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Does science shape society, or does society shape science? For much of the twentieth century, historians of science treated these as rival answers. The first—science as an autonomous force driving progress—long dominated popular and scholarly narratives. The second—science as a product of its social context—gained ground slowly and unevenly. The subfield now called Science and Society emerged from this tension, and its history is a story of frameworks that tried to resolve, complicate, or dissolve it.
The first systematic challenge to internalist history—which focused on the logical development of scientific ideas—came from Marxist historiography of science in the 1930s–1950s. Scholars such as Boris Hessen and J. D. Bernal argued that scientific problems and priorities were shaped by material and economic conditions. In their view, the rise of classical mechanics was not simply a triumph of pure reason but a response to the needs of early modern navigation, mining, and warfare. This approach treated science as a productive force embedded in class relations. It was openly political, aiming to show that a socialist society could direct science toward human welfare rather than profit.
A very different kind of externalism emerged in the 1940s–1960s with the Mertonian sociology of science. Robert K. Merton shifted attention from economic structures to the professional norms of scientific communities. He identified a set of institutional imperatives—universalism, communism (meaning communal ownership of findings), disinterestedness, and organized skepticism, later acronymized as CUDOS—that he claimed made science uniquely self-correcting. Where Marxists saw science as driven by class conflict, Merton saw it as sustained by a functionalist ethos that insulated it from external corruption. Both frameworks broke with internalism, but they disagreed fundamentally on what the 'social' in science meant: for Marxists, it was material power; for Merton, it was professional culture.
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) destabilized both externalist traditions. Kuhn argued that normal science operates within a paradigm—a shared set of assumptions, methods, and exemplars—until anomalies accumulate and trigger a crisis, followed by a revolutionary transition to a new paradigm. This picture did not fit easily into either Marxist or Mertonian categories. Kuhn was not primarily interested in economic causes or professional norms; he was describing the internal dynamics of scientific communities. Yet his account made science look deeply social: paradigm choice depended on persuasion, generational turnover, and incommensurable worldviews, not just logical deduction. The effect was paradoxical. Kuhn opened the door to social analysis of scientific knowledge itself, but he remained ambiguous about whether social factors shaped the content of that knowledge or merely its reception. That ambiguity became the starting point for the next wave of frameworks.
In the 1970s–1980s, a new generation of scholars at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Bath pushed Kuhn's insight further. The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) and its most influential variant, the Strong Programme, argued that the content of scientific knowledge—not just its institutional context—should be explained sociologically. The Strong Programme's symmetry principle demanded that true and false beliefs be explained by the same kinds of social causes. This was a direct challenge to Merton, who had treated scientific truth as self-explanatory and focused only on deviations from norms. It also went beyond Kuhn, who had stopped short of claiming that social interests could shape the actual substance of theories. SSK researchers conducted detailed case studies of scientific controversies, showing how laboratory practices, professional rivalries, and broader political commitments influenced which claims became accepted as facts.
If scientific knowledge was socially constructed, what about technology? The Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework, developed in the 1980s, extended SSK's methods to technological artifacts. SCOT introduced the concept of interpretive flexibility: a single artifact—say, a bicycle or a fluorescent lamp—could mean different things to different social groups, and its final design was the outcome of negotiations among those groups. Closure occurred when one interpretation stabilized and the artifact's meaning became taken for granted. SCOT preserved SSK's emphasis on social interests and group dynamics, but it applied them to material objects rather than theoretical statements.
Actor-Network Theory (ANT), emerging in the same period, took a more radical path. Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law argued that neither SCOT nor the Strong Programme went far enough. Both frameworks, they claimed, still privileged the social as an explanatory resource. ANT refused to treat 'the social' as a cause; instead, it proposed that social order, scientific facts, and technological systems were all effects of networks that included human and non-human actors—laboratory instruments, microbes, ships, currents, and so on. An actor was anything that made a difference in a network. This symmetry between humans and non-humans was ANT's most controversial move. It did not simply follow SCOT; it criticized SCOT for retaining a human-centered sociology. ANT also rejected the Strong Programme's focus on social interests as too narrow. For ANT, explanation came from tracing associations, not from invoking pre-existing social forces.
Feminist history of science, which gained momentum in the 1980s, shared constructionism's suspicion of scientific neutrality but added a distinctive critical edge. Early work documented the exclusion of women from scientific institutions and recovered forgotten female practitioners. More ambitiously, feminist scholars such as Donna Haraway, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sandra Harding argued that the very categories of objectivity, rationality, and nature were gendered. They questioned whether the ideal of a detached, value-free observer was itself a masculine construct. This placed feminist history in an uneasy relationship with SSK: both rejected the idea that science transcended social context, but feminists insisted that power relations—especially gender—were not just one social factor among many but were constitutive of scientific knowledge itself.
Postcolonial and global history of science, emerging in the 1990s, extended this critical impulse to geography and empire. Earlier frameworks, even when they acknowledged social context, had tended to assume that modern science originated in Europe and then diffused outward. Postcolonial historians challenged this diffusionist narrative. They showed that colonial encounters were sites of knowledge production, not just passive reception; that indigenous knowledge systems were actively suppressed or appropriated; and that the global circulation of science involved coercion, resistance, and hybridization. This approach revived some themes from Marxist historiography—especially attention to power, extraction, and material inequality—but it rejected economic determinism in favor of more fluid analyses of cultural contact and epistemic violence.
By the 1990s, the field had accumulated a rich but fragmented set of frameworks. Each had its own explanatory strengths, but none had fully resolved the original tension between science and society. The co-productionist idiom, developed by Sheila Jasanoff and others, offered a way forward by refusing to treat science and society as separate domains that interact. Instead, co-productionism argued that scientific knowledge and social order are produced together, in the same processes. A new technology does not simply impact society; it reconfigures social roles, legal categories, and moral orders. Conversely, political decisions do not just regulate science; they shape what counts as a scientific problem in the first place. Co-productionism drew on ANT's insight that the natural and the social are co-constructed, but it placed more emphasis on the role of institutions, law, and political culture. It also absorbed the feminist and postcolonial insistence that power and identity are at stake in these processes.
No single framework now dominates the study of science and society. The Marxist historiography of science is no longer a live research program in its original form, but its concern with political economy has been absorbed into global and postcolonial approaches. Mertonian sociology survives in science policy studies, though its functionalist assumptions are widely criticized. The Strong Programme and SCOT remain influential as historical case-study methods, but they are rarely invoked as exclusive theoretical commitments. ANT continues to be used, especially in science and technology studies (STS), where its methodological injunction to 'follow the actors' remains productive. Feminist history of science is an active field, increasingly intersectional and attentive to race and class alongside gender. Postcolonial and global history has become a major current, reshaping the discipline's geographical imagination. Co-productionism functions as a widely shared idiom rather than a rigid doctrine, informing work on everything from climate science to biotechnology.
What the leading frameworks agree on is that science is not autonomous: it is shaped by—and shapes—social, political, and material contexts. They disagree, however, about how to analyze that mutual shaping. Some emphasize power and inequality (feminist, postcolonial, Marxist legacies); others focus on networks and practices (ANT, co-productionism); still others prioritize the role of social groups and interests (SSK, SCOT). The field's pluralism is not a sign of weakness. It reflects the recognition that science and society are too entangled to be captured by any single lens. Students entering this subfield today inherit a rich toolkit of frameworks, each with its own history, strengths, and blind spots.