Year: 2010
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: This analysis, based on focus groups and a national survey, assesses scientists' subscription to the Mertonian norms of science and associated counternorms.It also supports extension of these norms to governance (as opposed to administration), as a norm of decision-making, and quality (as opposed to quantity), as a evaluative norm.When someone is introduced or identified as a scientist, there is no way initially to know if she studies butterfly wings, nanostructures, brain waves, glaciers or organic molecules.What is more certain is that she has been trained in scientific methods and likely does her research in accordance with them.Her work is subject to rules, regulations, policies and laws, some general and some specific to her area of inquiry.As a member of the broad scientific community, she is also subject to general expectations about how she should behave in her role as a scientist, expectations that encompass her motivations, relations with other scientists, standards for and evaluation of her work, and her autonomy.All of these conditions are invoked by a person's self-identification with science as a social system.Our focus in this analysis is on the norms associated with scientific research in academic institutions.Norms are collective expectations for and understandings of appropriate and desired behavior within a given social system.A normative system is the set of all norms associated with a particular social system, together with the members' collective subscription to the norms and weighting of the norms' importance and applicability.An individual's normative orientation is his or her unique pattern of subscription and resistance to all the norms in the social system, as he or she understands them.Neither a normative system nor an individual's normative orientation is fully knowable, since many of a social system's norms remain latent until they are challenged or violated.Robert Merton (1942) sought to give shape (literally, "structure") to the normative system of science overall by specifying norms that fairly and uniquely characterize the system.His pithy formulation of four norms was never intended as an exhaustive specification of the entire normative system of science.He specifically omitted from consideration what he
Source: The Journal of Higher Education
Institutions: University of Minnesota, University of Michigan
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems and Management
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Award: G5632830071
OpenAlex ID: W4244465994