Rethinking Scientific Habitus: Toward a Theory of Embodiment, Institutions, and Stratification of Science
Abstract
Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus has been largely absent in Science and Technology Studies (STS) despite its potential usefulness. In this essay, I develop the concept of scientific habitus as a useful way to think about scientific practices. I argue that scientific habitus may offer three contributions that illuminate scientists’ own micro-practices in relation to meso- and macro-level dynamics in the scientific field. First, the concept enables us to think of scientists’ worldviews and bodily techniques as objects of STS analysis. While the majority of STS scholars have focused on the construction of knowledge, scientific habitus allows us to study the construction of the scientists’ body and mind. Secondly, scientific habitus links individual practices with institutional contexts; it highlights how the micro-practices of individuals in scientific laboratories reflect and reproduce macro-social structural power dynamics. Third, scientific habitus reveals mechanisms of stratification within the scientific field. It helps unpack scientists’ practical decisions surrounding research topics, ideas, and data. It also helps explain why and how certain scientific projects are preferred and others left undone. Scientific habitus, therefore, has the potential to contribute to a more encompassing explanation of the relationship between societal structures and the internal logic of the scientific field.
References
Albert, Mathieu, and Daniel Lee Kleinman. 2011. “Bringing Pierre Bourdieu to Science and Technology Studies.” Minerva 49 (3): 263–73.
Albert, Mathieu, and Suzanne Laberge. 2017. “Confined to a Tokenistic Status: Social Scientists in Leadership Roles in a National Health Research Funding Agency.” Social Science & Medicine 185: 137–46.
Albert, Mathieu, and Elise Paradis. 2014. “Social Scientists and Humanists in the Health Research Field: A Clash of Epistemic Habitus.” Routledge Handbook of Science, Technology, and Society, 391–409.
Albert, Mathieu, Elise Paradis, and Ayelet Kuper. 2015. “Interdisciplinary Promises versus Practices in Medicine: The Decoupled Experiences of Social Sciences and Humanities Scholars.” Social Science & Medicine 126: 17–25.
Baker, Zeke. 2017. “Climate State: Science-State Struggles and the Formation of Climate Science in the US from the 1930s to 1960s.” Social Studies of Science 47 (6): 861–87.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1975. “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason.” Information (International Social Science Council) 14 (6): 19–47.
———. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice, Trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University
———. 1979. Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World, the Sense of Honor, the Kabyle House or the World Reversed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1984. Distinction : A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press.
———. 1987. “What Makes a Social Class? On The Theoretical and Practical Existence Of Groups.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32: 1–17.
———. 1988. Homo Academicus. Stanford University Press.
———. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press.
———. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Harvard University Press.
———. 1993. “Manet and the Institutionalization of Anomie.” In The Field of Cultural Production, 238–53. Polity Press Cambridge.
———. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Stanford University Press.
———. 2004a. Science of Science and Reflexivity. University of Chicago Press.
———. 2004b. “The Peasant and His Body.” Ethnography 5 (4): 579–99.
———. 2005. The Social Structures of the Economy. Polity Press.
———. 2008. The Bachelors’ Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Bearn. Polity Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1991. The Craft of Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries. Walter de Gruyter.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. University of Chicago Press.
Brubaker, Rogers. 1993. “Social Theory as Habitus.” Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, 212–34.
Burawoy, Michael. 1998. “The Extended Case Method.” Sociological Theory 16 (1): 4–33.
Burt, Ronald S. 2004. “Structural Holes and Good Ideas.” American Journal of Sociology 110 (2): 349–99.
Camic, Charles. 2011. “Bourdieu’s Cleft Sociology of Science.” Minerva 49 (3): 275–93.
———. 2013. “Bourdieu’s Two Sociologies of Knowledge.” In Bourdieu and Historical Analysis. Duke University Press.
Clarke, Adele E., and Joan H. Fujimura. 1992. The Right Tools for the Job : At Work in Twentieth-Century Life Sciences. Princeton University Press.
Collins, Harry M. 2010. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. Univ. of Chicago Press.
Collins, Harry M. 1974. “The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks.” Social Studies of Science 4 (2): 165–85.
Desmond, Matthew. 2008. On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters. University of Chicago Press.
———. 2014. “Relational Ethnography.” Theory and Society 43 (5): 547–79.
DiMaggio, Paul. 1979. “On Pierre Bourdieu.” University of Chicago Press.
Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Victoria Johnson. 2008. “Bourdieu and Organizational Analysis.” Theory and Society 37 (1): 1–44.
Etzkowitz, Henry. 2003. “Research Groups as ‘Quasi-Firms’: The Invention of the Entrepreneurial University.” Research Policy 32 (1): 109–21.
———. 2008. The Triple Helix: University-Industry-Government Innovation in Action. Routledge.
Etzkowitz, Henry, and Loet Leydesdorff. 2000. “The Dynamics of Innovation: From National Systems and ‘Mode 2’ to a Triple Helix of University–Industry–Government Relations.” Research Policy 29 (2): 109–23.
Foster, Jacob G, Andrey Rzhetsky, and James A Evans. 2015. “Tradition and Innovation in Scientists’ Research Strategies.” American Sociological Review 80 (5): 875–908.
Frickel, S., S. Gibbon, J. Howard, J. Kempner, G. Ottinger, and D. J. Hess. 2010. “Undone Science: Charting Social Movement and Civil Society Challenges to Research Agenda Setting.” Science, Technology & Human Values 35 (4): 444–73.
Fujimura, Joan H. 1987. “Constructing ‘Do-Able’ Problems in Cancer Research: Articulating Alignment.” Social Studies of Science 17 (2): 257–93.
———. 1988. “The Molecular Biological Bandwagon in Cancer Research: Where Social Worlds Meet.” Social Problems 35 (3): 261–83.
———. 1992. “Crafting Science: Standardized Packages, Boundary Objects, and ‘Translation.’” In Science as Practice and Culture, edited by Andrew Pickering. University of Chicago Press.
———. 1996. Crafting Science : A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer. Harvard University Press.
Garfinkel, Harold, Michael Lynch, and Eric Livingston. 1981. “The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar.” Phil. Soc. Sci 11: 131–58.
Gauchat, Gordon. 2011. “The Cultural Authority of Science: Public Trust and Acceptance of Organized Science.” Public Understanding of Science 20 (6): 751–70.
Gauchat, Gordon, and Kenneth T Andrews. 2018. “The Cultural-Cognitive Mapping of Scientific Professions.” American Sociological Review 83 (3): 567–95.
Gibbons, Michael. 1994. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. Sage.
———. 2000. “Mode 2 Society and the Emergence of Context-Sensitive Science.” Science and Public Policy 27 (3): 159–63.
Gieryn, Thomas F. 2006. “Review: Science of Science and Reflexivity.” Contemporary Sociology 35 (2): 185–87.
Gilbert, G Nigel, and Michael Mulkay. 1984. Opening Pandora’s Box: A Sociological Analysis of Scientists’ Discourse. CUP Archive.
Gingras, Yves. 2006. “Science of Science and Reflexivity.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 42 (4): 407–9.
Hackett, Edward J. 1990. “Science as a Vocation in the 1990s: The Changing Organizational Culture of Academic Science.” The Journal of Higher Education 61 (3): 241–79.
Hammarfelt, Bjorn, Ssrah de Rijcke, and Alexander D Rushforth. 2016. “Quantified Academic Selves: The Gamification of Science through Social Networking Services.” Information Research 21.
Hess, David J. 2009. “The Potentials and Limitations of Civil Society Research: Getting Undone Science Done.” Sociological Inquiry 79 (3): 306–27.
———. 2011. “Bourdieu and Science and Technology Studies: Toward a Reflexive Sociology.” Minerva 49 (3): 333–48.
———. 2015. “Undone Science and Social Movements.” Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, 141–54.
———. 2016. Undone Science : Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Holmes, Seth. 2013. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. Vol. 27. Univ of California Press.
Jerolmack, Colin, and Shamus Khan. 2017. “The Analytic Lenses of Ethnography.” Socius
Jordan, Kathleen, and Michael Lynch. 1992. “The Sociology of a Genetic Engineering Technique: Ritual and Rationality in the Performance of the ‘Plasmid Prep.’” In The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth-Century Life Sciences, 77–114. Princeton University Press.
———. 1998. “The Dissemination, Standardization and Routinization of a Molecular Biological Technique.” Social Studies of Science 28 (5–6): 773–800.
Kaltenbrunner, Wolfgang. 2018. “Situated Knowledge Production, International Impact: Changing Publishing Practices in a German Engineering Department.” Minerva 56 (3): 283–303.
Kleinman, Daniel Lee. 1998. “Untangling Context: Understanding a University Laboratory in the Commercial World.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 23 (3): 285–314.
———. 2003. Impure Cultures: University Biology and the World of Commerce. Univ of Wisconsin Press.
Kleinman, Daniel, and Steven P Vallas. 2001. “Science , Capitalism , and the Rise of the "knowledge Worker ’ ’: The Changing Structure of Knowledge Production in the United States.” Theory and Society 30: 451–92.
Knorr-Cetina, K. 1999. Epistemic Cultures : How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Harvard University Press.
Lamont, Michèle. 2010. “Looking Back at Bourdieu.” Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu’s Legacy: Settling Accounts and Developing Alternatives, 128–41.
Latour, Bruno., and Steve. Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life : The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press.
Lynch, Michael. 1997. Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science. Cambridge University Press.
Mears, Ashley. 2015. “Working for Free in the VIP: Relational Work and the Production of Consent.” American Sociological Review 80 (6): 1099–1122.
Nelson, Nicole C. 2013. “Modeling Mouse, Human, and Discipline: Epistemic Scaffolds in Animal Behavior Genetics.” Social Studies of Science 43 (1): 3–29.
Panofsky, Aaron L. 2011. “Field Analysis and Interdisciplinary Science: Scientific Capital Exchange in Behavior Genetics.” Minerva 49 (3): 295–316.
Polanyi, Michael. 1958. Personal Knowledge. Routledge.
Rushforth, Alexander, Thomas Franssen, and Sarah de Rijcke. 2018. “Portfolios of Worth: Capitalizing on Basic and Clinical Problems in Biomedical Research Groups.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 44 (2): 209–36.
Rushforth, Alexander, and Sarah de Rijcke. 2015. “Accounting for Impact? The Journal Impact Factor and the Making of Biomedical Research in the Netherlands.” Minerva 53 (2): 117–39.
Sallaz, Jeffrey J, and Jane Zavisca. 2007. “Bourdieu in American Sociology, 1980–2004.” Annu. Rev. Sociol. 33: 21–41.
Shinn, Terry. 2002. “The Triple Helix and New Production of Knowledge: Prepackaged Thinking on Science and Technology.” Social Studies of Science 32 (4): 599–614.
Shwed, Uri, and Peter S Bearman. 2010. “The Temporal Structure of Scientific Consensus Formation.” American Sociological Review 75 (6): 817–40.
Sismondo, Sergio. 2011. “Bourdieu’s Rationalist Science of Science: Some Promises and Limitations.” Cultural Sociology 5 (1): 83–97.
Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. 2004. “The Theory of Academic Capitalism.” Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education, 1–34.
Smith, Dorothy E. 2005. Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Rowman Altamira.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1983. “Simplification in Scientific Work: An Example from Neuroscience Research.” Social Studies of Science 13 (2): 205–28.
Suryanarayanan, Sainath, and Daniel Lee Kleinman. 2016. Vanishing Bees : Science, Politics, and Honeybee Health. Rutgers University Press.
Swartz, David. 1997. Culture and Power : The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. University of Chicago Press.
Swartz, David L, and Vera L Zolberg. 2006. After Bourdieu: Influence, Critique, Elaboration. Springer Science & Business Media.
Tavory, Iddo, and Stefan Timmermans. 2009. “Two Cases of Ethnography: Grounded Theory and the Extended Case Method.” Ethnography 10 (3): 243–63.
Traweek, Sharon. 1988. Beamtimes and Lifetimes : The World of High Energy Physicists. Harvard University Press.
Vallas, Steven Peter, and Daniel Lee Kleinman. 2007. “Contradiction, Convergence and the Knowledge Economy: The Confluence of Academic and Commercial Biotechnology.” Socio-Economic Review 6 (2): 283–311.
Vaughan, Diane. 2008. “Bourdieu and Organizations: The Empirical Challenge.” Theory and Society 37 (1): 65–81.
Wacquant, Loïc. 1995. “Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labour among Professional Boxers.” Body & Society 1 (1): 65–93.
———. 2011. “Habitus as Topic and Tool: Reflections on Becoming a Prizefighter.” Qualitative Research in Psychology 8 (1): 81–92.
Copyright (c) 2019 June Jeon
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors of all content published in ESTS retain the copyright to their work, and agree to license them under one of the following Creative Commons licenses CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, CC BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0, and refer to the individual article footer for specific licensing data. Please read our open access policy for more information.
