Abstract
Can Robert K. Merton’s seminal work in the sociology of science still offer useful insights to understand key features, trends, and challenges of science in contemporary societies? This chapter focuses on two main topics that bear particular relevance to contemporary science in society debates. It addresses the general theme of values and norms in science in the light of relevant organizational changes that have marked science in recent decades, as well as the resilience of the concept of ‘scientific community’ to those changes. Starting from Merton’s classic study of the ‘Matthew effect’, the article then analyses the theme of competition in science, with particular regard to the dynamics that characterize the reputation and visibility of scientists across both in specialist and public forums.
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Notes
- 1.
Among the most recent works devoted to Merton’s oeuvre see, for example, the volume edited by Calhoun (2010).
- 2.
Merton co-authored, with Elinor Barber, an entire book devoted to the historical vicissitudes of the concept of serendipity: […] if serendipity was originally coined to mean a quality of the actor in a happy accidental discovery, it has with use become coterminous with the whole event of accidental discovery, and even with the object of such a discovery (Merton and Barber 2004: 102).
- 3.
Merton quotes this passage from G. Burnet, A Funeral Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Honourable Robert Boyle London, 1692, p. 25.
- 4.
To understand this insistence upon norms as functional imperatives and, therefore, on science’s capacity for self-regulation, one should remember that Merton first dealt with this topic during the Second World War, at a time when the crucial attributes of science in a democratic society seemed to be its autonomy and its capacity to resist political, economic, or religious pressures. This point is also acknowledged by some of Merton’s critics, including Bourdieu (2004 [2001]).
- 5.
Price recalls that scientists like Kepler or Hooke not infrequently presented their results in encrypted form, so that they could establish their priority but without disclosing too much information to their rivals (De Solla Price 1963: 68).
- 6.
- 7.
Of interest is the argument of those who believe that the ethical imperatives of communitarian sharing and disinterestedness set by Merton for scientific activity today increasingly characterize areas like the practice and culture of digital technologies. In these areas—one thinks, for example, of free software or the collaborative online encyclopaedia Wikipedia—sharing and gratuitousness are important to gain recognition (see Paccagnella 2007). It should also be borne in mind that scientific circles played a significant role in the historical development of the Internet (see Castells 2001).
- 8.
On the role of patient organizations in shaping communicative and even experimental practices in contemporary biomedical research, see, for example, Epstein (1995).
- 9.
On the sociological concept of community, see the classic Tönnies (1887). Michael Polanyi (1951) was among the first to thematize the concept of scientific community, which was then resumed by Edward Shils (1954) and definitively introduced into the sociological literature on science by studies such as Hagstrom (1965). See also Ben-David (1971) and Storer (1973).
- 10.
It would be interesting to analyse this process in connection with a long-standing tradition of varieties in cultures and practices across scientific fields and even within the same field (see, for example, Pickering 1992).
- 11.
See above, par. 1; Merton (1938), Barnes (1985). More generally, according to Max Weber’s (1922) well-known statement: ‘The belief in the value of scientific truth is the product of certain cultures and is not a product of man’s original nature’ (p. 110). Merton’s thesis was challenged, especially by historians of science (Hall 1963). As Trevor Pinch (1992) has noted, however, Merton explicitly ‘rejected any simple-minded causal links between Puritanism and science’, accounting for heterogeneity across religious groups (p. 1133).
- 12.
Margaret Rossiter (1993) has pointed out that the expression ‘Matthew effect’ is rather appropriate: apparently, it was not Matthew who wrote the Gospel that bears his name.
- 13.
National Science Foundation (NSF) data also point to considerable increases, estimating that the total of articles published every year in the leading international peer-reviewed technical-scientific journals has almost doubled over the past 20 years. The NSF figure is based on a database of 9,358,420 S&E notes, reviews, and articles published in ‘a core set of internationally recognized peer-reviewed scientific journals’ tracked by Thomson Reuters in the Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). The number of journals in the cited analysis ranges from 4093 in 1988 to 5266 in 2008. For more details, see NSF (2010, Chap. 5: 29ff).
- 14.
Consensus on the existence of gravitational waves began to resurface in connection with new experiments in the following decades. The experiments culminated in the announcements of gravitational waves detection by LIGO and VIRGO experiments between 2015 and 2017. In October 2017, The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish, and Kip S. Thorne “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”. See Collins (2004, 2017).
- 15.
The Guardian, 27 October 2017, www.theguardian.com. According to a broad survey conducted on British scientists and journalists, already in the early 1990s more than 25% of the articles on science published in newspapers stemmed from an initiative by the researchers themselves or their institutions—press releases, announcements of discoveries, availability for interview (Hansen 1992). Today, it is estimated that around two-thirds of agency items on scientific topics are based on press releases and other materials furnished by press and PR offices (Goepfert 2007). See also Bucchi and Neresini (2011).
- 16.
The notion of ‘gate keeping’ was first used in the social sciences by Kurt Lewin (1943), who introduced it in a study on household food consumption. Two of the first works to thematize the notion in regard to science were those by De Grazia (1963) and Crane (1967). Merton, however, emphasizes that their use of the term ‘gatekeepers’ to refer only to the editors of science journals was too limited. In his opinion, the role of gatekeeping variously distributed within the organizations and institutions of science involves continuing or intermittent assessment of the performance of scientists at every stage of their career, from the phase of youthful novice to that of ancient veteran and providing or denying access to opportunities. (Merton and Zuckerman 1973 [1972]: 521–522).
- 17.
The term, originally used by Robert Boyle in correspondence between 1646 and 1647 to refer to the original group of scholars from which the Royal Society would arise, was introduced into science studies by De Solla Price (1963) and subsequently subjected to close analysis by Mullins (1968) and Crane (1972). See also Merton and Garfield (1986).
- 18.
Original interview with Robert K. Merton, 5 April 2001, partly published in Bucchi (2001).
- 19.
See above. A long epigraph from Whitehead’s The Organisation of Thought opens Merton’s Social Theory and Social Structure.
- 20.
One feature, only apparently negligible, that Merton shared with many writers in the discipline was his subtle sense of humour and the ironic quality of his style; a quality that some of the sternest critics of science and technology studies instead seem to lack: see the recent paper by Becker (2011). On the role of irony in theory and criticism in this area, see also Hacking (1999).
- 21.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Domenico Tosini for his comments on earlier versions of this article; Gianfranco Poggi for suggesting a reference that invited me to reflect on the ‘long tail of science’; and Trevor Pinch for stimulating discussions and valuable insights on the themes treated in this work. Part of the research for this article was conducted in the context of a fellowship by CM Lerici Foundation, Stockholm, and of a visiting professorship at the Universidad Carlos III, Madrid. I am also grateful to five anonymous reviewers for their critical remarks and useful suggestions. An earlier version of this chapter was published in the Journal of Classical Sociology 2015, Vol. 15(3) 233–252.
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Bucchi, M. (2021). Norms, Competition, and Visibility in Contemporary Science: The Legacy of Robert K. Merton. In: Delicado, A., Crettaz Von Roten, F., Prpić, K. (eds) Communicating Science and Technology in Society. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52885-0_2
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