Scientific Habitus, Boundary Works, and Everyday Politics of Knowledge in the Lab Bench

• In Event: 3165 - Sociology of Science: Facing the Epistemic Crisis

Abstract

How do scientists find their place in the social world? How do the institutional contexts of scientists’ work environment, training processes, and peer-group interactions reflect scientists’ understanding of scientific practices, rules of the game of the scientific field, and themselves as scientists? Studies on the politics of knowledge have demonstrated that various social forces are enmeshed with the production of the “legitimate” scientific knowledge, and boundary works in the scientific field—the field-wide efforts to distinguish science and non-science—are achieved through conflicts, negotiations, and stabilization. However, scholars have not yet developed an adequate explanation as to how scientists make sense of their own practice of boundary work in relation to their everyday laboratory life. Drawing on ethnographic research at a molecular genetics laboratory, this article argues that the scientific habitus—a set of dispositions of scientists’ mind and body, constituted and internalized via scientists’ institutional experiences—governs a particular practical strategy for understanding the social world. In particular, scientists are trained to be a rhythmic part of the treadmill of resource consumption and data production. With this acquired scientific habitus, scientists manage their scientific works as doable, make sense of their works in relation to the perceived rule of the scientific field, distinguish the world to which they belong and the world of uncontrollability, and voluntarily find their symbolic place in society—the place they feel comfortable and confident, but remain silent and indifferent under the already established order that deeply structures their deep-seated playground: the scientific field. This study suggests that the construction and exercise of the scientific habitus reveal the everyday politics of knowledge in the context of the neoliberal era of the knowledge economy.

Author

• June Jeon, University of Wisconsin-Madison