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Invisibilizing politics: Accepting and legitimating ignorance in environmental sciences
1Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.
Social Studies of Science
|September 10, 2019
Summary
Scientists develop dispositions to ignore research, leading to incomplete innovations. Organizational leaders legitimize abandoning projects, creating a cycle of accepted ignorance and indirect control over scientific knowledge.
Area of Science:
- Sociology of Science and Technology
- Organizational Studies
Background:
- Limited understanding of how scientists abandon research due to external controls.
- Existing research in science and technology studies (STS) lacks in situ laboratory studies.
Purpose of the Study:
- Examine the habitus of ignorance as a mechanism for the social production of ignorance.
- Investigate how scientists comply with external controls by abandoning research.
Main Methods:
- Drawing on ethnographic research within scientific laboratories.
- Analyzing the dispositions and practical contexts enabling scientists to ignore content.
Main Results:
- Scientists' dispositions establish contexts for ignoring specific scientific content.
- Organizational leaders legitimize unfinished projects; scientists accept unfunded research as undone.
- A cycle of legitimation and acceptance of ignorance functions as social control.
Conclusions:
- The habitus of ignorance socially produces ignorance in science and technology.
- This mechanism results in indirect political and economic domination of the scientific field.
- Self-governed by institutional rules, this process consolidates control over scientific knowledge.
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