Research Evaluation and Policy Project, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University
Jochen Gläser and Grit Laudel
The aim of our paper is to outline an approach to comparative investigations of natural, i.e. essentially non-social influences on human actions. Any sociological approach that does not subscribe to radical constructivism implicitly or explicitly acknowledges that nature interferes with human action. It must find a way of including non-social influences in sociological explanations. Sociology of science is especially affected because scientific research is aimed at investigating nature and therefore affected by it in a rather unmediated way. The solutions offered by sociology of scientific knowledge — especially Actor-Network Theory and the “Mangle of Practice” — are insufficient because they combine highly abstract concepts with idiosyncratic descriptions, both of which are unsuitable for comparative approaches. As a solution to the problem, we propose to identify sociologically relevant classes of non-social factors (epistemic conditions of action) and to look at the channels through which these conditions affect social action. These channels of influence can be described by linkage variables which depend on the non-social factors but are at the same time compatible with sociological descriptions of actions. This approach is demonstrated by two examples.