Knowledge Domains & Communities of Practice

1. Knowledge Domains & Communities of Practice Science & TechnologySocial Sciences

2. Science objectively establishes truth, but does not control the context in which the scientific discovery will assist in the creation of knowledge

3. the nature of knowledge realist social

4. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • Realist nature of knowledge: world is completely objective (pure realism) • Social nature of knowledge: there is no foundation to knowledge apart from the perception of humans (purely socially determined)

5. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • Prejudice against social and behavioral research on the grounds that it is ‘soft’ or concerned with trivial questions • If scientific truth is objective, it is also blind • Individuals’ beliefs formed based on information supplied by others (social nature of knowledge) -- contentions regarding the nature of ‘truth’

6. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • Scientific data may be used to justify social stratification and prejudice, or that certain groups will appear to be genetically inferior • Behavioral research - human subjects used in studies of heredity and human behavior, genetics, race and IQ, psychobiology, or sociobiology

7. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • S/R: Standards of evidence are not hopelessly culture-bound, though judgements of justification are always perspectival = knowledge is truth-indicative but not absolute • Knowledge is built through the perspectives of our disciplines

8. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • Knowledge claims form an important part of journals’ content - reflecting social/realist nature of knowledge • Knowledge claims: rhetoric & epistemology • Rhetoric:persuasion • Epistemology: logical argument, testimony, empirical evidence

9. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • Knowledge entails cognitive effort within communities • Recognition of the social structure of research • Condition upon which communities form consensus: • attribution of authority • division of opinion

10. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • Journal content (reliability & attribution) • Reliability: • Source of the claim (speaker) • Bodies of evidence supporting claims • Perspectival processes shaped by social forces (gender, national origin, social structures of scholarship and research - does it embrace multiple perspectives on which knowledge claims are based)

11. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • Journal content (reliability & attribution) • Attribution realized through citation of published work: • epistemic (new idea is incorporated) • procedural (author’s work is cited as proof that researcher has that knowledge -- association)

12. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • Information policy literature (Rowland) • ISI citation indexes to define document test collection • Assumption: authors interact with existing knowledge through referencing behavior (use of the accumulating body of recorded literature)

13. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • Accumulation of a body of recorded literature varies according to subject area (how older materials are incorporated in more recent publication through citation) • Science and technology: select nucleus of specific journals; brief span of time covering a few current years • Social sciences & humanities: greater dispersion of publications in different forms, on different subjects & over a comparatively long span of time • Ephemeral vs. classical literature

14. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • Comte (1798-1857) - taxonomy of sciences • science (physics, biochemistry) • soft science (social science) • non-science (humanities) • Price (1970) - Price’s index • how references are distributed over an archive of material • hard sciences cite works in the last 6 years

15. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • Cole (1983) • fundamental differences bw disciplines lie not in citation habits but in the structure of their knowledge systems (cognitive) • how empirical knowledge is codified into succinct and interdependent theoretical statements • Cozzens (1985) • periods of intellectual focus • reception - obsolescence of literature

16. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • Bradford (1934) • core ‘zones’ • core - scatter determine the structure of knowledge in a discipline (older, institutionalized have core) • Nadel (1980) • catholicity of interests is a function of the maturity of a specialty (institutionalization level)

17. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • Other observations • less highly structured or specialized disciplines: people read widely outside their own current areas of concern (arts and humanities - information from a wide variety of sources) • Coauthoring: sciences (apparatus for experimentation); social sciences (division of labor as strategy); humanities (coauthoring not practiced)

18. Science & TechnologySocial Sciences • Other observations • degree of institutionalization (professional associations, specialist journals) • institutional arrangements support & encourage research • debates over establishment of new forms of institutional knowledge and established academic fields