Loading field map
Science and society is the study of the mutual shaping of scientific knowledge and the social world. Rather than treating science as a purely intellectual enterprise that unfolds in isolation, this subfield examines how scientific practices, institutions, and claims are embedded in—and in turn reshape—the cultural, political, economic, and moral contexts in which they operate. It asks not only what scientists know, but why they come to know it in particular ways, who benefits from that knowledge, and how it travels beyond laboratories and journals.
The subfield is organized around a cluster of enduring questions. One concerns the production of scientific knowledge itself: how do scientific communities establish what counts as a fact, a good experiment, or a valid theory? A second concerns the authority of science: why do scientific claims carry special weight in modern societies, and what happens when that authority is challenged or delegated to experts? A third concerns the circulation of knowledge: how do scientific ideas move from specialized settings into law, medicine, industry, and everyday life, and how do those settings reshape the ideas in transit? A fourth concerns the social consequences of science: who gains and who loses from particular technologies, research priorities, and ways of classifying the world?
These questions carry real stakes. Decisions about climate policy, public health, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering all depend on how scientific evidence is produced, interpreted, and weighed against other values. The subfield does not assume that science is merely a social construction or that its findings are arbitrary; rather, it investigates the social conditions that make reliable knowledge possible and the social processes through which that knowledge becomes consequential.
The modern subfield emerged gradually from several distinct intellectual traditions. In the mid-twentieth century, the sociology of science, associated especially with Robert K. Merton, examined the norms and institutional structures that supposedly enabled science to function—such as organized skepticism, universalism, and disinterestedness. This approach treated science as a social institution with its own reward systems and career patterns, but it largely took the content of scientific knowledge for granted.
A more radical break came in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), centered at the University of Edinburgh and later at Bath. Scholars such as David Bloor and Barry Barnes argued that the very content of scientific beliefs—not just their institutional packaging—should be explained sociologically. Their "strong programme" proposed that the same kinds of social causes explain both true and false beliefs, and that sociologists should be impartial with respect to the truth or falsity of the claims they study. This stance was deliberately provocative, and it generated intense debate about whether social explanations could or should account for mathematical and logical truths.
Around the same time, the history of science was undergoing its own transformation. Earlier historians had often written "internalist" accounts that traced the logical development of ideas from one great thinker to the next. Beginning in the 1970s, historians influenced by social constructivism and by the work of scholars such as Thomas Kuhn began to write "externalist" histories that situated scientific change within broader cultural, political, and economic contexts. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) had already argued that scientific change is not a simple accumulation of facts but involves paradigm shifts driven by communal judgments, anomalies, and generational turnover—a view that blurred the boundary between the intellectual and the social.
A third stream came from feminist scholarship. In the 1980s, figures such as Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway asked how gender relations had shaped the questions scientists ask, the metaphors they use, and the exclusions that structure scientific communities. Feminist science studies did not simply add women to the historical record; it argued that the very categories of objectivity, reason, and nature have been historically gendered, and it proposed alternative models of objectivity that acknowledge the situated character of all knowledge.
By the 1980s, these various strands had coalesced into an interdisciplinary field often called science and technology studies (STS). STS added a focus on technology and material practice, drawing on anthropology, sociology, and philosophy to study how scientific facts and technological artifacts are coproduced. The field also became increasingly global, examining how science has been shaped by colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonial state-building, and how non-Western knowledge traditions have been marginalized or appropriated.
Several broad approaches have organized research in the subfield, and they coexist and overlap more than they succeed one another.
The strong programme, formulated by Bloor in the 1970s, insisted that sociological explanation should apply symmetrically to true and false beliefs alike. Its practitioners studied scientific controversies—such as the debate over the reality of gravitational waves or the nature of mathematical proof—to show how experimental results, theoretical commitments, and social interests interact. The approach was criticized for appearing to reduce scientific validity to social interests, and its early formulations sometimes did overstate the causal role of interests. Nevertheless, its core demand—that the content of scientific belief is a legitimate object of social explanation—became a foundational assumption of the field.
Developed in the 1980s by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law, actor-network theory (ANT) rejected the distinction between social and natural explanations altogether. Instead, it proposed that scientific facts and technological systems emerge from networks that include humans and non-humans alike: instruments, specimens, texts, funding bodies, and even natural entities themselves. In this view, a scientific claim becomes credible not because it corresponds to reality in some unmediated way, but because it is supported by a network of allies—laboratory equipment that produces reliable traces, colleagues who replicate results, journals that publish them, and institutions that grant authority. ANT's famous principle of symmetry held that the same analytical vocabulary should be used for scientists, politicians, scallops, and microbes. Its influence has been durable, though critics have argued that it flattens power relations and has difficulty explaining why some actors are far more able to shape networks than others.
A related tradition, beginning with Latour and Steve Woolgar's Laboratory Life (1979) and Karin Knorr Cetina's The Manufacture of Knowledge (1981), brought anthropological methods into the study of science. Researchers observed scientists at work in their laboratories, examining how experiments are actually conducted, how data are cleaned and interpreted, how papers are written, and how credit is allocated. These studies revealed a gap between the formal accounts of scientific method and the messy, contingent practices of daily research. They showed that scientific facts are not simply discovered but are "constructed" through material and rhetorical work—a claim that was often misunderstood as denying the reality of the phenomena science describes. In fact, most laboratory studies accepted that the natural world constrains what scientists can claim; they focused instead on the social and material processes through which those constraints become visible and persuasive.
Feminist approaches have contributed several lasting concepts. Harding's "standpoint theory" argued that knowledge is always situated, and that marginalized positions can offer epistemic advantages—not because the marginalized are inherently wiser, but because they must understand both dominant and subordinate perspectives. Haraway's notion of "situated knowledges" similarly rejected the ideal of a view from nowhere, proposing instead that objectivity should be understood as a matter of partial, accountable, and connected perspectives. Postcolonial science studies, developed by scholars such as Warwick Anderson and Helen Tilley, examined how colonial administrations used science to classify and govern colonized peoples, how indigenous knowledge was erased or appropriated, and how postcolonial states have built scientific institutions in the shadow of imperial legacies. These approaches have been criticized for sometimes romanticizing non-Western knowledge or for making it difficult to distinguish better from worse knowledge claims, but they have permanently widened the field's scope.
A more recent synthesis, associated especially with Sheila Jasanoff, holds that science and social order are "coproduced": neither is prior to the other. Scientific knowledge does not simply reflect nature, nor does society simply impose its categories on science. Instead, the two emerge together. For example, the development of the concept of climate change has simultaneously reshaped atmospheric science, international law, economic modeling, and popular understandings of responsibility for the future. The coproduction framework is less a testable theory than a heuristic for attending to the simultaneous making of knowledge and social arrangements. It has been influential in studies of biotechnology, environmental governance, and public participation in science.
These approaches are not mutually exclusive, and many researchers combine them. The strong programme's insistence on symmetry remains a methodological default, even among scholars who reject its early interest-based explanations. Actor-network theory and laboratory studies share a commitment to following scientists in action, though ANT extends the analysis to non-human actors. Feminist and postcolonial approaches add a critical dimension that early SSK often lacked, asking not only how knowledge is made but whose interests it serves and whose perspectives it excludes. The coproduction framework offers a way of integrating these concerns into a single analytical lens.
The field has also been shaped by ongoing debates about its own claims. The "science wars" of the 1990s, triggered by the publication of Alan Sokal's deliberately nonsensical article in a cultural studies journal, brought these tensions into public view. Some scientists and philosophers accused the field of relativism and of undermining the authority of science; some scholars in the field responded that their critics had misread constructivism as a denial of reality. The episode left a lasting wariness on both sides, though the field has largely moved toward more nuanced positions that acknowledge the robustness of scientific knowledge while insisting on the importance of studying its social conditions.
Contemporary science and society research is characterized by several durable features. It is thoroughly interdisciplinary, drawing on sociology, history, anthropology, philosophy, political science, and law. It is methodologically plural, combining archival research, ethnography, discourse analysis, and quantitative bibliometrics. It is increasingly attentive to the global South, to indigenous knowledge, and to the role of science in development and inequality. And it has become more engaged with public policy, contributing to debates about risk assessment, expert advice, public engagement, and the governance of emerging technologies.
One notable development is the growth of "responsible research and innovation" as a framework for anticipating the social and ethical implications of new science before they are fully realized. Another is the increasing attention to "post-normal" science—situations where facts are uncertain, values are in dispute, stakes are high, and decisions are urgent, such as climate change or pandemic response. In such contexts, the field argues, the traditional model of science speaking truth to power is inadequate; instead, knowledge must be produced through extended peer communities that include stakeholders and citizens.
The subfield also continues to grapple with its own normative commitments. Some practitioners see their role as descriptive and analytical, aiming to understand how science works without passing judgment. Others see the field as inherently critical, tasked with exposing the ways that scientific authority can mask power, perpetuate injustice, or foreclose alternative futures. This tension is not likely to be resolved, and it is arguably a sign of the field's vitality. What unites its practitioners is a conviction that science is too important to be left unexamined—that the most consequential knowledge-producing enterprise in modern societies deserves the same careful, skeptical, and historically informed scrutiny that scientists themselves direct at nature.