The political ideology of neoliberalism is widely recognized as having influenced the organization of national and global economies and public policies since the 1970s. In this article, we examine the relationship between the neoliberal variant of globalization and science. To do so, we develop a framework for sociology of science that emphasizes closer ties among political sociology, the sociology of social movements, and economic and organizational sociology and that draws attention to patterns of increasing and uneven industrial influence amid several (...) countervailing processes. Specifically, we explore three fundamental changes since the 1970s: the advent of the knowledge economy and the increasing interchange between academic and industrial research and development signified by academic capitalism and asymmetric convergence; the increasing prominence of science-based regulation of technology in global trade liberalization, marked by the heightened role of international organizations and the convergence of scientism and neoliberalism; and the epistemic modernization of the relationship between scientists and publics, represented by the proliferation of new institutions of deliberation, participation, activism, enterprise, and social movement mobilization. (shrink)

Steve Fuller has replied to my critique of his endorsement of a post-truth epistemology. I trace the divergence in our approach to social epistemology by examining our distinct responses to the principle of symmetry in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Fuller has extended the concept of symmetry and challenged the field to embrace a post-truth condition that flattens the difference between experts and the public. By contrast, I have criticized the concept of symmetry for policing the field to rule ideology (...) critique out of court. I argue that a focus on post-truth populism obscures the role of counter-elites and ideologies that restrict political choice. A better way to promote democracy would be to support minority positions within science that promise to open up suppressed political possibilities and to seek the coordinated use of different disciplines to address significant public problems. (shrink)

The independence of research is a key strategic issue of modern societies. Dealing with it appropriately poses legal, economic, political, social and cultural problems for society, which have been studied by the corresponding disciplines and are increasingly the subject of reflexive discourses of scientific communities. Unfortunately, problems of independence are usually framed in disciplinary contexts without due consideration of other perspectives’ relevance or possible contributions. To overcome these limitations, we review disciplinary perspectives and findings on the independence of research and (...) identify interdisciplinary prospects that could inform a research programme. (shrink)

Since the second half of the twentieth century, biomedical research has made increasing use of epidemiological methods to establish empirical evidence on a population level. This paper is about practices with data in epidemiological research, based on a case study in Denmark. I propose an epistemology of record linkage that invites exploration of epidemiological studies as heterogeneous assemblages. Focusing on data collecting, sampling and linkage, I examine how data organisation and processing become productive beyond the context of their collection. The (...) case study looks at how a local population database established in 1976 to investigate possibilities for the prevention of cardiovascular disease is used thirty years later to test hypotheses on the aetiology of breast cancer. For two breast cancer investigations based on the same core data set, I follow the underlying record linkage practice and describe how research objects such as molecular markers become relevant with respect to public health through information networking. Epidemiological association studies function as tools that performatively enrol different contexts into statistical risk estimation, thereby configuring options for research as well as for clinical testing and public health policy. (shrink)