5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Scientific Knowledge and Social Practice – High Expectations, Tensions and Compromises

Language: English

Scientific knowledge is usually seen as a crucial contribution to human progress. Frames of grand challenges, such as the metaphor of the Anthropocene, formulate desiderata of prospective research and, ideally, technical or social innovation. Funding programs regularly frame their calls for grant proposals by favoring research that can be expected to contribute to tackling these challenges and even to catalyze social change. This optimism is somehow reminiscent of Talcott Parsons’ modernist assumption that the expansion of higher education would contribute to a professionalization of work and a rationalization of society. Beyond the classic professions, the implied connection between research and social practice was not always part of how academia and societal stakeholders perceived of the purpose of research. Instead, research for the sake of purpose-free knowledge creation was an important topic in establishing the (relative) autonomy of science. Indeed, ample evidence suggests that there is a gap between academic knowledge production and its application, indicating fundamentally different logics of action. Approaches how this gap could be narrowed are manyfold, reaching from transformative research over transdisciplinary research to living labs and field experiments. Research policy tries to narrow this gap by measuring, monitoring and valorizing research impact. Higher education programmes bridge the theory-practice gap in a more implicit way through inter-organizational and spatial mobility of graduates. This session aims to explore the (historical) constitution of societal expectations toward research-practice relations, as well as the challenges and opportunities that may arise from attempts of narrowing the gap between research and practice.