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How can scientific knowledge be understood as a social product without collapsing into the claim that it is merely a reflection of social biases? This question has driven the sociology of science from its mid-twentieth-century origins to the present day. The subfield has moved through a series of frameworks that each redefined what it means to give a social account of science—from institutional norms to the content of knowledge, from laboratory practices to the agency of non-humans, and from gender to colonial power.
Robert K. Merton launched the sociology of science as a distinct enterprise in the 1940s. His framework, Mertonian Sociology of Science (1942–1970), focused on the institutional norms that supposedly governed scientific communities: communism (shared ownership of findings), universalism (evaluation based on impersonal criteria), disinterestedness (motivation by the pursuit of knowledge), and organized skepticism (critical scrutiny of claims). Merton asked how science maintained its authority and autonomy, not how its specific claims were produced. For him, the social structure of science explained scientists' behavior, but the content of scientific knowledge remained outside sociological analysis. This normative approach treated science as a special institution that largely policed itself.
By the 1970s, a new generation of scholars found Merton's framework too narrow. Why should sociologists accept scientists' own accounts of their methods and leave the content of knowledge untouched? The Strong Programme (1970–1990), developed at the University of Edinburgh by David Bloor, Barry Barnes, and others, demanded symmetry: the same types of social causes should explain both true and false beliefs. Instead of treating error as socially caused and truth as self-evident, the Strong Programme argued that all knowledge—including the most successful scientific theories—was shaped by social interests, negotiations, and institutional contexts. This was a direct replacement of Merton's focus on norms with a causal, interest-based explanation of knowledge content. The Strong Programme opened up the black box of scientific reasoning to sociological scrutiny.
At roughly the same time, a different approach emerged from ethnomethodology, the study of everyday practical reasoning. Ethnomethodological Studies of Science (1970–2000) shifted attention from macro-level interests to the micro-level work of scientists in laboratories. Pioneered by Michael Lynch, and famously exemplified by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's Laboratory Life (1979), this framework examined how scientists construct facts through mundane practices: inscription, conversation, and material manipulation. Unlike the Strong Programme, which explained knowledge through pre-existing social interests, ethnomethodology treated the social order as something that scientists themselves produce in real time. The two frameworks coexisted and often complemented each other, but ethnomethodology narrowed the focus to local, situated practices rather than broad social forces.
In the 1980s, Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law developed Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (1980–Present), which absorbed ethnomethodology's attention to practice but extended symmetry to non-human entities. ANT argued that scientific knowledge emerges from networks that include not only humans but also instruments, specimens, texts, and other material actors. The framework rejected the distinction between macro and micro, insisting that all actors—human and non-human—should be analyzed on the same terms. This was a direct critique of the Strong Programme's reliance on social interests as the sole explanatory resource: for ANT, the social is not a cause but an effect of network-building. ANT transformed the sociology of science by making materiality and relationality central, and it remains one of the most influential frameworks today, especially in science and technology studies.
While ANT was gaining traction, feminist scholars were raising a different set of questions. Feminist Sociology of Science (1980–Present), associated with Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Donna Haraway, argued that earlier frameworks had ignored how gender shapes scientific knowledge. Harding's standpoint theory proposed that marginalized groups, including women, can produce more objective knowledge because they see both dominant and subordinate perspectives. Haraway's concept of "situated knowledges" rejected the ideal of a view from nowhere, insisting that all knowledge is partial and embodied. Feminist sociology complemented ANT by adding attention to power, embodiment, and epistemology, but it also challenged the Strong Programme's assumption that interests are gender-neutral. It remains a living tradition, particularly in debates about objectivity and the politics of knowledge.
By the 1990s, scholars began to ask how the global history of empire had shaped science. Postcolonial Sociology of Science (1990–Present) examines how colonial power structured scientific institutions, practices, and categories. Researchers such as Warwick Anderson, Gyan Prakash, and Sujit Sivasundaram have shown that modern science was not simply a European export but was co-produced through encounters with colonized peoples, plants, and environments. This framework extends feminist critiques of power to race and empire, and it is in dialogue with ANT's interest in networks—but it insists that those networks were always embedded in asymmetrical relations of extraction and domination. Postcolonial sociology remains active, especially in studies of global health, biodiversity, and indigenous knowledge.
Today, the leading frameworks—Actor-Network Theory, Feminist Sociology of Science, and Postcolonial Sociology of Science—coexist and often overlap. They agree on a core constructivist premise: scientific knowledge is not a mirror of nature but a product of social, material, and historical processes. They also share a commitment to symmetry, though they interpret it differently. Where they disagree is on the relative importance of human agency versus material agency, and on whether power relations (gender, race, empire) should be the central analytical lens. ANT tends to flatten power into network effects, while feminist and postcolonial approaches insist that power must be named and critiqued. The division of labor is pragmatic: ANT is strongest for tracing how scientific facts travel and stabilize; feminist sociology for analyzing how gender shapes epistemology and practice; postcolonial sociology for understanding science's global inequalities. The field remains pluralistic, with each framework sharpening the others' blind spots.