Article by Natalie B. Aviles, and Janet Vertesi: “In this chaotic time, Vannevar Bush’s Science, the Endless Frontier has emerged as a symbolically meaningful text among scientists, who frequently point to it as the basis for the government’s long-running support of university research. Certainly, Bush marked a call for a new industrial policy in the United States that would make the nation a global leader in the new world order. He would later be credited as the architect of the so-called social contract of science, whereby federal funding is allocated primarily to university researchers in pursuit of free inquiry that might later yield some economic or social benefit. But this mythologized rendering of the innovation system overlooks other key ideas, like those expressed by sociologist Robert K. Merton, that described how the United States should govern science democratically based on lessons learned from the Second World War. Rereading Merton now, even more than revisiting Bush, better exposes the vulnerabilities driving us, as social scientists, to defend a vision of science as—and for—democracy in our own era.
A major figure in American sociology and a professor at Columbia University from 1941 until 1979, Merton casts a long shadow over contemporary sociology of science. As a structural-functionalist, his sociological approach assumed that the way institutions are structured strongly influences the social orders that allow them to serve different vital functions in society. Most enduring is his work from the 1940s addressing what he called “the normative structure of science,” which is still taught as “the norms” of science: communalism (science as communal property), universalism (participation without prejudice), disinterestedness (against ideology), and organized skepticism (deliberative, not dogmatic). These conditions, which Merton claimed are distinct to free scientific inquiry, allow science to thrive as an institutional form…(More)”.
