Sociological Review 48 (1983)781-795.
SCIENTISTS PROTECT THEIR COGNITIVE AUTHORITY: THE STATUS DEGRADATION CEREMONY OF SIR CYRIL BURT THOMAS F. GIERYN AND ANNE E. FIGERT Indiana University, Bloomington
Our inquiry begins with an observation by historian M.D. King, put forth in 1971 and then widely ignored: The sociologist. .. must discover the sources of scientific authority and the manner of its exercise.... Science is acclaimed and patronized to the extent that its intellectual authority .. .is acknowledged. The failure to give due priority to the problem of cognitive authority wielded by scientists has vitia ted much of the sociology of science of the last three decades (1).
What is cognitive authority, and why should sociologists of science study it? In the Weber ian sense, "authority" is legitimated power: subordinates accept as legitimate the commands of superiors (2). Although Weber's examples come mainly from political or bureaucratic settings, the concept of authority applies as well to culture, belief and knowledge. Authority is not only relevant for what people do but for what people know. "Cognitive authority" is the legitimate power (in designated contexts) to define, describe or explain bounded realms of reality (3). Cognitive authority is evidenced by one's acceptance-as-Iegitimate of the validity or utility of another's definition, description or explanation of reality. Few would deny the pervasive (but sometimes challenged) cognitive authority of contemporary scientists to produce pictures of reality accepted as legitimate. As Barnes and Edge put it: "in modern societies, science is next to being the source of cognitive authority: anyone who would be widely believed and trusted as an interpreter of nature needs a license from the scientific community" (4). Sociologists of science have several reasons to investigate cognitive authority. How is cognitive authority allocated among members of different kinds of societies, traditional or modern, capitalist or socialist? What historical processes have enabled scientists to demarcate their knowledge 67 G. B6hme and N. Stehr (eds.), The Knowledge Society, 67-86. © 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
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from other brands, and to monopolize professional control over the production and evaluation of a sphere of knowledge widely acknowledged as authoritative? How does the expanding cognitive authority of scientists affect the structure and functioning of other major societal institutions, such as the state, the law or education? How do scientists convert cognitive authority into other professional resources such as employment opportunities, state patronage for research, political influence and prestige? How does the profession of science respond to threats or challenges to its cognitive authority? We limit our attention to the final question. Threats to the cognitive authority of science come from several sources. Other culture-producing institutions (e.g., religion) may claim privileged authority over selected knowledge-claims, as exemplified by endless debates over the teaching of creationism and evolutionary theory in public schools (5). Political powers may reduce scientists' autonomy in the production or dissemination of knowledge, as exemplified by recent efforts of the U.S. government to block presentation of militarily useful technical knowledge at open meetings of scientific societies (6). Still other challenges come from within the scientific profession, and perhaps none is more threatening to the cognitive authority of science than a well-publicized case of research fraud, plagiarism or related misconduct. In this brief report, we examine responses by scientists to public accusations that an eminent researcher had engaged in fraud and fakery. The episode-at-hand is the posthumous "trial" of British psychologist Sir Cyril Burt (1883-1971). Burt's scientific contributions to psychology were sufficiently large that he became the first from his discipline to be knighted, and sufficiently enduring that at the end of more than 60 years of published research he was awarded the Thorndike Prize (1971) by the American Psychological Association. He is best known for measurements of cognitive ability, and for attempts to demonstrate that intelligence is a function more of heredity than of social environment. The need to re-evaluate Burt was thrust upon psychologists by Oliver Gillie's 1976 front-page story in The Times (London), which claimed that Burt had engaged in various kinds of fakery. In the wake of these unignorable charges, psychologists pursued a sequence of response-strategies in which the existence. extent, intentionality, causes and consequences of Burt's alleged misconduct were reconstructed and reinterpreted in ways that pro-
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tected the cognitive authority of science. Like physicians or lawyers, scientists face what Robert Merton calls the professions' "dilemma of social control: to publicize or not to publicize deviant behavior" (7). Neither choice is cost-free. As Durkheim noted long ago (and Kai Erikson more recently), public sanction of deviants reinforces for other members of a group the boundary between prescribed and proscribed behavior (8). Harriet Zuckerman suggests that public vilifications of deviant scientists might deter other practitioners from even considering fraud as a route to professional success: "fledgling scientists soon .. .learn that faking of evidence in science is its capital crime" (9). The socialization-and-deterrence function of sanctioning is lost if deviance is routinely undetected or covered-up. To hang out the dirty laundry for all to see has its own costs for scientists. Can the cognitive authority of science in modern society, grounded in public assumptions of its trustworthiness and disinterestedness, be defended in the face of frequent charges of research fraud? The media is primed to broadcast discrepancies between how scientists should behave and how some of them do not: "Fraud is a sensational story, and scientific fraud has the added dramatic element of a fall from grace of privileged members of society whose stock in trade is truth. For the media the irony is compelling" (10). In their sensational book Betrayers of the Truth, journalists William Broad and Nicholas Wade note: "there is harm done by each new revelation of laboratory legerdemain to the public credibility of science ... [and] pressure will build for Congress to take action ... perhaps by instituting a laboratory police force ... " (11). The charges of fraud against Burt threatened the cognitive authority of psychology, as Burt's biographer Leslie Hearnshaw observed in 1980: The most serious harm done by Burt is the discredit he has brought on the profession of psychology. He has undermined the public's faith, slowly and laboriously built up, and still far from achieved in the work of psychologists. It is a setback that may take some time to repair. Psychologists will find it harder to gain credence for their findings. Burt has generated an aura of distrust, which may affect public support, financial and moral, for some time to come. Distrust ofthis sort is hard to dispel (12).
Our analysis will suggest that psychologists' handling of the "Burt Affair" minimized professional costs imposed by the "dilemma of social control." Psychologists' sequenced response-strategies resemble what Harold Garfinkel called a "status degradation ceremony." At his death in 1971,
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Burt stood at the pinnacle of scientific psychology; ten years later, his former peers excluded him from the profession and denied him the status "scientist." Garfinkel's final condition for a successful status degradation ceremony became Burt's fate: "the denounced person must be ritually separated from a place in the legitimate order, i.e., he must be defined as standing at a place opposed to it. He must be placed 'outside', he must be made 'strange'" (13). Relocation of Burt from inside to outside the boundaries of science (14) no doubt sent a message to young psychologists that the wages of fraud is banishment. More importantly for us: the sanctioning of Burt was accomplished in a way that minimized threats to the public credibility - and thus cognitive authority - of science. As we shall see, Burt's exclusion from science focused attention on idiosyncratic sources of his fakery, and deflected attention away from structural flaws in the institution of science itself. Burt's career was destroyed, but science may emerge from the mess "squeaky clean." The status degradation ceremony of Sir Cyril Burt passed through eight stages.
1. Ignorance (or Feigned Ignorance) of the Crime Beginning with the 1974 publication of Leon J. Kamin's The Science and Politics of I.Q., continuing with Gillie's 1976 report in The Times, and concluding with the 1979 biography of Burt by psychologistcum-historian Leslie Hearnshaw, Sir Cyril Burt was accused of the following crimes: (a)
The extraordinary consistency of key correlation coefficients, as reported in Burt's publications separated by more than a decade of apparent research, raised doubts about their scientific authenticity. In 1955, Burt reported that the correlation of I.Q.'s between 21 identical twins reared apart was .771; by 1966 the number of pairs grew to 53 but the correlation remained precisely .771. Hearnshaw suggests that there may be twenty coincidences of this kind in a table reporting a total of sixty correlation coefficients (15).
(b)
Several scholars report a pattern of contradictions and inconsistencies in findings apparently based on the same data; worse, adjustments of data tend to add support to Burt's theories (16). For ex-
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(d)
(e)
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ample, I.Q. scores of designated twins mysteriously varied over time. The scores for the brightest pair of twins was reported as 137 and 136 in 1958; about a decade later, when these data were given to Arthur Jensen (who used them in his own publications), the scores changed to 131 and 132 for the same brightest twins. Psychologist D.O. Dorfman contends that Burt's 1961 statistical analysis of links between I.Q. and social class are based not on actual I.Q. data (i.e. empirically detected) but on systematic constructions of tables designed to fit almost perfectly the curve of a normal distribution. Burt treats the data as if they are empirical patterns, but Dorfman argues that the cell frequencies are fixed to conform to Burt's theoretical assumptions. In a word, Burt fabricated these data (17). Burt has been accused of providing so few details about his technical procedures that even interpretation of his conclusions - to say nothing of their replication - is impossible. The reader of Burt's papers has "no way of knowing what test(s) he used, how well they were standardized, or how test scores might have been combined. We do not know what was correlated with what in order to produce the coefficient of .77" (18). Burt has been cliarged with using subjective, impressionistic methods for collecting data, and then enhancing the apparent objectivity and reliability of the results by manipulating them with unjustifiably sophisticated and demanding statistics. He is said to have "guessed" at the I.Q. scores of parents in studies of intelligence among family members, and to have relied upon teachers' evaluations of pupils' intelligence rather than using the preferred practice of administering psychometric tests (19). Burt is said to have invented two collaborators - Margaret Howard and J. Conway - who were given the task of collecting additional I.Q. data on twins in the late 1950s and 1960s. Hearnshaw suspects that Burt assembled no new data after 1955, and that neither Howard nor Conway paid him a visit during that period. His diary reveals that these were probably pseudonyms used for Burt's unending efforts to heap praise on his own work and scorn on that of his adversaries. The entry for April 7, 1962 reads: "chiefly doing Howard's reply to Isaacs" (20).
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Reports from Burt's non-fictional students suggest that he made inappropriate use of their research. On one occasion, Burt "slanted" the emphasis of a student's dissertation (Burt edited it for print) so that it could serve as ammunition for Burt's attack on a critic, although such an attack was not at all part of the student's intent.(21) Burt allegedly "falsified history in the interest of self-aggrandisement" (22) by claiming that Pearson - not Spearman - was preeminently responsible for the development of factor analysis and "that he [Burt] was the first factorist in psychology" (23).
If the pattern of Burt's fraud and forgery began in 1950 or earlier, why was it not brought to light until 1974? One explanation is that psychologists in the 1950s and 1960s were simply unaware of Burt's improprieties, and that they had little reason to be suspicious. Sandra Scarr-Salaptek told Science reporter Nicholas Wade that "people trusted Burt to be reporting accurately what he did" (24). Hearnshaw adds: "There was a tacit assumption that people took up science because they were interested, and that they could be trusted to work honestly and report honestly. Scientists were gentlemen, and gentlemen did not cheat" (25). Other evidence suggests that not everyone was ignorant of Burt's illicit activities. Hearnshaw reports that in the 1950s, D.F. Vincent "made a critical study of Burt's published articles and analysed their misrepresentations, contradictions and evasions" (26). Vincent's study was never published, for reasons that have as much to do with the cognitive authority of science per se, as with the personal authority of Burt within the science of psychology. Philip Vernon, once a collaborator of Burt's, told Wade: "there were certainly grave doubts although nobody dared put them into print, because Burt was enormously powerful" (27). Vincent "believed that no publisher or journal would agree to accept [his critical study], such was Burt's reputation at the time" (28). Some of Burt's suspicious peers may have been deterred from "going public" by Burt's reputation as a bulldog in intellectual battle: "He stuck to his guns, and was a formidable controversialist - always fair and polite, but devastating in the armaments he could bring to bear" (29). Perhaps the doubters feared that Burt's widely acclaimed statistical prowess would make it difficult for them to make the charges stick. Others may have been deterred by fear of what Burt's reprisals could do to their own career: Burt was a nonpareil gate keeper of Bri-
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tish psychology, as evidenced (for example) by his long-running editorship of the British Journal of Statistical Psychology. Not even his co-editor (Godfrey Thompson) was in a position to blow the whistle on Burt, according to Hearnshaw: .. It appeared that he was uneasy, but deferred to Burt's superior historical knowledge, and ... [Thompson] probably hesitated to rock a boat that was in some danger of foundering altogether. His friendship with Burt moreover had been of long standing. So Thompson did not openly protest" (30). It is not surprising, in those days of the Nixon-Watergate Scandals, to hear some psychologists reply to Gillie's charges with the accusation of cover-up (31). It is perhaps impossible to reconstruct the extent to which the suspicions of Burt had spread among the psychological community. At his death in 1971, Burt's public reputation as a bona fide scientist seemed secure. Little evidence suggests that Hearnshaw's obituary was disingenuous: "As long as psychology remains a subject of scientific inquiry [Burt] will live in its halls of fame" (32). The reluctance of some psychologists to publicize their suspicions of Burt is not necessarily the result of a conspiracy, that is, a widespread collective cover-up. It is enough to observe that the structure of power, evaluation and reward in science (a structure in which Burt was at the top) may on occasion deter individual scientists from reporting cases of suspected fraud among their superiors. Moreover, we are less interested here in the diverse motivations of psychologists who chose not to press charges against Burt than in the consequences of their silence for the profession of science. So long as Burt's sordid activities remained in the closet, the discipline of psychology - "still struggling to be taken seriously as a science"(33) - was spared the need to defend itself against a threat to its public credibility and cognitive authority. 2. Denial of the Charges
With Gillie's 1976 article in The Times, Burt's misbehavior was out of the closet. The story of his alleged fraud and fakery was picked up by periodicals that reached a wide band of the public, from Science to Time. Some psychologists reacted with a 'denial of the charges. Harvard psychologist R.J. Herrnstein told Science that the suggestion of fraud "is so outrageous I find it hard to stay in my chair. Burt was a towering figure of 20th century psychology. I think it is a crime to cast doubt over a man's career"
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(34). Beginning in 1976, the Bulletin of the British Psychological SOciety (BBPS) frequently published letters on the Burt Affair, culminating in a 1980 special issue titled "A Balance Sheet on Burt" (35). Burt's innocence was defended by some throughout the period. H.J. Eysenck (a former student of Burt's) wrote in the January 1977 issue of the BBPS that the evidential grounds for fraud are "so weak that they could never be judged even remotely adequate by any unprejudiced person" (36). Raymond B. Cattell, who worked with Burt in the 1920s, noted "that Burt was such a capable statistician that if deception had been his aim he would not have done the crude and obvious substitutions now being interpreted as deception" (37). At its meeting of 20 October 1979, the Council of the British Psychological Society in effect seconded Hearnshaw's just-published verdict that Burt was guilty of "( 1) falsification of the early history of factor analysis; (2) production of spurious data on monozygotic twins; and (3) fabrication of figures on declining levels of scholastic achievement" (38). Burt's innocence continued to be defended by Sheila Franglen, Principle District Psychologist for the Tower Hamlets of London: "The 'evidence of fraud' which the Council appears to have accepted without impartial investigation, and in camera, relies on conclusions reached in Professor Hearnshaw's biography - conclusions not based on hard evidence, and which have proved unacceptable to a number of eminent psychologists" (39). Our reading of psychologists' responses to Gillie's charges and Hearnshaw's verdict, as found both in popular and scientific publications, suggests that flat-out denials of Burt's fraud constitute a minority opinion. Typically, such denials were embedded in interpretations that shifted attention away from Burt's deviant behavior and focused it instead on his accusers. Three strategies prevailed: first, some challenged the appropriateness of Gillie's attempt to judge in a newspaper the evidence for scientific fraud; second, others argued that Burt's accusers had greatly exaggerated the extent and intentionality of his misconduct; third, still others located the accusations in the raging "I.Q. controversy" between hereditarians (Burt and most of his defenders were on this side) and environmentalists (most of Burt's accusers were on that side).
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3. Stacking the Jury Who should decide the guilt or innocence of Sir Cyril Burt? Psychologists agree: psychologists. To allow outsiders (such as the medical correspondent Oliver Gillie) to accuse, judge or sentence Burt is itself an affront to the autonomy and cognitive authority of scientific psychology. Professional psychologists benefit in several ways from successful efforts to control the "juridical" process. First, by publicizing their in-house trial of Burt, psychologists broadcast a willingness to police themselves; perhaps this would obviate the need for outsiders to serve as watchdogs for scientific misconduct. Second, if psychologists control the trial of Burt, then they can manipulate interpretations of events to best serve their professional interests (even if events ineluctably point to Burt's guilt). Finally, the cognitive authority of science depends in part on a recognizable boundary between the technical knowledge of specialized researchers and the more accessible common sense of the laity. That boundary is weakened if permeated by a non-specialist who presumes to comprehend scientific concepts and data sufficiently well to indict an esteemed practitioner. The call for a trial of Burt by a jury of his peers (i.e., psychologists) took several forms. Most strident was the denunciation of Gillie for conducting the trial on the front page of The Times. Eysenck condemns Gillie for not presenting the evidence in an arena more suitable for separating truth from error: It is noteworthy that all the criticisms have come from people who have concentrated their contributions on the popular press, and who have failed significantly to communicate their conclusions to the scientific journals. It would seem more in line with the usual processes of scientific debate if such criticisms were to be thrashed out in the leading scientific journals .... These operate a proper refereeing system which guarantees as far as humanly possible absurd and nonsensical allegations do not pass this screening (40).
Cattell makes the link between the inappropriateness of a journalistic trial of Burt and threats to the cognitive authority of psychology: "I suspect the journalistic melodrama about colossal scientific deception is off on a too simple-minded wild goose chase, but one that will unfortunately take psychology as a science some time to live down .... (Journalism has often treated psychology as the comic science.)" (41). Gillie replied to Eysenck in the July 1977 issue of the BBPS, calling it
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a "scurrilous attack upon me and upon newspapers" (42). The progressively nasty exchange between the two was momentarily halted in the May 1978 BBPS, which carried a letter from Professor B. Shackel, Chairman of the Standing Committee on Publications of the British Psychological Society: "my conclusion is that it is time the correspondence was closed" (43). In place of the GilliejEysenck vitriol, Shackel proposed the soothing solution of a scientific inquiry into the matter (44). Hearnshaw was eager to provide just that kind of study, and he successfully established himself as the authority on matters of Burt: It is a great pity that the controversy about Cyril Burt and his alleged malpractices has been ventilated in the first place in the public press rather than among psychologists themselves .... The proper course, I would suggest, is to suspend judgement until all the evidence can be fully and fairly assessed .... I have been working on a life of Burt for some time. A great many of the key documents ... are in my possession .... I venture to suggest that until I have finished my job no one is in a position to pass a final judgement on Burt (45).
The Council of the British Psychological Association deferred to the authority of the insider Hearnshaw, and they refrained from taking any action until publication of the biography in 1979. Kevin Connolly noted in his introduction to the 1980 "Balance Sheet on Burt" that "the Society waited until one of its number, a skilful and respected historian, completed his biography" (46). 4. Plea Bargaining: Guilty of a Lesser Charge
Shortly after the 1976 report in The Times, Eysenck took aim at its author Oliver Gillie: "The notion that actual (,fraud') was perpetrated was introduced by Dr. Gillie, and has no foundation in Professor Jensen's analysis" (47). Gillie retaliated: "these thunderings in defense of Burt distorted the evidence and so diverted attention from fraud to lesser charges" (48). Eysenck and several others defended Burt by arguing that there was no intent to deceive and that the errors and inconsistencies reported in Jensen's 1974 paper were the results of mere sloppiness and negligence. Nowhere did Jensen accuse Burt of fraud: The most serious problems with Burt's presentation of all these correlations are the often unknown, ambiguous or inconsistent sample sizes .... If the Ns are questionable, the standard errors of the correlations are useless for hypothesis testing ... Perhaps even more disturbing is
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the doubt that so many questionable and discrepant points cast on the trustworthiness of the various correlation coefficients themselves (49).
Following Gillie's charges, Nicholas Wade summarized Eysenck's guess that Burt "simply carried over figures from his earlier papers. Though quite inadmissible as a scientific practice, a shortcut of this nature would fall a long way short of fraud since not done with the intent to deceive" (50). Cattell offers an explanation of Burt's errors and inconsistencies, one that avoids the conclusion of fraud: Younger psychologists, accustomed to computer aids and research grants, have no idea under what burdens Burt conducted, alone (with a little non-electric hand calculator I often saw him churning), his remarkable range of studies. There is no doubt that, especially in hi~ eighties, he made careless mistakes, and failed to describe fully where he got his data. But blandly (or maliciously) to label this 'cheating' is a very different matter (51).
Cattell suggests that "impish" Burt - when inventing imaginary co-authors - may have "gained some ... emotional catharsis from this ... leg-pull" (52). Other defenders who received reprints of Burt's articles noted that he had hand-corrected several published errors, something that would not have been done (they imply) by a man intent on fraud (53). Many defenders of Burt's innocence wondered whether his research practices - however sloppy - were different from the norm. Cattell notes that "many other psychologists would leave town if their raw data files were threatened with similar scrutiny!" (54) The Canadian psychologist W. Anthony Norton adds that "few psychologists ... would escape criticism or the discovery of errors of some sort or another" (55). As with any plea bargain, the defendent accepts guilt for a lesser crime in order to receive a lighter sentence. In the trial of Burt, his supporters accepted his sloppiness and negligences as mere "misdemeanours" that hardly justified the extreme sentence of banishment from the scientific community. 5. Blaming the Accusers
Burt stood at the center of debates among hereditarians (e.g., Herrnstein, Eysenck and Jensen) and environmentalists (e.g., Kamin and Christopher Jencks) (56). For the five years or so following the 1974 publication of Kamin's book on I.Q., the location of Burt as either inside or outside the boundaries of acceptable scientific behavior depended on who drew the
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map, an environmentalist or a hereditarian. Detection of fraud in Burt's work was obviously a greater threat to the hereditarian position, and they responded by denying that Burt had engaged in unethical behavior and by discrediting those who made such an accusation. Eysenck suspected that the charges against Burt were "a thinly veiled plot to undo the hereditarian position by rhetoric," and he wrote to Burt's sister in 1976: "I think the whole affair is just a determined effort to playa political game with scientific facts" (57). And Jensen told Time: "It is a political attack. The real targets are me, Herrnstein and the whole area of research on the genetics of intelligence" (58). Environmentalists argued that it was Burt who played politics with the facts. Kamin told Wade in Science: "It was fraud linked to policy [Burt was instrumental in setting up the ll-plus exams in Britain's educational system] from the word go. The data were cooked in order for him to arrive at the conclusions he wanted .... Everything the man did from 1909 is wholly fraudulent" (59). For environmentalists, if the Burtian corpus is dismissed as fake, so must the entire case for hereditarianism. Richard Lewontin, the Harvard biologist, told Wade: "Burt's twin study is the only large study which is methodologically correct, so its loss is no trivial problem for the heritability people" (60). For a time, then, the extent, intentionality and consequence of Burt's alleged fraud was a matter for debate among psychologists. There was little agreement over what should be excluded from science. Hereditarians at first argued that only some of the spurious coefficients from Burt's last publications were unscientific, and that Burt's misconduct was not premeditated; some environmentalists argued that Burt the man, all of his research, and the entire hereditarian case which rested on Burt's shaky foundation, had no place in science. This divided response to Burt's misconduct suggests that scientists may not always agree on what constitutes deviance in science, and that reactions to a case of fraud may reflect researchers' interests in defending or discrediting a designated theoretical orientation. Here, the norms of science and Burt's possible nonconformity became cultural and rhetorical resources used differently by hereditarians and environmentalists to advance their chosen line of inquiry (61). The debate between hereditarians and environmentalists may also have protected the public credibility and cognitive authority of psychology tout court. The lay reader could easily come away from the Time account
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with a conclusion that the charge against Burt had been trumped up to advance the position of environmentalists. But such a conclusion could not be effective over the longer haul, for it implies that issues of scientific truth (whether Burt's guilt or the determinants of intelligence) are settled by mere politics. As we shall see, both hereditarians and environmentalists came to agree that only the evidence (as produced by systematic scientific inquiry) could settle the issues, a position that reinforces for the public the idea that scientists are disinterested pursuers of the truth. 6. Perpetrator as Victim When it became clear to almost everyone that the evidence was likely to confirm Burt's guilt, some psychologists (notably Hearnshaw) began to explain Burt's fraud as the result of personal crises that prevented him from doing science properly. The list of Burt's crises is a long one: His 1932 marriage had fallen apart by 1952; German air raids in 1941 destroyed many early records and papers; from the 1940s on, Burt suffered from repeated attacks of Meniere's disease (causing vertigo,nausea and hearing loss); in the mid-1950s, he was de-barred - in a humiliating way - from further participation in his former department at University College London (he had formally retired in 1950); he lost control in 1963 of the British Journal of Statistical Psychology, after having edited it for 16 years; and by 1965, it was apparent that the testing and tracking system based upon the eleven-plus exams was to be dismantled (62). These crises left Burt a "sick and tortured man," and so his illegitimate behavior was "not the act of a rational man" (63). H.G. Armstrong adds: "I think not enough emphasis has been placed on the declining powers of an ageing psychologist."(64) The implication is that fudging data and inventing collaborators is not something risked by scientists of sound mind and body. Burt's violation of scientific norms is said to result from conditions idiosyncratic to the deteriorating Burt, not conditions endemic to the science of psychology. This interpretation of Burt as a man so troubled as to be incapable of science was offered not as a defense of his misconduct, but as a step toward the final stage in Burt's status degradation ceremony: his separation from science.
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7. The Sentence: Banishing Burt
The recognized authority of Hearnshaw's biography made it difficult after 1979 to deny Burt's guilt: The verdict must be, therefore, that...beyond reasonable doubt, Burt was guilty of deception. He falsified the early history of factor analysis ... ; he produced spurious data on MZ twins; and he fabricated figures on declining levels of scholastic achievement. Moreover, other material on kinship correlations is distinctly suspect (65).
With that verdict, only the sentencing remained, and it too was read by Hearnshaw in the "Balance Sheet on Burt": Burt was primarily an applied psychologist.... The gifts which made Burt an effective applied psychologist, however, militated against his scientific work. Neither by temperament nor by training was he a scientist. He was overconfident, too much in a hurry, too eager for final results, too ready to adjust and paper-over, to be a good scientist. His work often had the appearance of science, but not always the substance (66).
The distinction between applied science and "real" (i.e., basic or pure) science is here used to relocate Burt outside the boundaries of scientific psychology. The public message is clear: legitimate scientists do not engage in fraud, fudging and fakery; if they do, as Burt did, they are not scientists. 8. Recovering the Authority of Science: "The Truth Will Out"
The status degradation ceremony of Sir Cyril Burt had two goals: to exclude Burt from science, and to restore public confidence in the trustworthiness and authority of psychologists-as-scientists. By banishing Burt, psychologists took one step toward the second goal: when Burt fudged data, he was not behaving as a scientist. But a second step was needed: to remind other psychologists and the public as well that one man's stoop to dishonesty has negligible effect on the ability of science to discover truth. Interestingly, both hered- itarians and environmentalists resolve the Burt affair with a rhetorical strategy identified by G. Nigel Gilbert and Michael J. Mulkay: "the truth will out" (67). Scientific knowledge (we are told) is not dependent on one or another investigator but on the collective and cumulative published record that washes away the idiosyncratically deviant behavior and its sometimes fraudulent findings. As Hearnshaw wrote in the "Balance Sheet": "Science is a continu-
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ing self-correcting exercise, and Burt's delinquencies could never have deflected the course of truth more than momentarily" (68). Still, some hereditarians suggested that even the large contribution of Burt could be excised from the scientific record with little impact on the validity of that theory. Two psychometricians wrote Science: "The data demonstrating the heavy dependence of I.Q. on genetic features are far too solid to be shaken by the rejection of the work of any single investigator - even Sir Cyril Burt" (69). Eysenck offers the same view: "Burt's data fitted in perfectly well with the overwhelming mass of data collected by other people; even if they were to be eliminated it would make no difference to the overall conclusion one would come to from an examination of all the facts available" (70). No environmentalist would agree with this, of course (71). But even the most vociferous critic of Burt and of hereditarianism - Princeton's Leon J. Kamin - could agree that in science, "the truth will out." What kind of evidence in fact supports the wide-spread assertion that LQ. scores are heritable? That is a straightforward scientific question, one which can be answered by a logical analysis of the data .... The social functions served by data do not in principle affect their scientific validity. The social history of I.Q. testing has told us something about psychologists, and science, and society; but only the data can tell us the truth about I.Q." (our emphasis) (72)
Kamin implies that Burt's misbehavior is not cause for an indictment of
science on grounds that it is inherently biased or flawed by occasional fraud or fakery. Rather, the eventual agreement to exclude Burt from science is evidence for scientists' ability to detect fraud and to prevent fabricated data from impeding progress toward truth (73). In the profession's last word on Burt, we are told that the affair offers little ground for suspecting that scientific knowledge is anything but truthful and thus legitimate. "What has been revealed is not that psychologists are unscrupulous, or that the subject is prone to cheats any more than any other ... " (74). Instead, psychologists hoped to "reveal" "the time-honoured self- correcting procedures of science,"(75) and the idea that "science has built into it checks and balances, hypotheses are tested to destruction, experiments repeated and refined" (76). This "revelation" is scarcely a threat to the cognitive authority of scientific psychology.
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Conclusion Thomas Kuhn is quite wrong to suggest that definitions of the boundaries of science are merely "semantic" questions that give little "worry" to natural scientists. He asks: "Can very much depend on a definition of science? Can a definition tell a man whether he is a scientist or not?" (77) Our analysis of psychologists' response to the Burt Affair suggests a "Yes" answer to both questions. In this episode, scientists defined science as a knowledge- producing institution that does not allow fraudulent fabrication of data, and this definition was then used to relocate Burt outside the boundaries of legitimate science. This status degradation ceremony has significant consequences for science as an institution. First, we can only assume provisionally (without further study) that such de-legitimations of wayward scientists compel other scientists to avoid risks of exclusion by playing within the rules of the game (78). Second, the Burt Affair illustrates that the boundary of acceptable science is sometimes drawn differently by scientists with competing theoretical commitments: hereditarians and environmentalists may agree that fudging has no place in science, but they disagreed (for a time) on whether Burt and his research was legitimately scientific. Third, the boundary-work to exclude Burt is accomplished in a way that does not invite condemnations of science per se: the fraudulent behavior of even such an esteemed figure is no reason to doubt that scientists are credible, honest, objective and disinterested pursuers of truth. That message - if widely believed - goes far to establish and to protect the cognitive authority of science in modern societies. Notes I. M.D. King, 'Reason, Tradition and the Progressiveness of Science', History and Theory 10 (1971), 3-32. 2. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978, p. 53. 3. For a parallel discussion of the concept of "cultural authority," cf. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, New York: Basic, 1982, pp. 9-17. 4. Barry Barnes and David Edge (ed.), Science in Context, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982, p. 2. 5. For a sociological analysis of the creation/evolution controversy, cf. Thomas F. Gieryn, George M. Bevins and Stephen C. Zehr, 'Professionalization of American Scientists:
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Public Science in the Creation/Evolution Trials', American Sociological Review 50 (1985). 6. Cf. National Academy of Sciences, Scientific Communication and National Security, Washington: National Academy of Sciences Press, 1982. 7. Robert K. Merton with Thomas F. Gieryn, 'Institutionalized Altruism: The Case of the Professions', in Merton, Social Research and the Practicing Professions, Cambridge: Abt Books,1982,pp.124-126. 8. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, New York: Free Press, 1984; Kai Erickson, Wayward Puritans, New York: Wiley, 1966. 9. Harriet Zuckerman, 'Deviant Behavior and Social Control in Science,' in E. Sagarin (ed.), Deviance and Social Change, Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977, p. 91. 10. Marcia Angell, 'Review of: Broad and Wade, Betrayers of the Truth', Science 219 (25 March 1983), 1417. 11. William Broad and Nicholas Wade, Betrayers of the Truth, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982, p. 220. 12. Leslie Hearnshaw, 'Balance Sheet on Burt', Supplement to the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 33 (1980), 7. 13. Harold Garfinkel, 'Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies,' American Journal of Sociology 61 (1956),423. 14. Status-degradation ceremonies are one form of "boundary-work." Cf. Thomas F. Gieryn, 'Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists', American Sociological Review 48 (1983), 781-795. For a historical analysis of psychology along these lines, cf. Mitchell G. Ash, 'The Self-Presentation of a Discipline: History of Psychology in the United States between Pedagogy and Scholarship', in L. Graham et al. (eds.), Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories, Sociology of the Sciences 7 (1983), 143-189. 15. Leslie Hearnshaw, Cyril Burt: Psychologist, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979, pp. 233-4. Leon J. Kamin, The Science and Politics of I.Q., New York: Wiley, 1974, pp. 37-38. Arthur Jensen has written: "I believe the first person to point out this invariance of n=O.77 across changing Ns was Dr. Leon Kamin, in a colloquium of The Psychology Department at the University of Pennsylvania, on September 19, 1972." See Jensen, 'Kinship Correlations Reported by Sir Cyril Burt', Behavior Genetics 4 (1974),12 note 4. The first unambiguous charge of fraud is often attributed to Drs. Ann and Alan Clarke and Michael McAskie in Oliver Gillie, 'Pioneer of IQ Faked his Research Findings', The Times (London), 24 October 1976. Their statement reads: "Burt was either a fraudulent scientist or a fraud as a scientist." 16. Kamin, op. cit., 1974, p. 43; Hearnshaw, op. cit., 1979, p. 233. 17. D.D. Dorfman, 'The Cyril Burt Question: New Findings', Science 201 (1978), 1177-1186. Stephen J. Stigler denies that the curious pattern of Burt's statistics in this paper are necessarily grounds for Dorfman's conclusion of fraud. Cf. Stigler, 'Burt's Tables', Science 204 (1979), 242-5. 18. Kamin, op. cit., 1974, p. 41.
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19. Ibid., p. 46. 20. Quotation in Nigel Hawkes, 'Tracing Burt's Descent to Scientific Fraud', Science 205, 674;cf. Hearnshaw,op. cit., 1979, chapter 12. 21. Hearnshaw,op. cit., 1979"p.148. 22. Ibid., p. 180. Cf. Oliver Gillie, 'Letter', BBPS 30 (July 1977), 257. 23. Hearnshaw, op. cit., 1979, p. 179. 24. Nicholas Wade, 'IQ and Heredity: Suspicion of Fraud Beclouds Classic Experiment', Science 194 (26 November 1976),918. 25. Hearnshaw, op. cit., 1980, p. 5. 26. Hearnshaw, op. cit., 1979, p. 177. 27. Quotation from Wade, op. cit., 1976, p. 918. 28. Hearnshaw, op. cit., p. 177. 29. Leslie Hearnshaw, 'Obituary: Emeritus Professor Sir Cyril Burt (1883-1971)', BBPS 25 (January 1972),33. 30. Hearnshaw, op. cit., 1979, p. 180. 31. Leon Kamin hints at a cover-up: "Professor Eysenck ... could have had priority for himself had he chosen to expose Burt's 'data' 20 years ago. He did not. Professor Jensen, deeply familiar with Burt's work for many years, could have exposed it much earlier. He did not.. .. The important question, I think, is not who said it first, but where the experts were all those years- and why?" Kamin, 'Letter', BBPS 30 (July 1977),259. An explicit mention of cover-up is found, for example, in Jerry Hirsch, 'To "Unfrock the Charlatans",' Sage Race Relations Abstracts 6 (1981), 24. 32. Hearnshaw, op. cit., 1972, p. 33. Hearnshaw wrote nine years later: "At this time [1972] my attitude to Burt was almost wholly favourable .... " Hearnshaw. op. cit., 1980, p. 1. 33. Quotation from 'A Taint of Scholarly Fraud', Time (6 December 1976),66. 34. Quotation in Wade, op. cit., 1976, p. 916. 35. Halla Beloff (ed.), "A Balance Sheet on Burt," Supplement to the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 33 (1980). 36. H.J. Eysenck, 'Letter', BBPS 30 (January 1977),22. 37. Raymond B. Cattell, 'Letter', BBPS 31 (January 1978),18. 38. 'Monthly Report', BBPS 33 (February 1980),71. 39. Sheila Franglen, 'Letter', BBPS 33 (May 1980),223. 40. Eysenck, op. cit., 1977, p. 22. In this letter, Eysenck mentions that Gillie had not contacted him regarding the accusations, and that this "is adequate evidence for the lack of care with which information was acquired." Also, Eysenck in effect places Kamin's 1974 book in the category of non-science: "I do still feel...that scientific debate should take place in leading scientific journals rather than in the popular press. Kamin's book does not come under this category; it has been very severely criticized by leading geneticists and psychologists, and much of what is contained in it would certainly not have passed the refereeing system of any scientific journal." Eysenck, 'Letter', BBPS 30 (July 1977), 258.
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41. Cattell, op. cit., 1978, p. 19. 42. Oliver Gillie, 'Letter', BBPS 30 (July 1977), 257. 43. Prof. B. Shackel, 'Letter,' BBPS 31 (May 1978),200. In this letter, we find a demurral to the majority opinion (among psychologists) that psychologists should judge psychologists: "Eysenck considers that only evidence contained in refereed contributions to scientific journals should be used as the basis for evaluation of issues of this nature. Not all scientists would agree completely ... , particularly where political or societal decisions are involved with the scientist's evidence used as a basis for decision." 44. "It would appear to me that any true rebuttal of Eysenck's challenge concerning the nature of evidence needs to be a presentation of evidence in an incontestable form. I suggest that Dr. Gillie does not achieve this .... " Schackel, Ibid. 45. Leslie Hearnshaw, 'Letter', BBPS 30 (January 1977), 22-23. 46. Kevin Connolly, 'Introduction,' Supplement to the Bulletin of The British Psychological Society 33 (1980), i. (our emphasis) 47. Eysenck, op. cit., 1977, p. 22. 48. Oliver Gillie, 'Burt: The Scandal and the Cover-up', Supplement to the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 33 (1980), 11. 49. Jensen, op. cit., 1974, p. 24. 50. Wade, op. cit., 1976, p. 917. 51. Cattell, op. cit., 1978, p. 18.
52. Ibid., p. 19. 53. Graham R. Skanes, 'Letter', BBPS 31 (May 1978),201. 54. Cattell,op. cit., 1978, p. 18. 55. W. Anthony Norton, 'Letters', BBPS 33 (May 1980),222. 56. For a sociology of the hereditarian/environmentalist dispute over IQ, cf. Jonathan Harwood, 'The Race-Intelligence Controversy: A Sociological Approach I - Professional Factors', Social Studies of Science 6 (1976), 369-94; Harwood, 'The Race-Intelligence Controversy: A Sociological Approach II - External Factors', Social Studies of Science 7 (1977), 1-30. 57. Quotation in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, New York: Norton, 1981, p. 235. 58. Quotation from Time, op. cit., 1976, p. 66. 59. Quotation in Wade, op. cit., 1976, p. 919. 60. Quotation in Wade, ibid.; cf. Kamin, op. cit., 1974, p. 35. 61. The idea that the definition and application of the norms of science may be used as rhetorical resources or vocabularies of justification was developed in Michael J. Mulkay, 'Norms and Ideology in Science', Social Science Information IS (1976), 637-656; cf. Mulkay, 'Interpretation and the Use of the Rules: The Case of the Norms of Science', in Thomas F. Gieryn (ed.), Science and Social Structure: A Festschrift for Robert K. Merton, New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1980, pp. 111-125.
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62. Hearnshaw, op. cit., 1979, pp. 274-6. Hearnshaw's explanation of Burt's fraud "in terms of the progressive personality breakdown" is a rebuttal of Kamin's continuing charge that Burt was a right-wing reactionary guided more by ideology than truth. From our perspective, the "official" explanation by Hearnshaw is less damaging than Kamin's to the cognitive authority of psychology: Burt's "pathological personality symptoms" are no threat to public perception of a value-free, non-ideological image of science. The quotations come from Hearnshaw, op. cit., 1980, pp. 4-5. 63. Gould, op. cit., 1981, p. 236. 64. M. G. Armstrong, 'Letter', BBPS 31 (July 1978),269. 65. Hearnshaw, op. cit., 1979, p. 259. 66. Hearnshaw, op. cit., 1980, p. 2. Some feel that Hearnshaw let Burt offlightly. The Clarkes write in the 'Balance Sheet': "Burt was lucky in his biographer, and Hearnshaw's generous evaluation may well have made the acid pill easier to swallow." Ann and A.D.B. Clarke, 'Comments on Professor Hearnshaw's "Balance Sheet on Burt",' Supplement to the Bulletin of The British Psychological Society 33 (1980), p. 17. Oliver Gillie concludes: "Professor Hearnshaw is too nice to say it in so many words but Burt was a classic confidence trickster ...... Gillie, op. cit., p. 14. 67. G. Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay, Opening Pandora's Box: A Sociological Analysis ofScientists' Discourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, Chapter 5. ~8.
Hearnshaw, op. cit., 1980, p. 7.
69. Bernard Rimland and Harry Munsinger, 'Burt's I.Q. Data', Science 195 (1977), 248. 70. Eysenck, op. cit., 1977, p. 22. 71. Biologist Steve Rose writes: " ... even if Burt had not forged his data, and even if it had generated a heritability of 100 per cent, it would tell us precisely nothing about the origins of group differences in intelligence ...... Rose, 'Letter', BBPS 34 (May 1981). 72. Kamin, op. cit, 1974, pp. 35-6. 73. Cattell observed: "But if Burt is to be attacked anyway, surely it should be by further and better research concerning data and methodology in nature-nurture research." Cattell, op. cit., 1978, p. 18. 74. Connolly, op. cit., 1980, p. i. 75. John Raven, 'Letter', BBPS 33 (April 1980), 135. 76. Connolly, op. cit., 1980, p. i. 77. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2nd ed. 1970, p. 160. 78. "For the young scientist about to embark on a research career [the Burt Affair] should be read as a cautionary tale." Robert M. Farr, 'Some Observations on the Nature of Probity in Science: The Case of Sir Cyril Burt', Supplement to the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 33 (1980), 36.
THE REPRODUCfION OF OBJECTIVE KNOWLEDGE: COMMON SENSE REASONING IN MEDICAL DECISION MAKING * AARON V. CICOUREL University ojCalijornia, San Diego
Introduction Modern society is said to epitomize the production of objective knowledge. Considerable time is devoted to the production as well as the reproduction of objective knowledge in public and private sectors of nation-states. We seldom recognize that the reproductive process is not only very time consuming, but also gives knowledge a central role in the way modern societies sustain themselves. Knowing contributes to the creation, maintenance, and change in status systems and the acquisition and use of authority and power. Sociologists are only beginning to examine the socially organized processes which lead to the reproduction of objective knowledge. Structures of dominancy, asserted Weber (1), profoundly influence every aspect of social action. In modern societies, domination, as a special case of power, is closely linked to the possession and use of knowledge. Nowhere is this view of power more evident than in the professional-client relationship, particularly the case of doctor-patient exchanges, where the reproduction of objective knowledge is a source of power that also translates into economic rewards. A central feature of power is special knowledge and the ability to interpret this knowledge in circumstances that can favor the professional's ability to create and influence courses of action. The professional, in Weber's terms, is able to dominate because of a monopoly or control over information or a constellation of interests. The physician is said to possess the authority to command, while making use of a cultural tradition that in its idealized form states that a patient's duty is to obey. The physician's knowledge base is a powerful resource that few patients can challenge. The doctor is able to sustain and justify his authority and power by his or her knowledge base and the cultural expectations associated with health 87 G. Bohme and N. Stehr (eds.), The Knowledge Society, 87-122. © 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
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care delivery. The physician's possession and use of medical knowledge is like the "scientific authority" described by Pierre Bourdieu (2). Physicians' power derives from their ability to create "objective" representations of the patient's health or illness. A familiar theme in the study of the sociology of organizations stems from Weber's view that bureaucratization and bureaucratic domination is one way of sustaining efficiency and achievement. Domination that derives from rational argument or the administration of things by professional or "functional" authority, notes Schluchter (3), has become a significant aspect of change in industrial society. The contrast underscored by Schluchter is that between "official" and "functional" authority. The idea of professional authority is seen by Schluchter as a way of eliminating "irrational" domination and thus being able to approximate a more democratic environment of social relations. Schluchter discusses forms of organizational complexity that can exist in a context of bureaucratization; professionalization and democratization as competing strategies and principles within an environment of "functional" and "official" authority. One consequence of increasing rationalization for Schluchter is the possibility of less bureaucratization, while a second consequence can be the necessity of organizational authorities seeking a delicate balance between expertise and official authority. The distinction between authority derived from expertise or professional competence or specialized knowledge versus authority derived from an "office" in the bureaucratic hierarchy and hence "official," is a useful way to begin an empirical clarification of the impact of increasing technological specialization on the organization of social relations in societies or nation-states. Within organizational environments there exist persons with distinct, but overlapping, and often ambiguous horizontal and vertical authority relationships. We lack precise formulations of such authority relationships because we have made "theory" something of a cottage industry instead of seeking empirical clarification of key concepts. In the health sciences we can find a broad range of activities, e.g., biologically oriented laboratories and practical hospital settings, where different types of expertise must co-exist in environments where there must be delicate forms of cooperation regardless of the explicit or implicit hierarchical or horizontal relationships that may exist. Teams of scientists and technicians and teams of
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medical personnel and technicians are mutually dependent on each other in order to synthesize an enzyme or run experiments on animals or treat a hospitalized patient or operate an outpatient clinic. Depending on the scale of each operation, the interaction between official and functional authority remains conceptually and empirically problematic unless we can focus our attention on settings where expertise or specialized knowledge can be examined empirically. The notion of an idealized doctor-patient relationship exemplifies the functional expertise in which the patient's welfare and health is said to take primacy over the economic consequences of the fees attached to professional actions. Escalating medical costs in the United States have altered this idealized relationship, if indeed it ever existed. The practice of medicine is a good example of the wayan applied science can influence interpersonal relations and social stratification. The current emphasis on third party payment of medical expenses by private insurance companies and governmental agencies has forced these groups to reexamine the increasing costs of medical health care delivery, especially in the USA where physicians enjoy an unprecedented standard of living for professionals dedicated to the welfare of others. Weber tends to focus on the notion of domination as the "authoritarian power of command." But Weber's notion requires theoretical modification and empirical confrontation. In medicine, for example, we must look at communication strategies and their implications to understand the way different interest constellations can operate. It is difficult to pinpoint the economic goals of patient and doctor during their actual exchanges. The extent to which a patient complies with a cultural tradition to obey or follow the physician's wishes is contingent on several factors. For example, the fear of serious illness and death can be a strong motivating factor to be submissive with a physician. But the patient's theories and knowledge about medicine, illnesses, and remedies may be used to withhold information or challenge the doctor's use of his or her presumed monopoly over scientific medicine. The patient may appear to comply with the doctor's wishes throughout the medical interview but not pursue the physician's instructions for treatment. The physician may not dominate the interaction if the patient is convinced that he or she cannot ask questions, or if asked, they will not be answered by the doctor. The doctor-patient relationship can be charged with latent or hidden if not
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sometimes open emotion (4). Medical interviewing and history-taking, and a physical examination, can help us understand several complex aspects of knowledge as power and control. Abstract written summaries represent the interpretation of complicated prior experiences and different types of information. Physician and patient are dependent on cognitive and linguistic processes and mechanisms that are embedded in a local context of social interaction. The changing setting becomes a source of information used for constructing a dialogue and subsequent medical history. The bureaucratic setting includes certain legal and medical interaction rituals (e.g., signing release forms) associated with health care. The discourse and text-writing activities that occur are informed and constrained by the local setting and larger organizational context. But we need a theoretical perspective that goes beyond idealized notions of how the natural and human sciences make claims to knowledge. Habermas (5) refers to several ideal types of action (instrumental, communicative, and emancipatory) and contrasts the way theories are constructed deductively in the empirical-analytic sciences, with the theoretical concern for meaning that occurs in the historical-hermeneutic sciences. The idealized notions of technical interest and purposive-rational or instrumental action attributed to the empirical-analytic sciences is said to be guided by controlled observation and a concern with facts validated by reciprocal expectations. The historical-hermeneutic sciences are said to be preoccupied with the understanding of meaning as guided by a reliance on practical cognitive interest and social norms that are not reducible to technical rules. These latter communicative interaction systems revolve around power relations that govern social interaction among and between the members of a social class. There are many adherents to the two views described by Habermas. Each group is motivated by strong interests in wanting to preserve a separation between the natural and human sciences. In the present work, I want to reexamine the idealized conceptualization between the empirical-analytic and the historicalhermeneutic sciences by calling attention to their constant reliance on different yet overlapping modes of inference and comprehension. In practice, the ideal type separation is hard to find despite the attempt by participants identified with each type of idealization to present their activities as if the ideal types prevail.
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Physician-patient communication during medical diagnostic reasoning requires a theoretical view that recognizes the utilization of language and reasoning strategies that both support and compromise the notion of domination and the structure of action depicted as ideal types. I will discuss aspects of diagnostic reasoning in medicine in a way that sometimes parallels studies in the sociology of science (6). The sociology of science studies examine the way that everyday reasoning enters into the social production of objective knowledge in daily laboratory science activities and how findings are constructed and reported to colleagues in seminars, scientific meetings, and publications. We need more information on the social reproduction of similar claims to objective knowledge in different laboratory settings. This reproductive process is especially evident in the case of individual patients whose medical records contain claims of objective knowledge based on laboratory, radiological, and "hands-on" physical examination data. My concern with medical diagnostic reasoning looks at the interaction between basic and clinical science knowledge in a setting that forces the physician to recognize that a patient's knowledge base and reasoning can be orthogonal to the perspective of the doctor. Similar differences can occur between novice and expert physicians. The discussion that follows will claim that doctor-patient and physician-physician interaction presuppose and rely on knowledge sources that are embedded in everyday life experiences, yet a differential knowledge base and use of technical language and reasoning pervade the exchanges that can be observed. The observation that medical personnel rely on formal and intuitive knowledge and reasoning when they talk with patients and during their own thinking underscores the importance of knowledge processes as problematic aspects of what we often call subjective and objective knowledge. In order to discuss the role of taken-for-granted or intuitive knowledge and reasoning in medical diagnostic reasoning, we must first acknowledge the schematized knowledge representations that persons bring to settings where on-line decision making occurs. Studies in the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of science must examine the relationship between schematized and local knowledge as it emerges during social interaction in different socially organized settings. In the pages that follow, I examine aspects of a hospital clinic in order to illustrate the way functional authority is displayed at two le,vels of the
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organization. In the first case, we have a physician-patient interview where the physician is a training fellow seeking additional specialized knowledge about rheumatological diseases. The second level of organizational complexity involves the training fellow giving the attending or supervisory professor or "real" expert an account of the initial interview with the patient.
Schematized and Local Knowledge Schema theory, or the schematized knowledge that directs and is influenced by our experience, refers to cognitive structures or underlying representations in our memory. Schemata, or mental structures or folk models of the mind, are created through interaction with different environments. The notion of a schema can represent very general and abstract categories or quite discrete features. The term schema has a long historical tradition, but in this paper I will ignore the work of Bartlett (7) and Piaget (8) and focus on recent developments in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Schemata or folk models, not only structure our perception of aspects of an object or event, but also provide us with the basis for constructing the meaning or interpretive sense of our experiences. Environmental experiences activate schemata while the latter simultaneously guide and are influenced by what is perceived. The interactive nature of schemata tends to be automatic as the environment produces new experiences or data (9). The idea of folk models presumes taken-for-granted knowledge that has been called "personal" (10) or "common sense" (11) or "procedural" (12), when embedded in and sensitive to the contexts in which it emerges. Schematized knowledge that is said to be governed by context free inference rules is termed "declarative" by the latter group of authors and "objective" by others. The idea of declarative and procedural knowledge clarifies the "process" aspects of a representational system from its "data" aspects (13). Declarative systems are said to consist of large numbers of facts and very few special purpose procedures. Rumelhart and Norman (14) note that general rules exist for making inferences in declarative systems and these rules are not dependent on any particular set of facts. An advantage of declarative systems of knowledge is that they easily receive new knowledge
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without having to develop new rules of inference, yet these same rules make it possible to create new inferences. Knowledge, in this system, can be segmented into discrete statements that can be identified and made accessible fairly easily. Procedural knowledge is characterized by reference to processes and the knowledge embedded within these processes. Procedural knowledge depends on many special purpose procedures that contain knowledge of the kinds of contingencies that are an integral part of the special operators that make up the system. Rumelhart and Norman (15) refer to procedural systems as "hand crafted by the theorist" in the sense that each domain of knowledge is likely to be separate with little or no transfer from one to the other, hence making it difficult to add new knowledge. Procedural knowledge, therefore, is context-dependent and tied to those special activities and settings in which it is used. The reference to an idealized distinction between procedural and declarative knowledge is analogous to the notion of informal and formal organization in sociology. Decision making in organizational settings entails processes which cannot be reduced exclusively to technical rules or context-free inference and knowledge. The reproduction of knowledge, therefore, is contingent on a changing ecological setting that activates schematized procedural and declarative knowledge, while interacting with local informational resources. Local interaction and organizational constraints and resources are essential to the reproduction of knowledge. The internal semantic structure of knowledge representation in the Rumelhart and Norman view assumes importance under three sets of conditions. In the first case it means going beyond old knowledge to semantic domains schemata were not designed to represent. The second application occurs when new knowledge must be assimilated into the old structures. The third condition is when elements of knowledge must be compared with one another. The key issue here is that of learning or applying knowledge acquired in one domain to another through analogical reasoning. Hence learning by analogy (how to specify new procedures from old ones) is central to the Rumelhart and Norman schema theory. They seek to identify a mechanism that will bridge the differences between procedural and declarative perspectives. The procedural-declarative distinction refers to forms of reasoning that are assumed to be an integral part of all human information process-
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ing and would be expected to occur in the research actlVltles of the empirical-analytic and historical-hermeneutic sciences. The extent to which more formalized models and units of analysis are used for purposes of representation, explanation, and prediction remain empirical issues requiring comparative research into the natural and human sciences. In the medical context, the declarative-procedural distinction described by Winograd and Rumelhart and Norman can help us understand the way the physician interrogates his or her own knowledge system to understand something during medical practice, thereby extending and transforming, in an analogic way, the factual status or relevance of a datum or event. The clinical practice of medicine is not merely an application of declarative systems learned in basic science courses, journals, medical clerkships and practice, but is an independent arena for creating new schemata by intuitive and systematic analogical modifications of old domains of knowledge that interact with new experiences. Clinical contexts reveal both declarative and procedural-like knowledge systems. The physician continually invokes her or his declarative and procedural-like knowledge in an organizational setting during unfolding social interaction. The local knowledge that emerges can be unique to the setting and the particular patient, thus creating a frame that interacts with schematized knowledge.
Reproduction as a Process of Interpretation and Integration A central task of the physician is to convert the often idiomatic and sometimes ambiguous language and personal beliefs or folk theories of the patient into unambiguous declarative knowledge using a systematic notation system. The process of creating declarative-like knowledge relies heavily on the information contained in previously established and interrelated concepts and categories whose semantic properties are assumed to be well-known. Yet the patient's language reflects an uncertainty about how to reveal knowledge about symptoms and their consequences, and these expressive problems are invariably embedded in confusing and often frightening emotions and feelings about their health condition. The patient's folk cognitive perspective and language use must be interpreted and integrated into existing procedural and declarative knowledge employed by the physician. An understanding of this interpretive-integrative
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process is what is lacking in sociological theories of domination in bureaucratized organizational settings. The patient's doubts, emotions, language use, and common sense reasoning must contend with the language and question format and content posed by the physician. The patient, however, often produces narrative bursts of speech within the interview that reveal aspects of their perspective. The physician as problem solver must learn to apply several specific domains of medical and non-medical knowledge to a narrow class of problems as a sub-specialist, while the general practitioner must address many domains of less specific knowledge about several broad classes of problems. Although the explicit knowledge base the physician can apply to known diseases is always tacitly dependent on intuitive knowledge, this latter knowledge may be the only resource when ambiguous symptoms are encountered while conducting the medical history and the physical examination. All physicians possess some level of awareness or proficiency in the use of different linguistic registers or codes. But these semantic domains must be negotiated with respect to the sociocultural background of the doctor and patient. The cognitive approaches outlined earlier ignore the linguistic registers, sociocultural background, local interactional, and organizational conditions negotiated by the physician and patient. The local knowledge that emerges in these circumstances may not be easily processed by the physician. Local knowledge and organizational or bureaucratic conditions, therefore, can lead to a greater reliance on intuitive reasoning and knowledge. We will explore the conditions under which everyday modes of communication and thinking take precedence over formal concerns with the production of objective knowledge in technological environments.
The Clinical Setting The natural settings sociologists call formal organizations or bureaucratic institutions are rich resources for semantic analysis because they routinely exhibit states of apparent semantic consistency and clarity, confusion, ambiguity, and misinformation. Our judgments of organizational intrigue, conflict and cooperation, invariably assume the existence of {airly clear
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and bounded semantic domains. But these domains remain tacit resources to researchers and professionals, and do not become topics of explicit research. Interpersonal, status or power relationships, and adherence to organizational policies or rules or practices, are always an integral part of the problem solving or decision making of an organization and its members. The medical history and physical examination, as well as the communication between supervisory physician (the attending) and house staff (medical student, intern, resident, or training fellow), all pose problems of authority and power. Elements of authority and power differences can be found in the case history that is discussed briefly in the following pages. Additional interpersonal and status or power relationships orient organizational members in the pursuit of official and unofficial medical and patient goals. Issues of authority and power begin when a patient calls for an appointment and later on enters the door of a clinic and waits (usually a long time) to be attended by staff and doctor. Additional issues of authority and power emerge when the resident reports to the attending in order to give an account of the medical history and physical examination. The participants of these organizational settings routinely reconstruct and sustain a sense of social structure by their reproduction of two universal features of bureaucracies; the creation of verbal and non-verbal discourse and well-bounded texts (reports, memoranda) that generate truncated descriptive traces of the daily activities, decisions, and official actions of the organization. Medical decision making begins when the physician becomes aware of the reason for a referral or when something is written about the patient's complaint to a nurse or other personnel engaged in the initial screening and scheduling of an appointment. The physician poses questions and transforms the patient's responses into general or specific categories or facts that might lend support to general or specific hypotheses about a differential diagnosis. It is this largely unexamined, historicized, interpretive, summarization process that produces a crisp and factually oriented account of the patient's medical history and physical status. Yet the verbal and nonverbal interaction sequence virtually always contains elements of confusing, ambiguous, factually misleading or incorrect data, in addition to information that is both helpful and necessary f~r a differential di-
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agnosis. The general idea of the research was to choose a natural setting in which its members must publically and informally account for their activities routinely and relentlessly. Specific occasions are identified in which an organization's normal practices occur. The doctor-patient interview and physical examination, and the resident or training fellow's account to the attending, are two such occasions. A major concern was how to minimize altering the day-to-day medical practices because of the researcher's presence. Our research strategy was simple: We recorded an.d observed a number of cases (at least 20) but selected only a few for careful study. Working as members of the medical setting before and after the recording of specific events provided us with control over the uniqueness and variability that can be present in our data. Having the attending review our materials provided us with an additional source of data and a check on the validity of our materials. The medical interview occurs within a context of asymmetry because of the differential power that each participant brings to the interview. The physician's written medical history is constrained by a limited time frame and h~r own and the patient's selective attention to questions, answers, memory searches, and problems that emerge unexpectedly over the course of the interview. Parallel processing is required by the physician; the recording of a few notes (but not all do), and remembering answers to previous questions while posing and thinking of new ones. This activity occurs in the context of a patient who often cannot remember details, often misleads the interviewer in her description of experiences, and may confuse the sequence of elements in an account. The original interview we examine between a training fellow (TF) and the patient occurred in a small examining room in the regular clinic area of a university hospital. The setting in which the TF gives her account of the original interview to the attending (supervisory) physician is a small room a few doors away from the examining room. I did not sense anything unusual about the original doctor-patient interview. An informal atmosphere seemed to prevail for the TF-attending exchange; the two participants leaned against work benches and there seemed to be a kind of casualness to the discourse. But my intuition told me that a subtle tension existed in the room because of what I perceived to be a measured or cautious manner in the TF's speech. Others are often
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present during these exchanges and the residents or TFs are aware that these conditions are often a normal part of the teaching situation in the hospital. The informal atmosphere seemed to soften or perhaps minimize the lines of authority between teacher and student, and the appearance of casualness in the setting suggests a cooperative venture. Despite the apparant relaxed atmosphere, the discourse also reflects a mode of presentation and interrogation that is part of an organizational routine. The TF knows she is being evaluated at all times despite the lack of formal criteria and procedures for assessing fellows (in contrast to residents or interns or medical students) in the Division of Rheumatology. The TF's mode of presenting her information on the patient suggests a subordinate status despite attempts by the attending to sustain a collegial exchange. Unlike the initial doctor-patient exchange where the TF is in control of the situation, the account that must be given to the attending should contain topics or themes that can be perceived as coherent by the attending and that convey a comand over a knowledge base both physicians can take for granted for the practical purposes of the exchange. The reader can obtain a minimal understanding of the kinds of information the TF must display as part of her competence by consulting Figures lA, IB, and ID. These materials represent a slightly modified and partial handout given to medical students when they are introduced to rheumatology in a course called An Introduction to Clinical Medicine. We will return to these materials below when we discuss aspects of the initial interview and the TF-attending exchange. Several broad and specific issues in the sociology of knowledge are relevant here. We would like to know the extent to which schematized knowledge we bring to a setting interacts with the local production of meaning or local knowledge. For example, how does the TF link the concepts that are outlined in Figures lA, IB, and ID, to the questions posed and answers received from the patient, and the account given to the attending? We can contrast the TF's knowledge base as displayed in two different contexts, and ask if she captures or misrepresents the formal or objective knowledge of Figures lA, IB, and ID. We also seek the attending's views of this correspondence. The use of a sociology of knowledge framework to discuss medical decision making requires that we hypothesize an important role for local intuitive or common sense reasoning and knowledge in th~ scientific produc-
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tion and reproduction and use of objective knowledge. The researcher's intuitive knowledge of American health care systems, and what it is like to be a patient, all contribute to the way the observer perceives the local setting and other data as obvious or meaningful or problematic. The TF's and patient's knowledge base, as displayed to each other and as expressed by the TF to the attending, provide us with resources for examining the role of local conditions that can influence reasoning and knowledge in medical problem solving and the construction of objective knowledge. The issue addressed here is the extent to which the everyday world sustains its intuitive or common sense foundations despite the impersonal impact of science and technology on health care delivery. Three sources of data are used below to illustrate theoretical issues in the sociology of knowledge. Two exchanges were noted above between the doctor and patient, and the doctor (TF) and attending. A third source of information was obtained by asking the attending to review the transcripts and tape recordings of the initial patient interview and TF-attending exchange. The attending'S extensive comments are not shown verbatim, but are paraphrased as a part of my analysis. Schematized and Local Expressions of Knowledge
A central feature of everyday discourse is the pervasive or ubiquitous use of anaphoric and deictic functions. The general topic here is the use of pronouns in discourse. A deictic use of pronouns occurs when the referent is contingent on context and the local circumstances in which the utterance is produced. Let us assume a doctor and patient have been talking about the pain the patient has been experiencing in her fingers. For example, the patient may state: "This is the one that kills!" The patient may point to a particular finger that is within the visual field of doctor and patient. The patient uses deictic expressions to identify a particular finger that perhaps has caused more pain than the others. "This is the one" refers to the particular finger, while "that kills" refers to the pain. When a pronoun is used to refer to objects or persons that were introduced by other expressions in the discourse, the pronoun is often called an anaphoric function because it refers back to some object or person identified previously. For example, the patient may tell the doctor about a previous experience with a physician and say: "Dr. Jones said I had a tumor.
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He said it was benign." "I," "he" and "it" exemplify the use of anaphoric functions. The use of anaphora is economical; they enable us to presume that certain referents are clearly established and do not have to be repeated each time. Deictic elements enable us to make inferences that are highly contingent on local circumstances in the production of meaning that can be taken for granted. The interview between the doctor and patient opens with the TF asking the patient "who sent you to arthritis?" and the patient responding that it was "oncology" (actually gynaecological oncology) as recorded in Figure 2, lines 1-2. After a brief diversion, during which time the patient's age is established, the TF asks the patient a general question (line 8, Figure 2): "And (do you?) have any problems?" The patient's general response (line 9) that her "whole body" is a problem, is followed by a more specific reference to her joints (line 11). The TF's noncommittal reply in line 12 encourages further remarks (lines 13-14) by the patient about " ... these big red spots, (mumbling) tops and toes." ' The opening lines of the initial doctor-patient interview provide us with deictic and anaphoric linguistic functions and ambiguous referents like "tops and toes" that are characteristic of medical interviews and all discourse. The reference to "tops and toes" could mean that red spots appear on the top parts of the hands and feet rather than the palms and soles. The reference to " ... these big red spots ... " in lines 13-14 of Figure 2, presupposes a common knowledge base for the physician and patient, but where the deictic element "these" signals a past occasion and imagery that are unclear. The term "these" could imply a here and now, but there was no direct pointing by the patient to existing red spots. Local knowledge, therefore, helps us infer that the patient has invoked procedural-like schematized knowledge from prior experiences. The past nature of the red spots is underscored in lines 16-17 of Figure 2 when their appearance is said to occur " ... only when 1 sit in the hot water .... " The anaphoric function "they" of line 17 refers to the hands that " ... get, like this" and simulates a process that suggests a previous stiffening condition in the hands. We can confirm the patient's reference to past events because of the statement that the red spots only appear when she sits in hot water, and our local knowledge about the lack of the same conditions in the examining room.
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Thus far we do not observe directly the way the doctor's schematized knowledge is activated, but the attending immediately informed me that the patient's reference to her joints and red spots should have triggered several schemata associated with Figures lA, lB, and lD. The TF's knowledge base about several rheumatological diseases seems to be guiding the question in line 20, Figure 2, where she asks, " ... how long has this been happening?" The reference to "this" can imply the red spots and hand stiffening. The dialogue employed thus far by both doctor and patient is rather informal and presumes considerable local tacit knowledge, and the use of ambiguous lexical items or phrases such as "whole body," "joints really bad," "these big red spots," and "tops and toes." The attending, however, stated that the red spots and hand stiffening that emerge when the hands and feet are placed in hot water are not diagnostic and not consistent with the information contained in Figures lA, lB, and lD. The TF's attempt to establish a time frame for the red spots and hand stiffening in lines 20-29 of Figure 2, raises doubts about the stability and conciseness of the TF's knowledge base. According to the attending, the time frame of eighteen months should have told the TF that obvious rheumatoid arthritis symptoms should have been evident if this disease was diagnostically relevant here. The symptoms described in Figure IA do not associate red spots with submersion in hot water. The reference to "joints really bad" needs considerable additional specificity to be of diagnostic value. The doubts raised by the attending do not alter the TF's authority from the point of view of the patient, but did cause the attending to question the TF's competence retrospectively. The taken-for-granted semantics and reasoning of the discourse is evident in line 20 of Figure 2 where "this" can refer to the red spots and hand stiffening. The two "it's" of lines 27 and 28 refer back to the occurrence of red spots and stiffening in lines 13-19, and the remark " ... how long has this been happening?" of line 20. When the TF (lines 22-27) asks if the time period has been a "couple of months" and then "9 months," her remarks could be motivated by a desire to explore schemata found in Figures lA, lB, or lD. But the patient's reference (line 28) to " ... about a year'n a half' should have eliminated many diagnostic possibilities because her symptoms were too ambiguous for the amount of time that had elapsed.
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A somewhat different aspect of the TF's knowledge base is revealed in lines 23-25 of Figure 2 when the patient indicates a longer time period than a "couple of months? .. " as asked by the TF, and mentions a Dr. Blumberg. The TF asks if Dr. Blumberg is " ... an arthritis doctor?" According to the attending, Dr. Blumberg is a rheumatology specialist in the county and someone whose diagnosis he respects. The TF did not know who Dr. Blumberg was. The attending observed that the TF should have sought more information about this physician's diagnosis in order to clarify the patient's initial reference to symptoms. The materials of Figure 2 are a vivid reminder of the necessary role of deictic and anaphoric functions in medical interviewing and all discourse ("they come out quite a bit," "my hands get, like this," "they stiffen up," "they stiffen all the way up," " ... how long has this been happening"). These functions are an integral part of everyday communication and the use of taken-for-granted knowledge and reasoning. Returning to Figure 2, the attending drew my attention to lines 13-14, noting that the patient's reference to red spots implies a rash. A rash is diagnostically important and the TF should have asked for more details instead of continuing. For example, were they on the lower or the upper extremities? The latter information is necessary in order to include the possibility of certain joint diseases and lupus. The TF employed lupus schemata extensively later in the interview. The reason the TF should have obtained more information about the rash, according to the attending, can be found in Figure 2, lines 31-43, where first Dr. Blumberg was said to have diagnosed the patient as having osteoarthritis, and then Dr. Waltz was said to have diagnosed the patient as having rheumatoid arthritis. The attending noted that Dr. Waltz was also a respected rheumatologist in the county. The patient's reference to two contrasting diagnoses called for more information on the reasons for the diagnosis, including information on whether the two rheumatologists had requested special blood tests, x-rays, or other procedures. The patient should have been asked if the test results were called "normal" or "unusual" or confirmed a problem. The TF should have probed for any remarks by the two rheumatologists about specific findings. For example, information on laboratory results (e.g., the sedimentation rate) could have suggested the patient earlier had experienced an inflammatory process. Instead of pursu-
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ing the matter, the TF changed the topic to the medicine taken by the patient. The attending's remarks to me indicated a variety of schemata that he could invoke based on the local knowledge produced by the interview material. The TF's clinical experience did not always appear to evoke the same schemata. But we must also note that if I had asked the TF to assess what was happening during an interview between an intern or first year resident and a patient, perhaps she would have been able to provide me with observations analogous to those of the attending. The attending's remarks remain of central importance because they represent his expert ability to invoke schematized knowledge that could explain or assess the significance of local knowledge produced by the interview. This expertise is a key property of the attending's functional authority in the bureaucratic context of the clinic. The reference to painful joints, red spots, stiffening, and the like, remind us of the fact that the doctor and patient are discussing prior events or symptoms and not conditions that could be observed in the current setting. The schematized nature of knowledge invoked in local interaction is continually influenced by the local production of meaning and the use of specific types of linguistic functions and tacit knowledge . .The doctor and patient, as well as the researcher and reader of this paper, rely on the same conditions for the comprehension of different discourse or textual materials. The idea that local conditions contribute heavily to the framing of the task or problem at hand is similar to work by Tversky and Kahneman (16) and the idea that a decision-maker's choices or action revolve around a "decision frame" or the decision maker's conception of the acts, outcomes, and contingencies associated with a particular choice. The Tversky and Kahneman research provided subjects with clearly bounded options and assumed a common knowledge base for the participants. The on-line comprehension of the problems presented to the subjects did not include the normal role relationships found in natural settings. In the present situation, the schematized and local knowledge base of physicians and patients as they interact with each other are part of the problem, and not prior outcomes or acts that have been experimentally structured by the researcher. The natural setting within which doctor-patient interaction occurs un-
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derscores the mutual activation of schematized and local knowledge. The participants of natural settings help to create their own historical conditions, while a laboratory problem-solving situation imposes a fairly fixed declarative-like knowledge frame and set of constraints because of the experimental conditions to which subjects are exposed. The laboratory, however, is also a bureaucratically organized setting and creates its own historical conditions. The patient's remarks and the physician's questions interact and are in turn influenced by the patient's appearance and the results of the physical examination. These remarks call our attention to the overlapping reproduction of knowledge conditions that exist in the natural and human sciences. The contradictory diagnoses given by the patient and the TF's failure to pursue this contradiction led the attending to assume that the TF was unclear about how to clarify the patient's condition. A key factor in the attending's conclusion that the TF was confused can be found in the fact that the patient had consulted two competent rheumatologists some eighteen and twenty-four months prior to the present visit. Symptoms associated with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis should have been flourishing at the time of initial interview, according to the attending. In lines 46-47 of Figure 4, the TF asks the patient about medication, but does not distinguish between the two physicians and who prescribed medication. In lines 48-53, the medication Tolectin is identified by the patient, but the TF was not able to elicit information that would indicate the amount that was consumed. The patient, referring to implied financial constraints, states she stopped taking the drug, but there is no followthrough by the TF on the time the medication was terminated. According to the attending, the medication question was appropriate and should have alerted the TF to Tolectin as an anti-inflammatory medication that would suggest rheumatoid arthritis, but can also be helpful with osteoarthritis as well. The medication alone, therefore, is not diagnostically precise. But the combination of complaints about joint problems and the medication, and the fact that the patient has experienced the joint symptoms for at least two years, should have told the TF to examine the joint areas in a direct way by feeling each hand while asking for verbal descriptive material on each joint. The TF should have pursued the use of the medicine, including the extent of any relief of symptoms (asking the patient "did it help you ?"), how
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long she took the medicine, and perhaps the dosage by asking for the color of the pill or trying to reconstruct the number of pills taken each day by establishing the time period more carefully. The attending's knowledge base motivated several additional questions. For example, Did the Tolectin bother the patient's stomach? Was there any symptom relief, and if there was, how long after taking the drug did relief occur? The TF, according to the attending, would have had to establish the kinds of symptoms experienced by the patient to determine if Tolectin was of help in relieving conditions associated with rheumatoid versus osteoarthritis. These remarks help us clarify the way differences in functional authority are derivable from declarative and procedural-like knowledge base discrepancies that may exist between the TF and attending. The physician, therefore, is dependent on an interaction of schematized and the local production and use of language and knowledge in order to clarify the kinds of symptoms experienced by the patient, and to establish the conditions which would enable the physician to infer that the medicine relieved or reduced the patient's symptoms. Finally, the TF would have had to ask about other drugs to decide if one or another diagnosis was more likely. For example, the patient, according to the attending, should have been asked if she had taken Prednisone, a steroid. Prednisone would not be given to a patient with osteoarthritis. The brief excursion into the initial doctor-patient interview indicates the cooperation needed between physician and patient to extract relevant information from the patient's memory. The patient's schematized knowledge is contingent on local conditions of interaction and the physician's ability to stimulate the activation of relevant information from the patient's memorial knowledge. The patient's procedural-like knowledge is not organized in terms of the information needed by the physician. In order for the physician to obtain the information she needs, the patient's experiences must be activated by associations that will be perceived as relevant. The TF's knowledge base can be a limiting condition because she appears to lack stable declarative-like knowledge about disease categories, their possible symptoms, and the relevance of different drugs for relieving symptoms. In addition, the physician may not have the clinical experience that would enable her to understand the significance of symptoms that are exhibited by the patient despite the availability of the symptoms in a declarative format in a text or journal article. The physician must, be able to
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elicit information in an appropriate manner despite having patients who present themselves in a variety of linguistic and paralinguistic ways. The local conditions of interaction are a rich resource for suggesting and triggering off a search routine for more information. Such information is likely to emerge when the physician seeks memorial information that normally is available only when prior ethnographic and collective and individual experiential conditions are reconstructed during the medical history and physical examination. In the present case, the physician's knowledge base and use of language were not always satisfactory. She often asked the wrong questions. The reader's comprehension of the interview material presupposes a familiarity with deictic and anaphoric functions in ways that are quite similar to the doctor and patient's understanding of the discourse. The coherence of the talk depends on our ability to read line 49 of Figure 2 and conclude that "how much" refers to the dosage of Tolectin that was taken. In line 51, "them" refers to the pills in a generic sense. The "it" used twice in line 52 provides us with another general reference to the drug. In each line of the transcript we must interpret what the physician and patient meant by their deictic and anaphoric usage by retrospectively remembering an earlier contextual use and its current relevance. The sociology of knowledge problem, therefore, is not merely an object of the sociologist's attention, but part of a process the researcher must also reconstruct for himself or herself. The same problem exists for the members of a group whose interaction is being studied and whose reports or documents are constructions of prior social interaction and individual or collective activities. The initial doctor-patient interview was too long to present and analyze here. The TF's knowledge base was perhaps activated in a more systematic way later in the interview when she appeared to be pursuing the red spots or rash by taking the patient through a series of questions that could only be the result of schemata associated with the disease lupus erythematosis. But before concluding the paper, it would be instructive for the reader to examine a small portion of the TF-attending exchange in order to have a glimpse of the way a sometimes incoherent or confused interview can be transformed into a declarative-like format.
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A Quick Look at Schematized Knowledge The medical training of house staff (interns, residents, and training fellows) provides us with a convenient display of schematized knowledge when the TF, in the present case, reports her findings to the attending immediately after the initial interview with the patient. . The material in Figure 3 does not reveal any obvious organizational constraints in the way the TF indicates her first long narrative about the patient to the attending (lines 1-28). An apparent relaxed atmosphere seems to prevail, and the discourse reflects a mode of presentation and interrogation that is an integral part of a bureaucratic routine (17). Myobservations tell me that the TF knows she is being evaluated by the attending, and her way of presenting information on the patient suggests to me a subordinate status despite the attending's attempts to sustain an informal exchange. The material presented in Figure 3 appears in a crisp, declarative format that suggests confidence about the information expressed. We do not observe the prior sometimes ambiguous and fragmented discourse with the patient. The concepts described in Figures lA, 1B, and 1D, are incorporated into the declarative-like statements of the TF. The order in which the information was obtained has been altered and reflects the kinds of symptoms which can be found in Figures lA, 1B, and 1D. The language employed by the TF is a mixture of technical and everyday terms such as "erythema" or redness, "swelling," "lateral border of the lateral malleolus" (a reference to the ankle), "back stiffness," "Raynaud's" (disease), and the like. The attending does not challenge the TF's remarks and seems to join the TF in taking for granted (presupposing) that the semantic domains of relevance here are known to both participants, as suggested by the attending's remark in line 29 of Figure 3. The remark, "How long, has this been a problem?" implies that the long narrative created by the TF (lines 1-28, Figure 3) has been understood by the attending. The attending, however, told me that the opening remarks by the TF are not relevant diagnostically. The attending physician was critical of the way the TF had posed questions of the patient, stating that she was unable to understand the patient's condition adequately in order to pose appropriate questions. The, attending stated that many of the questions by the TF were designed to
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review various medical systems in the hope of encountering symptoms that might signify something more crystalized. The misdiagnostic reasoning attributed to the TF by the attending should be clarified for the reader. An examination of lines 8-10 of Figure 3 could suggest that the patient has rheumatoid arthritis and not osteoarthritis. The ankles, notes the attending, are not usually part of osteoarthritis. The TF's diagnosis, however, was "DJD" or degenerative joint disease, or a form of osteoarthritis. The TF's remarks in lines 17-28 of Figure 3 seek to rule out rheumatoid variants, systemic erythematosis, and gouty arthritis, the other major categories that are normally explored with rheumatology patients. The attending stated that in addition to ruling out osteoarthritis, he also would have ruled out rheumatoid arthritis because the redness, swelling, and pain reported by the patient had not persisted in a way that would be characteristic of this disease. According to the attending, the TF had misdiagnosed the patient's condition and had not pursued certain signs adequately. For example, over what period of time did the symptoms or signs persist? The patient's responses revealed inconsistencies that an experienced rheumatologist should have recognized as not fitting any of the classical rheumatological categories. The TF's questions, and her account to the attending, however, reveal considerable reproduction of schematized knowledge about rheumatological diseases. This more formal knowledge base, however, cannot be implemented unless the physician also possesses clinical experience that is of a procedural-like form and that is activated in the context of perceiving certain symptoms or physical conditions that cohere in a local setting. The TF's often leading questions of the patient were designed to ope rationalize the declarative knowledge displayed in Figures lA, lB, and lD. But the TF lacked the clinical experience that would enable her to pursue the significance of examining the patient's joints carefully. The TF was able, however, to rule out lupus by a systematic set of questions, despite the leading and sometimes inappropriateness of her questions. Figure 3 reveals a continual shift in the use of terms by the TF, from the technical to the nontechnical. The shift in the use of terms (from "erythema" in line 5 to "redness" in lines 9 and 11) is more than a partial mapping from one semantic domain to another, but also glosses details about the patient's "arthritis of her ankles." The refere~ce to the patient's
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ankle in line 8 is a gloss in the sense that it does not pinpoint several possible details but does provide for slight elaboration when there is a shift (after the term "redness" in line 9 of Figure 3) to technical terms ("lateral border of the lateral malleolus") in line 9, along with the nontechnical use of "swelling" in line 10. The TF, notes the attending, refers to the redness and swelling of the ankle, but does not mention any tenderness or possible degeneration. The physical examination report does not state that the ankles were palpated in order to rule out tenderness and possible inflammation, but reports that "examination of her ankle is within normal limits." The TF's oral account, constructed for the attending, presumes prior schemata and their current activation and creation. The TF refers to episodes over the "past two years" (Figure 3, line 4) in which the patient has experienced redness followed by swelling in the joints of the middle part of both hands (lines 5-6). The symptoms are said to alternate between the two hands (line 7). The somewhat formal, opening declarative-like statements by the TF can be described as a partial representation of the patient's "voice" during the initial interview. The opening lines of Figure 3 by the TF display schemata that trace some of the initial interview with the patient. These context-dependent descriptions index the setting in which they were first used in the medical interview. The TF's opening remarks reflect the reproduction of knowledge process by the way she has transformed the patient's procedural-like format into a set of declarative-like statements. In Figure lA, lines 1-13, we can observe material that is similar to the TF's descriptive narrative to the attending. Figure 1A refers to symmetrical problems in the large and small joints of the upper and lower extremities (as in the present patient's hands and ankles, for example), "stiffness" in the morning or upon rising (line 5, Figure 1A) as noted by the TF in Figure 4, line 18, and the fact that the symptoms can "wax and wane" (Figure lA, line 7) as noted in Figure 3, line 7, when the TF refers (ambiguously) to the alternating nature of the symptoms between the hands. In lines 9-10, and lines 12-13, of Figure lA, we can see references to functional hand and walking difficulties, and the swelling that the TF refers to in lines 5, 10, 12, 15, and 16, of Figure 3. Systemic features are also noted in both Figures 1A and 3. Similar remarks could be made for the relationship between Figures 1B and 3.
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The parallels between the material that is organized declaratively in Figures lA, IB, and ID, and the TF's account to the attending, reveal a reliance on prior clinical procedural-like knowledge and the local knowledge generated by the actual exchange. The different types of thinking and knowledge required for diagnostic reasoning include complex professional semantic domains that reflect functional authority in organizations, and continuous interaction with locally derived sources of knowledge and social constraints. Concluding Remarks The initial interview between doctor and patient indicates differences in functional authority by revealing differentially appropriate medical schemata for rheumatological diseases that can be identified in a superficial way by examining the TF's questions and probes. But we would have no way of assessing the professional adequacy of the questions and probes unless we could review the interview with a medical expert. The TF's oral presentation to the attending and the initial interview with the patient pose difficult problems for a researcher who is not familiar with clinical medicine and the sub-specialty of rheumatology. The researcher's knowledge base is as much at issue as those of the TF, attending and patient. We tend to view knowledge as if we are able to identify homogeneously bounded domains the researcher is privileged to know. Research in technical areas creates a problem for the researcher. In most field research, we often acquire enough technical knowledge to understand much of the routine activities of the persons and groups we observe and interview. But we seldom allow the reader to see the limitations in our knowledge base and this can influence our inferences and claims about those studied. Our research in the sociology of science is itself a case study in the observer's production and reproduction of objective knowledge and domination. The technical and everyday language used in natural settings only partially reveal the schematized knowledge and environmental conditions they index. To clarify the level of detail required for a diagnosis, the clinician must link the mental spaces or schemata of the diagnostic categories, and the lexical elements also associated with them, to the intuitive clinical procedures and knowledge that are implied .. The local setting,
The Reproduction of Objective Knowledge:
111
however, is governed by an intuitive communicative frame and contrasting categories, as well as the use of lexical items and metaphors associated with local sources of meaning. We can easily show a correspondence between the language employed in the initial interview, the TF's account to the attending, the physical examination report and medical history, and the material in Figures lA, lB, and 1D. But we must also include the intuitive and formal knowledge provided by the attending to the researcher, and observe and identify the emergence of this intuitive knowledge in the training of medical house staff. Research whose data sources are limited to single utterances, or conversational or discourse materials that are not ethnographically contextualized, or brief, written organizational texts, do not clarify the extent to which our understanding of domination and the reproduction of objective knowledge is contingent on the interaction between schematized and locally produced knowledge and reasoning. How do we assess the accuracy of interpretation in a medical (or any organizational) environment that can be routinely ambiguous because of the fluidity in the TF's (or personnel's) knowledge base and the way the patient (or client) presents her symptoms (or problems)? The problem can be compounded in a context where inadequate elicitation procedures are used. The activation of schemata is always contingent on the participants' knowledge base, their perception of each other, and local knowledge conditions, all of which are processed in a context where intuitive, analogic reasoning and understandings are an integral part of the communication achieved. The physician and patient, and the TF and attending, cooperate in a Gricean and organizational sense in order to frame the medical problem during the initial interview. The health care practitioner will bring to the interview procedural-like knowledge and a context-free formulation characteristic of the TF's oral presentation to the attending and reflected in Figures lA, lB, and lD. Procedural-like memorial knowledge will be activated by locally emergent knowledge that also can be confusing, ambiguous, and contradictory. Professional authority in medical and other settings reveal a shifting from one semantic sub-domain to another in a social context where a less experienced expert is being held accountable or being asked for information by a more experienced expert. It is not only the fact that certain mental structures are presupposed if the exchange is to sus-
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Aaron V. Cicourel
tain its coherency, but that both participants must work at maintaining a polite sociolinguistic decorum in Grice's (18) sense that masks the somewhat emotional and critical professional assessment that can be unfolding. The "tension" I attribute to the setting is difficult to demonstrate. Inappropriate laughter by the patient and a sudden shift to a casual style (or shifting from technical to nontechnical language) by the TF can be viewed as indirect evidence of tension and a concern for organizational and career consequences. According to the attending's retrospective account, the TF did not possess the knowledge base to pursue different aspects of rheumatological diseases adequately. For example, the patient's remarks about her ankles and hands were not clarified clinically. The TF was not able to reach an adequate diagnosis and the attending attributed this to a lack of clinical knowledge that is understandable given her prior training. But the TF's failure to pursue specific symptoms expressed by the patient resulted in a misdiagnosis. An adequate pursuit of symptoms should have eliminated the major rheumatological categories. The thinking and activities we subsume under the name of science have enhanced our ability to think logically and reason in a declarative-like mode as we seek objective, context-free knowledge. But the development and use of objective, context-free knowledge always builds on and presupposes forms of organization, communication, and reasoning that derive from procedural-like and local knowledge conditions, analogical inference, and everyday language. These latter conditions are ubiquitous elements of a theory of comprehension, meaning and communication in daily life, and scientific and formal bureaucratic activities. The applied science of medicine nicely illustrates the interaction of intuitive, taken-for-granted, and formal knowledge in the construction of a differential diagnosis and the exercise of professional authority and its assessment. Theoretical issues in the sociology of knowledge and a sociological theory of social action must acknowledge the cognitive, linguistic, and local conditions of knowledge production and reproduction. Our research must examine participants' representation of procedural and declarativelike knowledge and the ways in which these knowledge sources are displayed in local settings as constrained and facilitated by interactional and bureaucratic regularities and practices.
The Reproduction of Objective Knowledge:
113
Notes and References
* Paper
prepared for the conference on "The Impact of Scientific K'1owledge on Social Structure," Technical University of Darmstadt, West Germany, 22-24 of November, 1984. I am grateful to Dr. Michael Weisman for his valuable help and suggestions, and to Nico Stehr for his helpful suggestions.
1. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology 3 vols., G. Roth and C. Wittich (eds.), New York: Bedminister Press, 1968, p. 941. 2. Pierre Bourdieu, 'The Specificity of the Scientific Field', in C. Lemert (ed.), French Sociology, New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, pp. 257-292. 3. Wolfgang Schluchter, 'Modes of Authority and Democratic Control', J. Casanova and V. Meja (trans.), in V. Meja, D. Misgeld, and N. Stehr, (eds.), Modern German Sociology New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 4. Aaron Cicourel, 1982. 5. Jiirgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. 6. David Bloor, 'Polyhedra and the Abominations of Leviticus', British Journal for the History of Science 2 (1978), 245-72; H.M. Collins, 'The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon or the Replication of Experiments in Physics', Sociology 9 (1975), 205-224; Karin D. Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981; B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life. The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, Beverley Hills: Sage, 1979; Michael J. Mulkay, 'Three Models of Scientific Development', Sociological Review 23 (1975), 509-25. 7. F.C. Bartlett, Remembering, Cambridge, 1932. 8. J. Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children, M. Cook (trans.), New York: International Universities Press, 1952. 9. J.L. McClelland and D.E. Rumelhart, 'An Interactive Activation Model of Context Effects in Letter Perception, Part I: An Account of Basic Findings', Psychological Review 88 (1981), 375-407. 10. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. II. Alfred Schutz, 'On Multiple Realities', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research S (1945), 533-575; 'Common-sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14 (1953), 1-38. 12. D.G. Bobrow and D.A. Norman, 'Some Principles of Memory Schemata', in D.G. Bobrow and A.M. Collins (eds.), Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science, New York: Academic Press, 1975; D.E. Rumelhart and A. Ortony, 'The Representation of Knowledge in Memory', in R.C. Anderson, R.J. Spiro, and W.E. Montague (eds.), Schooling and the Acquisition of Knowledge, Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1977; D.E. Rumelhart, 'Toward an Interactive Model of Reading', in S. Dornic (ed.), Attention and Performance VI, Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1977; D.E. Rumelhart and D.A. Norman, 'Analogical Processes in Learning', in J.R. Anderson (ed.), Cognitive Skills and Their Acquisition, Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1981; T. Winograd, 'Frame Representations and the Declarative/Procedural Controversy', in D.G. Bobrow and A.M. Collins (eds.), Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science, New York: Academic Press, 1975. .
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13. Winograd, op. cit. 14. Rumelhart and Norman, op. cit. 15. Ibid. 16. A. Tversky, and D. Kahneman, 'Causal Schemas in Judgments Under Uncertainty', in M. Fishbein (ed.), Progress in Social Psychology Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1978; 'The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice', Science 211 (i 981),453-58. 17. A. V. Cicourel, 'Diagnostic Reasoning in Medicine: The Role of Clinical Discourse and Comprehension', (in French), Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, in press. 18. H.P. Grice, 'Logic and Conversation', in P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics Speech Acts 3, New York: Academic Press, 1975.
Figure lA - Formal clinical description of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) 1.
Large and small joints of upper and lower extremities,
2. 3.
symmetrically (both sides of body). Early joint problems can be transient or "migratory" - appear
4. 5.
to leave one joint, then another. "stiffness" or gel-like sensation in the morning upon rising,
6. 7.
caused by inflammation. Symptoms can wax and wane, but usually the arthritis is
8. 9.
persistent after a while. Functionally: can produce difficulties in ambulation (because
10.
of lower extremities) and in activities of daily living
11. 12.
(upper extremities such as shoulders, thumbs, etc.). Fairly constant, observable joint swelling, meaning involvement
13. 14.
of intra-articular structures (inside capsule of the joint). Systemic features = fatigue, weight loss, and general weakness.
15.
Also, nodules may be present at some time in 1/3 of patients;
16.
common for systemic features to be dominant in young and elderly
The Reproduction of Objective Knowledge:
17. 18. 19.
patients (over-shadowing the joints as a problem). Distinguishing characteristics: Classical type of arthritis.
20.
Systemic features are salient; the patient is "sick," and not
21.
just from joint pain.
22.
Distribution of problems.
23.
Extra-articular features are clear.
24.
Functional questions needed to elicit which joints bother
25.
patients.
115
Figure IB - Osteoarthritis (OA) 1.
Degenerative process
2. 3.
(osteoarthroses, emphasizes non-inflammatory nature of disease). Can appear in 30s, but especially in women with history in
4.
family with other women (mother, sisters).
5. 6.
Normally appears in middle age. Two forms are common:
7.
(a) Weight bearing joints (knees, hips), low back and small
8.
joints of the hands. (Generalized OA)
9.
(b) Fingers only (interphalangeal or inflammatory or erosive
10. 11.
are the terms used). (OA of fingers) Certain joints seldom involved: wrist, elbow, shoulders, and
12.
ankles. When OA does occur in these joints, it means another
116
Aaron V. Cicourel
13. 14.
disease may be present (hyperparathyroidism, hemochromatosis). When OA occurs in hand, it spares the metacarpel-phalangeal
15.
joints (knuckles) and wrist, but usually involves the first
16.
carpel-metacarpel joint (base of the thumb) and all the
17.
inter-phalangeal joints (below knuckles). Characteristic distribution
18. 19.
of problem in the hand. Seldom systemic (no fatigue, weight loss, weakness, etc.).
20.
Usually, articular involvement in finger joints can be
21.
inflammatory or moderate pain and swelling. Can move from
22.
PIP (proximal interphalangeal) to DIP (distal interphalangeal)
23.
joints in the different hands at different times; months or
24.
even one year. Use own hand as model. Inflammation or pain
25.
and swelling "out of phase" vis-a-vis RA, which moves from
26. 27.
one set to another progressively. Watch for confusing signs; inflammatory OA (erosive OA is
28.
radiologic term) may appear quite inflammatory (redness,
29.
swelling, acute pain).
117
The Reproduction of Objective Knowledge:
Figure ID - Systemic Lupus Erythematosis (SLE) 1.
Multisystem; can affect kidneys, central nervous system and
2. 3. 4.
cardiovascular system. Fever, rashes and polyarthritis dominate the clinical picture. Joint involvement can be dramatic and very painful because
5.
disease may involve (teno-synonitis)
6.
which are very painful, but with little swelling
7. 8.
or objective signs of inflammation. Both small and large joints can be involved, but not like RA;
attachments
capsules,
tendons
9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
no progressive joint deformity and destruction. Females more; most common in teens and 20s. Quite ill; marked fatigue, weight loss, muscle wasting, skin rashes especially in face and hands. Sun can make rash and joint pain and fatigue worse. Raynaud's occurs, and pleuritic-type chest pains
15. 16.
(even pericarditis or pleural effusion) and myositis. Special features:
17.
Joints are different from RA in appearance.
18.
Systemic conditions very common.
19.
Multisystem, sometimes life threatening and severe.
20.
Skin rashes, photosensitivity.
21.
Distribution by age and sex.
22. 23.
Myositis and Raynaud's help distinguish SLE from RA, variants. General observation: symptoms of inflammation are often
118
Aaron V. Cicourel
24.
greater than observable signs. Patients often viewed as
25.
"crocs" or malingerers.
Figure 2 - Initial Interview Between Training Fellow and Patient 1. TF: Ummm, who sent you to arthritis? 2. P:
Uh, uh, oncology.
3. TF: Oncology. (unclear) That's okay. (other voice) 4.
Now let me just get a piece of paper (7 seconds)
5.
(closing drawers).
6.
How old are you?
7. P:
44.
8. TF: Okay (9 seconds) and (do you?) have any problems? 9. P:
Oooooh, the whole body.
10. TF: Whole body. 11. P:
Joints, really bad.
12. TF: Uhuh, yeah, okay. 13. P:
And ummm, breakout in these big red spots, (mumbling)
14.
tops and toes.
15. TF: Uhummm. 16. P:
But only when I sit in the hot water, they come out
17.
quite a bit, my hands get, like this, they stiffen up.
The Reproduction of Objective Knowledge:
IS. TF: Uhummm. 19. P:
They stiffen all the way up.
20. TF: Ummkay, so now how long has this been happening? 21. P:
Oh, quite a while.
22. TF: Couple months? Er, 23. P:
Longer than that, cuz I was taking Dr. Blumberg
24.
(door /drawer slamming closed) up in San Miguel.
25. TF: But is he an arthritis doctor? 26. P:
Mmhuh (?)
27. TF: Okay, what did doc, now, so, it's maybe uh 9 months? or
2S. P:
No, it's been about a year 'n a half.
29. TF: 'Bout a year an a'half, 30. P:
Uhummm, seems to get worse though ....
31. TF: And that was Dr., 32. P:
Blumberg.
33. TF: In San Miguel. 34. P:
Yeah, that's right, it's allergy.
35. TF: And what did he feel, was, was the problem? 36. P:
He said it was osteoarth-
37.
ritis.
3S. TF: Oh, okay.
119
120
39. P:
Aaron V. Cicourel
And then that was, then it was rheumatoid arthritis.
40. TF: So you saw another doctor after you (?) 41. P:
Yeah, Dr. Waltz.
42. TF: Okay ... and how long ago was that? 43. P:
Uhh, about 2 years ago.
44. TF: He told you that 2 years ago. 45. P:
Uhuh,
46. TF: Okay, (9 seconds) (slamming door) did they start 47.
you on some medicine?
48. P:
I was taking Tolectin.
49. TF: Okay, do you know how much? 50. P:
Uhhh, no, I don't.
51. TF: Okay, are you still taking them? 52. P:
Can't afford it, hahaha, can't afford, to
53.
buy it anymore ....
Figure 3 - Training Fellow-Attending Initial Exchange 1. TF: Ok, next is Elena Louis, (background voices) anyway, 2.
she's 44 years of age and sent here from (the?)
3.
oncology group.
4.
So the past two years she has had episodes initially
The Reproduction of Objective Knowledge:
5.
of erythema followed by swelling involving the second
6.
and third metacarpal and PIP joints of both hands,
7.
alternating, one time this hand, one time this hand.
8.
She's also had arthritis of her ankles, which includes
9.
redness on a lateral border of the lateral malleolus
10.
followed by swelling.
11.
Comes on, first the redness, and she has pain and
12.
swelling within 24 hours.
13.
Lasts for several days, and then it goes away.
14.
But when she has it, the pain is quite severe.
15.
It greatly limits her hand function, and her walking
16.
function.
17.
Umm, she really has minimal joint complaints other
18.
than back stiffness and her other joints.
19.
She had had no difficulty with her elbows really, or
20.
her shoulders.
21.
Uhh, she's not had any nodules.
22.
She has no Raynaud's (disease).
23.
She has no Sjogrens.
24.
She is tired all the time.
25.
She is now getting a lot of leg cramping.
121
122
Aaron V. Cicourel
26.
Umm, she has no family history of arthritis
27.
she has no occasional morning sickness, but it's
28.
not real (?) ...
29. A:
How long, has this been a problem?
30. TF: Two years. She was seen by a Doctor Blumberg, in 31.
San Miguel, and told she had DlD (degenerative joint
32.
disease).
33.
She previously had seen another physician and was
34.
told she had rheumatoid arthritis.
35.
She was tried at one point in time on Tolectin and
36.
she didn't feel it helped her, and at this point in
37.
time she's on medication ... uh.
Part III PROCESSES OF SCIENTIFICATION
INTRODUCTION
With the topic of scientification we arrive at the most dynamic processes which turn our societies into knowledge or information societies. It is here that in the decades to come substantial transformations of social structure and organization in advanced societies are to be expected and intensive research is needed. The progressive transformation of our societies not only affects the role and social status of men of knowledge, but also the patterns of social action and the social structure in general. Science and technology are going to penetrate and change the realm of jurisdiction, education, and administration, as they already have done with realms of production and transport. There also is or has been a scientific penetration and transformation of reproductive behavior (sex life and childbirth) and nutrition. This process has also been called a "colonization of the life-world." In fact, scientification not only means that certain aspects of our life are made a subject of research, but also a gradual transformation of the life-world and the realm of social action which makes scientific concepts and technological procedures applicable. This will become more obvious the more data processing becomes a means of social control. The effectiveness of technology-based administration requires the establishment of a technological infrastructure of society. This technical penetration of our societies and their transformation into nets of data is the second aspect which interests us here. The third is the extension of the responsibilities of scientific-technically trained staffs and the related disablement of the citizens. Scientification of certain parts of our everyday life and of social activities always means a shift of responsibilities and a delegation of social action to experts. Processes of scientification are ubiquitous. Quite clearly, we can give 125 G. Bohme and N. Stehr (eds.), The Knowledge Society, 125-127. © 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
126
Introduction
only examples. It may be good to begin with an example representing the traditional way in which history and the sociology of science have perceived processes of scientification: as the emergence of scientific disciplines and specialties. Studies of this type take scientification as the scientific appropriation of a particular subject matter without taking into account what possible changes will be effected by the process outside science. Our example here, presented in Angela M. O'Rand's paper, is the scientification of the study of life around the turn of the century. O'Rand has studied the emergence of the American community of experimental biologists, which gradually formed itself in connection with the summer courses at the Marine Biology Institute in Woods Hole, Mass. Our second example is the scientification of architecture in our century. Goren Wallen presents the case on the basis of Scandinavian material, but his results may be valid for larger parts of western Europe and the U.S. as well. Scientification of architecture means that this occupation, traditionally considered to be something between art and craftsmanship, is being transformed by the introduction of science and technology. This means far-reaching changes in the training of architects, the emergence of something like architectural research - and it also means an alteration of building itself. Wallen claims that the background of this development can be seen in extensive governmental planning of housing (which is true in particular for welfare states like Sweden) on the one hand and in internal shifts of style which led to functionalist architecture on the other. A third reason may be the university reform by which architecture together with nonscientific traditions have been included in the academic system. Wallen does not predict whether the scientification of architecture will turn out to be a transient phenomenon, which in recent time has already found its countermovement in postmodernity. According to the general hypothesis of this book processes of scientification must be irreversible. Our last example demonstrates the close connection of the scientification of one occupation with the establishment of a scientific-technological infrastructure of our society. The study of the scientification of police work, presented by Richard V. Ericson and Clifford D. Shearing, is an excellent case in point of what we have been arguing in this volume. The police traditionally are considered to be an agency of law and order. Ericson and Shearing show that the principle of action .has been replaced
Introduction
127
by "law, science and order" today. The reasons for this development are not only to be found in the offers of scientific methods and technical equipment made to the police and the general trend to professionalization which the police share with other occupations, but in the structure and goal of police work itself. Seen from a time budget point of view the main part of police work is not actual prosecution of crime and criminals but surveillance, information gathering, and reporting. The systematic goal of the police shows a general trend toward crime prevention which means that information policing becomes its main issue. Ericson and Shearing cite an ongoing manpower inflation, a legal inflation, as well as scientific inflation of the police. This means the creation of a huge potential of social control based on scientific and technological means. "Through their scientific, technological and legal methods of penetration / surveillance/information / registration /knowledge / administration, the police are the central agents of the knowledge society" (p. 163 of this book).
THE SCIENTIFICATION OF POLICE WORK RICHARD V. ERICSON AND CLIFFORD D. SHEARING University o/Toronto
Law as an Agency of Police Legitimacy and Power It is now accepted wisdom among scholars of law and society that the law derives its strength by providing for two discourses. There is the discourse of the public culture: its normative sentiments about the rule of law provides a legitimating symbolic canopy for the work of police and other legal agents. There is also the discourse of the operational reality of social control on behalf of the state: the law allows police and other legal agents to take the actions they deem necessary, and yet be able to construe them and account for them in terms which make them publicly acceptable. The law promises that the police operate with special powers for construing the truth. It allows them to reduce a complex event, with as many shades as a chameleon in a box of crayons, into a black and white account that fits the genre capacities of the official report. In the process the police are able to shift from saying "look at things this way" to asserting that "things look this way." Moreover, the law allows the police to legitimately claim that they are taking action within the rule of law, that is according to universal, general, uniform and neutral criteria in the public interest. It gives the police a general authorization or warrant of the type, "Because we are doing things the legal way, we are doing them the right way and therefore you have no legitimate grounds for criticism." The police are thereby able to take particular actions with authoritative certainty, and to appear as professionals. The professional imagery includes the view that rules of criminal procedure are constraining rather than enabling; that criminal law is the primary instrument of social order, and the police as the "thin blue line" its embodiment; and that the police are there primarily to enforce the criminal law and control crime. In the realm of public culture, the police become agents of ~olitical ac129 G. Bohme and N. Stehr (eds.), The Knowledge Society, 129-159. © 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
130
Richard V. Ericson and Clifford D. Shearing
countability. As the embodiment of "law and order" the police system is central to what Gusfield identifies as a key role of the law itself: "It creates a day-to-day authority and legitimates control through building the image of a social and natural order based on moral consensus" (1). The fact that accountability is channelled into legal discourse means that the police remain legitimacy incarnate in most jurisdictions, at least as can be judged by public opinion surveys (2). Always at the forefront of debates about the state and civil society, the police are politically useful in taking the brunt of criticism and channelling it into legal discourse. As Berger and Luckmann have argued, "[T]he success of particular conceptual machineries is related to the power possessed by those who operate them. The confrontation of alternative symbolic universes implies a problem of power - which of the conflicting definitions of reality will be 'made to stick' in the society" (3). The police contribute to a public sense of order by this stick as well as by those they carry with them on the street. It gives the police, on behalf of the state, a significant purchase on the ownership of public problems and on being used by citizens to handle private problems. Formal legal rationality obviously helps the police to legitimate their actions to various interested parties, to achieve accountability. However, it is not adequate to conceive it simply as a legitimating surface structure (4), underneath or behind which can be found a deeper structure which it glosses. Such a view suggests a dichotomy between a public manipulation of appearances and a "real world" of social control that is concealed, and an attendant search for the "real rules" which are imagined to govern this world. The police use of formal legal rationality is not adequately conceived if it is only seen as a means to publicly legitimate actions which have been guided by other, subterranean rules. It is better conceived as a necessary, integral resource of their work at the point they are called upon to give an account of their activity. No doubt in the process of polishing the semiotic pebbles to achieve a symbolic gem of accountability a gloss becomes evident. However, this gloss is not a blurring of vision that must be looked behind; it is something to look through in order to understand the way in which it is created by police use of legal resources. In everyday police work, legal rules are an enabling resource to justify the particular action the police officer wishes to take. The substantive law is written so that if the need arises to invoke formalleg~l control, the be-
The Scientij'ication ofPolice Work
131
havior in question can be so construed. In this respect the substantive law serves as an "all purpose control device" when other means of social control have failed or seem absent (5). In terms of the procedural law, the public culture view that it constrains, directs, and guides police conduct misses the point that it essentially serves as a vehicle for the police to construe their own behavior as legal and therefore justifiable. As McBarnet shows in so many ways, "due process is for crime control" (6). For example, in Canada the law of search and seizure is so enabling that it is extremely difficult for the police to go wrong (7). Searches are always justifiable with "consent," with judicial warrants which are almost invariably "rubberstamped," and without consent under legislation related to specific offences (e.g. drugs, liquor, weapons) or if incident to arrest for serious offences. Furthermore, even if the police officer is so incompetent as to be unable to show other legal agents the legality of his search and seizure under this array of enabling provisions, he can still have the illegally seized material admitted as evidence in court at the judge's discretion. The laws of criminal procedure also provide the necessary literary devices by which the police officer acquires accountability to achieve legal accountability. That is, the procedural forms put in place to compel the police officer to legally account for his actions become just a matter of form as the same justifications are routinely used to obtain what is desired. For example Lidstone (8), a former police inspector turned police researcher, demonstrates convincingly that the "informations" documents required to obtain judicially authorized search warrants in English jurisdictions do not contain reasonable grounds for the search as required by law. Instead, "the informations invariably contained the 'formula', 'as a result of information received from a previous reliable source', or variations thereof," without requirement or practice of identifying the informants. Furthermore, observational research revealed that magistrates rarely probed for further information, and Lidstone concludes that "the use of the 'formula' [allows] applications to go through 'on the nod' ... [far] from giving false information they give virtually no information because they are not asked to do so." In police work, justice is deeply embedded in practices of justification. Legal truth is constituted by the prevailing criteria of rational acceptability among the police and other legal agents, in the context of their goals and interests. The police use criminal law as an imaginative, interpretive,
132
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constructive device to construe behavior as well as to regulate it (9). The process by which police make cases is characterized by "criteria oscillations" as different matters are taken into account. One thing to take into account is whether the matter can be and should be constructed in terms of the criminal law. The criminal law stands as a power tool to be used as the police see fit, but there is no imperative that it will be used to deal with a trouble and in many instances it is not. As in laboratory science, "the 'rules' according to which choices are made appear to be 'made up in going along' so that decision criteria may oscillate from one step to the next, and glaring inconsistencies between selections appear to occur quite frequently" (10). The police officer sifts among the rules as they can be used to normatively construe the facts, thereby translating the matter before him into an acceptable account, and ultimately transforming it into something which meets established criteria of rational acceptability. Once a particular form for legal action has been chosen, the contingent nature of the enterprise evaporates. Even while he flies by the seat of his pants, the police officer's official legal accounts must display authoritative certainty. The police officer can hardly demonstrate finesse in the craft, accountability, by expressing a contingent view of his work which underscores that he makes cases as he goes along. Indeed, he knows that any contingency in the account will result in other legal agents asking him for further justifications and thus disrupt the smooth flow of dispensing justice. The police officer learns to use the law to erase contingency in his official accounts, and thereby to greatly minimize the risk of losing cases. Science as an Agency of Police Legitimacy and Power
While scholars of law and society have recognized that law is an agency of police legitimacy and power, they have generally failed to appreciate that science has the same properties. There has been little research on the nature and influence of scientific knowledge, technology, and the expectations they create in police work. One of our major tasks in this paper is to indicate trends in the scientification of police work which suggest directions for basic research. Science, like law, is a form of action with attendant symbolic and rhetorical features, used to discover the truth and settle problems by constructing a view that "satisfies certain criteria of ratio~al acceptability"
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(11). It too promises special powers of construing the truth which reduce complexity to statements of authoritative certainty. It also offers the procedural characteristics of being universal, general, uniform and neutral. It
gives the police a general warrant of the type, "Because we are doing things the scientific way, we are doing them the right way and you have no legitimate grounds for criticism." With efficient suppression of crime as the publicly stated goal of the police, arguments are advanced that in order to achieve this goal the police must acquire the latest available scientific and technological aids. In the process science serves not only as an aid for finding and construing facts, but as an ideological tool of justification and excuse. The belief is created that a universal and general system of criminal justice can be accomplished by a police who are technical agents of scientific rationality rather than instruments of particular interests and a morality reflecting those interests. Police "professionalism" is the key word, embodying not only the norms of legality but also the norms of the scientifically equipped and managed police officer as automaton. The modern, professional bureaucratic police organization is to be equipped with the latest information technology for the scientihc management of both the products of the organization as well as those who produce them. Order is not a neutral concept. However, the police, on behalf of the state, must act as if it is both neutral and natural by applying apparently general and universal criteria. Politically, they must constantly struggle with the dilemma of how to avoid appearing as a partisan tool without . thereby being rendered immune to democratic control (12). The discourses in which the police manage this struggle are those of scientific and legal rationality, which attest to the ideals of generality and universality. The police officer-as-automaton is to employ the latest advances in scientific technology to ferret out evil according to the technical dictates of law. Male or female, white or black, young or old, patrolling suburbs or slums, police officers are supposed to be technicians. The ideal is to make them even more so through increasing doses of "professionalism," the quintessential definition of which is that practitioners are controllable by norms of scientific and legal rationality. Increasingly, a democratic police are to appear as the political version of the scientific method. The police are thus an important vehicle for studying how "the rhetoric of rationality" (13) enters public political discourse about social con-
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. trol and order. Science, technology and law become bound up in the constant ideological struggle of trying to make sectional interests appear general and universal, part of the "public interest," and the police are used frequently in this regard because they are at the forefront of debates about the relationship between the state and the individual and are a primary means by which the citizen can assess the state as acting on his behalf. Indeed, as Habermas has argued (14), an ideology constructed on purposive-rational action can neutralize social choice aspects of such action and thereby depoliticize them. As has been well documented and argued regarding other professions - for example, medicine and especially its specialism of psychiatry - the construction of police as mere technical and instrumental agents of legal and scientific rationality fosters the ignoring of, and even ignorance about, the moral and political nature of their activities. The police are contributors to the cultural frame in which the state advances its claim to legitimacy and attendant images of progress. As agents embodying the dominant scientific and legal sensibilities about social order, the police are a primary agency through which science and law are used to create the illusion of cultural dominance (15). The police wear the "uniform" of science and law so that they can appear to be making only technical decisions in fulfillment of their instrumental roles; and so that they can be used to "still" ideological clamor and accomplish consensus in fulfillment of their symbolic roles. In summary, the police are a key agency for the ideological uses of science and law in the reproduction of dominant order: for representing sectional interests as universal ones; for managing contradictions; and, for "the rationalization of the present," making "social relations appear to have the fixed and immutable character of laws" (16). In addition to drawing the veil of legitimacy over police work, science and technology also serve as an enabling power resource to be drawn on as the police officer sees fit in particular circumstances. For example, devices for watching (e.g. video surveillance, infrared telescopes, light amplifiers), listening (e.g. bugs, wiretaps), recording (tape recorders, body-packs), detecting (breath analyzers, polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, computer matching and profiling), collating (computers) and retrieving information (e.g. computer-assisted vehicle and person checks), are available as power tools to get the job done. The actual use of these resources is much greater
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than the use of legal resources. Research shows that the vast majority of police activities do not involve any reference to legal norms, while virtually all police activities do involve the use of scientific technology and are constantly oriented to an elaborate system of internal accountability based on scientific management (17). Moreover, scientific technology resources may have more powerful effects because they are more subtle and indirect, and are deployed in conditions of low visibility or are invisible to those being watched (18). As with law, there are a vast array of scientific technologies available for potential use, but it is wrong to see them as dictating what the police actually do. The main function of the technology is to provide a potential means of producing information which in turn has the potential to be used to take further action against the targeted person or organization. As Weick argues, "Technology may alter the process of enactment, but to argue that enactment decreases as the density of technology increases is to forget that it is not machinery but information that is processed by organizations. Technology generates a great deal of raw data, a process that places even greater demands on the organization to bracket those raw data so that they can be made manageable" (19). While patterns of organizational relationships and information flow are affected by the use of technologies, the technologies are best viewed as resulting from police efforts to embrace the patterns of their activities. In sum, science and technology is available to be taken into account and used according to the discretion of police officers in the situations they face. The autonomy of police officers to avoid its influence in their work has been well documented in the case of technological innovations of scientific management (20). Even when technological devices appear to be most precise in providing the police with technical facts for decision-making - such as radar for registering speeding drivers or the breathalyzer for ascertaining the level of alcohol impairment - there is still considerable discretion by the police officer to ignore the violation, to charge for a less serious offence, and so on(21).
Policing Inflation At the level of the public culture, talk of police activity is largely confined to crime control. Capitalizing on popular anxiety, and the fact that crime
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control is elastic, carries a virtuous ring, and cannot be easily assailed, the police argue for more manpower, technology and resources to get the job done. This is so in spite of the fact that the police spend a very tiny portion of their time dealing with matters that involve consideration or use of the criminal law. An indicator of this is the fact that nationally in Canada, a police officer on average records one criminal occurrence a week and makes one criminal arrest a month. The police devise measures of the "crime" product for public consumption which are fictive because they are a sign not of behavioral levels of crime, but of how the police are organized for selecting, interpreting, defining and creating it. They also devise measures of their crime control capacities - for example, the number of crimes "cleared" by arrest and charge in relation to the number recorded - which are fictive because again they are an artifact of police and social organization rather than a sign of good, hard work. In sum, the police help to manufacture "the crime problem," "the exaggerated fear of crime and the consequences of that fear" (22) which is distinct from the problem of crime itself. They are thereby able to turn the facts of crime into virtues, arguing for more manpower, legal resources, and scientific resources in an amplifying spiral (23). This public culture discourse has arguably led to policing inflation in three ways: manpower inflation, legal inflation, and scientific inflation. In terms of manpower, there has been a substantial increase in many Western countries over the past two decades. In Canada, for example, from the early 1960s to the late 1970s the proportion of police personnel in relation to the population grew by over fifty percent, and expenditure on policing increased nineteenfold (24). Evidence of "legalistic inflation" comes from a Catalogue of Discretionary Powers in the Revised Statutes of Canada 1970 as compiled in 1975 by the Law Reform Commission of Canada. As Jean-Paul Brodeur writes, "this catalogue lists 14,885 discretionary powers, of which 5,938 are judicial and 1,298 are investigative; there are also 3,487 rule-making powers and 2,933 administrative prerogatives. This description would be more complete if it also included a list of powers enshrined in provincial laws and municipal regulations. However, this additional list would be so long and complex that it would defeat any attempt at classification" (25). Backed by scientists who argue that police productivity in crime con-
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trol depends on providing more and improved resources for gathering, processing, and analyzing data (26), policing has also undergone "scientific inflation." The imagined and real, the less certain and more certain resources of science and technology are brought to bear on the core police task of patrolling the facts. For fact finding or detection there are surveillance technologies suited to each of our senses: telescopes and· video-cameras for seeing, "bugging devices" for hearing, dogs for smelling drugs, breathalizers for getting a taste of alcohol impairment, and so on. There are computerized information systems on criminal and other records of the citizenry. The construction of "psychograms," an effort at "pinpointing a criminal by his crime" is heralded as a recent advance of forensic science. For fact registration many of the same devices are used, with the proverbial bureaucratic file giving way to tapes and discs. For fact prevention there is a large assortment of security hardware, including again surveillance equipment as well as computerized locking systems. There is also an assortment of patrol-surveillance vehicles, communications systems and riot equipment. For fact establishing there is ballistics, finger-printing and other aspects of forensic science. There are also more uncertain approaches - usually associated with social sciences - such as the polygraph to yield statements from suspects, and doll play to yield statements from child victims of sexual assault. For facts about the fact finders many of these same devices are used, along with various measures of efficiency, psychological tests for recruits, and vehicle locator systems to keep track of patrol officers. This list, far from exhaustive, reflects what Clifford Geertz has recently observed about the legal institution more generally. Similar to other areas of bureaucratic existence, the legal institution has become caught up in "technological restlessness, a sort of rage to invent ... the general revolution of rising expectation as to the possibilities of fact determination and its power to settle intractable issues that the general culture of scientism has induced in us all .... " Geertz goes on to state, "Uncluttered justice has never seemed so attractive" (27). This attraction may be even greater for police managers and police officers than it is in the culture generally because they routinely experience uncertainty. Any development which promises to ease the task of turning the colorful kaleidoscope of a dispute into black and white is likely to be most welcome. The police, like scientists, really have nothing to sell
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other than their authoritative certainty, and a collaboration in their mutual enterprises is thus certain. The nature of the collaboration is something about which virtually nothing is known. However, it would be a mistake to assume that the police simply take over distinct scientific and technological innovations developed for other purposes and convert them to their use. As the police come to emphasize a preventative role with the aid of surveillance and data collation technologies (28), they in turn create and provide for new opportunities for technologies and stimulate further scientific and technological development. In other words, there is a mutual interdependence between science and technology and policing requirements, and therefore an amplification effect over time.
Tbe Policing of Organizational Life Research has shown that while the police spend very little time ordering the population in terms of the criminal law, they spend most of their time conducting surveillance, interviewing citizens for information relevant to making cases, and writing reports. Even ordinary municipal patrol officers and detectives are primarily "information police," who spend more time writing accounts in official bureaucratic forms than in the actual activity being reported on (29). The essence of police work is to penetrate spheres of organized life to set up surveillance mechanisms in human form, technologically, or some combination of the two. The surveillance is to gather information which, in turn, is to be registered in various bureaucratic forms for future use. Ultimately some of the registered information is converted to knowledge, for use in administration or control of the targeted person or organization. This in turn can lead to further penetration and surveillance in response to demands for more information, and so on. This process is represented schematically in Figure 1. As Reiss has argued, "All policing in an important sense is the policing of organizational life," and the primary activity of both the police and the policed is "the control of information" (30). In this work of patrolling for facts and the patrolling of facts, the police have a mandate to collect information on various sources of potential threat to the state, to predict possible sources of disruption, and to devise measures of compliance where
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Figure 1
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----> penetration -------> surveiUance ------ > information
------->
registration ------ > knowledge --------- > administration
the main goal is normalizing conduct rather than sorting claims. Here police work resembles the original French definition of policing as governmental social control, a means for the state to monitor~ refine, and improve the population. Policing in this form has the entire society as its potential sphere of operation. Since anything might be relevant regarding any person or organization, it takes on an "absorbent" quality. Thus Brodeur cites an interview with the Director of the French Renseignements Generaux, who described his particular service as "police journalism on behalf of the State"; as Brodeur comments, "In using the word 'journalism' he meant that no field of activity in France was alien to police reporting" (31). Moreover, on the occasions when criminal law violations became one possible means of construing the behavior under scrutiny, there are many options chosen depending on the need to develop further information or to achieve other goals. Thus violators may be turned into informants in exchange for the currency they most value, not being prosecuted. Indeed, police may choose crime control targets as a means to generate intelligence about other activities. In many areas of policing - for example, prostitution, drug dealing, political policing - the work is best characterized as an effort at crime management, rather than crime suppression or even control (32). In drawing upon human, legal and technological resources for penetrationj surveillance j informa tionj registration jknowledge j adminis-tration, the police are key operatives within the evolving "knowledge society" (33). In this capacity, the police are the fulcrum of the state's efforts to engineer social integration. Using their "positional advantage" (34) as
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information brokers, policing systems construct and organize the database of the knowledge society. Their discipline of policing science provides for discipline within the knowledge society. The police thus provide a good substantive vehicle for studying knowledge/power relations. "If one must have warrant addressed to social needs, let it be for unsponsored analyses of the social arrangements enjoyed by those with institutional authority - priests, psychologists, school teachers, police, generals, government leaders, parents, males, whites, nationals, media operators, and all the other well-placed persons who are in a position to give official imprint to versions of reality" (35). Along with only a few other workers - among them journalists and social scientists - the police have warrant to treat all of organized life as their field for knowledge. More similar to social scientists than journalists, they must process a vast and diverse array of information sources. More similar to journalists than social scientists, they are frequently called to act with immediacy and certainty upon their information sources, to integrate them into their knowledge and action. And, more than journalists or social scientists, they have an imperative to be right about what they do, both in the sense of correcting harmful action and doing it with propriety. Perhaps among all occupational groups the police provide the test case for the application of human rationality: whether and how it can be applied to the control of irrational conduct to reproduce order.
Scientific Enhancement of Information Production and Use Police ability to penetrate organizations, conduct surveillance, obtain information, register it, and convert it to knowledge for administration, is being greatly enhanced by continuing developments in science and technology. The ability to produce information is greatly improved by technologies of "sensory enhancement," that is devices which allow the police to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel better. The developing technologies include: [NJew or improved lasers, parabolic mikes and other bugs with still more powerful transmitters, subminiature tape-recorders, remote-camera and videotape systems; means of seeing in the dark, detecting heat or motion; odor, pressure, and contraband sensors; tracking devices and voice stress analyzers. The last decade has seen the increased use of supposedly scientific "inference" or "personal truth technology" based on body clues (such as the polygraph, voice stress analysis, the
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stomach pump, the "passive alcohol detector," and blood or urine analysis for drugs). These highly diverse forms of detection have at least one thing in common - they seek to verify an implicit or explicit claim put forth by an individual regarding identity, attitudes, and behavior (36).
These technologies obviously allow policing to transcend space, and to prod deeper and more intensively into targeted persons and organizations. They also allow for time to be transcended, because information can be registered and stored indefinitely for any later occasion when it may come in handy (37). There is an enormous volume of registered information that can be readily accessed by police. Citizens have to look no further than their pocket or purse for reminders that their selves are objectified by their employers, schools, banks, favorite shops, and state: drivers' licences, company identity cards, insurance cards, library cards, credit cards, health registration cards, and so on. These documents not only remind everybody who they are within organized life, they are also reminders that policing agents can know a great deal about them each iime they demand these cards to access data relevant to their transactions. It is as if citizens can only feel like themselves when they are fully registered. As we have already observed, police officers are primarily engaged in registering an enormous range of information about things they see and about stories they are told by citizens in trouble. Indeed, any given occurrence which the police officer decides to take on in the form of an official police report becomes worked on further within the police organization by supervisors, clerks and detectives, who in turn have their own forms and categorizations to add to the matter. All of the citizens involved - as suspects, accused, witnesses, complainants, victims - become subject to the official record, and in this form too the police have a reservoir of registered information about a large number of citizens. This registered information is readily accessible to patrol officers, many of whom now have computer terminals in their own patrol cars. Computerized information systems supply data on crime patterns in an area, including areas or buildings vulnerable to trouble in the past. They offer the official status of vehicles, including who they are registered to and whether there are outstanding violations against the vehicle. Information about citizens includes whether they have a criminal record; whether they have outstanding warrants against them; and whether they
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are under various court orders (bail, probation, parole) which restrict the social places they are allowed to be, the times they can be there, and whom they can associate with. A substantial proportion of the population is so registered, whether they are the registered owners of vehicles; those who have been involved in a criminal offence as suspect, accused, witness, victim or complainant; or those who, at some time and in some place, have merely appeared to a police officer as offensive. While many of the technologies for producing data may appear to have relative autonomy, they are tools in the hands of humans who maintain control. Part of the human element is the agreement of persons in organizations to allow surveillance to be conducted or information to be handed over. Cooperation and success at this level is achieved more through the general legitimacy of the police office than through the application of specific technologies (38). The police must infiltrate organizations or engage members inside organizations to do their work. Even if they normalize their operations inside the territory or organizations policed, the police remain largely dependent on information that has been produced by others. In Bohme's terms this is "second level production," appropriating knowledge already socially constructed in bureaucratic settings for conversion to police use. Thus the policing of organizational life presupposes "a society that is bureaucratically conditioned and prepared for data processing" (39). The need for police officers to gain the cooperation of informants to make people and their organizations knowable means that a large number of citizens in various organizational capacities are involved in policing. "[A] police force is an organization that thrives on its ever-expanding fringe" (40), and for a variety of reasons citizens enter into being at least part-time policing agents. Those who are also on the fringe of criminal activity often become "corrupted" by information because it is the only currency they have to trade with the police. Informants are motivated to use the same deceptive and illegal tactics as the police to obtain information, and sometimes even facilitate the illegal activities of others so that they can have something of value to offer the police (41). More routinely and regularly, citizens who are well placed to give registered information from their organization do so out of a spirit of good will with the police, or as reciprocity for special police attention to their security. Research indicates that employers, school officials, credit
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agencies, government record officers, apartment superintendents, store managers, etcetera, routinely give information that allows the police to assess the credibility of suspicious citizens or obtain incriminating evidence against them (42). A more recent development, employing electronic media and the telephone system, is the use of "hot lines" for citizens to inform on wrongdoers. For example, the American "Crime Stoppers USA, Inc." or the British "Crime Watch UK" television shows reenact major crimes to encourage people to report any information they might have. The formalization and routinization of organizational information is aided by the development of private security units within large public and private bureaucracies. In Canada the rate of growth of identified private security personnel has outstripped that of the public police and they now approximate the number of public police personnel (43). We consider this development in more detail later. At this juncture it is only necessary to point out that private security operatives have specific documents, as well as information banks, which can be "plugged into" by the public police. The development of computer technology is an enormous aid to the process by which the police convert information into knowledge for use in administration, and in turn to discover more information about anomalous behavior. Computers have assisted traditional tactics, such as permitting the quick retrieval of the names of suspects who fit a description fed into the computer. However, as Marx and Reichman document, computers also enable "systematic data searching" which provides a new tool for the discovery of violations. It permits the joining of heretofore independent pieces of information in order to expose offenses and offenders that would remain hidden unless such links could be drawn. Systematic data searches do not merely expedite existing discovery processes. They offer an entirely new means of exposing rule breaking. They offer a "value added" or inductive method that differs from traditional, deductive methods. Rather than drawing inferences from a "crime scene" that has natural, seemingly self-evident boundaries, systematic data searching permits investigators to construct criminal scenarios from disparate data and events. They may also permit a form of statistical surveillance (44).
Two basic approaches are involved. Matching entails comparing information from distinct data sources for "cross-checking and verification or to discover inconsistencies and multiple listings suggesting violations. According to one estimate, approximately 500 computer matching
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programs are being carried out routinely at the [U.S.] state and federal levels" (45). For example, a registered list of salvaged cars can be matched to cars reported stolen to see if a person who has salvaged his car has made a fraudulent stolen car report for the purpose of collecting insurance (46). In New York City matching allows officials to prevent citizens with outstanding parking tickets from registering a deed for a new home or purchasing a marriage licence (47). Profiling entails correlating "distinct data items in order to assess how close a person or event comes to a predetermined characterization or model of infraction" (48). "Singular" profiling is a model of distinct attributes, such as those of a potentially "dangerous person" (e.g. terrorist, airline "skyjacker") or a potentially dangerous place (e.g. buildings susceptible to arson). "Aggregative" profiling entails the reappearance of factors which arouse suspicion (e.g. multiple insurance claims from the same person). The potential for error in this process is substantial. Profiling is obviously problematic because it will inevitably lead to many false accusations and also fail to identify many potential offenders (49). Beyond this, much of the information obtained by police is of dubious relevance, gossipy, uncorroborated, and subject to clerical error, as one might expect when such a large volume of information is handled by so many people for different bureaucratic purposes (50). Slade and Biddle state that the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment found almost one-half of a sample of Federal Bureau of Investigation computerized records to be incomplete or inaccurate (51). This of course creates the potential for further intrusions well beyond whatever intrusions initially lead to the information being registered in the system. As the U.s. Privacy Protection Study Commission (1977) emphasized, computers are not mere data repositories; their real potential lies in interconnecting already available data. Intrusiveness is more than the depth of penetration into personal intimacy; it is also measured by the breadth of information possessed. Computers do not, of course, intrude by themselves; however, they can transform into a system of pseudo-knowledge intrusive gossip by police informers and input mistakes by unskilled clerks (52).
In interconnecting data and providing a breadth of information, police use of computers has important implications for conceptions of privacy. It extends the penetration of privacy from the situational to the extra situational by permitting the production of personal and organizational "biographies" as well as "social maps."
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Bits of scattered information that in the past did not threaten the individual's privacy and anonymity are now joined. Organizational resources are extended over time and across space. Observations have a more textured, dimensional quality ... surveillance increasingly involves more complex transactional analysis, interrelating persons and events (for instance, the timing of phone calls, travel, bank deposits) (53).
The power to make people and places knowable is continually being enhanced by developments in science and technology, and the police are at the forefront of this power jknowledge nexus.
Legal Enhancement of Information Production and Use As scientific and technological power tools are developed for police use, the law as an agency of legitimacy and a power tool emerges in tandem. Most routinely, the substantive and procedural case law is interpreted to give police access to citizens' documents and to force citizens to answer their questions. For example, a citizen who refuses to identify himself, supply documents of identification such as a driver's licence, or to answer questions of a particular type in particular circumstances, may be charged with obstructing police. A citizen who refuses to turn over documents believed to contain information that might incriminate him or other citizens may be charged with obstructing justice. In certain circumstances, arrest, search and seizure are allowed for the purpose of establishing incriminating evidence, rather than incriminating evidence being the basis for arrest and seizure (54). The enabling provisions of the law in this respect may be one reason why citizens almost invariably comply with police requests for documents about them, and almost invariably wait while police run criminal information checks on them even though they are not under arrest (55). In the past two decades new legislation has emerged to deal with special needs of organisational penetration, surveillance and information gathering. For example, the 1977 Protection of Privacy Act in Canada allows police to invade the privacy of citizens by electronic monitoring of their private verbal communications. To be sure this Act requires judicial approval of police applications to use electronic surveillance devices, but as in other areas of the law this proves to be nothing more than a rubber-stamp procedure. Brodeur argues that judges dispense these warrants with the same abandon that pharmacists dispense drugs on the
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request of physicians: according to official figures of the Solicitor-General of Canada, between 1977 and 1982 "police officers under federal authority made 5,239 applications for warrants permitting the legal use of hearing devices. Only ten applications were refused by the judges. During the same period, police made 3,529 applications to renew initial authorisations; only four were refused, although Subsection 178.13(3) of the Criminal Code stipulates that renewals may only be granted 'from time to time'" (56). A separate Canadian Act known as the Privacy Act provides for the invasion of privacy in other forms, for example allowing confidential information to be given out to any member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Member of Parliament, Senator, a foreign government, or anybody else if it is in the "public interest" as defined by a Cabinet Minister and certified by the Privacy (equals Publicity) Commissioner. Many American states have legislation designed to encourage the cooperation of informants in bureaucracies and to protect them from reprisals. For example, in 1981 the State of Michigan enacted the Whistleblower's Protection Act, designed to protect corporate employees who turn informants and then find that they are dismissed or otherwise disadvantaged because of their informing efforts. In the United States and in Canada legislation is also being introduced which penalizes people who do not inform; for example, in the Province of Ontario doctors are required by law to report suspected cases of child abuse. Legislation has also been passed to restrict the access of outsiders to police information, as well as other information the government decides to define as secret. In the Canadian tradition of putting titles to Acts to indicate the exact opposite of what they enable, the Access to Information Act provides for no access to information the federal government receives from other governments, Royal Canadian Mounted Police information, trade secrets, income tax information, Cabinet documents, and material which the government decides might affect international relations, national defence, their work against subversives, and so on. Covering up deviance by police or other government agents is also legally authorized by the Canadian Federal Court Act, section 41(2), which gives the Solicitor-General of Canada authority to refuse communications of documents to quasi-judicial bodies on grounds of national security. More global legislation has also emerged to break up organized power
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that is politically or economically threatening. In the United States, the "anti-rackets" R.I.C.O. legislation allows the authorities to seize the assets of organizations before trial, to effectively shut them down. This has been used against organizations ranging from the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club in California to a fish packing plant that was defrauding the American military (57). The use of law to justify police surveillance is epitomized in a draft "Security Bill" (C-157) which was sent back for re-drafting at the time of the dissolution of the last Canadian Parliament. This Bill was the reform offered by Parliament in response to a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service. This enquiry had revealed widespread illegal activity by the police, such as arson, kidnapping, break, enter and theft, and illegal mail opening. This draft Bill provided security in the form of allowing policing agents to investigate law-abiding citizens by having access to bureaucratic files on them, by electronic eavesdropping on their conversations, by entering their homes, and by opening their mail. In one general clause security operatives were to be allowed to break the law as it became "reasonably necessary to enable them to perform" their work. In case someone had the inclination to blow the whistle on a security operative anyway, Bill C-157 provided for imprisonment up to five years for anyone who discloses any information which could lead to the identification of a security operative. In sum, Bill C-157 was to make legal many of the activities RCMP Security Service personnel found it necessary to perform illegally in order to acquire the information they needed to discredit people and organizations. The police attitude in this connection is illustrated in a 1980 newspaper article which quoted the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as being in favor of both open and legal access to information: he "argued that the police should be legally allowed to use any information about individuals contained in federal data banks .... Although he admits that investigators actually manage to get the information they want, [he] claimed that legalising the process would make police information- gathering more efficient" (58). There is undoubtedly some legal lag in relation to police perceived need for information and their strategies for obtaining it. For example, while there is law pertaining to the recording of verbal communications in Canada, there is no similar law with regard to the recording of behaviour
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with visual technologies. In the United States, the "Federal Privacy Act of 1974 does not address many of the issues raised by recent computer developments. Less than one-fifth of the states have laws requiring written standards for the collection, maintenance, and dissemination of person information, though this number is growing" (59). We can expect that in general, the law as an agency of police legitimacy and power will develop to provide for police use of technological penetration and surveillance. The law will also continue to provide for penetration and surveillance where it is technology that is not quite up to what the police want to do.
Preventative Policing The police vision of order has always focused on the dream of general prevention of wrongdoing, rather than on capturing and prosecuting the individual wrongdoer. At the founding of the modern police system in Britain in 1829, Robert Peel stressed the primacy of prevention via police integration with the people policed. However, the police have traditionally experienced great difficulty in realizing this goal because they have been unable to achieve significant penetration into private space. They have had to remain largely reactive to citizens' calls for service, limiting their proactive work to public streets and places. The development of surveillance technologies, computing technologies, and the law in relation to these, is now moving us closer to the historic mandate of preventative policing. The police are now more capable than ever of entering private space, or mobilizing those who inhabit private space, to focus on their targets and obtain information which is, in their terms, a successful "hit" (60). Whether the concern is national security, private security, or community policing, the emphasis is increasingly on reducing risk and uncertainty by a panoptic vision that anticipates wrongdoing. At least initially, the concern is with categorical suspicion rather than with a specific suspect, as everyone is subject to scrutiny and analysis to see if their data traces can be matched or profiled to confirm suspicions. An important element of this is the presumed deterrent impact created by the belief that technological hardware has the ability to produce hard facts to capture and convict hard criminals. For example, [P]reventing fraud and abuse before they occur is the new objective of the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency (PCIE), established in March 1981 to pr~mote and coordinate the
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activities of inspectors general, many of whom pioneered the use of computer matching. Program administrators hope that the publicity about data searching will deter potential offenders. Public relations efforts may seek to create the impression that the computer's awesome power is all-knowing. This may build upon the mystique surrounding technology in general and computers in particular (61).
The preventative orientation is evident in national security policing. Most Western nations have developed specialized national security police whose sole occupation is the collection of information on groups and individuals who seem to be diffusely troublesome to the state and its version of democratic process. In this system of policing, "the State, as law enforcer, has to rely on itself, as a victim or informant, to identify its enemies" (62). This takes creative ingenuity, both in construing threats and infiltrating the threatening organization to acquire information. Policing entrepreneurs in different countries have been highly successful at this, creating large bureaucracies of what are explicitly information police. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States created a role for itself as a defender of national security, growing from a few hundred to over twenty thousand employees even though it "had not explicit statutory authority for its intelligence-gathering activities" (63). One target of their entrepreneurial activity was the American Communist Party, who were so infiltrated by agents that three of the five people running the party in the early 1960s were reputedly informants, and it was estimated that at one point nearly twenty percent of Party membership was working for the FBI (64). The United States also specializes in using policing agents internationally. The U.S. National Security Agency has an elaborate network of personnel and devices to monitor electronic communications to and from the United States. They are reported to have 2,000 interception posts, with staff, throughout the world, as well as ships, airplanes, and satellites. "Its computer system permits simultaneous monitoring of about 54,000 telephone calls and cables. The agency is beyond the usual judicial and legislative controls and can disseminate its information to other government agencies without a warrant" (65). In Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service grew within a decade from a few loosely connected members to a specialized bureaucracy of 2,000 members. Among their favored targets was the separatist movement in the Province of Quebec, especially the legitimate
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political party which later formed the government of Quebec, the Parti Quebecois. Unlike the ordinary patrol police, whose measures still relate in part to crime control, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service members are measured and evaluated by the number of files they open and the quantity and nature of information on the files (66). They were reported to have expanded files on over 800,000 citizens by the time a Royal Commission on their activities reported in 1981. The preventative orientation is also very evident in private security policing (67). As mentioned previously, in-house and contract private policing has grown to be about equal in manpower to public policing. It cannot be avoided by anyone who participates as an employee, student, consumer, spectator, traveller, etcetera, in organizations where private security agents and their security devices are present. Its ubiquitous nature is related to the trend toward mass private property (e.g. apartments, condominiums, housing estates with common property), and to the fact that many public places are situated in private property (e.g. indoor shopping malls). Private security officers have legitimate and routine access to the private places they police, and are therefore in a particularly advantageous position to gather data and to make full use of the "sensory enhancement" that technological innovations provide. Deriving their powers from the legal powers and privileges of those who own the property they police, private security personnel can control access to the property as well as what people do within its perimeters. The main sanction at their disposal is removing or banning persons from the facility concerned. Most private policing is non-specialized, integrated within other organizational functions. For example, the retaB store clerk is also on the look-out for shoplifting by customers, or theft by fellow employees. Contract security officers function mainly to supervise non-specialist employees in their security functions, ensuring that they are attentive to locked doors, fire safety, suspicious persons, etcetera. They therefore work "within the fabric of social interaction, and members of the communities in which it operates are simultaneously watchers and the watched. They are the bearers of their own control" (68). The definition of what is offensive as well as the remedy is very much in the hands of the property owners and their managers. Private policing tends to be very instrumentally oriented, aimed at reducing threats to the interests of the client. Offenders are those who are diffusely perceived as a
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threat, but the discovery and blaming of offenders is of less concern than establishing security devices which will reduce the threat in the future. Often technological hardware alone will do, such as fake video cameras which make shoppers or employees believe that they are under a constant gaze. The fact that citizens are bound to cooperate with private security personnel and devices if they wish to participate in the organizational sphere in question, means that very extensive and rich data are available to private security agencies. For example, a range of financial information on a citizen is available from a number of sources, including credit agencies, banks, shops, employees, and so on. These data can be plugged into routinely by the public police, as can more loose bits of information. Reciprocity between public and private police sometimes derives from coincident interests, as well as from the fact that many private police are former public police officers, and many public police officers see private security as a lucrative "second career" route. The flow of information is not all one way. Private security personnel can also obtain police information through police officers with whom they have reciprocal arrangements. The extent of this cooperation was summed up by the director of security we interviewed at a large commercial shopping mal1 in Toronto. After noting how easy it was for him to obtain the support of the local public police, he described his relationship with them as "one big police force." Yet there was no doubt in his mind that it was he who effectively control1ed this force, through his control over access to the private property under his jurisdiction (69).
Various public police programs that operate under the rubric of community policing also have a preventative orientation. In community policing the police seek to structure the environment so that citizens can be mobilized to conduct surveillance on each other and feed information to the police which they can make into useful knowledge either directly or with the collation capacities of the computer. This involves special programs such as Neighborhood Watch, in which citizens display a sticker on the front door of their homes indicating that they are receptive to any information about suspicious persons in the community and will pass the information on to the police. It can also involve special hotlines for citizen tips, and at least in the United States, citizen patrols. Police patrol officers are taken off mobile patrol in cars, and the practice of changing patrol areas regularly, to foot patrol in the same area over an extended period of time. This approach is specifically designed so that
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the police can acquire "local knowledge" about local citizens and places, and to normalize conduct beyond the jurisdiction of crime control by connecting citizens with a broad range of social service and control agencies in the community. As in private security arrangements, citizens become watchers as well as watched, and bearers of their own control. As the mesh of social control is thinned, and the net widened, community policing enhances the quantity and range of information available to the police from which to collate data and select particular risks for preventative action. While social control is dispersed and decentralized in the process, it is nevertheless on behalf of central authority and their centralized mechanisms of converting the information into knowledge. Moreover, information collected in one place and time for the purposes of one policing agency - whether it be public community policing, private policing, or national security policing - becomes extrasituational and fixed for possible other uses by other policing agencies at a different time and place. Hence dispersed and decentralized policing systems do not necessarily entail a decrease in centralized state control. They do indicate that surveillance is virtually everywhere. They also indicate that registered information from diverse sources can be called upon by state authorities to assist in assessing what it is a person is up to at any given time or place. Policing the Police
The scientific and technological enhancements which police use to control and administer the lives of citizens are simultaneously useful for internal police administration of police officers. The police officer is very familiar with the discipline of time and place commanded by the various technologies he is expected to use. For example, his actions are traceable by the dispatch and radio communication systems, by vehicle locator systems, and by his signing on and off his patrol car computer terminal and by the information he inputs and draws upon. Generally, the very devices which enable the police officer to keep informed about, and to inform on, the activities of citizens, also allow his supervisors to be informed about him. One nice illustration of this is provided by contemporary police station architecture. Buildings are not only designed in the spirit that the public
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are not trustworthy and must be kept at a distance, but also that police members are only partially trustworthy at some times and in some places. This is revealed in the following description of a recently constructed police building in Ontario, Canada. The basic idea is to control the movement of everyone who approaches and enters the building. The movement of policemen will be controlled by computer access cards. There are eighteen security doors, and only some cards will be programmed for all of them. All entries will be recorded - with card number, date and time - and entries that are unauthorized will trigger an alarm. If an intruder still gains entry, despite cameras outside that can pan, zoom and tilt by remote control, he will find himself in a square corridor looking into full-length security mirrors and more steel-encased tamper-proof cameras. Controlling and monitoring all these cameras and other items, such as electronic door hinges that signal when a door has failed to shut automatically, will be specially trained civilians working 24 hours a day. They will sit in front of a large console with a graphic of the entire building, lights signalling exits and entries, and TV monitors for the 18 security cameras. Certain top-security areas also have sonic intrusion alarms, and the entire outside of the building is lit by high-intensity sodium lights. The windows are all strip, ribbon windows, their double glass tilted at a 45-degree angle to deflect bullets and stones and placed seven feet above ground so they need not be draped. Besides, they are reflective, to make viewing impossible even if apartment buildings are erected around the structure (70).
This article concludes by quoting police spokepersons who state that "The planning is not paranoia, it is realistic," and that "Whatever happens in the U.S. usually comes here in ten years and the time gap is becoming shorter." Clearly, the panoptic vision gazes upon the controllers as well as the controlled. In this case, the police simply buy into what is available. Hotels are now using the same computer card access system for guests, who open their door with the card (the combination can be changed daily or with each new guest), and also use it for access to leisure facilities, for purchasing meals, and all other uses of hotel facilities as a registered guest. Technology has allowed Bentham's original vision of panoptic prison architecture to move closer to reality. The police, as scientific traders in authoritative certainty, naturally buy into it for purposes of police administration as well as the policing of administered society.
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Conclusions The thrust for a complete system of preventative policing has been with us for a long time. For example, as early as the eighteenth century in Germany Johann Peter Frank proposed multifarious means "to prevent evils through wise ordinances" in his six volume System for a Complete Medical Policing. Since the founding of the "new" police in Britain in 1829, there has been a constant thrust to rationalize crime control in Anglo-American jurisdictions (71). It now seems reasonable to conclude that previous illusions are being transformed into realities, as technologies develop to make people and their organizations knowable, and as law develops to authorize the process. Through their scientific, technological and legal methods of penetration/surveillance/information/registration/ knowledge/ administration, the police are the central agents of the knowledge society. This society is also an "administered society ... one in which centralised control of 'knowledge' or 'information' is a medium of domination" (72). We should begin to think of the police not only in the traditional terms of their legal monopoly on the legitimate use of force, but also in terms of the scientific and legal means at their disposal to monopolize the acquisition and use of information about the objects of knowledge they select on behalf of the state or private interest. Of course these are trends, not absolutes. Human beings are not just passive objects of knowledge, but are able to incorporate and convert it to their own use. There is no clearer testimony to this than the ability of police officers to resist and deflect efforts at technological surveillance by their own supervisors (73). One service offered by the private police is to protect the privacy of those who feel they are subject to unwanted surveillance. Often the very same technologies which are used to invade privacy are also a means to protect it. Some technological devices for detecting surveillance are readily available to citizens, such as "fuzzbusters" which indicate the presence of police radar, and debugging devices, although in some jurisdictions these have been made illegal. As Marx and Reichman observe, In any setting of strategic conflict, efforts at systematization (unless kept secret) can be exploited by skilled adversaries ... Altheide (1975) has illustrated how security operations designed to restrict territorial access also can serve as a means for facilitating unofficial entry. The same holds for access to the benefits that systematic data searching is designed to control.
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By learning what prompts a hit or a red flag, knowledgeable violators may take steps to avoid them. Some variables in matching and profiling can be avoided easily (74).
Social control is not one-directional, but fluid at multiple levels of negotiating social order. Most of police knowledge is at the second level of production, already socially constructed by a process they do not control directly. While they may misappropriate this knowledge and use it unwisely or for purposes not originally intended by those who constructed it, they are at least restricted in terms of the accounts and data others give them. Moreover, the growth of information systems is so great that even the bureaucratic and professional custodians of it do not have a good grasp. Fortunately poor grasp curtails the reaches of the system. The police themselves benefit from a public culture image that resembles Orwell's 1984: complete infiltration, total surveillance and perfect knowledge on behalf of a Ministry of Truth that has everything in order. This is far from the truth. "It is in some ways sad and reassuring that we are a long way from having to fear the kind of police we would like to have" (75). For sociologists, it is difficult to gain in-depth access to police organizations to obtain sufficient knowledge about what should be encouraged or discouraged. Police role-specific knowledge accumulates much more quickly than sociological knowledge. What is public knowledge tends to reinforce the view that the police are merely technical agents of science and law, whose occasional deviance from normative paths is attributable either to rotten apples or noble motives, and is in any event the exception that proves the rule. Efforts by sociologists to loosen this view are deeply suspect, because such knowledge of the police is political knowledge. Sociologists are directed to attend to science and technology as an agency of legitimacy or authorization, and as a practical resource or power tool, in the same way they conceive the criminal law in relation to police activity. There is a need to expand inquiry beyond the sociology of "law and order," to the sociology of "law, science and order." This sociology should address itself to the implications of the new laws and technologies of surveillance for the social dimensions of time and space and the related matter of the institution of privacy. Attention should also be given to the amplification effect, whereby police find new ideas for law, science and technology in the very process of using them. Another matter for thought is the implications of what we have said for the interactionist
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tradition of research on the police, which focuses on face-to-face behavior. Since surveillance is often by technological device alone, or with a police officer observing one-way or collating data on his own, and even direct police-citizen transactions frequently involve information that is extrasituational, the stress on face-to-face interaction must be qualified. Giddens has argued that the form of contemporary technocratic society requires social scientists to give greater attention to politics, especially an account of the state. In the study of police work the political can hardly be missed. As we have argued, all policing agencies are political instruments, generating and using knowledge to manage conflicts and control social developments. In addition, the public police are key instruments by which the state demonstrates its political responsibilities in the public culture. Not just by "law and order," but by "law, science and order" the police are simultaneously the representative and representation of the state. The problem with political representation is that it is difficult to know what to encourage or challenge because of what one is not permitted to see. As always, the sociological mandate is to improve vision by showing how the police give official imprint to the preferred versions of reality in the administered society.
Notes and References 1. J. Gusfie1d, The Culture of Public Problems, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 18-19. 2. E.g. J. Hagan, Victims before the Law, Toronto: Butterworths, 1983. 3. P. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Middlesex: Penguin, 1966. p. 126. 4. A. Cicourel, Cognitive Sociology: Language and Meaning in Social Interaction, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973; L. Weider, Language and Social Reality, The Hague: Mouton, 1974. S. E. Bittner, The Functions of Police in Modern Society, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970. 6. D. McBarnet, Conviction: Law, the State and the Construction of Justice, London: MacMillan, 1981. 7. R. Ericson, 'Rules for Police Deviance', in C. Shearing (ed.) Organizational Police Deviance, Toronto: Butterworths, 1981; R. Ericson, Making Crime: A Study of Detective Work, Toronto: Butterworths, 1981; R. Ericson, Reproducing Order: A Study of Police Patrol Work, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982.
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8. K. Lidstone, 'Magistrates, the Police and Search Warrants', Criminal Law Review (August, 1984),449-458. See also Law Reform Commission of Canada, Police PowersSearch and Seizure in Criminal Law Enforcement, Working Paper No. 30, Ottawa: Ministry of Supply and Services, 1983. In this study a panel of judges organized for the purposes of the research were asked to rate a large number of already processed police applications for search warrants and the warrants themselves from several Canadian cities, and found that 59 percent were invalidly issued. 9. Cf. C. Geertz, Local Knowledge, New York: Basic Books, 1983, pp. 213-214. 10. K.D. Knorr-Cetina, 'New Developments in Science Studies: The Ethnographic Challenge', Canadian Journal of Sociology 8 (1983),153-177,162. II. H. Putnam, Reason. Truth and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p.130. 12. R. Reiner, 'The Politicization of the Police in Britain', in M. Punch, (ed.), Control in the Police Organization, Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press, 1983, pp. 126-148. 13. A. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology, New York: Seabury, 1976. 14. J. Habermas, 'Technology and Science as Ideology', in Toward a Rational Society, Boston: Beacon, 1970. 15. Gusfield, op. cit., 1981. 16. A. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, London: MacMillan, 1979, pp. 193-195. 17. Ericson, op.cit., 1981, 1982; M. Punch, (ed.), Control in the Police Organization, Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press, 1983. 18. G. Marx, 'I'll be Watching You: Reflections on the New Surveillance', Dissent (Winter, 1985),26-34. 19. K. Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979, p.168. 20. S. Holdaway, 'Changes in Urban Policing', British Journal of Sociology 28 (1977), pp. 119-137; M. Chatterton, 'The Supervision of Patrol Work Under the Fixed Points System,' in S. Holdaway (ed.), British Police, London: Edward Arnold, 1979. 21. For examples, see Ericson, op. cit., 1982. 22. G. Kelling, 'On the Accomplishments of the Police', in M. Punch (ed.), Control in the Police Organization, Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1983, p. 163. 23. R. Carr-Hill and N. Stern, 'Crime and the Dole Queue', Police (15 April 1983). 24. J. Chan and R. Ericson, Decarceration and the Economy of Penal Reform, Toronto: Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, 1981. 25. J.-P. Brodeur, 'Policing: Beyond 1984', Canadian Journal of Sociology 9 (1984), pp. 195-207,204. 26. E.g. W. Skogan and W. Anthunes, 'Information, Apprehension and Deterrence: Exploring the Limits of Police Productivity', Journal of Criminal Justice 7 (1979), 217-241. 27. Geertz, op. cit., 1983,pp. 171-172.
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28. G. Marx, 'Routinizing the Discovery of Secrets: Computers as Informants', American Behavioural Scientist 27 (1984) pp. 423-452. 29. Ericson,op. cit., 1981, 1982. 30. A. Reiss, 'The Policing of Organizational Life', in M. Punch (ed.), Control in the Police Organization, Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1983. 31. J.-P. Brodeur, 'High Policing: Some Remarks about the Policing of Political Activities', Social Problems 30 (1983), 507-520. 32. Ibid. See also G. Marx, 'Ironies of Social Control: Authorities as Contributors to Deviance through Escalation, Nonenforcement and Covert Facilitation', Social Problems 28 (1981),221-246. 33. cf. G. Bohme, 'The Knowledge-Structure of Society', in G. Bergendal (ed.), Knowledge Policies and the Traditions of Higher Education, Stockholm, 1984. 34. K. Cook, 'Exchange and Power in Networks of Interorganizational Relations', The Sociological Quarterly 30, 62-82. 35. E. Goffman, 'TheInteraction Order', American Sociological Review 48 (1983), 1-17, 17. 36. Marx, op. cit., 1985, p. 27. 37 . Ibid, pp. 30-31. On the importance of space and time for social analysis, see A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society, Cambridge: Polity. 1984. 38. As we have argued, this legitimacy is itself produced in part by the aura, in the public culture, of the professional "scientific" police officer. 39. Bohme, op. cit., 1984. 40. J.-P. Brodeur, 'Legitimizing Police Deviance', in C.D. Shearing (ed.), Organizational Police Deviance, Toronto: Butterworths, 1981. 41. Marx, op. cit., 1981. 42. Ericson, Making Crime, op. cit., 1981, chapter 4. 43. C.D. Shearing and P.C. Stenning, 'Private Security: Implications for Social Control', Social Problems 30 (1983), 493-506; C.D. Shearing and P.C. Stenning, 'Private Security: Its Growth and Implications', in M. Tonry and N. Morris (eds.), Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, Volume 3, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. 44. Marx and Reichman, op. cit., 1984, p. 425. 45. Ibid, p. 427. 46. Ibid, p. 429. 47. Marx, op. cit., 1984, p. 27. 48. Marx and Reichman, op. cit., p. 429. 49. Ibid., p. 438-439. This point has been extensively researched regarding psychiatric prediction of a person's "dangerousness." A survey of this field and up-to-date research is provided in R. Menzies, Doing Violence: Psychiatric Discretion and the Prediction of Dangerousness, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 1985.
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50. Cf. C. Ackroyd et al.. The Technology of Political Control. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1977; D. Campbell. 'Society under Surveillance'. in P. Hain (ed.) Policing the Police. Vo1ume2.1980. 51. M. Slade and W. Biddle. 'Is Big Brother Prone to Error?' New York Times (31 October 1982. cited by Brodeur. op. cit .• 1983. 52. Brodeur. op.cit .• 1983. p. 516. 53. Marx. op. cit .• 1985. p. 26. 54. See generally McBarnet. op. cit .• 1981. 55. Ericson. Making Crime .• op. cit .• 1981; 'Rules for Police Deviance'. op.cit .• 1981; op.cit .• 1982. 56. Brodeur. op. cit .• 1984. pp. 202-204. 57. For an analysis. see S. Wynn and N. Anderson. 'The Useful Myth of Organized Crime'. Paper presented to the American Society of Criminology. Toronto. November. 1982. 58. Brodeur. op.cit .• 1984. p. 197. referring to A. Prefontaine. "Le policeur devrait avoir acces atout ce lui est utile. selon Ie commissa ire de la G.R.C .... Le Devoir (Montreal). February 10.\980. 59. Marx and Reichman. op. cit .• 1984. p. 442. 60. Ibid .• p. 432; Ericson. op. cit .• 1982. 61. Marx and Reichman. op. cit .• 1984. p. 433. 62. Brodeur. op. cit .• 1983. 63. Marx. op. cit .• 1981. p. 237. 64. Ibid. 65. Marx. op. cit .• 1985. p. 27. 66. E. Mann and J. Lee. R.C.M.P. vs. the People. Don Mills. Ont.: General Publishing. 1979. 67. This discussion is derived from Shearing and Stenning. op. cit .• 1981. 1983. 68. Shearing and Stenning. op. cit .• 1983. p. 504. 69. Ibid. p. 503. 70. Z. Kashmeri. Globe and Mail. 1981. 71. S. Spitzer. 'The Rationalization of Crime Control in Capitalist Society'. Contemporary Crises 2 (\979) pp. 187-206. 72. Giddens. op. cit .• 1979. p. 162. 73. Holdaway. op. cit .• 1977; Chatterton. op. cit .• 1979. 74. Marx and Reichman. op. cit .• 1984. p. 443; referring to D. Altheide. 'The Irony of Security'. Urban Life 4 (\ 975). pp. 179-195. 75. E. Bittner. 'Legality and Workmanship: Introduction to Control in the Police Organization'. in M. Punch (ed.). Control in the Police Organization. Cambridge. Mass.: M.I.T. Press. 1983.
THE SCIENTIFICATION OF ARCHITECTURE GORAN WALLEN University oJGothenburg and Chalmers University oj Technology
Introduction The main objective of this report is to point out how architectural and research traditions interact in the development of "modern architecture" in the (western) industrialized world. Although I will take my examples mainly from the Swedish context, a few will be from other countries. In my presentation I will exclude "representational buildings" like churches, opera houses etc., because they are more art and individual influenced than most of the "utility buildings." Most examples will be from housing (1). Briefly, there has been a development from arts and crafts to science between the 1920s and 1950s, in the functionalist period in architecture (also known as "Modernism," or later as the "International style"). The ideals of science correspond to the positivistic research tradition of which the main aim is to distinguish scientific knowledge. (Science is here used in a wide sense including social sciences.) In the 1960s the building process was industrialized. This meant a technification of architecture under the influence of systems theory. Beginning in about 1970, architecture, like all science and technology, was highly criticized and alternative methods in research, such as hermeneutics, were introduced into the study of how people interact with their environments. From an esthetic point of view, architecture also entered into a crisis ("postmodern" eclecticism). In all these changes the profession of architecture changed, too. In this development cognitive and social factors interact, since every phase of research corresponds to certain problems in society. This is evident in housing, school buildings and in industrial architecture. Construction in industries has long been adapted to the processes and the kind of work to be done. This main principle was transferred to housing in the functionalist tradition. Later, (in the 1960s) there were increasing 161
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demands for versatile uses, flexibility and general solutions as characterized by the systems design period. Examples of buildings of this kind include the industrial "hangar," a large shell for protection against the outdoor environment. In the latest period (covering the last 15 years), financial and social factors have been dominant. Industrial buildings are not constructed for a specific activity but as objects for investment such as "industrial hotels," etc. In this period there have also been "countermovements," such as a growing interest in the preservation and renewal of older industrial areas.
Some Methodological Reflections This paper springs from an ongoing project about the development of research in architecture and nursing. These fields have a number of features which are interesting to compare, such as their norms for good research, and patterns of explanation. The same research traditions mentioned above for architecture could also be found in nursing research - like architecture nursing has been professionalized and scientificated. In this paper I concentrate on architecture but use some examples from nursing research to point out the "transdisciplinary" character of the research traditions. In the development of architecture, societal factors are important in defining the kind of problems to be solved and the kind of solutions which are accepted. But this development interacts with an internal development of theory (the different explanations of interactions between man and environment) and a partly cumulative development of methods. If architecture is mainly conceived of as an art, individual architects and their churches, concert halls and other public buildings are put in focus, then the development is far more complex. For example, in Jencks' Modern Movements in Architecture (2), six main traditions and a large number of lower level traditions are examined. An analysis classifying the development of architectural research into periods of styles and paradigms implies a merging of traditional epochoriented art history with a Kuhnian approach to research. There is no doubt that dominating paradigms in different periods exist, but the rest of Kuhn's theory of development is more questionable. There is a great deal of continuity, systems planning and design are, in many, respects, the logi-
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cal conclusion of functionalism. In "ecological architecture" a systems approach is used. In hermeneutic studies of man's experience and interactions there is also a need for "hard facts" to guide interpretations (but their kinds of explanations are different from those of positivism). In the social sciences there are often competing paradigms. Some paradigmatic factors can, then, be seen as parallel or recurrent themes. In most architectural traditions there are different attitudes to utopist architecture, as is described from an ideological point of view in Tafuri's Architecture and Utopia (3). Another kind of thematic analysis (somewhat closer to a periodization) is the scheme of Choy (4). In this scheme city planning includes a "regulative line," based on hygienic and technical norms, as exemplified by the Haussmann regulation of Paris in the 19th century, and a "humanist" line of development, with links to art, crafts, the historical context and the individual, represented for example, by architects around 1900, Camillo Sitte in Austria, Sullivan in USA, William Morris in Great Britain. The third line is "rationalist line" with its peak in functionalist and systems architecture. The humanist line reappears in architectural criticism of the 1970s and 80s. However, the relations between the development in research and society can be seen more clearly in a straightforward periodic analysis framework. This paper is an attempt to make a synthesis of the already existing detailed analyses of the architectural history of the 20th century from the point of view of the theory of science. This implies that I mainly have to use secondary literature such as architectural histories and reviews. But I have also used memoirs, made some interviews, and, recently, been a kind of participant-observer in projects relating to ecological buildings, user participation planning and industrial area renewal.
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The Emergence of Modern City Planning: 1900-20 (5) The expansion of cities in the industrial world brought about a new kind of city planning early in this century. The growth of cities in the 19th century was mainly regulated in terms of building laws and not city planning. Building and city growth were largely dependent on proprietorship. More comprehensive planning was made only for military reasons, and for street and water supply planning, etc. City planning was carried out by military engineers, members of the corps of road and water engineers, and civil en-
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gineers. Very few architects were involved and their tasks were limited to building design. The military planning of cities, however, was outdated by the end of the 19th century, by which time architects were pleading for consideration of esthetic values in city planning. There was also an important need for an integrated approach to city planning and architecture. Architects were the professionals suited to fulfilling this need. The architectural profession was a subject for discussion throughout the Western world around 1900 (6). There was a lot of discussion about the relations between architects and master builders and about relations between art and technology. In most countries art was one of the fundamental features in architect training. In Sweden in 1877 the training of architects was moved from the Royal Academy of Art to the Stockholm University of Technology, the "art" element gradually losing its importance. But the training did not become a totally technical education, since there were also building engineers on the technical side. In Sweden, like in many other countries, the architects on the whole received an inter- disciplinary training in art, technology and the social sciences. City planning was mainly a question of technical aspects such as communications, water and sewage. But the planning of the rapidly growing cities in the early 20th century was mainly centered around fulfilling social needs. The building of cities is no longer only the development of roads and channels of communication, it has developed into planning, for a far-reaching future, both the material and spiritual growth of a society (7).
Facts about and forecasting the population, commerce and industry were needed, this was the root of scientization. Functionalism: 1920s-1950s
The economic crisis after World War I, the severe problem of hygienic conditions in working class areas, and the housing shortage made a need for housing solutions acute all over Europe: "Architecture or revolution." One of the solutions was an architecture of the times, based on research and in a style as matter of fact as industrial design and planning. The functionalist movement in Germany was baptized "Die neue Sachlichkeit" (the new matter-of-fact architecture). The form of a building was to be determined by its function and use. This new approach was
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not quite so influential in the UK or the USA as in continental Europe. At the end of this period (the 1950s and 60s) the functionalist movement also spread to those countries but lost its original social content and became the commercialized "International style" or "Modernism." In an analysis of functionalism, made in the 1970s, this style is described as a "symbol of rational thought": no ornaments, straight lines, geometrical patterns, impersonal and not really rational for the user (8). (Today we may be more inclined to appreciate functionalist architecture.) Its conceptual breakthrough in Sweden was a large exhibition in Stockholm 1930, where some famous architects participated. In 1931 a pamphlet was published with the significant title "Acceptera" (9) (accept modern times, the industrial world). An important factor in the spread of functionalism was that it was introduced by the architectural offices of the Tenant-Owners Society and the Co-operative Union and the Wholesalers' Society, and was used in their new factories, in housing for their employees and for their shops. (These organizations have links with the Social Democratic Party.) Functionalism as an architectural style only lived briefly for the 1930s - and in the next period cognitive aspects were brought into focus. In Germany, and even more so in Sweden, the city planning problems and housing shortage after World War I had led (in the 1920s to 40s) to empirical studies of the social situation of the family: size, income, and extent of work outside the home. Health-related aspects such as available daylight, ventilation, use of space, etc. were also investigated. In the 1940s this was made more explicitly scientific. '''The New Empiricism' (referring to the pragmatic, deadpan approach then current in Sweden)" (10) was born. Intensive studies were made on working movements within a kitchen, in order to determine where to put the kitchen stove, the sink, cupboards, etc. Standards and coordination of furnishings were developed quantitatively, this was an important basis for subsequent rationalization of production. The institutionalization of this research is an indication of support from society: In 1942 a government committee on building research was established, in 1944 a "research institute of home life" was set up, and in 1960 a building research council came into being.
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Positivism The functionalist approach in architecture corresponds to the research tradition of positivism, with the same programmatic emphasis on the superiority of scientific rationality. This does not mean that the (neo-) positivist tradition (which also originated in Germany in the 1920s) explicitly influenced architecture. The paradigmatic examples are often from industrial architecture, assembly lines and from the "scientific management" movement, mainly in the USA. Uno Ahren, one of the most influential spokesmen of functionalism, writes: It is high time to introduce exact methods in the city building. Exact presentations of problems, exact solutions. It is truly curious that a domain of human activities where the conditions are so comprehensible and measureable, has so long managed to escape from becoming a science .... Organize! This is the requirement of today in the field of city building. Organize toughly, radically, as all enterprises must be organized. Get to the bottom of the problems, study the mathematics, statics, and logic of city building (1\).
This view of planning could also be found among researchers in the social sciences and economy, for example Gunnar Myrdal. This view was influenced by a philosophical tradition in Sweden: values are not absolute, therefore the individual must be subordinate to societal values (12). In Sweden the researchers of the 1940s and 50s were explicitly linked to positivism. The positivist tradition had not previously been so widespread in Sweden, but after World War II it strongly affected research, partly through the American social sciences. (Some influential positivist researchers and functionalist architects left Germany for the USA in the 1930s.) Sociologists were (and still are) generally more methodology oriented than architects. By then positivism was no longer only "in the air," but a well-defined theory of science in Sweden. This is especially evident in a relatively recent quotation from one of the empirically oriented architectural researchers of that period, Lennart Holm (criticizing anti positivists) : Functionalism is knowledge. In both generations there has been a manifest disregard of verified and standardizing knowledge, however much it has been directed towards satisfying human functions. Instead interest has turned toward speculation, psychological and sociological theories and sweeping generalizations on cultural history. [... .in functionalism] knowledge has been understood as deep and detailed analyses of precisely the task at hand, its setting and its functions .... The other definition of knowledge is the general, growing and increasingly detailed information about man's. sizes and dimensions, habits and values - and about the numerous but limited variations within this spectrum (\3).
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The positivist approach to research could briefly be described using the following key points (many of them found in the quotations above). One of the main features was the belief in scientific rationality. (Often there is an ahistorical and, in retrospect, anti-humanist approach.) One of the main problems in (the philosophical part of) the positivist tradition was what constitutes scientific knowledge in contrast to "meta-physics" (exemplified by psychoanalysis and Marxism), which it was not possible to verify. The problem as such still exists, but it is now about the relations between science and art, practical experience and official reports. The stress on verification sometimes meant that all concepts had to have an empirical foundation. Research methods had to be precise, and norms for reliability were developed. Researchers must be objective, and personal observations and estimations were to be replaced by measurements. Knowledge had to be expressed in the form of general laws and cause and effect explanations. In the biological sciences (but also in some social sciences) there is also a strong attempt to provide reductionist explanations. Phenomena relating to groups and individuals should be explained in terms of the properties and processes of human organs, then in cells and in the end at a chemical-physical level. In architecture this meant, more generally, that functions and properties could be traced back to the parts of an object. Moving up to a larger scale was considered un problematical , knowledge from different parts, fields of study, etc. could be simply added together. It is on this point that systems theory, Marxism and the hermeneutic tradition have a point against positivism in common: "The whole is something more than the sum of its parts." Certain problems in society could not be traced back to the actors (or at the extreme to the genes) but are structural (organization of production, epidemiological health factors, etc.). In the functionalist architecture often good small-scale solutions (kitchens, buildings) are put together into unsatisfactory wholes (suburbs). The 1920s and 30s was the period of the breakthrough of functionalist ideas and program. Buildings were still mainly manually built except for a few experiments with prefabricated elements (mostly in Germany). The architects combined the new ideas with their earlier skills, and many· houses and some of the first areas were of high quality. In many respects the first half of the 20th century was a peak period for architects. They
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were needed and their architectural programs were very influential. City Planning after World War II (14) Integrated city planning problems were not of interest in the functionalist period, but the two main principles introduced had far-reaching effects. One was the breakup of closed blocks into parallel patterns of houses. The other was sectorization (zoning) which means that a city is divided into different sectors for work, recreation and housing, linked by a traffic system. This came into being partIy in order to improve the environment residential areas were separated from industrial (and other) areas. In today's terms the new housing sites were not far from the city centers. The most well-known architectural experiment in the UK was the "garden cities," a kind of semiautonomous city in which the traditional contrast of city-country was neutralized. Suburban expansion around community centers was tried and in the USA more "soft" social factors, such as networks and neighborhoods were studied. After World War II this influenced Swedish suburban building. But the service centers in the suburbs seldom developed a social life of their own, and were often commercialized. The new housing areas were far from the city centers and had less variety and richness of social life than the older parts of the city, they became dormitory suburbs. Functionalism has often been criticized, but that criticism ought to be directed at this later period of fulfillment of the industrialization of housing when some of the social efforts were lost. In the new period of housing shortage and later expansion around 1960, housing construction was also seen as a means of creating employment and the rationalization of production was put into focus. This brings us to the systems building period. Structuralist and Systems Architecture: the 1960s and 1970s) During the war, new planning methods had been developed (which culminated in the planning of the space program in the USA). This kind of planning began to be applied to architecture in the 1960s. In this new period of housing shortage planning, technical and production problems were in focus. This stage can be referred to as "technification." The same kind of systems planning was also applied to medical care, which was no
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longer held back by the limits of medical research, but rather by costs and efficiency as measured by required number of days of care, the capacity of patients per day, etc. To cope with the increasing costs and lack of experienced nurses and assistants etc., tasks were specialized and divided. In architecture there were a lot of commissions, but the influence of the architects' role had begun to diminish. It was no longer possible to encompass the whole field; technical and financial matters demanded separate sets of expertise. The development of systems thinking had several roots: earlier "positivist" planning was intended to find the optimum solutions to planning, but the result was in many cases suboptimum, what was gained in some areas was lost in others. Different parts of a society interact, changes must be made with this interaction in mind. Systems thinking was also influenced by the mathematical and statistical methods developed in the War: "operations research" and information theories. In military equipment design, discussions were held about "self-contained systems" and interdependent systems. Another root was systems thinking in ecology and biology but this was at first rather isolated. In the International Biological Program (of the 1960s) and some later projects, different systems approaches were combined. Systems planning was tried out in research projects in which the object of research was ecosystems (e.g. a forest; its plants and animals interacting with each other and with soil and climate conditions). In the late 1960s a more comprehensive systems philosophy was established (15). In building and architecture the systems theory simply began with rationalization of production, use of prefabricated elements and construction cranes, and planning methods thus had to be upgraded. Later considerations were of a more principle nature: How do cities grow? What are the relations between the structural patterns of a city and the flows of electricity, water, etc., and the different kinds of communications networks? The systems approaches in architecture are thus of several kinds (16). One important direction is systems planning. In the main, it is a continuation of the functionalist program asking what are the basic demands of function, what kinds of methods and solutions are possible? Weigh the pros and cons and decide how to act. It was later found that there is seldom one best solution: solutions only satisfying certain demands have to
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be accepted. The weighing of alternatives presupposed that they were measurable and compatible (i.e. that all consequences of architectural planning were expressed in financial terms) (17). Despite their weaknesses, large profits could be made from making planning schedules for delivery of goods and the timed contribution of different groups of skilled workers in developing the building from the foundation to the framework, the roof, and the interior. In principle, the most important use of systems thinking is in design theories and systems technology. The break with functionalism is most evident in demands on buildings to be changeable, flexible and general in use. Buildings planned strictly for certain functions become un functional when there are rapid changes in society and user needs. This is clearly expressed in a program (1967) for a new kind of building projecting from the Royal Office of Construction: It should be possible to adapt a building to changing demands which may be made on it.. .. From the experience of the administration, however, it is known that such changes, except for extensions, are mainly in terms of use of space, technical installations and interiors. The technicallife span is thus different for different parts of a building .... Parts with different life spans ought to be kept separate in order to avoid changes in one part requiring changes of a part with a longer lifespan. This is especially true for the relationship between the foundation and the framework of a building on the one hand, and the other parts on the other. The connections between different parts must be systemized so that more permanent parts have simple and general connections to the other parts ( 18).
The most well known examples of construction according to these principles in Sweden are a huge governmental office (the "Garnisonen" block) in Stockholm and buildings for the University of Link6ping. In industry one often finds more stress on general solutions (such as the hangar kind of environmental shelters) than flexible ones. Internationally, the forerunners of systems constructions were the Hertfordshire Schools in Great Britain and the Schools Construction System Development (1964) in the USA (19). In the Scandinavian countries these "schools without walls" (in the late 1960s) were used for educational reforms, breaking up the classes, informal cooperation, educational projects and a problem-solving orientation (20). Systems construction as an architectural style meant a kind of simplified functionalism (included in the concept of the "modern style"): buildings are huge boxes. Inside, there is often an emphasis on the esthetic expression of technical installations, materials used" etc. (The New
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Brutalism). A third direction for systems thinking is studies of urban form and flows of matter, energy, information, etc. Mathematical models are used in computer simulation for communication systems, sewage systems, etc. Relatively little has been done in this area in Sweden, although some studies of energy systems have been made. On mostly a thought-provoking level only there is futurist architecture, which has not been very influential on the pragmatic Swedish architecture. However, this architectural fantasy is typical of that period of growth in western societies. Technical development was glorified, cities were intended to move and grow over the landscape, the portable flat could be transported between "plug-in cities." This kind of architecture is most evident in the British Archigram and Japanese Metabolist groups (21). There is, though, some futuristic architecture and discussion that aims to be a critique of contemporary society. The last movement I will mention is the structuralist movement in architecture. Structuralism has its origin in disciplines such as linguistics and social anthropology. One kind of study is of architectural codes and language from a semiotic point of view. Later, analyses were made of "deeper" structures of myths and worldviews relating to the observable surface phenomena. Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form, and A Pattern Language are the most evident examples of attempts to develop an architectural language and planning system based on the study of societal patterns (22). All the directions mentioned above are often thought of as structuralist architecture although the technical systems design is the most important in actual construction. Common to them all is an analysis of the relationship between a whole, its parts and structures. But systems terminology is often only used metaphorically. The holistic concept and change and growth are stressed to criticize functionalism. Only seldom are explanations, such as control mechanisms, used to go into depth. The corresponding planning principles have only recently been scrutinized. On a global worldview level the systems approach is therefore still often considered "holistic-progressive" while its sometimes antihuman actual uses are concealed by the general financial and planning routines of society.
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A Summary of Systems Theory These different approaches in architecture, city planning, biology and medicine have some common traits: A holistic view of a system, its parts and con/ext is needed. The system must be delimited by determining relevant goals or functions. In some cases a physical border is drawn in order to delimit flows of matter and energy (or to make them measurable). One of the most important aspects is interaction, functions of regulation and control. There are systems properties (synergetics, multiplicator effects) not to be found in separate parts but determined by the structure and interactions. An important kind of structure, assumed or produced, is hierarchical strata. (In ecology and medicine: population, individuals, organ systems, organs, tissues, cells, etc. As mentioned, reductionist explanations in the positivist tradition are an attempt to connect these levels by linking explanations "down" to lower levels, systems theory sometimes has explanations linked upwards to systems functions and structures.) In many planning theories there is, correspondingly, a hierarchical goal structure. Physical planning is divided into levels of national, county and regional planning, local government plans for land use, and building plans. Systems planning and construction holds the same kind of belief in scientific rationality and empirical orientation as positivist/functionalist science and architecture (with the exception of the structuralist analysis of hidden orders). These views of planning have been criticized the last 10-15 years, for instance: decisions in society are often determined by negotiation between the parties concerned and the arguments for and against alternatives are seldom comparable. The concept of rationality was also narrow in housing: effective use of space, minimizing internal transports and movements. A Time of Crisis and a Search for Alternatives: the 1970s and 80s) From the late 1960s until about 1980 scientification and technification were highly criticized. The protests and counter-movements included pleas for preservation of old buildings, a return to the land, etc. On the research side, interest has grown in action research and about user participation in planning. Hermeneutic traditions then continued the semiotic
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studies of meaning but were expanded to study how man experiences architectural space such as streets and squares, and how social activities create "socially constructed" working areas, bypasses, etc. The same kind of research orientation is evident in nursing research in order to differentiate nursing research from traditional positivist medical research. In the latter, man is seen as a biological being, sickness as a disturbance of function in the affected organs, explanations are reductionistic. Nursing research, on the other hand, is intended to be patient-oriented, seeing the patient as an experiencing, participating subject, it is meant to be a holistic discipline closely related to nursing practice. The similarities to architecture with regard to man are quite evident. The hermeneutic approach in architecture is parallel to nursing research - being oriented toward cultural influence and the individual (inhabitants' or patients') experiences and participation. Functionalist and systems architecture supported the development towards a high technology society. This is the main point of criticism in the search for an ecological alternative in architecture. But, on the methodological side, there is a continuation in the use of systems thinking. Direct links between systems technology and ecology could be found in projects about energy systems. Howard and Geddes are forerunners whose theories have been revived today. Geddes developed a kind of planning with features later known as systems thinking and ecology. To a certain extent architects adapting to nature and interested in "organic growth" such as Frank Lloyd Wright, could be considered among them (but many who draw biological analogies, like the metabolists, are technological futurists). There is also criticism not only of architecture but also of science in society and of scientific methods in this period. In several research approaches (Marxism, hermeneutics, Kuhnian paradigm analysis, sociology of research) objectivity in research is questioned and the influence of the social context is pointed out. This has led, however, to a relativistic view of knowledge which affects the intellectual disciplines - architecture, research and education - but will never change profit-making or industrial production. Since building construction went large-scale, the customers are not the users. This fact and Marxist criticism influenced attempts with user participation in planning. In paradigmatic analyses, the architect's role as an artist, technician and social scientist are discussed.
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The view of man and society is also articulated. A self-critical period has begun. The earlier semiotic studies of architectural language often coincide with an interest of the same technological kind as in computer programming (23). There are two very early more context-oriented studies of how man experienced a city, and spaces, such as streets and squares: The Image of the City, by Lynch (24) and The Concise Townscape, by Cullen (25), both written in the very early 1960s. The relations between physical and social milieu were discussed in Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities (26). These books were widely discussed but had no real effects on research or architecture until the architectural crisis had also been followed by a crisis in society in 1970s. In Sweden they were discussed in an architectural dissertation in 1974 (27). In reports from conferences in architectual psychology in 1977 (28) and 1980 (29) further changes could be found: from the user-inhabitant experiences to interaction with and "appropriation" of the environment. (Social activities redefine and affect the physical environment.) This gives us hermeneutic and Marxist-oriented theories of urban life. Other alternative research traditions are humanistic, human ecology or interdisciplinary approaches. The hermeneutic tradition is not the most widespread alternative but very typical of the new efforts to analyze architectural design, user experience and participation. I refrain from giving a more in-depth summary of Marxism. It is similar to positivism in its matter of fact view, its social analytic perspective is like systems theory, and its analysis of ideologies is closely akin to that of hermeneutics. (The section below contains some further aspects of Marxism in its relation to hermeneutics.) An Overview of the Hermeneutic Tradition Hermeneutic means interpretation of the significance of human experiences, feelings and ways of life in all shapes: chat, poetry, art, architecture and cultures. Like structuralism there is an effort to find "deeper" structures behind the activities of daily life. Interpretations are of many kinds, from decoding conventional symbols to understanding and feeling insight. Interpretation could also mean following and performing from a given tradition of ~usic (or putting a
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specific case in relation to legal practice and precedents). Meta-artistic interpretations are of special interest in architecture and 20th century art. One mode of understanding the latest (fifteenth), much discussed but not so widespread, style of "postmodern architecture" is to interpret it as a discussion in the language of architecture itself, about the architectural form: therefore there are "quotations" and mixtures of older styles (30). The interpretation is dependent on the researchers' frames of references (preconceived attitudes, interests, cf. Marxist class interests). In interpretation comparisons must be made of parts, wholes and contexts (cf. systems theory). Although the cultural and historical perspective is important, hermeneutics is often oriented to the individual. In simplified form, hermeneutics is about subjects, positivism about objects, systems theory about objects interacting and Marxism about classes, society and systems.
A Summary of the Development of Architectural Research Research in architecture is, as seen above, strongly influenced in its direction and scope by societal factors, and in problem solving approaches and methods by other disciplines. The changes in society make scientific knowledge outdated as quickly as progress in science does. It is easy to point out the drawbacks of functionalism and systems architecture, but these ought to be considered in relation to the problems of their times. However, the development of a research field is not entirely socially determined. In the development from functionalism/positivism to systems design/systems theory and then to Marxist and hermeneutic criticism and alternatives, there are changes in architectural styles and, parallel to these, "paradigmatic" periods of architectural science. In this it is (at least retrospectively) possible to find general traits of internal development in architectural research. The explanations of the interaction between man and environment are gradually more complex (31). The paradigms are not "incomparable" and there are also traits of a cumulative development of knowledge, especially in terms of methods. The different research approaches are no longer seen as competing, but related to different kinds of problems. Architectural form is related to many "researchable" factors, such as use and function, materials, construction, production, economics, cultural
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history, and societal factors. Different periods in architectural practice and research can be described by the domination of one or a few of these factors. The scientification is thus established in several steps: Problems in society are approached with borrowing from other research fields. The influence of positivism (in the 1920-30s) is mostly on an ideological level. (A Zeitgeist of rationality and socio-technical pragmatism.) In a second wave of positivism (in the 1950-1960s) the worldviews and ideals of science have turned into methodologies and internal research development. In the 1960s there was again a housing problem in society. The bottleneck was now production. Different research and planning methods were also again borrowed from other fields. In the end of this period a more comprehensive systems approach was formulated. The common theoretical features of systems planning, systems analysis of processes and regulation, and ecology were made evident. Systems theory is thus not "applied" to architecture. Systems planning and design is a part of the making of a general systems theory. This period implied a technification of architecture and architectural research. The most important effects of research in architecture were the foundations for standards, modular systems and the new planning methods necessary in large scale production. The boring results in terms of housing and, not least, the economic crisis as a consequence of the expansion phase of society in itself, led to protests from people, actions for preservation of old houses and the eclectic quasi-historical mixture of architectural styles in "postmodern architecture." There are only a very few examples of postmodern architecture in Sweden, and none are in housing. There is no main architectural tradition of style (but meta-architectural quotations of older style elements). In other countries, especially France, a classicist and conventionalist variety of postmodernism has emerged in housing as well, the main examples of this being Krier and Bofill (32). Ordinary apartment housing is built in the style of old palaces. (Compare to similar traits earlier in the USSR.) This is paralleled by an increasing interest in conventions and norms in architectural research. Internal criticism from the Marxist and hermeneutic traditions point to external influences on the research process, methods and systems of criteria. The scientific foundation is put to question, the architect's role is discussed. These traditions have, of course, an older origin but they are actualized by the architectural development.
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Especially in the case of hermeneutics this (together with similar developments in other disciplines) has led to an improvement of methods and theories, thus a "hermeneutic paradigm" seems to appear. The crisis can be characterized by a lack of confidence of research, although the planning and design methods from the earlier periods are used by the practitioners (but their limitations are better considered now). The alternatives in Sweden today are reflected in the attempts to deepen and renew research, in seeing the architects as allied with the users instead of the commissioners, and in revival of artistic design. But it must be stressed that research in modern architecture is necessary. This is partly because, since there are no strong architectural traditions, research has a role in maintaining and mediating practitioners' knowledge. An important task is to scrutinize traditions and routines in research and practice. In order to do this, the practitioners' knowledge must be articulated and systematized. The research must also include comparative studies of traditions and cultures and make studies from societal and long term perspectives. Architectural research in a wide sense is then only partially of immediate interest for construction purposes. Most of the direct use of research lies in the development of new methods. But, in the next phase of use, architectural research contributes to the practitioner's self-reflection, definition of tasks, etc. and to the general view of architecture in society. Society- and user-oriented research is an important part of research in the (technical) universities but is often considered of only secondary importance for the architects. (It is mostly used by authorities for new planning regulations, etc.) Interdisciplinary research has had only limited success, even the holistic systems theory research uses simplifications, delimitations and theoretical perspectives. Nor is research successfully used for design - it is a hindsight kind of analysis. Instead, architectural design begins with sketches of the final form. Architecture is definitely not only the application of architectural research, there are of course, many tasks of a scientific nature: user studies, development of planning methods etc. The main task - an integrated design - is something more than research. The relationship of research to practice then, is one of interdependence not application. In the planning of research programs in the building research council, however, efforts are made to support an emerging interest in research in architectural design.
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I am doubtful about the possibility of expanding the scope and methods of research so it could provide a foundation for all aspects of the architectural practice. In several reports the losses of personal, intuitive and skill bound knowledge through the computerization of architecture and other fields on a scientific basis are discussed (33). But research as an activity is also dependent on the same kinds of personal knowledge, there are no self-evident ways of obtaining reliable and relevant knowledge. Ideology and Competing Professions
Architectural research was considered to be of importance for the practitioner-architect but developments in society and research have led to a specialization, where other groups gain more. In society new customer-contractor relations have emerged, there is emphasis on finance and large-scale planning. The development of technical and economic research has reached far beyond the architect's scope. The peak period of architecture was a period of integrated design. When architects tried to compete with planners, building engineers and sociologists they lost their unique areas of competence. Scientific knowledge can be made reliable and general only at the price of limited range. Totally integrated knowledge is impossible to achieve. Integrated design is possible only in specific cases because society, use, technology, etc. change. There are no permanent solutions. Full-scale experimental building is a necessary link between research and practice which is very much neglected in Sweden today. But research and technology are not only means of improving housing, they have ideological functions. The attempts to design houses on a primarily functional basis, and the sometimes explicit denial of esthetic considerations by the functionalists was, in fact, an esthetic decision (34). Correspondingly, the functionalist movement not only used research but also legitimated both research and the architect as a professional. In the post World War II building period, esthetic values were also tied to some functional features. Dependence on new materials, new modes of construction, etc. is mirrored in the "new brutalistic style." "Brutalism tries to face up to a mass-production society, and drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work" (35). The systems production mode made architectural research an "imme-
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diate productive force" (36). But with this development and the introduction of the general contractor system, the architect's position was weakened. The introduction of systems analysis in architecture may be seen as an attempt to strengthen the architect's bargaining position against the new kinds of commissioners: local governments, committees, multinational companies (37). It is interesting to note that the new planning system of the Royal Office of Construction was developed as a reaction to severe criticism from the Ministry of Finance in Sweden regarding bad calculations of building costs (38). But as architecture becomes a part of production its ideological function fades away. There is also "architecture without architects." Architects can no longer fulfill the primary demands of financial and technical considerations. The integrated design approach is not sufficient, and the base of knowledge is split up. Esthetic factors are considered of secondary importance. It is also on these conditions that the postmodernist style, with its mirroring of earlier architectural traditions, is to be understood. The crisis in architecture has led to a lot of self-criticism about architecture in society but this is mostly an attempt, on the ideological level, to avoid external criticism (39). Architectural research of an ideological-critical nature (Marxist - hermeneutical - self-reflective) as sketched above is of course in conflict with the commissioners' interests. In this latest period, the pace of building has been cut down to a minimum, but the architect's role has also diminished for other reasons. Their growing social interests (especially in architectural research) were not of use to the customers, nor were their internal debates and criticism. As mentioned above the whole field has become more dependent on specialized technical and financial knowledge. The architects in Sweden had partly given up architecture as an art in order to be scientific and efficient. The architects' internal professional norms for good design were replaced by (governmental) research based norms for building and by financial factors (40). Now, on the other hand, there are - especially among architectural students - unrealistic efforts to be pure artists and to deny research. There is a corresponding scepticism among practitioners. In architectural schools credentials of successful practice are in many cases preferred to scientific credentials for professorships. The scientification and technification of architecture has thus led to
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an architecture determined by technical and financial matters. The new planning methods (and purchasing system) prevent successive adjustments of design during the building phase. The architects have then lost an important feedback of knowledge and have to rely on formalized and research based knowledge (41). Their original tasks are considered secondary. The architect has partly been de-professionalized and there is a long way to go to regain their own competence and interest from the customers of architectural design. Notes and References I. This paper has been sponsored by the Research and Development Unit of the Swedish National Board of Universities and Colleges. I would like to thank Prof. Harriet Ryd and Prof. Bjorn Linn for their valuable comments. 2. Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture, Oxford: Penguin Books, 1973. 3. Manfredo Tafuri, Arkitektur och utopi, Stockholm: R. University of Technology / Architecture section, 1982. An abridged translation of Architecture and Utopia, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1975/1977. 4. Francoise Choy, The Modern City Planning in the 19th Century, London: Studio Vi8ta, 1969. My short review is based on the application of the scheme in Bjorn Linn, Storgardskvarteret, Stockholm, Governmental Institute of Building Research, 1974, pp. 68-108. 5. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of the Cities, New York: 1938, and Hans Bjur, "Stadsplanering kring 1900," Gothenburg: T.D. diss. Chalmers University of Technology, 1984. 6. Anna Ostnas, Arkitekterna, Gothenburg: T.D. diss. Chalmers University of Technology, 1984, pp. 103-118. 7.Ibid., p. 117: the quotation is from an editorial in the periodical Arkitektur May 1908. 8. Per G. RAberg, Funktionalistiskt genom brott, Stockholm: Norsteds fOrlag, 1972, pp. 292-331. 9. Gunnar Asplund et. aI., "Acceptera", Stockholm: Tidens Forlag 1931 (a facsimile print 1980). 10. Jencks, op. cit., 1973, p. 247, note 3. 11. Uno Ahren, 'Synpunkter pit stadsbyggandet', in Byggmiistaren. op. cit., 1972, pp. 99-104, note 9. 12. Staffan Kallstrom, Viirdenihilism och vetenskap. Uppsala.filosofin i forskning och samhallsdebatt under 1920 och 30-talen, Gothenburg: Publ. from University of Gothenburg, diss. 1984. 13. Lennart Holm, 'Funktionalism ar kunskap', in Arkitektur, (Sept. 1976), 12-13. 14. Nils Ahrbom, Arkitektur och samhiille, Stockholm: Arkitektur fOrlag, 1983, pp. 92-154.
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15. See for instance Ludwig v. Bertalanffy, General System Theory, New York: George Braziller,1968. 16. Francis Ferguson, Architecture, Cities and the Systems Approach, New York: George Braziller,1975.
17. Ibid., pp. 80-87. See also the review of criticism in Bryan Lawson, How Designers Think, London: The Architectural Press, 1980, pp. 56-57. 18. Nils Ahrbom, 'Svensk strukturalism', in Anders Ekholm et. aI., Utvecklingen mot strukturalism i arkitekturen, Stockholm: Building Research Council, 1980, p. 168. 19. Jencks, op. cit., 1973, p. 76, note 3. 20. Jadwiga Krupinska and Per Olsen, 'Skolans form under 40 ar', Arkitektur 3 (1983), 31-36. 21. Peter Cook et aI., Archigram, London: Studio Vista, 1972; and Ekholm, op. cit., 1980, pp. 57-84, note 19. ' 22. Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ Press, 1964, reprint 1970; Alexander, A Pattern Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. For a further overview see Geoffrey Broadbent et aI., Signs, Symbols and Architecture, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1980. 23. Tafuri, op. cit., 1982, Ch. 7, p. 42, note 4. 24. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960 (15th printing 1979). 25. Gordon Cullen, The Concise Townscape, London: Architectural Press, 1961, rev. ed. 1971. 26. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life ofGreat American Cities, London: Penguin Books, 1961. 27. Bjorner Torsson, Staden som rum och gestalt, Stockholm: T.D. mimeo. diss. R. University of Technology, 1974. 28. Ramon Wah lin (ed.), Forskningslaget inom arkitektur-psykologin 1977, Stockholm, Building Research Council, Report R 56:79, 1979. 29. Pehr Sallstrom (ed.), Gtira och veta vid miljtigestaltningen, Stockholm, R. University of Technology/Architectural section, 1981. 30. Charles Jencks The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, London: Academy editions, reved. 1978. 31. For a more straightforward "evolutionary" view of scientific development see Franz Wuketitz (ed.), Concepts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology, Dordrecht: Reidel Publishers, 1984. 32. Jencks, op. cit., 1978, pp. 108-109, note 32. 33. Bjorn Linn Att bygga po kunskap, Gavle: unpublished report from Governmental Building Institute, 1983. See also Bo Goranzon (ed.), Datautvecklingens filosofi, Stockholm: Carlsson & Jonsson BokfOrlag, 1983. 34. Raberg, op. cit., 1972, pp. 292-298, note 9.
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35. Jencks, op. cit., 1913, p. 251, note 3. The quotation is from Architectural Design, (April 1951). 36. Gernot Bohme, 'The Knowledge-Structure of Society', in Gunnar Bergendal (ed.), Knowledge Policies and the Traditions of Higher Education, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell Int., 1984, p. 1. 31 Ferguson op. cit., 1915, p. 2, note 11. 38. Ahrbom, op. cit., 1980, p. 166, note 19. 39. Tafuri, op. cit., 1982, pp. 31, 54, note 4. 40. Ostniis, op. cit., 1984, pp. 209ff., note 1. 41. Ostniis, op. cit., 1984, p. 142, note 1.
KNOWLEDGE FORM AND SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY: EARLY EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY AND THE MARINE BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY * ANGELA METROPULOS O'RAND Duke University
The idea of scientification is founded on conceptions of the growing hegemonic status and structural impact of the sciences beyond their own boundaries and across diverse spheres of thought and activity. This view at times presumes that the modern natural sciences, as we ordinarily conceive of them from our historical vantage point, have prior, relatively homogeneous and almost immutable cognitive and social organizations that, in turn, have recursive effects on social structure. That is, it tends to emphasize 1. the impact of "official science" inherited from the past and in states of "objectification" and "incorporation" (1) in the wider society, 2. the undifferentiated form of scientific knowledge (e.g., experimental design), and 3. the common, as opposed to specific, social and cultural conditions (e.g., laboratory structure) favoring the development and extellsion of particular fields of knowledge. However, the organization of the pursuit of scientific knowledge and the demarcation of the boundaries of fields of scientific knowledge production have always been problematic and socially contingent, particularly within the context of the "knowledge society" (2). This can be demonstrated in the case of laboratory-based experimental biology and its development in the U.S. context at the turn of the century. The demarcation of experimental biology from natural history, the consolidation of institutional and organizational resources for the extension of the new biological knowledge, and the establishment of its cognitive authority within the rapidly growing discipline emerged from the interplay between the form of the new knowledge and the institutional setting(s) for the conduct of 183 G. Bohme and N. Stehr (eds.), The Knowledge Society, 183-202. © 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
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biological science at this time. The "laboratory" provided the organizational form for this development since it brought together the necessary study materials, physical structure and scientists to develop the new experimental craft and to transmit it to students. As such, agricultural experiment stations, medical schools, and marine laboratories emerged as strategic contexts for scientific development (3). The latter context, which has received the least attention of the three from historians of science, played a particularly significant role in the introduction to the United States of experimental biology from research centers in Europe and England. The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in particular, served as an organizational and intellectual "center" for the introduction, development and dissemination of the new biology to American scientists between 1890 and 1910. Its status as a center derived from its strategic situation as a productive site for experimentation on fresh live materials by scientists as well as regular collaboration and communication among institutionally dispersed scientists and students interested in the new knowledge. It became a summer research school for biologists in the tradition of the Naples (Italy) Stazione Zoologica founded sixteen years earlier in 1872 by Anton Dohrn, where several of the MBL'smore influential early summer researchers themselves had studied and worked (4). And its success in promoting the new biology contributed to the shift in scientific influ~ ence in areas of biology away from Europe to the United States. The following historical case analysis of this particular laboratory demonstrates how a modern biological science emerged in the context of a specific form of social organization. The form of the new knowledge will be reviewed first. The strategic history of the MBL will then be examined, especially in its relationship to the broader institutional environment of biological science in this period. Finally, the implications of this historical case for the relationship between scientific knowledge and scientific organization will be evaluated.
The Scientification of the Study of Life During the latter part of the nineteenth century in the United States, the natural sciences were developing as disciplinary and professional organizations. The "fundamental sciences" were physics, astronomy, chemistry,
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the earth sciences (botany and geology) and zoology (the last three also fell under the rubric of "natural history"). Each had a distinctive history to this point in its relationship across national contexts to other social enterprises (including industry, higher education and the state) and its own development as a discipline. The study of living organisms at this time was undergoing especially rapid transformations, both as a scientific pursuit and as an organized profession inside and outside, the universities. Scientifically, the discipline was expanding beyond descriptive, natural and evolutionary history to a laboratory-based experimental, functional biology (5). Organizationally, employed biologists were dispersed. College and university departments, medical schools and agricultural research stations were employing growing numbers of biological scientists to expand science education, while private and public museums and gardens (e.g., the Smithsonian) and government agencies (e.g., U.S. Coast Survey and U.s. Fish Commission) continued from an earlier time to be alternative occupational contexts for the transmission and application of biological knowledge. The rapid expansion of biological science employment across organizations and institutional sectors reflected the broader changes taking place within the American context, i.e. a highly diversified and rapidly expanding system of higher education (6), a vigorously growing and differentiating private sector (7), and a newly developing state (federal) structure (8). Then, as now, most biological scientists were not employed across diverse organizational domains to produce new biological knowledge. Rather they were engaged in the transmission and application of "official" biological knowledge in the service of textbook instruction, medical training, agricultural technology, and state environmental accounting and archiving. These activities and the resources allocated to them did not serve automatically to promote the organized production of new "scientific" biology being promoted by a few scientists recently trained in the British and German laboratory traditions. Neither did they serve to consolidate cognitive authority within the changing discipline. The ascendance of modern experimental biology in the U.S. is associated with the research programs, disciplines, and organizational entrepreneurship of a circle of individuals whose significant research was tied at one time or another (if not throughout their careers in several instances) to the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), in par~icular, and
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to other similar institutions (e.g. Cold Spring Harbor). Central to this circle were C.O. Whitman, E.B. Wilson, E.G. Conklin, F.R. Lillie, J. Loeb, T.H. Morgan and R.G. Harrison, who were all exposed directly to the European and British experimental traditions at the Naples Stazione Zoologica and other European laboratories and who were influenced scientifically by the spirited controversy between Roux's mechanistic materialism (Entwicklungsmechanik) and Driesch's vitalism taking place at Naples and other European laboratories (9). The "new" biological science was largely exempt from the religious, social and scientific controversies swirling around evolutionary theory. It did not concern itself, as natural history did, with questions of speciation and interspecies descent, but focused on highly specific suborganismic processes ranging from circulation of the blood (10) and the chemistry of digestion (11) to the cellular development of the embryo and the nerve (12). The difference in disciplinary focus between natural history and morphology, on the one hand, and experimental biology and physiology, on the other, was not trivial. The primary interests of the latter research program separated it from the often volatile disputes over evolution and committed it to an agenda that was more "scientific" than "learned," to use Bourdieu's distinction (13). The scientific focus on minutiae and micro processes promoted the active production of new highly specific knowledge, while natural history represented learned speculation based on disputation and rereading, not on productivity. And morphology and taxonomy, like natural history, yielded little more than the descriptive classification (and reclassification) of life forms (14). Between 1890 and about 1910 the experimental researchers sought to unify and redefine biology by reordering assumptions about appropriate research problems and research practices. Generally, they recognized that biological phenomena had both "proximate" and "evolutionary" causations (15). But they pursued the former source of causation and chose the cell (initially) as the primary object of study to answer questions regarding the "substance of life" and the "causes of development and differentiation." They moved over this period from simple manipUlative and disruptive experimental techniques (that answered "what if..." questions) to more complex controlled experimental approaches that tested specific alternative hypotheses. The emphasis on development (and regeneration) at the cell level meant that the special program was in the European em-
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bryology tradition with a specific concern for cell-lineage. As such, the new biological knowledge was distinctive in its emphasis on proximate causes of development, the suborganismic level of analysis, the development of specific interventive techniques and instrumentations, and the requirement for the laboratory as a research and training context. Writing in 1899, T.H. Morgan expressed both the idea of the emergent research program and the social identification of its circle of advocates distinguishing themselves from earlier and contemporary natural historians: "the younger investigators" base their interpretations on the assumption that when a change takes place a sufficient cause for the change is to be sought in the organ itself and in the external conditions surrounding the organ. They are not content to rest their "explanations" on "the phyletic origins" of the changes. It is not necessary to deny the theory of descent, but it is unsafe and in many cases unscientific to base "causal explanations" on the imaginary line of ancestors (16).
The reductionist program viewed the living organism as a "commonwealth of cells," which were considered the ultimate independent units of organization, structure and function (17). The controlled manipulation of the cell's immediate environment was thus expected to yield causal explanations of life processes. Matching the "right technique" with the "appropriate materials" was the central skill to be learned in this program. Instrumentation (achromatic and oil immersion lenses and the apochromatic objective) was becoming more sophisticated but the techniques of primary value consisted of human capital, i.e., craft-like skills in materials selection and experimental manipulation. One of the great boosts in the progress of this research program had come in the 1870s in Europe when Boveri discovered the capacity of sea urchins during the summer months to make available large quantities of eggs that could be easily fertilized for the study of cell development. After this relatively technical advance in acquiring the right materials for problem solution, research on developmental processes proliferated throughout the world testing the competing theories of development of the day: the mosaic theory of Roux which postulated a prior differentiation of cytoplasm and nuclear material and the epigenetic or emergent theory of differentiation attached to Driesch and to Schwann and Schleiden, which asserted that later differentiation in the embyro could not be traced to prior organization in the protoplasm. Simple experi-
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ments and detailed observations of stages of development of cells (and occasionally, limbs) were applied to these questions (18). The biologists who conducted their research at the MBL during these years were interested in these questions. They came to the laboratory with their students during the summer months when the materials were plentiful and when they could interact and consult with each other. One of them, E.B. Wilson, who had visited laboratories at Cambridge (England), Leipzig and Naples, set about a research program to study the "real process" of development by beginning with the ovum. He started with sea urchin eggs by modifying ("tinkering with") them in early stages of development and ended up noting that the final result was unaffected. This led to a tentative support of the epigenetic theory. He compared several animals and published these studies extensively over his career (19). T.H. Morgan was more strongly committed to the epigenetic theory in this period in part because he had worked with Driesch at Naples. He especially advocated the extensive manipulation of materials, e.g. sticking eggs, separating blastulae and the heteroplastic grafting of cells. These approaches were well suited, he believed, for determining the proximate external influences on development. Development of the cell under varying stimuli seemed to depend on observable "physiological contractile processes." These processes could not be explained by the "prior" organization of the cell, but by the interplay of the cell and its immediate environment. Moreover, Morgan made the strong case that intrusive methods and "abnormal" conditions could reveal more about the causes of normal development than mere passive description (20). The research of others in this circle (C.O. Whitman, E.G. Conklin, R.G. Harrison and J. Loeb) largely paralleled the concerns of Wilson and Morgan. This group published extensively on the stages of development, the manipulation of living materials to disrupt "normal" development and, thereby, to "understand" it, and the comparison of these processes across animals and cell types. Historians of science disagree over the "revolutionary" nature of the new research program although the recognition that a change occurred is without dispute. The experimental program has been characterized by Allen as the "revolt from morphology" inaugurated at the MBL with the translation of Roux's Manifesto in 1894. As such, it represented a qualitative shift and reorientation of biological science that signalled the rise of
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modern biology. Other historians, however, view the emergence in less revolutionary terms. Maienschein, for example, prefers to place the experimental approach in biology on a developmental continuum that began with passive observation which, in turn, evolved into "systematic" classification and comparison culminating in controlled experimentation as an outcome consistent with trends in biology over the previous half century (21). In either case, a new form of biology took hold and experimental methodology assumed a hegemonic status in the discipline.
The Laboratory and the Universities The new form of biological knowledge at this time in the U.S. history was launched within the particular setting of the MBL for several reasons. It was not inevitable that the new knowledge carried over from Europe should be immediately transplanted or transplantable either to this organization or to the research universities that had been established over the previous decades. But the physical facilities and the "social makeup" of the colleges and universities were, in fact, obstacles to the immediate establishment of experimental research programs and plants. Also, the circle of biologists interested in the new program worked in many quite different settings over the period, e.g. Wilson at Bryn Mawr and then at Columbia, Morgan at Hopkins and then Bryn Mawr, Lillie at Chicago, Michigan and Vassar, Conklin at Ohio Wesleyan, Northwestern and Pennsylvania, and Loeb at Chicago and then California. The MBL provided the physical plant, live materials, and human intellectual resources to train biologists to "modern" biology and to advance the new discipline. However, its origins as an organization were more tied to natural history and "amateur" science (22). During the two decades before the founding of the MBL, three separate efforts had failed to build a permanent research station in the same vicinity near the waters around Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The first was Louis Agassiz's Seaside School of Natural History (1873-74) on Penikese Island, which attracted mostly amateur naturalists from the Boston-Cambridge area. A second, quite different early effort was made by the U.s. Fish Commission under Spencer F. Baird to attract academic biologists to the government fisheries laboratory in the area and convert it into a national research center. But the orientation of the Commission towards commercially useful research in
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natural marine c1,lltures did not have wide appeal to the scientific community. The third effort, and the immediate precursor to the MBL, was the Annisquam Laboratory of the Boston Society of Natural History. This laboratory, like Agassiz's, appealed to natural history buffs and to public school and small college teachers interested in collecting botanical and zoological materials for their courses. Annisquam lasted from 1880 to 1886 but could not continue due to insufficient resources. The MBL, founded in 1888, was a scientific and professional transformation of the earlier organizational forms. It openly identified itself with "biology" (the word had been coined only a decade earlier by T.H. Huxley) as opposed to natural history in its corporate name. Moreover, it consciously asserted its autonomy by forming a private nonprofit corporation of biological scientists, untied to the state, or a particular university, or local amateur society (23). Shils has characterized the MBL as merely a dependent adjunct to the universities whose scientists visited and worked intermittently at the laboratory (24). This description of the laboratory at the time of its founding is based on the strong assumption that the universities were both inclined and equipped to advance experimental biology themselves and that they were the "epistemic" centers for the basic sciences, in general, and for the new experimental biology in practice. Rather, at the time of its founding and during the first two decades of its existence, this organization served as a cognitive center on which university researchers depended. It was a "research school" in its own right, in the sense that Geison refers to Michael Foster's Cambridge Laboratory of Physiology (25). Indeed, the scientific genealogy of some of the early researchers at the MBL (T.H. Morgan, E.B. Wilson, E.G. Conklin among others) can be traced to Foster directly (in the case of Wilson) and indirectly via Henry Newell Martin who studied with Foster and T.H. Huxley at Cambridge and later directed the first American biological laboratory in a university at Johns Hopkins beginning in 1884 where Morgan, Conklin and Harrison received their Ph.D.'s. But at Hopkins and other universities, descriptive and structure-oriented biology still prevailed as course content. And, more importantly, at most of these universities access to living biological materials and laboratory facilities for experimental investigation was seriously limited (26).
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Disciplinary Agency
The MBL, on the other hand, came to represent the experimental and functional approach to the living organism. The form that the MBL took was not merely as an interinstitutional adjunct to university departments but as an autonomous disciplinary agency, whose social organization was based in large measure on the kind of knowledge to be pursued laboratory-based experimental functional biology. I use the term disciplinary agency to represent scientific organization at the research front at that time in that place and to emphasize the importance of the research front for the emergence of the MBL as a particular kind of scientific organization distinct from the museum or university department. The laboratory facility, the immediate access to living organisms, and the proximate interaction of researchers experimenting on the same materials or pursuing related problems were intrinsic features of the laboratory tied to the pursuit of biological knowledge. The university departments, medical schools, and agricultural research stations tied to land grant institutions, on the other hand, were comprised of specialists with disparate interests constrained by other primary purposes besides original research. For example, laboratory science and pre-clinical education in the medical schools continued largely to serve a professional rather than a scientific purpose since the latter increased the expense, duration and contents of medical training and reduced the number of "accredited" medical schools and doctors. Even after the Flexner Report's prescription calling for the scientification of medicine in the second decade of the twentieth century, medical schools resisted the strong incorporation of scientific curricula, faculty and facilities (27). Similarly, laboratory scientists in the medical schools (particularly experimental physiologists interested in understand~ ing the normal functioning of living organisms as well as abnormal and disease-related conditions), consistently encountered resistance from physicians and administrators both in the adoption of new knowledge and in the provision of resources for the production of new knowledge (28). In the same vein, medical schools and agricultural research centers actually hindered scientific innovations in areas of basic biology, including, for example, genetics beginning in 1900. Physicians and agricultural scientists both resisted the introduction of Mendelian genetics as a result of a "false sense of knowledge" (29). In essence, these applied knowledge settings
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were more interested in "textbook" and "handbook" science, and less in the "esoteric" knowledge at the research front (30). Similarly the university and college departments did not lend themselves to the pursuit of new knowledge, contrary to the conventional view of the organization of U.s. science as "centered" and naturally "at home" in the department (31). Even the German universities which had provided the model for the American research university had a well specified division of labor between teaching and biological research, with the latter activity carried on "away" from the regular (teaching) university context and in (a) the Instituten connected to and directed by the chair holders (Ordinariat) and not closely integrated with the rest of the educational enterprise and at (b) laboratories like the Stazione Zoologica where experimentation and discovery were undertaken and promoted as the primary activity and goal. The Laboratory and Tacit Knowledge It was not surprising then that between 1890 and 1910 biological scien-
tists from over one hundred fifty different institutions interested in the new science joined in the MBL summer laboratories and noncredit courses. And, significantly, the largest portion of these investigators came from so-called "research universities," i.e., University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, Clark, Columbia and Yale (32). The practice of the new biological science could not readily be transmitted in formal ways. The skills required were related to trial and error manipulations, discretion in the choice of animal (or plant) materials, and some interdependence among the scientists with different expertise. Tacit knowledge, in exactly the sense that Collins discusses scientific practices and skills among TEA-laser researchers in modern experimental physics, could only be gained in close working proximity with the practitioners (33). The "newness" of the science had much to do with the convergence of dispersed scientists on the MBL. Formal means of communication were slow for circulating methods and results. But, the craft-like nature of experimental science could not readily be communicated in written form in any case. The detailed experiential exposure in the context of the laboratory was a requirement. The "substance of life" was revealed as a result of active manipulations; it did not show itself to the "learned" eye.
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The subtleties of design could only be learned in social practice. Whitley has pointed out that we do not really know how "laboratory science became the dominant form of research in the natural sciences" (34). The peculiar history of the MBL and the introduction of experimental cell biology to the U.S. may provide some clues. This laboratory gained "scientific capital" from its historically conditioned status as the most productive site for advancing the new biology and for training new disciples to it. The rapid production of new knowledge and its broad dissemination via courses and collaboration brought cognitive authority to those attached to the "place" and added legitimacy to "the laboratory" as an effective organizational form for these purposes. Indeed, the early success of the MBL is illustrated by its role as a "model" for later scientific organizations, particularly the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research founded in 1901 and the Carnegie Institution of Washington founded in 1902. Both of these organizations sought to support basic experimental research by bringing together scientists to work unhampered in a laboratory setting committed to original research. Cognitive Authority and Scientific Community
The growing influence of the new science stemmed from the scientific community that developed around the MBL. A genuine "community" emerged as a result of direct interaction and a shared set of research experiences both abroad and at this laboratory. As such the community was not merely a network based on shared interests. A solidarity emerged as part of the scientific organization and was based on personally meaningful interactions and tacitly acquired skills. It had a firm geographical locus within which interpersonal conceptual and methodological influence operated. And it led to an often "jealous" protection of the scientific field from those not tied to the MBL circle. Correspondences among the MBL cell-lineage researchers during this period are filled with allegations and gossip regarding "cell-lineage cranks" and "third-rate ... bookkeepingcell-lineage men" outside the circle who were not trained to the subtle and tacit knowledge of experimentation and manipulation and whose scientific judgments were presumed to be based on books. One set of correspondence between Morgan and Conklin reveals their "belier' that only the cell lineage workers in their tradition should be "allowed to do research exper-
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imental work" at all (35). The MBL program worked to consolidate and centralize the discipline in the pursuit of what it deemed the proper content and conduct of biological research. Several institutional strategies served this purpose. The MBL actively, and publicly, sought recognition as a national center in all areas of biology including the medical sciences of anatomy, pathology, and psychology. C.O. Whitman, the first director of the MBL, called for this central status as he cautioned against increasing specialization and emphasized the need for the laboratory context to facilitate the advance of knowledge: Specialization has now reached a point where such union appears to be an essential means of progress. Specialization is not science, but merely the method of science. For the sake of greater concentration of effort, we divide labor; but this division of labor leads to interdependence among the laborers and makes social coordination more and more essential ... Comparison of results, interchange of views and ideas, and a thousand other advantages of social contact, become of paramount importance to the highest development (36).
The social contact he envisioned would be mediated by this laboratory. Whitman's "sociology" presumed the necessary relationship between knowledge development and transmission and social organization. It also responded to the sheer growth of biological science across diverse institutional settings and the need for the consolidation of scientific authority. Laboratory-based summer research courses for advanced students from throughout the country became the principle means of influencing the advance of biology in the preferred direction. The courses were taught by the circle of MBL experimental and evolutionary biologists. Each summer by the turn of the century, well over 100 "students" and "investigators" participated in the courses and research activities of the laboratory. These courses produced the "disciples" of the research program in cell-lineage who learned the new science in apprentice-like fashion and then disseminated it to their own students (37). The establishment of new journals for the publication of this research was also undertaken by this circle. At least four major disciplinary journals were founded and controlled by this group. C.O. Whitman founded the Journal of Morphology in the same year that he assumed the directorship of the MBL (1888). Later in 1897 he established the Zoological Bulletin which in 1902 became the permanent official journal of the MBL titled the Biological Bulletin. Later E.B. Wilson, E.G.
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Conklin, and T.H. Morgan participated in founding the Journal of Experimental Zoology (1904) and installed their colleague R.G. Harrison as its first managing editor. Even later Loeb co-founded the Journal of General Physiology. These journals along with Science eventually overtook Roux's Archiv fur Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen as the preeminent journals in experiment cell biology and embryology. Finally, E.B. Wilson's book, The Cell in Development and Inheritance, first published in 1896 and followed quickly with a second edition in 1900, "reconstructed" the results and advances of the scientific program of the Laboratory and consolidated the cognitive core of the new discipline. This research program eventually extended beyond embryonic cells and their response to proximate external stimuli. In Morgan's case, the research moved from questions of development to studies of inheritance using altogether new materials (Drosophila). But he would continue to bring these new materials to Woods Hole and maintain a "fly room" similar to the famous one at Columbia, his home institution, where his research led to the Nobel Prize. He would also attempt to reproduce the MBL organization years later at the California Institute of Technology marine station without success. Others in the circle moved to problems of neuronal development and cell-to-cell identification. Scientific Organization and the Advance of Knowledge
These efforts contributed to the redirection of biological research nationally towards a particular problem area (i.e. development) in the short run and established the authority of a broader research program (experimental biology) prescribing the problems, practices, and appropriate social organization for the production of biological knowledge. More recent studies of other scientific organizations suggest a similar process but with different historical constraints. Mullins' study of the phage group provides strong parallels. The purpose served by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the 1940s was to bring together the phage group and promote the necessary interaction and work environment for the advancement of knowledge. The diversity of this group was not only geographical but also disciplinary. The disciplinary migrants (e.g., Delbruck) from quite disparate origins (e.g. physics) had to learn the tools of the trade in an experiential, cutting-edge experimental context. Cold Spring Harbor provided this (38).
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As such, the MBL, at the turn of the century, and Cold Spring Harbor at mid-twentieth century, are exemplary of a particular scientific form repeated in the biological sciences. The Michael Foster, Claude Bernard, Justus Liebig, Carl Ludwig and Naples laboratories of Britain and Europe were models of tacit learning and hands-on research. But, they were all tied to particular universities and to single individuals. In the American context over the period covered here, this scientific style of study and disciplinary agency was approximated in a different organizational form. The institutional diversity and geographic dispersal of the scientists involved an alternative organizational base for the conduct of this style of research at this time. What emerged was a private "research school" out of a natural history marine station with many of the characteristics outlined by Geison in his conceptualization: leaders with research reputations, an "informal setting," discipleship, techniques, recruits, and access to publication outlets. Yet, unlike Geison's model, the MBL was not a university department or a single professor's research program (39). Rather, it was created by a physically dispersed group of scientists to promote a common research program. Its form as a private nonprofit corporation was contingent on an historical situation coexisting with the imperatives of the science involved. The result was a scientific organization situated in a form of knowledge and historically constrained to develop in circumscribed ways. The scientific organization associated with the development of new knowledge in the case of the MBL was the knowledge production process itself, i.e., the linkage of techniques, materials, skills, and interactions in the production of knowledge. As such, scientific organization must be distinguished from professional organization. Professional organization is an historically situated form taken by labor groups to control the process and, in some instances, the goals of their work in the larger marketplace (40). In the case of academic scientists, building scientific organizations may be part of a professionalization strategy, but the latter includes more. The professional organization that emerged in tandem with the scientific organization was associated with the development of journals and the effort to maintain the "reputational control" of scientists undertaking the research emanating from the program developed at the MBL (41). The middle to the late 19th century in America was characterized by extensive professionalization of science through institution-building. The
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"culture of professionalism" that attended and followed Jacksonian democracy and the rise of competitive capitalism spawned the proliferation of professional organizations, even among scientists from different fields (42). The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Education Association, the National Academy of Sciences were only three professional organizational forms that emerged between the 1840s and the 1870s to differentiate scientists from other interest groups and workers. Professional institution-building served to demarcate boundaries between scientists and nonscientists; it did not seek to advance knowledge. The National Academy of Sciences (1863) was a particularly "professional" rather than a "scientific" strategy. It was concerned with upgrading the calibre of science by establishing its authority in the determination of "good" science and "less good" science. It proceeded towards this purpose by stratifying the scientific community into elites and nonelites. It sought to gain authority in distinguishing the proper advancement of knowledge from mere replication or application; but it was not organized as such to advance scientific knowledge. It staked professional claim on the certification of the best science and, therefore, of the best scientists. As a result, the boundaries between science and other institutional sectors were laid down and the reputational control of scientists in general was instituted. But the advancement of scientific knowledge was not its basis (43). Scientific organization for the advancement of knowledge should also be distinguished from scientific change. The "research school" that emerged at the MBL represented the coincidence of a new knowledge transmitted from Europe with a physical and social facility initially founded for another purpose. As such, scientific advancement (through research and training) of the new program rather than scientific change, was the issue. "Theories" of scientific change are as plentiful these days as are studies of science and scientists. Revolutionary macro-models of scientific change, like Kuhn's, have offered very little in the way of a middle-range theory of the organization of work in the advancement of particular sciences; only the social order for the advancement of science in general is handled explicitly. The constraining assumptions regarding the homogeneity of the sciences and the inevitability as opposed to the contingency of change make this approach less useful for understanding scien-
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tific organization. Even the notion of anomalies, though it is a beginning point in the direction of developing a theory of producing new knowledge, suffers from logical inconsistency with the rest of the model that others have already pointed out (44). Migration theories, i.e., those that focus either on the movement of ideas from the margins to the center or on the movement of scientists from exhausted or over-populated research areas to new ones, are equally deficient in establishing the connection between the scientific knowledge to be advanced and the scientific organization formed in this pursuit. Finally, constructivist programs, also dealt with quite thoroughly in the recent literature, are inherently unable (and would renounce the effort) to associate epistemic imperatives in the advancement of knowledge with particular organizations for this purpose (45). The research program initiated at the MBL during its first twenty years had arrived with a well-defined basis from Europe, particularly Germany, in the form of experimental embryology. The American researchers advanced this tradition conceptually and technically by increasingly the precision and formality of their theory. But they did not revolutionize this area nor did they construct an altogether new scientific program. They did, however, establish scientific capital in this new discipline in the U.S.; that capital took the form of scientific authority, professional control, and a formal organization that served to transmit the new research program and to recruit new scientists. I would like to end with the idea that scientific organization as it relates to kinds of knowledge production need not manifest itself as a formal organization. That is, because the MBL had a formal organizational status and title does not mean that the latter is a criterion for scientific organization. Typically, formal organizations are more likely to be contexts or environments for social arrangements linking methods, materials, and scientific knowledge producers. However, the historic situation of the emergence of the Marine Biological Laboratory conditioned the early form of this official place; its place as a scientific organization represented the conjunction of a new form of knowledge with a social organization that favored the development of that form.
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Notes and References • I am indebted to Nico Stehr, Richard Whitley, Aaron Cicourel, Terry Shinn and Tom Gieryn for their helpful comments on the earlier draft of this paper. 1. P. Bourdieu, 'The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions the Progress of Reason', Social Science Information 14 (1975), 30. 2. R. Whitley, 'The Sociology of Scientific Work and the History of Scientific Developments', in S.S. Blume (ed.), Perspectives in the Sociology of Science, New York: Wiley, 1977, pp. 21-49; and 'From the Sociology of Scientific Communities to the Study of Scientists' Negotiations and Beyond', Social Science Information 22 (1983), 681-720; T.F. Gieryn, 'Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science', American Sociological Review 48 (1983), 781-795. 3. C.E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought, Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1976, and M.W. Rossiter, The Emergence of Agricultural Science: Justus Liebig and the Americans. 1840-1880, New Haven: Yale, 1975, describe the role of the agricultural experiment station in the advance of agricultural chemistry in the U.S. F.L. Holmes, Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry: The Emergence of a Scientist, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1974, and very recently W. Coleman, 'The Cognitive Basis of the Discipline. Claude Bernard on Physiology', ISIS 76 (1985), 49-70, describe the European model of the research laboratory. 4. E.B. Wilson. 'The Memorial to Anton Dohrn', Science 34 (1911), 632-633. See also T.H. Morgan, 'Impressions of the Naples Zoological Station', Science 3 (1896), 16-18. Marine stations were vital to the development of biological research from the middle of the 19th century. Carl Vogt in Europe, Louis Agassiz in the U.S. and Anton Dohrn at Naples founded precursor organizations to the MBL. 5. G.E. Allen, Life Science in the Twentieth Century. Second Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978 [1975); and 'The Transformation of a Science: T.H. Morgan and the Emergence of a New American Biology', in A. Oleson and J. Voss (eds.), The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America. 1860-1920, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1979; J. Maienschein, 'Shifting Assumptions in American Biology: Embryology, 1890-1910', Journal of the History of Biology 14 (1981), 89-113; and E. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity. Evolution. and Inheritance, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1982. 6. L.R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1965; J. Ben-David, The Scientist's Role in Society: A Comparative Study, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971; and K.H. Jarausch (ed.), The Transformation of Higher Learning. 1860-1930, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983. 7. E.g. S.P. Lee and P. Passell, A New Economic View of American History, New York: Norton,1979. 8. S. Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities. 1877-1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 9. F.R. Lillie, The Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1944; C.O. Whitman, "Report of the Director," First Annual Report for the Year 1888, Marine Biological Laboratory, Boston, 1889.
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10. G.L. Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology: The Scientific Enterprise in Late Victorian Society, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 11. F.L. Holmes, op. cit., 1974, note 3. 12. E.B. Wilson, The Cell in Development and Inheritance, New York, 1896 (reprinted edition, r-;ew York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1966). 13. P. Bourdieu, op. cit., 1975, pp. 34-35, note 1. 14. W. Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977 [1971]; and G.E. Allen, op. cit., 1978, note 5. 15. E. Mayr, op. cit., 1982, p. 845, note 5. 16. T.H. Morgan, 'Regeneration: Old and New Interpretations', Biological Lectures, Marine Biological Laboratory, Boston: Ginn and Company, 1900, p. 194. 17. C.O. Whitman, 'Specialization and Organization, Companion Principles of All Progress. The Most Important Need of American Biology', Biological Lectures, Marine Biological Laboratory, Boston: Ginn and Company, 1891, pp. 1-2. The same passage of the lecture compares sociology and biology of the day: .....on the same grounds that the sociologist affirms that society is an organism, the biologist declares that an organism is a society." 18. E. Mayr, op. cit., 1982, note 5. 19. E.B. Wilson, 'Some Problems of Annelid Morphology', Biological Lectures, Marine Biological Laboratory, 1891, p. 53; 'Experiments on Cleavage and Localization in the Nemertine Egg', Archiv fur Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen 16 (1930). 20. T.H. Morgan, 'Experimental Studies on Teleost Eggs', Anatomischer Anzeiger 8 (1893), 803-814. G.E. Allen, op. cit., 1978, note 5.; G.E. Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 21. G.E. Allen, op. cit., 1978, and J. Maienschein, op. cit., 1981, note 5. 22. N. Reingold and I.H. Reingold. Science in America: A Documentary History /900-/939. 1981, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 126-129. 23. F.R. Lillie, op. cit., 1944. Note 9 chronicles the early struggles of the MBL in its first half decade to consolidate its autonomy in 1897 from the Boston Society for Natural History and Women's Education Association whose members sought to retain control of the marine laboratory and in later years to retain its separate status from both the Carnegie Institution and private interests in 1902 when these "outsiders" sought to establish formal or financial control. Collected correspondences in N. Reingold and I.H. Reingold, op. cit., 1981, pp. 129-132, note 22 by E.G. Conklin illustrate the diverse employment contexts of biologists of the period and the special incapacity of universities to transmit the new knOWledge. 24. E. Shils, 'The Order of Learning in the United States: The Ascendancy of the University', in A. Olesen and J. Voss (eds.), op. cit., 1979, pp. 19-47, note 5. Shils minimizes the significance of this laboratory as well as any non-university form of knowledge production. He asserts that for biologists of this period sojourns to the MBL "were interludes in their academic careers" (p. 25). For the central figures and leaders of the new biology this was not the case.
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25. G.L. Geison, op. cit., 1978, note 10; and G.L. Geison, 'Scientific Change, Emerging Specialities, and Research Schools', History ofScience 19 (1981),20-40. 26. L.R. Veysey, op. cit., 1965, p. 129, note 6, notes that one of the most "important early effects of the Hopkins University was to send many more students to Germany from the U.S. than might otherwise have gone." Thus, even with the "research university" in place the context was still not "mature" or (better) appropriately developed for training natural scientists for the advancement of knowledge. 27. A. Flexner, Medical Education in the United States and Canada. A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Boston: D.B. Updike, 1910. 28. G.L. Geison, 'Divided We Stand: Physiologists and Clinicians in the American Context', in M.J. Vogel and C.E. Rosenberg (eds.), The Therapeutic Revolution, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979; and R.C. Maulitz, 'Physician versus Bacteriologist: the Ideology of Science in Clinical Medicine', in Vogel and Rosenberg, 1979. 29. C.E. Rosenberg, op. cit., 1976 and M.W. Rossiter, op. cit., 1975, note 3. 30. L. Fleck, Genesis and Development of A Scientific Fact, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1979. 31.J. Ben-David, op. cit., 1971, note 6; Shils, op. cit. 1979, note 24; and D.L. Woltle, The Home ofScience: The Role of the University. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. 32. Marine Biological Laboratory. Annual Reports. Woods Hole, MA., 1890-1910. Institutions represented at the MBL averaged approximately 30 annually during the period between 1888 and 1899. Notable among these were women's colleges (Mt. Holyoke, Goucher, Smith, Wellesley, Vassar and Bryn Mawr). In the following decade institutional representation more than doubled on average annually with the mix of institutions including more and more medical schools, private institutes (e.g., the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology) and government agencies. Also, an examination of J. McKeen Cattell's American Men of Science, New York: The Science Press, 1906, reveals that nearly half of the approximately 200 zoologists and physiologists listed in this directory participated at Woods Hole some time over this period. And given the "missing data" in this source, the rate of participation may actually be underestimated. 33. H.M. Collins, 'The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks', Science Studies 4 (1974),165-185. 34. R. Whitley, op. cit., 1983, p. 710, note 2, cites Dupree's earlier observation on this topic. 35. Correspondence between E.G. Conklin and T.H. Morgan between June 8 and June 10, 1905, in N. Reingold and I.H. Reingold, op. cit., 1981, pp. 153-155, note 22. 36. C.O. Whitman, 'Report to the Director', Annual Report of the Marine Biological Laboratory,1890. 37. Marine Biological Laboratory, op. cit., 1890-1910, note 32; F.R. Lillie,op. cit., 1944, p. 92 note 9, analyzed American Men of Science in 1939 to determine the attainments of the early researchers at the MBL. He reported that "between 1918 and 1931 [allowing for a lag time of at least ten years for recognition to be established l, inclusive, out of 1,720 total registrations [for summer courses or labs at the MBLl, 51.3 per cent of the men and 14.3 per cent ofthe women were included [in American Men ofScience l." Lillie argues that the
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figures underestimate the real influence of the MBL, since so many students went into applied science settings (medical schools) and were thus excluded from consideration for Cattell's who's who of science. 38. N.C. Mullins, 'The Development of a Scientific Specialty: the Phage Group and the Origins of Molecular Biology', Minerva 10 (1972), 51-82. 39. R. Whitley, op. cit., 1977 and 1983, note 2; and G.L. Geison, op. cit., 1981, note 25. 40. M.S. Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. 41. R. Whitley, 'The Establishment and Structure of the Sciences as Reputational Organizations', in N. Elias et al. (eds.), Scientific Establishments and Hierarchies, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982, pp. 313-357. 42. S. Kohlstedt, The Formation of the American Scientific Community: The American Associationfor the Advancement of Science 1848-1860, Urbana: University of I1Iinois Press 1976 .. 43. C. Hay, 'Advice from a Scientific Establishment: the National Academy of Science', in N. Elias et. al. (eds.), Scientific Establishments and Hierarchies, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982. 44. H.M. Collins, 'The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Studies of Contemporary Science', Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983), 265-85; H. Martins' critique of the Kuhnian approach is especially important in this regard. See H. Martins, 'The Kuhnian 'Revolution' and Its Implications for Sociology', in T. Nossiter et. al. (eds.), Imagination and Precision in the Social Sciences, London: Faber and Faber, 1972. 45. H.M. Collins, op. cit., 1983, pp. 276-277, note 41. Gernot Bohme and Nico Stehr Preface
INDEX
-prison 153; -research 126, 161, 162, 175ff.; -science of 175; -structuralist 168ff.; -systems 162, 163, 168ff.; -technificationofI61, 163, 168, 172; -utopist 163
Access to Information Act 146
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