ABSTRACT
During the second half of the twentieth century, sociology was exhilarated by an intellectual debate, the main premises of which still strongly structure our general ideas about science and scientific research. What became known as the specialty of the sociology of science comprises quite different views on the object of interest: science as a social institution characterized by binding cultural norms, as a social laboratory for interactively constructing knowledge, or as a social field of power driven by various types of capital. These competing notions of science, 1 their key concepts and methodologies are reviewed in the first part of this chapter in order to establish a common understanding of the design of the following case study.
