Yves Gingras, Sociologie des Sciences, PUF, 2013
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17185
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2038-3460
17185
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Thomas Vangeebergen
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Yves Gingras, Sociology of Sciences, PUF, 2013
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Book Reviews
2014-07-14
2023-06-13
2014-07-14
2023-07-24
226-229
TS
Thomas Vangeebergen
2014/07/14
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17185
226
Liège University
2038-3460
1
en
229
Yves Gingras, Sociology of Sciences, PUF, 2013
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17185/16085
5
226                                                             Tecnoscienza 5 (1)

Yves Gingras
Sociologie des Sciences [Sociology of Sciences]
Paris: PUF, 2013, pp 127

Thomas Vangeebergen Liège University

    According to the author, sociologists of science have an unfortunate
tendency to favour a polemic attitude in their field of study by excessively
multiplying the theoretical currents and methods, and by being almost
systematically opposed to their colleagues. This book intends to offer a
synthesis of these various works, in a cumulative and integrative vision of
the knowledge accumulated in this field. It comes in four parts, namely:
(1) the socio-cultural foundations of science; (2) the institutions of sci-
ence; (3) the social system of science; and (4) the social determinants of
scientific knowledge.
    In the first chapter, Yves Gingras succinctly addresses the develop-
ments of scientific activities in relation to the religious context, the emerg-
ing democracies and the growing importance of the expert’s role, and fi-
nally regarding the redefinition of the contract between science and socie-
ty. The approach consists in profiling the contexts that allow science to
flourish fully, and in attempting to go beyond the simplistic shortcut stat-
ing that religions are systematically opposed to science, while (in contrast)
the political organization of liberal democracies is systematically the best
soil for science. We notice that the predominant historicist vein, dear to
the author, leads him along two complicated paths. To begin with, the
framing he chooses is reductive. Religious issues are primarily treated on
a 17th century basis, relations to democracy in sight of the 19th, and the
social contract from the prevailing point of view in the post-war period.
Assigning a central and specific standpoint to each era and according a
dominating role to the historical context make the analytical framework
unnecessarily rigid, whereas these themes are rather key threads beyond
times and places. Besides, and this is undoubtedly more fundamental, this
diachronic approach assumes the idea that some contexts favour the
emergence of scientific activities more than others. Though he mentions
nuances and counter-examples, the author always choses to explain ra-
ther than understand the events. However, it is not offensive to Comte
nor to Merton to say that their work has been continued after them, and
that there are alternatives to the causal and/or internalist analyses of sci-
entific phenomena.
    In the second chapter, we discover a panorama of scientific institu-
tions. Academies and universities, or the learned societies, the organiza-
tion of laboratories, the disciplinary constitutions, the dissemination and
training organizations, are structures that display the organizational
framework of science. Here again the approach is largely historical, but it
extends the argument to pre-modern contexts. By unfolding a series of
Book Reviews                                                               227
facts that, the other way around, seems necessarily inevitable, this ration-
alist approach has a strong deterministic tinge. Apart from the fact that
the sociological approach of the title is refuted, we hesitate between a sci-
entist macro-history and anachronistic interpretations.
     The third part deals with the “social system”. Regarding the increasing
and constant autonomisation of science in the 19th and 20th centuries,
Gingras focuses on how order is established in the area of science, whith
its specific standards, logic, setting and conflicts. This chapter, which
deeply engages in the functionalist analysis of scientific values and
standards, is probably the most mertonian. Further, the analyses dealing
with the issues of production, peer recognition, stratification and hierar-
chy take a more critical turn. Remarkably, while today science is generally
treated in conjunction with techniques (an approach summed up under
the STS banner), the author focuses here on science for he considers that
it belongs to an autonomous field of study, with its own actors and logic,
its history, and a particular literature. One of the reasons for this choice is
probably the decidedly internalist approach, rooted in a scholarship heav-
ily impregnated with epistemic issues.
     The fourth and final part takes shape around the "nebula" of social
constructivism in science, and seeks to establish an inventory of the dif-
ferent recent approaches in social studies of science. There again, the
presentation, from the beginning of the 20th century until the 1980s, is
too easily chronological. Sociology of translation can be found in this
chapter entitled: “Social determinants of scientific knowledge”, which
brings together ethnomethodology, cognitivism, SSK and the strong pro-
gram (among others). The author does not really linger on these theoreti-
cal and methodological renewals but places them in a category of more
descriptive than explanatory work – which is supposed to be the goal of
the sociology of science. In this chapter, the author also proposes a very
popperian version of scientific controversies, boiling down to argument
contests, the outcomes of which are determined by the cognitive (theoret-
ical and experimental) contingencies of the time. It is probably is a little
more complex, insofar as controversies are a good way of questioning the
scientific autonomy and the relations to actors of a different nature.
     The book closes with a disconcerting conclusion: it shows us, with
statistics to back up the demonstration, that today increasingly costly and
instrumented science is essentially collective and largely globalized. This
would force a comeback to normative concerns, necessarily treated on
meso or macro scales. In the introduction, Y. Gingras explains the need
to combine the different levels of analysis, based on the principle that the
focus depends on the objects the researcher is interested in. Rather than
seeing a contradiction or a competition between these scales, it would be
best to reserve a suitable framework for each object and, if necessary,
articulate it. If we can fully subscribe to the will of interpretative plural-
ism recommended by the author (of which, to be true, he does not give us
here a very convincing demonstration), we find once again a profund dis-
228                                                                 Tecnoscienza 5 (1)

sensus in his approach of sociology. Not only is the macro level not the
analysis framework of ‘lower’ frameworks, in the Matrioshka dolls fash-
ion, but this a priori division between phenomena break their interactions
and singularities, terribly impoverishing them. It seems much more
judicious to stay tuned to phenomena and to the actors themselves, in or-
der to carve a made-to-measure framework as the investigation
progresses1.
    It would not be fair to put the blame of the shortcuts, of the omis-
sions, of the choice of themes found in this short book only on the au-
thor. Indeed, some editorial responsibility is engaged here in the sense
that the issue of the readership is questionable. Considering the tone as
well as the “factual” contents, I wonder who would benefit from this type
of reading.
    Undergraduate students would find here a partial and biased intro-
duction to something much more complex and branched out than it
seems in these pages. The discrepancy between the level of generality
suitable to an introduction and the concern to give empirical landmarks
contributes to the perception of bias. Professionals in the field of social
sciences wishing to approach themes more or less remote from their own
practice would probably be battling with methodological issues, dis-
cussed elsewhere but presented here as evidences (see above). Finally, the
general public wishing an accessible approach of a learned domain would
not necessarily be satisfied with this approach, for here pedagogy
amounts to swotting up on issues the scope of which is still to be to
demonstrated. Through this booklet, the question may actually be that of
popularization, of opportunities it offers and prohibits, of effectiveness,
of its relevance2.
    It must be said that it is difficult to locate this dense set of issues relat-
ed to sciences among other lines of research in such a restricted space.
Inevitably, what the author can do is pass over many important issues in
silence: the political meaning of research, its relation to techniques and to
their study, the parallel evolution of other issues that have shaped them
(colonialism, feminism, social emancipation, education and mass
knowledge), the marginality of the links with other disciplines dealing
with scientific activities (philosophy, anthropology, economics and man-
agement). Ironically, it could be said that history has been overshadowed
by this very historicist vision. Here the author’s approach seems to take

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
  This question has been treated by sociologists of science, including: Callon
(1991) and Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel (1981). For arguments in favour of an
emergentist approach of analytical frameworks see also: Boltanski et al. (1984)
and Ragin and Becker (1992).
2
  For purposes of comparison, here are two other introductory books in French
that address the subject in a different vein: Pestre, D. (2006) Introduction aux Sci-
ence Studies, Paris, La Découverte; Vinck, D. (2007) Sciences et société. Sociologie
du travail scientifique, Paris, Armand Colin.
Book Reviews                                                                   229
advantage of all these limits and to offer a highly personal reading of the
sociology of science. Admittedly, on this point, he has been very success-
ful.

References
Boltanski, L., Darré, Y., Schiltz, M.A. (1984) La dénonciation, in “Actes de la re-
       cherche en sciences sociales”, 51, pp. 3-40.
Callon, M. (1991) Techno-Economic Networks and Irreversibility, in J. Law (ed.),
        A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination,
        Sociological Review Monograph, London, Routledge, pp. 277-303.
Knorr-Cetina, K.D., Cicourel, A. (eds.) (1981) Advances in Social Theory and
      Methodology. Toward an Integration of Micro and Macro-Sociologies, Bos-
      ton, Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 277-303.
Ragin, C.C., Becker, H.S. (1992) What Is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of
       Social Inquiry, New York, Cambridge University Press.
