Disciplinary Practices As Social Manoeuvers: A Field Theory Alternative To Michael Burawoy’s Typology Of Knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his call for more public sociology, Michael Burawoy presents a generic framework to describe disciplinary structures in the social sciences. This model is based on a fourfold typology of knowledge which has been criticized by many. However, alternatives have fallen short of providing a convincing articulation of the social organisation and meaning of the intellectual practices the original typology was trying to describe. The debate on public sociology did not bridge differences in analytical beliefs about knowledge production and thus could not be expected to build a consensual disciplinary orientation. The current paper builds on field theory, organizational sociology, and interview data to frame the practices identified by Burawoy as social manoeuvers (i.e. ways of utilizing and legitimating knowledge) within specific social fields. In so doing, the paper provides a framework that is more flexible, more empirically adequate, and congruent with the sociology of science and the sociology of intellectuals and experts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".