Knowledge and the constitution of society: Dead ends and ways forward in the sociology of knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses the roots of knowledge society theory – an emerging paradigm within theoretical sociology – in classical sociology of knowledge, and draws some conclusions about the former’s validity, relevance and shortcomings. The paper first presents a framework for understanding the development of classical sociology of knowledge, and positions knowledge society theory within this tradition by connecting it to the earlier theory of post-industrial society. It is argued that, while knowledge society theory has much to recommend it in terms of its effectiveness in challenging existing orthodoxies about the relationship between society and knowledge, it has not sufficiently differentiated itself from the theory of post-industrial society and falls prey to some of the problems that it has itself raised against this theory. This problem can, however, be mitigated by connecting knowledge society theory with some of the positive theoretical developments that are beginning to emerge from the agency–structure debate.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.130 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.044 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".