Exploiting Science and Technology (II)

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the industrial exploitation of science and technology. Although the vast majority of scientists work for private corporations as technicians, engineers or laboratory researchers, the sociology of science has paid much less attention to them over the past two decades than it has to the public sector academic research community. Perhaps in part this is because the earlier Mertonian approach tended to regard scientists in industry as technologists, concerned apparently more with applying knowledge for commercial gain than pursuing it via the putative norms of academic science. As such, ‘technologists’ could be regarded as of secondary sociological importance inasmuch as the key institutional locus for the development of novel, objective science was the academic ‘pure’ science lab. Indeed, much of the early sociology and history of science sustained this split between science and technology, despite the fact that no one had really explored these two worlds to find out how different they actually were.