Political sociology of science: Universities and organizational resources of science

Political sociology of science draws attention to the changing institutional and extrainstitutional matrix of the scientific field. It assumes that science is a quasiautonomous field of power that is subject to influence from other fields but also possesses a degree of self-governance. Following the idea that science is just a set of institutional error filters for the job of discovering the objective character of the world, we may follow the idea of epistemic modernization, that rests on the tenet that science respects no domain restrictions and will admit no epistemological rivals. Within the public dimension epistemic modernization is intended to capture the shifts in the governance of science that have involved escalating the challenges toward scientific research and technology regulation, the growing permeability of the scientific and industrial fields to both partnership and opposition from various civil society actors, and the increasing legitimacy and institutionalization of such relationships through innovative collaborative arrangements and new forms of governance. In this new situation an old question about the organizational resources of science seems to have a new additional content. The tension between scientists seeking for academic freedom, the state relied on the conception of Humboldt University, and the commercialization of science process leads to a new neoliberal understanding of the economics of science. We suppose that the political sociology of science framework will help us to clarify this tension and will tell us more than other traditional approaches to assess the organizational resources of science.