New Developments in Science Studies: The Ethnographic Challenge

The aim of this paper is to bring together and review the results of a series of studies which, for the first time in the sociology of science, have chosen to study scientists at work through close, unmediated, ethnographic observation. The results of these studies vary with the theoretical outlook of their authors and the field of science investigated. I shall focus on what I consider to be their overlapping conceptions and concerns: first, the constructivist interpretation of scientific activities; second, the notion that the logic of research is indexical and opportunistic; third, the challenge of the concept of scientific communities and of quasi-economic models of science; and fourth, the rejection of the social-cognitive distinction and of the distinctions customarily drawn between the social and the natural sciences.