ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, I examined in some detail the relationship between the
intellectual context of knowledge production and the decisions that scientists take
about how to produce knowledge in abstraction from the social context of know-
ledge production. I now want to examine the relationship between the social
context of knowledge production and the decisions that scientists take about what
sort of knowledge to produce – whether specialized, disciplinary or integrative,
interdisciplinary research – but in abstraction from the intellectual context of
knowledge production. My objective is to shed further light both on the nature of
the social context of knowledge production – that is, the types of social entity of
which it is comprised – and on how its causal effect is mediated by the agency of
scientists. The underlying assumption is that we can understand both the nature
and effect of this context through comparison of the challenges, choices and
dilemmas facing scientists from different disciplines and the strategies they adopt
in response – from which we can then draw conclusions about the degree to
which the production of integrative forms of knowledge varies across disciplines.
