Copyright is owned by the Author of the thesis.  Permission is given for 
a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and 
private study only.  The thesis may not be reproduced elsewhere without 
the permission of the Author. 
 



1 of 298

Misfits of science and creatures of habitus:

Ecological expert witnesses across water resource
management fields

Matthew Russell

A thesis submitted to Massey University in partial fulfilment
of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy



2 of 298

Thesis abstract

This thesis applies Bourdieusian field-theory to investigate the way scientific knowledge is
converted into evidence to inform decision making across four key fields central to the development
and enforcement of water resource management law in New Zealand: the New Zealand
Environment Court, the Environmental Protection Authority, regional councils plan hearings, and
ministerially appointed science and technology advisory groups. The New Zealand publicly funded
science system now exhibits most of the characteristics of a “neoliberal science regime” (Lave, 2012),
a regime constituted by an extensive and influential science "consultocracy" (Hodge and Bowman,
2006) a marketplace of expertise which encompasses the seven Crown Research Institutes, hybrid
scientific research institutes and significant aspects of the university sector. This regime has
structurally entrenched a series of contradictions across New Zealand’s publicly funded science
system which have a decisive influence on 1.) scientific habitus across institutional settings, 2.) the
production of ‘public good' environmental expert knowledge claims, and 3.) the way that ecological
expertise is converted into evidence to inform decisions on RMA law and policy.

While the autonomy of New Zealand’s publicly funded science system has been greatly diminished,
the New Zealand Environment Court has developed a set of procedures and rules that are designed
to reconstruct the idealised or ‘pure’ autonomous scientific community inside the juridical field.
Some of these procedures and rules, most significantly those that relate to the still developing
practice of expert-conferencing, have been replicated within regional authority plan hearings and
science and technology advisory groups.

These procedures function relatively effectively inside the Environment Court. Within
quasi-juridical fields like the EPA, councils and STAGs however, politics and power have a
significant influence in the process of converting scientific knowledge into evidence to inform
actions and judgements, as well as the evidentiary burden that is placed on ecological and
biophysical evidence versus other forms of expertise. The neoliberal regime favours agents with the
greatest economic capital to engage experts, primarily industry and local and regional authorities.
Aside from a small number of highly active ‘misfit' individuals, university-based experts are not
major players in the Environment Court, which points towards the powerful authority assigned to
expert-knowledge claims produced outside academia. Within this context, mātauranga Māori
increasingly represents a corrective to the technocratic, ecological modernisation project embodied
in the New Zealand RMA. Ecological misfits see mātauranga Māori as the most powerful
articulation of 'public good' environmental values in Aotearoa today. However, the most vocal
champions of mātauranga Māori tend to argue around the contradictions produced by the
neoliberal science regime, rather than challenging them directly, arguably blunting its

transformative potential.



3 of 298

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge Massey University for the financial support afforded by the
Vice Chancellor's scholarship, and staff within the Doctoral Research Committee for their
continuing patience and support over the long journey to get this thesis to completion. In
particular, I owe Jacqueline Koenders a debt of gratitude, both for her empathy, and for her
commitment to the success and welfare of postgraduate students.

I am eternally grateful to my supervision team: Brennon Wood, Matt Henry and Warwick
Tie. Matt's archaeological insight into the history and political economy of resource
management law and policy is central to the core arguments of the thesis. Warwick's deep
theoretical knowledge informs a significant part of the conceptual framework and
discussion chapter. I could not have wished for better supervisors and I badly miss our
supervisory meetings

To Brennon and Sue, Massey is a severely diminished place without you both. Brennon,
thank you for showing me how to write, teach and think, and what the sociological
vocation can be.

Immense thanks to the interview participants who were exceptionally generous with their
time and insights, and patiently guided me through the complexity of what they do. To the
misfits especially - thank you on behalf of humanity.

I am very grateful to Helen Dollery, Pete McGregor and Richard Shaw for being wonderful
humans, and for kindly assisting with marking and tutoring when I was late on a chapter
deadline, sick, having car troubles, etcetera.

I'd like to acknowledge my friends and comrades within the Massey branch of the Tertiary
Education Union: Leon, Sean, Josh, Shaun, Felix, Te Awatea, Toby, Ben, Emma, Vincent and
Zoe.

Finally, thank you to Ellie and Finn, my family.



4 of 298

Table of Contents

THESIS ABSTRACT 2

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 6

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 7

CHAPTER TWO: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 16

2.1 Introduction 16

2.1 Mertonian functionalism 18

2.2 Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 23

2.3 The turn to practice 30

2.4 Bourdieu and STS 34

2.5 Habitus, field, capital 36

2.6 Scientific capital and the scientific field 39

2.7 The juridical field and juridical reasoning 50

2.8 The Misfit 54

2.9 Conclusion 61

CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY 62

3.1 Introduction 62

3.2 Research pathway 62

3.3 Research question and objectives 64

3.4 Operationalising Field, Capital and Habitus 65

3.5 Data identification and analysis 76

3.5.1 Identifying interview participants 77

3.5.2 Interview technique 79

3.5.3 Ethics and participant confidentiality 80

3.5.4 Legal material 82

3.5.5 Policy literature 83



5 of 298

3.5.6 Data analysis 84

3.6. Conclusion 85

CHAPTER FOUR: THE NEW ZEALAND SCIENCE/POLICY NEXUS IN CONTEXT 86

4.1 Introduction 86

4.2 DSIR: Expansion (1926-1973) 89

4.3 DSIR: Dissolution (1973-1993) 93

4.4 Stabilising the neoliberal regime 103

4.5 Mātauranga Māori vs. western science 115

4.6 Tertiary reform and academic capitalism 124

4.7 The New Zealand Resource Management Act 129

4.8 Between science and law: the New Zealand Environment Court and the emergence of
new agents 139

4.8.1 The expert-witness and expert-conferencing 141

4.8.2 Independent Commissioners and Freshwater Commissioners 144

4.8.3 Te Ao Māori and Resource Management Law 147

4.9 Conclusion 154

CHAPTER FIVE: DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS 158

5.1 Introduction 158

5.2 The New Zealand Environment Court as a juridical “field of fields.” 162

5.2.1 The development of expert-conferencing in the Environment Court 163

5.2.2 Expert conferencing as a juridically constructed ideal speech situation 169

5.3 Expert conferencing as contextually embedded practice 188

5.3.1 The Ruataniwha dam scheme 215

5.3.2 The One Plan 219

5.3.3 STAG and the National Policy Statement on Freshwater (2020) 234

5.4 Conclusion 249

CHAPTER 6: MISFITS AND SCIENCE AND CREATURE OF HABITUS 254

REFERENCES 275



6 of 298

List of abbreviations

ADS Alternative Dispute Resolution
CCMAU Crown Company and Monitoring Advisory Unit
CRI Crown Research Institute
DAF Department of Internal Affairs
DSIR Department of Scientific and Industrial Research
EDS Environmental Defence Society
EnvC New Zealand Environment Court
FRST Foundation for Research, Science and Technology
GWRC Greater Wellington Regional Council
HBRC Hawke's Bay Regional Council
HRC Horizons Regional Council
IWRM Integrated Water Resource Management
MBI Ministry for Primary Industries
MBIE Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment
MfE Ministry for the Environment
MM Mātauranga Māori
MoRST Ministry for Research, Science and Technology
NIWA National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research
NPM New Public Management Theory
NPS-FM National Policy Statement - Freshwater Management
NZAS New Zealand Association of Scientists
OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
OCFC Office of the Chief Freshwater Commissioner
RNZ Radio New Zealand
RSNZ Royal Society of New Zealand
R&D Research and Development
SSIF Strategic Science Investment Fund
VM Vision Mātauranga Fund



7 of 298

Chapter One: Introduction

We collectively experience a world both created by and understood through technological

rationality and science, but seemingly unable to mitigate any risk that would require a

significant disruption to production or consumption. More than thirty years ago, Ulrich

Beck (1992) defined reflexive modernity as the recursive turning of modernity back on itself:

the attempt to understand and address the problems generated by neoliberal modernity -

such as climate change, freshwater degradation, nuclear catastrophe, domestic and

international terrorism, post-truth, the decline of democratic structures and habitus - with

the techniques of neoliberal modernity. These techniques take the form of quantitative

cost-benefit and risk-benefit analysis, environmental impact assessments, economic

forecasts, opinion polling, economic and financial modelling, the proliferation of science

and technical advisory bodies and science consultancy industries, integrative and

participatory resource management ideologies and processes, performance and

accountability metrics, surveillance, attempted censorship and information control, to name

a few examples. Today these techniques are primarily carried out by an assemblage of

public and private science providers connected with multiple government and public sector

authorities that comprises a system Mirowski defines as the "neoliberal regime of science"

(2018).

Risk society has created the conditions in which neoliberal science regimes can thrive. The

neoliberal science regime "reconfigures both the institutions and the nature of knowledge so

as to better conform to market imperatives" (Mirowski, 2018, p. 172), the core principle of

which is that "the market is the ultimate information processor" (p. 173). The result is a

paradoxical situation in which we are mostly aware that science is commodified and

politicised, while increasingly dependent on science for reliable, impartial and

non-politicised knowledge. In such conditions, the authority of science is continually called

into question.



8 of 298

These contradictions culminate dramatically in New Zealand with respect to intensive dairy

farming and the degradation of freshwater ecosystems. 'Dirty dairying’ is regarded by most

New Zealanders as one of the most important political issues, and one that involves a

complex range of competing interests and values. Increasing public awareness of the

externalisation of the environmental costs of primary production is highlighted repeatedly

in surveys which show that freshwater is considered the most important environmental

issue for 80% of New Zealanders, and freshwater was a significant national election issue in

2017 (Statistics New Zealand 2018; Rood 2019). This awareness gave the current Labour

government the strongest possible public mandate to mitigate and reverse freshwater

degradation. However, progress remains superficial and performative, and economic

interests continue to trump science-informed mitigation measures (Joy and Canning, 2020;

Koolen-Burke and Peart, 2022).

The "crisis of expertise" (Eyal, 2019) has generated vast bodies of scholarship

internationally, but the political economy of the science-law and science-policy nexuses has

only received intermittent attention from sociologists in Aotearoa. Within this nexus, the

scientific expert witness is a key player. Inside the framework established by the Resource

Management Act (1991), the scientific expert witness is a key mediating agent between

science providers and legal and policy fields. Scientific expert witnesses are drawn both

from the neoliberal science regime, (which is comprised of Crown Research Institutes,

tertiary institutions and hybrid research organisations), as well as the environmental

"consultocracy" (Hodge and Bowman, 2006) (comprised by the largest, transnational

environmental consultancy firms such as Boffa Miskell and WPS). The neoliberal science

regime and the environmental consultocracy are structurally coupled and are the most

powerful providers of expertise within Aotearoa's science-policy and science-law nexuses.

The legal literature on expert witnessing in environmental adjudication tends to be

descriptive (Forret, 1998; Warnock, 2014; Warnock and Pedersen, 2017), and critical political

economic approaches are comparatively rare (Monod de Froideville, 2022; Koolen-Bourke



9 of 298

and Peart, 2022). While there is a body of literature examining the use of expert witnesses in

New Zealand’s criminal and family court systems (see Katz, 2018; Henderson, 2013) the

conduct and activities of expert witnesses across resource management fields remain mostly

obscure to the public and have attracted comparatively scant attention from social science

researchers. Within the legal scholarship and juridical commentary produced by the New

Zealand Environment Court, "expert witnessing" is almost never used as a verb. In a written

interview response from one Environment Court Commissioner, the term 'expert

witnessing' was flanked with scare quotes to indicate that it is the interviewer's phrase, not

the Court's (Interviews, Oct 2022 - March 2023). Rather, legal scholarship and juridical

commentary speaks of 'the expert witness', which points to the way that expert witnessing

is legally conceptualised as a set of rules that define and delimit a role, rather than a practice

that has generated its own strategies, dispositions, political economy and culture. A central

objective of this thesis is to explain expert witnessing as both a role and a practice and in

doing so, to shed light on the 'game within the game' of expert witnessing for water

governance law and policy. This leads to the central question of this thesis: Have the

practices of expert-witnessing generated their own specific form of culture and politics?

And if so, what are the implications for the contribution of science to the legal resolution of

water resource management conflicts?

The Aotearoa science reforms, the beginning of which is usually traced back to the

dissolution of the centralised Department for Industrial and Scientific Research (DSIR) in

the early 1990s, have pushed publicly funded science providers in an explicitly commercial

direction (Gailbraith, 1998, 2009; McGuinness et al., 2009; Davenport and Bibby, 2007; Leitch

et al., 2014; Robinson, 2015). The Aotearoa science reforms involved a continual rollback of

public funding; the exclusion of scientists from science-related policymaking and science

funding structures; the rapid growth of a 'knowledge economy’ involving the marketisation

and privatisation of different forms of expertise; the narrowing of research agendas to focus

on the needs of commercial actors and the decline of 'public-good' science (Davenport and

Bibby, 2007; Leitch et al., 2014; Hendy, 2015). Unlike neoliberal science regimes operating in



10 of 298

societies like America however (Lave, et al., 2010; Mirowski, 2011; Mirowski, 2018), the

neoliberal science regime in Aotearoa is distinguished by extremely low-levels of private

sector research funding, producing a highly commercially-orientated science system that is

still predominantly reliant on public funding, with very limited autonomy from central

government (Leitch et al., 2014; OECD, 2021, 2020; MBIE, 2022). Over the same period, the

RMA regime has necessitated the growth of an industry of experts, which are drawn both

from the heavily commercialised publicly funded science sector as well as the

environmental consultocracy. Seeking to reassemble the set of practices and relations that

constitute expert witnessing within the context of the application of neoliberal principles

across the public sector raises an important subquestion to the central research objective,

namely: To what degree do some forms of expert witnessing function as a structural

component of Aotearoa’s neoliberal science regime by recasting science as a form of

expertise and a source of evidence in both environmental adjudication and policy formation

that favours the economic over the ecological?

The expert witness is retained by a client to provide evidence on their behalf in multiple

forms of environmental litigation and policy formation: from Environment Court consent

and plan appeals, regional council policy plan and resource consent applications and EPA

directed boards of inquiry. In order to dis-embed experts from their institutional setting and

separate client objectives from expert evidence, the Environment Court has developed a

series of rules and procedures to incentivise and discipline experts towards impartiality.

The most powerful disciplinary mechanism is the Environment Court's application of the

Code of Conduct for Expert Witnesses (EnvC Practice Note, 2023, s.9), which instructs experts to

demonstrate impartiality both in the presentation of written and oral evidence, and through

processes designed to enhance good faith expert deliberation, most significantly the

developing practice of expert conferencing. The rules and procedures outlined in the

Court's Practice Note (2023, ss7-10) bear similarity to Habermas' (1984) notion of the "ideal

speech situation", but one specifically tailored for the adjudication of contested scientific

and technical knowledge claims. While these rules and procedures can operate quite



11 of 298

effectively within the relatively autonomous juridical setting of the Environment Court,

they become much less effective when replicated in more heterogeneous, quasi-juridical

and non-juridical resource management fields, such as regional council resource consent

and plan hearings, EPA boards of inquiry and science and technology advisory groups,

where power, politics and self-interest continue to dominate.

Due to the absence of existing domestic research to draw on, much of the information and

the most important insights in this thesis are derived from ‘insider knowledge’:

semi-structured interviews conducted with a pool of ecologists and conservation scientists

with substantial experience acting as expert-witnesses across multiple fields. These experts

are primarily housed within tertiary institutions, Crown Research Institutes and smaller,

green-focused consultancies. Interviews reveal that many of these experts have little faith

that the Code of Conduct for Expert Witnesses (EnvC Practice Note, 2023, s.9 - hereafter The

Code) itself guarantees the impartiality of expert-witness evidence. A recurring theme is that

expert witnessing is more like a 'game' or an 'art' in which experts can 'perform' objectivity

to decision makers who already share similar dispositions characteristic of agents within

the environmental consultocracy and neoliberal science regimes. Participants describe the

unspoken rules and conventions of expert-witnessing and the epistemic and discursive

strategies that are used to both interpret a client brief and then tailor the presentation of

information in a way that can meet the objectives of their client while maintaining a

simulacra of impartiality and 'objectivity'. The Code's insistence on a traditionally

empirico-positivist separation of facts and values, combined with juridically constructed

disciplinary boundaries, combines to greatly disadvantage integrated, multidisciplinary

forms of ecological expertise compared to other knowledge claims, especially privileging

economic knowledge claims. The structural coupling observable between the neoliberal

science regime, the environmental consultocracy and environmental governance authorities

has marginalised academic ecologists, who, aside from a small group of highly active

'misfit' individuals, are not major players in these processes. As such, experts working in

the interests of the agricultural sector have been able to have a very significant and



12 of 298

disproportionate influence on sustainability policy and resource management litigation and

legislation in Aotearoa.

Within the RMA context, the neoliberal science regime has produced an institutional

configuration and culture that is somewhat unique to Aotearoa's system of state-funded

science and regionally devolved resource governance. Scientists within CRIs talk of a

'culture of silence' which involves a range of both formal and informal rules preventing

them from speaking publicly about issues which might expose their institution to public

criticism (Interviews, October 2022 - March 2023; Hendy, 2016). Within regional councils,

technical staff articulate what could be called an anti-political disposition: an aversion to the

'messiness' of politics, which is connected with an idealised vision of "pure science" (Peilke,

2012) or "neutral science" (Ozawa, 2005): objective scientific knowledge cleansed of any

'external' political considerations (Interviews, October 2022 - March 2023). As such, many

scientific researchers and technical staff within regional councils and CRIs perceive their

role as fundamentally apolitical, and the artifice of politics is seen as a hindrance to

environmental policymaking, rather than an intrinsic part of it. Politics is a fly in the

ointment of policy, a problem that stands between prescription and practice, one which can

be overcome by rational, evidence-based and deliberative decision-making. As explained in

the final chapter, Sir Peter Gluckman - probably the closest New Zealand has come to

producing a theoretician of the ethos of science - has repeatedly championed a vision of

scientific authority that rests on its assumed value-neutrality and separation (and

superiority) to politics. But because 'pure science’ is based on informed disagreement and

logical argumentation, this type of approach is inherently vulnerable to the kind of

problematisation and complexification that can be tactically employed to undermine its

authority in policy and legislative spheres.

These strategies are facilitated and structured into regional and national-level

environmental legislative and planning processes by the RMA regime. The RMA was

originally intended to provide for a devolved, democratic and evidence-driven decision



13 of 298

making and policy formation to both enhance public participation and a sense of ownership

over natural resources, and to “promote the sustainable management of natural and

physical resources” (Palmer, 2013: 14). Four decades later and it has become something

close to common-sense that the RMA has failed to realise anything resembling sustainable

development (Joy, 2015; Joy and Canning, 2021; Joy, 2022; Koolen Burke and Peart, 2022).

The declining state of freshwater quality has been documented for over forty years and

successive governments have failed to respond with an effective policy framework. From an

ecological perspective, the most persistent criticism of the RMA is that it has failed to

protect biophysical bottom-lines, and that it has failed to respond to "greater demands from

the public for higher standards and more certain sustainability” (Oram, 2007: 12). More

fundamentally, there is a growing acceptance that the normative concepts at the very heart

of the RMA (which, during its history have fluctuated between superficial notions of

sustainable development and ecological modernisation) are deeply compromised

(Kawharu, 2000; Jackson and Dixon, 2007; Nicolas, 2018, Clapcott et al., 2018, Kaiser and

Saunders, 2022). This has opened a space in which both academics, legal agents and policy

makers are increasingly receptive to alternative value-frameworks, most significantly

mātauranga Māori which could provide a corrective to the productivist, colonial ethos that

has dominated both science provision and resource management law and policy in New

Zealand for much of its history (Kawharu, 2000; Muru-Lanning, 2012; Clapcott et al., 2018).

In some instances it appears the symbolic capital of mātauranga Māori represents a

challenge to economic capital, most notably in the formalisation of Te Mana o Te Wai and

the extension of legal personhood to the Whanganui River. The juridical, scientific and

political recognition of mātauranga Māori is in its very early stages, and whether or not it

represents a counter-hegemonic force, or whether it will be co-opted into the existing

neoliberal science regime is unclear. The ambiguities in the way mātauranga Māori is

defined and used by scientists, policymakers and juridical agents reflects the complex

politics of hegemony that are pulling Mātauranga Māori in different (and sometimes

contradictory) directions simultaneously.



14 of 298

The prioritisation of economic matters over environmental outcomes has been a recurring

criticism of the planning, policy-formation and resource consent processes enshrined in the

RMA (Jackson and Dixon, 2007; Wheen, 2013; Koolen-Bourke and Peart, 2022). Authorities

publicly valorise ‘evidence-driven’ and ‘science-driven’ policy, but in practice, economic

concerns consistently trump matters of long-term ecological sustainability and scientifically

defined biophysical limits. A recent Environmental Defence Society (EDS) research project

summarises the current situation: 1

We found that current regulatory direction ensures economic matters are prioritised

over environmental ones and can prevent good science-driven outcomes … the current

focus on costs unreasonably elevates the evidentiary burden to justify environmental

reforms, creating systemic inertia against change (Koolen-Bourke and Peart, 2022, p.

13).

Koolen-Bourke and Peart starkly conclude that ”given that most of the environmental issues

we face today require an urgent response, this broader finding is deeply troubling” (2022, p.

13). However, while the EDS provided a badly-needed and impressively comprehensive

insight into the systems and policy structures that shape the science/policy interface (using

the development of the National Policy Statement - Freshwater Management 2020 as a case

study), it does not delve into the minutiae of expert-witnessing across fields, or make

explicit connections between the political economy of expertise and the neoliberal science

regime in which it is embedded. The practice of expert-witnessing, including its internal

culture and politics (nomos) and experts' own ‘sense of the game' remains a largely

unexplored territory for sociologists. The thesis does not claim to provide an 'objective' account of

'the field of expert witnessing', rather, it is concerned with how interconnected water resource

management fields produce ecological misfits, those who are attuned to recognise a 'game within a

game', and struggle against it. The thesis aims to make the experiences of these misfits visible

1 The Environmental Defence Society is a New Zealand-based environmental NGO that specialises in
sustainability policy and litigation and is funded by a combination of private and public sources.



15 of 298

and accessible to sociological inquiry and by necessity relies heavily on the accounts of the

misfits themselves.

The thesis structure is as follows. Chapter Two outlines the theoretical framework that

informs the study - Bourdieusian field theory. As well as elaborating Bourdieu's tripartite

concepts of habitus, capital and field as they relate to the scientific and juridical fields,

Bourdieu's (marginal) position in STS is briefly contextualised, with a focus on the two

major figures most relevant to Bourdieu's own approach - Robert Merton and Thomas

Kuhn. Chapter Three seeks to operationalise Bourdieu's field-theoretic by way of a viable

research methodology tailored to the institutional configuration of science and resource

management law and policy in Aotearoa. Chapter Four provides a Bourdieusian-influenced

history of the development and structure of the New Zealand system of state-funded

science and resource management legislation, situating mātauranga Māori within this

history. This chapter also conceptualises the Environment Court as a 'field of fields' and

describes how the Court's rules and procedures regarding expert witnessing and expert

conferencing have been displaced and partially replicated throughout key RMA decision

making arenas. Chapter Five turns towards an interview-driven analysis of expert

witnessing both as a judicially constructed ideal speech situation and as contextually

embedded practice with reference to three key water resource management conflicts:

Horizons Regional Council's One Plan, the aborted Ruataniwha dam scheme in Hawkes

Bay, and the development of the National Policy Statement on Freshwater (2020). The final

and concluding chapter is concerned with possibilities for agency and resistance, making

use of Bourdieu's underdeveloped concept of the 'misfit' to understand the disruptive

struggles of ecological expert witnesses and the increasing symbolic capital of mātauranga

Māori.



16 of 298

Chapter Two: Theoretical framework

2.1 Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to outline Bourdieu’s tripartite theory of field, habitus and

capital, and to explain its relevance both to the study of scientific practice, and its relevance

to the conversion of scientific knowledge into evidence used to inform resource

management decisions within key juridical fields. Before explaining Bourdiusian

field-theory it is necessary to historically contextualise Bourdieu within the development of

STS, with an emphasis on the work of the two theorists who arguably influenced the

concept of the scientific field most strongly, Merton and Kuhn. This chapter lays the

theoretical groundwork for the methodological operationalisation of field-theory in Chapter

Three and informs the historical narrative of the field-external forces that drove the

de-autonomisation of Aotearoa’s publicly funded science system in Chapter Four. The ideas

covered in this chapter also provide the conceptual framework for interpreting the

interview data and providing a more 'internalist' account of ecological expert witnessing

across juridical fields in Chapter Five.

Four key arguments emerge from this chapter: Bourdieusian field theory is a useful

framework for understanding: 1.) the structural configuration of scientific research across

public institutions; 2.) the forms of habitus that this configuration has produced; 3.) the

various strategies and practices that individual scientists enact within this configuration

and 4.) what happens to ecology when it is converted into 'evidence' to inform freshwater

water policy and law within judicial and quasi-judicial fields.

It is widely recognised that field-theory has been, until very recently, largely ignored within

STS. Quoting Lave:

"For its part, the STS world is profoundly ambivalent about Bourdieu. His classic 1975

article on the structure of scientific fields is included in the major STS anthologies, but



17 of 298

his later critiques of STS researchers for taking positions that he considered too

strongly constructivist alienated many who might have made use of his powerful

analytic framework" (2012, p. 10)

Given the prominence of his ideas in other areas of sociological inquiry - consumption

practices, cultural distinction, education and inequality - Bourdieu’s absence within STS is

striking. Part of the explanation for his absence is evident in the historical trajectory of STS

theory, which has long moved away from structuralist and functionalist accounts in favour

of ANT-inspired, micro-sociological and ontological approaches that tend to emphasise

contingency, plurality and change, with a focus on the agency of individual scientists and

other agents within wider assemblages (see Hess, 2013; Fuller, 1999). Researchers who see

field-theory as a structuralist, political-economic alternative to the more dominant agentic

approaches within STS must therefore expend much effort justifying their use of Bourdieu,

attempting to 'build bridges' between STS and field theory with the aim of making

Bourdieuian structuralism palatable to mainstream STS (Albert and Kleinman, 2011; Baker,

2017; Camic, 2011; Gauchat and Andrews, 2018; Hess, 2013; Jeon, 2019; Kate-Lostuvali, 2016;

Nelson 2014; Eyal, 2013; Lave, 2012).

Another reason for Bourdieu’s absence is his long-standing antagonism with one of the

most influential voices in STS: Bruno Latour. This antagonism is usually traced to

Bourdieu’s final publication prior to his death, Science of Science and Reflexivity, in which he

dismisses aspects of nascent Actor Network-Theory as a theoretical trend (2004: 26-31). In

his many subsequent publications, writings and interviews, Latour has singled-out

Bourdieu for critique seemingly more than any other thinker (perhaps, aside from Kant),

positioning Bourdieu as emblematic of the arrogance of 'old-fashioned' social science and its

universalistic categories and assumptions. But increasingly, scholars are recognising that

this antagonism has been detrimental to the development of STS and are simply getting on

with field-theoretic approaches to scientific practice (Crossley, 2004; Nelson, 2014; Lave,

2012; Gorski, 2013; Camic, 2013). For many of these scholars, particularly Lave (2012), field

theory provides a means to understand both the internal and external determinants of



18 of 298

scientific practice: the nitty-gritty of field specific practice as well as the wider political

economy of science in the context of neoliberalism.

While Bourdieu's absence within STS is contextualised, the following chapter does not

attempt to build any 'bridges' between STS and field theory or 'reconcile' Bourdieu with

STS. This is ground already covered elsewhere. Instead, it focuses on three core bodies of

theory relevant to the analysis and discussion of the publicly funded science system and the

way this system provides scientific knowledge to the related judicial and quasi-judicial

fields central to resource governance in Aotearoa. The thesis as a whole seeks to

demonstrate the relevance of field-theory empirically, and the purpose of the following

sections is to lay the conceptual foundation for the empirical discussion in Chapters Four

and Five. The chapter begins with a discussion of the Mertonian ethos of science, shifts to

the Kuhnian inspired 'turn to practice', before turning to an elaboration of Bourdieu's

theoretical oeuvre as it relates to science and law.

2.1 Mertonian functionalism

By the early 1970s, STS was characterised by the dominance of structural functionalism, of

which Robert Merton was a leading figure. Merton conceptualised science as a

semi-autonomous field in which research is structured through norms and an institutional

“reward system” that grants prestige and resources to scientists according to the quality of

their work (Merton, 1973). Merton’s definition of the ethos of science is a moral consensus

reproduced and transmitted through institutionalised practice. He quotes Bayet’s remark

that “this scientific ethos does not have its theoreticians, but it has its artisans. It does not

express its ideals, but serves them: it is implicated in the very existence of science” (Beyet, as

cited in Merton, 1973: 39).

Loosely defined, norms are specific to a social group, context or situation. The term norm is

typically used in two ways: either as a pattern of behaviour, or as behaviour that is deemed

desirable (Anderson et al., 2010). Merton distinguished between technical and moral norms.



19 of 298

Technical norms refer to the methodological principles which guide and order scientific

discovery, such as logical coherence, empirical validity and repeatability. Technical norms

"guide the extension of certified knowledge”, which is “the institutional goal of science”

(Merton, 1973, p. 117). Moral norms also provide a methodology, but a different kind, “The

mores of science possess a methodological rationale but they are binding, not because they

are procedurally efficient, but because they are believed right and good. They are moral, not

technical prescriptions” (Merton, 1973, p. 118). These are norms that govern scientists'

relations to themselves, to the institution they reside in, and to the wider public.

Harriet Zuckermann, a student of Merton, conceptualised Merton's norms into “four sets of

institutional imperatives": communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organised

scepticism (often referred to under the acronym CUDOS) (Zuckerman, 1977, p. 7). CUDOS

are the non-codified “guiding principles” of scientific work: scientists must relinquish

ownership of their research findings through publication (communism); truth-claims must

be evaluated according to pre-established impersonal criteria that can be reproduced

universally (universalism); personal interest or bias must be excluded from scientific

method (disinterestedness); and critique is both welcomed and essential (organised

scepticism) (Zuckermann, 1977). These norms are “expressed in the form of prescriptions,

proscriptions, preferences and permissions” and legitimised institutionally, through

rewards and sanctions, forming what Merton describes as a “scientific conscience” (1973:

38).

"The entire structure of technical and moral norms implements the final objective. The

technical norm of empirical evidence, adequate and reliable, is a prerequisite for

sustained true prediction; the technical norm of logical consistency, a prerequisite for

systematic and valid prediction. The mores of science possess a methodologic rationale

but they are binding, not only because they are procedurally efficient, but because they

are believed right and good. They are moral as well as technical prescriptions" (1973: 32).



20 of 298

Merton’s analysis of the social organisation of science led him and his colleagues to

investigate the ways in which "the social system of science works in accordance with, and

often also in contradiction to, the ethos of science” (Hess, 2001: 179). Ideally a Mertonian

reward-system will function in such a way as to bestow credit in proportion to a scientist's

contribution to the advancement of knowledge, and how much credit is received will reflect

the epistemic and cultural status of the knowledge that is produced (Hess, 2001). Merton

observed that the rewards of science - prestige, fame, and the many material benefits

including salary, research funding, laboratory space, access to the ‘best’ postgraduate

students - are mostly apportioned by scientists themselves (Strevens, 2006). This

reward-system is deemed to be functional to the degree that it encourages scientists to

produce knowledge that has a social value: the more significant the contribution, the more

rewards are bestowed; the more rewards are bestowed, the more credibility and fame a

scientist has. For example, Pasteur’s status is an outcome of the social value of penicillin;

Darwin’s status is an outcome of the social value of evolutionary biology.

But Merton was aware that as an individual scientist's prestige grows so does their power,

which can lead to an unbalancing of the reward-system in favour of those who have already

attained status, what he termed “cumulative inequality" (Merton, 1949, cited in Strevens,

2006: 48). Merton defined the 'Matthew effect' drawing inspiration from the Gospel of

Matthew, "For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but

from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath" (Merton, 1949, cited in

Strevens, 2006 p. 31). The “Matthew effect” describes instances “that for equally good

scientific work, renowned scientists tend to get more credit than unknown scientists”

(Merton, cited in Strevens, 2006: 48). This can sometimes be the case when scientists come

into conflict with one and other, or scientists at the top of the institutional hierarchy are able

to skew the distribution of rewards and resources in their own favour (such as the

apportionment of more credit to senior authors in instances of co-authorship) thus violating

the norm of universalism (Strevens, 2006). But the scientific reward system remains

functional to the degree that instances of unfairness and inequality are minimised by



21 of 298

fine-tweaking the distribution of labour and rewards, and overall, contribution to society

continues to determine credit.

The Mertonian ethos of science provided a way to describe the scientific enterprise as

driven simultaneously by morality and self-interest, both of which are kept in check by the

institutionalised reproduction of incentives and disincentives. A normative system is the set

of all norms associated with a particular social system combined with members' collective

understanding of the importance and applicability of these norms, which remains very

close to both the ethnomethodological (Lynch, 2000) and Bourdieusian conceptualisation of

how rules influence practice (2012, p. 22-30). An individual scientist's 'normative

orientation' is similar to Bourdieu's 'disposition', it is her particular pattern of conformity or

resistance to the norms of a system, as the individual understands them (Anderson et al.,

2010: 1). To achieve the “goal of science… the extension of certified knowledge” (Toren,

1984: 1666), it is necessary for scientists as a whole to abide by this system. While deviations

will occur, as in all institutions, generally scientists will uphold these conventions and gross

deviations, such as faking evidence or plagiarism, are uncommon. A functionalist analysis

can give shape and coherence to a normative system, but because the 'system' encompasses

both non codified and contextual conventions as well as individual 'orientations',

Mertonians typically take the position that the system itself is never “fully knowable"

(Anderson et al., 2010: 16).

Although Merton was certainly more attuned to inequality than Parsons, leftist critiques of

Merton broadly followed already established critiques of Parsonian functionalism. Marxist

or conflict-theory inspired sociologists questioned functionalism's failure to attend to

conflict, the inability to account for institutional and social change and, most significantly,

the blindness to the influence of individual actors (see Toren, 1983 for an overview of these

debates). Both the optimism in self-regulatory systems and the focus on order and

equilibrium led to a widely-shared perspective that functionalism housed an implicitly

conservative bias.



22 of 298

While Parsonian social theory has been widely accused of conservatism, a number of

authors have argued that the characterisation makes less sense in relation to Merton (Knorr

Cetina, 1991, 2001; Hess, 2013). For example, Hess makes a persuasive case that the values

underlying Merton’s social theory are closer to left social liberalism (Hess, 2001: 179). The

“tension" that Hess identifies in Merton’s thinking runs parallel with a “tension" in

liberalism itself:

“[Merton] studies distributive issues such as patterns in allocation of credit, but also

sought to explain how apparently unfair outcomes, such as the apportionment of more

credit to senior authors in cases of multiple discovery, were often necessary for the

institution to maintain functional stability” (2013: 180).

In attempting to conceptualise the problem of inequality, Merton introduced the idea of

manifest and latent functions to the functionalist vocabulary, with manifest functions

referring to the intended outcomes of a system, while latent functions are unintended,

possibly undesirable outcomes (Merton, 1972). While Merton was concerned with the effect

that cumulative inequality may have on science itself, his solutions focused on tweaking the

internal constraints to individual advancement, while factors 'external' to the field such as

class, gender, ethnicity, or the political economy of science itself, remain mostly untouched.

A functional system of science for Merton meant one with strong norms and a reward

system geared towards maximising merit-based inequality. As Hess explains:

"Merton supported students who wanted to do work on gender and inequality in

science, but his support for universalism in science led him to criticise

African-American scholars who argued only they could do good

African-American scholarship. He found such views to lead to solipsism, and he

compared them to the equal and opposite view that only outsiders such as Gunnar

Myrdral could understand a social controversy like American race relations" (2013:

180).



23 of 298

2.2 Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The obvious intellectual affinity between Merton’s study of science and the dominant

functionalist paradigm in American social science partly explains the enormous influence

that the ethos of science had and continues to have on American sociologists. The

disposition of thinking about institutions as normative systems, or the impulse to look to

norms, values and the 'agency' of individuals to explain patterns of behaviour seems to be a

recurring disposition within U.S. social science generally, and arguably, continues to be a

point of contrast in relation to Anglo and continental approaches in STS (see Nelson 2014;

Hess, 2013; Swartz, 2019). This might also at least partly explain why the most significant

challenge to the ethos of science came from outside the sphere of American sociology.

Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had an immeasurable impact on the sociology

of science, and is “a permanent part of the repertoire of historians and philosophers in the

study of science” (Hacking, quoted by Stix, 2012). Whereas Merton was (somewhat

unfairly) criticised for reproducing an idealised and semi-heroic vision of scientists as moral

agents, Kuhn presents an entirely unromantic picture where the most scientists are closer to

cogs in a giant, impersonal machine he defined variously as a ‘paradigm’ or a ‘disciplinary

matrix'. According to Kuhn, science does not gradually inch towards truth through a stable

process of accumulation, but instead lurches forward in violent revolutionary convulsions

following long periods of what he termed "normal science”.2

2 Some of the historical exemplars Kuhn uses to explain paradigm shift in his writings are; the transition from
Ptolemaic to Copernican cosmology, the transition from Aristotelian mechanics to classical mechanics, the
acceptance of Lavoisier’s theory of chemical reactions in place of phlogiston theory, the replacement of the
Great Chain of Being with Darwinian evolution, Germ Theory overtaking miasma theory, and the transition
from Newtonian mechanics to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Some contemporary examples of
paradigm shift in the natural sciences include the acceptance of plate tectonics as an explanation for geological
change, the acceptance of the existence of quarks and the standard model of particle physics, the supersession
of deterministic predictability with the concept of non-linear dynamic systems as promoted by chaos theory,
and the increasing understanding of the nitrogen cycle and resulting paradigm shift within soil science and
resource management. In Kuhn’s view, paradigms are distinctive of the natural sciences, whereas social
science are characterised by a "tradition of claims, counterclaims, and debates over fundamentals” which do
not meet the criteria of a paradigm by his definition (Kuhn, 2000, p. 77). Nevertheless, many social scientists
have applied Kuhn’s concept of paradigms to social science, perhaps the most famous of which is Galbraith’s
seminal study of the Keynesian revolution in macroeconomics (Dunn and Pressman, 2005). In the later part of
the 1990s, 'paradigm shift' emerged as popular buzzword referring to almost any type of cultural or



24 of 298

In opposition to the teleological image implicit in functionalist accounts, Kuhn favours what

has been termed an “evolutionary" view of scientific progress (Wray, 2011).3 As Wray

explains, the evolutionary development of an organism is no more than an adaptation that

allows the organism to continue surviving within the particular constraints of its

environment. There is no teleological or qualitative aspect to evolution: the organism is not

developing towards a 'better' or perfect organism, it is simply developing characteristics

that may or may not allow it to adapt to whatever constraints produce the need for

adaptation. Darwin famously identified a number of species that he termed “living fossils”,

such as the Australian platypus and the lungfish, which belong to an ancient genetic lineage

and display a physiology remarkably similar to their fossilised ancestors (Shear and Werth,

2014). He theorised that these organisms are “anomalous" in the sense that their habitats

have remained comparatively or uncommonly stable for millennia: “[These] living fossils …

have endured to the present day, from having inhabited a confined area, and from having

thus been exposed to less severe competition” (Darwin, 1859, quoted in Shear and Werth,

2014, p. 434). 4 Similarly, science develops by allowing new theories to emerge in response

to puzzles and problems, and advancement is gauged by how successful a theory is in

solving these puzzles, not in terms of advancement towards the ‘perfect' theory, or abstract

truth. As Wray (2011) explains, environmental constraints do not lead to a ‘perfect’

organism, but they do lead to a proliferation of different types of adaptations and different

types of organisms, at least temporarily.

4 Today biologists know that these species have evolved significantly (Shear and Werth, 2014), but the analogy
is still useful in understanding Kuhn’s definition of paradigms. But this does perhaps point to the major
limitations of the evolutionary/biological analogy for scientific change: organisms do not resist adaptation.
Kuhn demonstrates the similarity between scientific change as mirroring social change, yet also claimed that
paradigms were unique to the physical sciences.

3 This is not a characterisation imposed by interpreters of Kuhn. In Structure, Kuhn compares his theory to that
of Darwin’s: scientific progress is like evolution in that its development cannot be understood with reference
to any end-goal (2000, p. 173). And in the later part of his career Kuhn was still describing himself as a
“post-Darwinist Kantian” (e.g. Horgan, 2012, para 10).

institutional change, and the increasing commodification of the term by the marketing industry led to a widely
shared view that the word has been overused to the point of becoming meaningless, and is now hopelessly
divorced from Kuhn’s original concept.



25 of 298

This is perhaps as a far as a naturalistic analogy can take us, however. Natural selection

dictates that organisms that do not adapt successfully will eventually become extinct. While

a revolutionary paradigm is driven by a need to solve puzzles that cannot be solved by the

dominant paradigm, Kuhn recognised there are different cultural, political, economic and

institutional factors that may prevent or delay the scientific acceptance of a revolutionary

paradigm. Karl Popper’s (2002) theory of falsification was based on the argument that a

reproducible anomaly could be enough to destabilise a paradigm.5 Popper echoed Merton’s

moral vision of scientific work when he posited that scientists would actively seek out, or at

least welcome revolutionary paradigms, "not because they add to positive knowledge of the

truth of theories, but because they add to the negative knowledge that the relevant theories

are false” (2002, p. 281). Kuhn rejected both of these arguments.6 He argued that progress in

normal science is only possible through the inculcation and institutionalisation of the

dominant paradigm (what Bourdieu would call a ‘scientific habitus'). This means that under

conditions of normal science an array of non-voluntary techniques, measurements,

methods, assumptions and even world-views are shared by the majority of the relevant

scientific group.

In his earlier writing Kuhn termed this constellation of shared beliefs a “paradigm”, later he

tried to redefine it as a “disciplinary matrix”. It is a concept with many clear parallels both

with Bourdieu’s idea of habitus, and also with Wittgenstein’s idea of a “language-game”:

6 While the role attributed to falsification by Popper is similar to the one that Kuhn assigns to anomalies, Kuhn
doubts that falsifying experiences exist for a number of reasons. Kuhn argued that Popper’s idea of
falsification replicated the same flawed assumptions as the concept of verification: "both assume the existence
of absolute standards of evidence that transcend the paradigm. A new paradigm may solve puzzles better
than the old one does, and it may yield more practical applications. But you cannot simply describe the other
science as false” (quoted in Horgan, 2012 para 12).

5 Karl Popper’s theory of falsification holds that science develops through trial and error, it is driven by
conjectures and refutations (‘new ideas’) towards a realist concept of truth. Kuhn rejects the idea that science is
a search for truth (Fetzer 1993, p. 160) and the claim of theory-truth correspondence (Kuhn 2000, p. 95), as
science does not evolve towards the truth, but from the truth (Meynell, 1975, p. 80). Kuhn’s evolutionary
depiction of science is "driven from behind, not pulled from ahead" (Kuhn, 2000, p. 96). For Popper, scientific
progress is driven by problems, and scientists' motivations for problem solving are moral. But Kuhn argues
that problem-solving only opens the potential for paradigm shift during those rare and contingent periods of
scientific crisis: the accumulation of anomalies in itself does not guarantee a scientific revolution. While
Popper’s theory of falsification is relevant to describing aspects of a scientific crisis, it does not describe the
mundane practice of normal science.



26 of 298

the shared and structured ways of speaking, thinking and interacting, which make sense

only within the context of a broader “form of life”. Differing language-games with differing

rules may exist within the same scientific paradigm, but it is the dominant paradigm which

constitutes the particular ‘form of life’ and provides these language-games their respective

sense and coherence. Language-games have sense only in relation to other language-games

within the broader system of language-games (the paradigm) to which they belong. By

Wittgenstein’s account, whatever persuasiveness or power a language-game might have is

primarily derived from the rules of intelligibility which are embedded in the social context

in which they are situated (Wittgenstein, 2009, p. 18-23; 225-237). Rationality or truth

becomes part of an activity where "It is the language-game that manifests a rational

behaviour and not the person herself" (Schwed, 2009: 6). Thus, from a Kuhnian point of

view, it makes much less sense to talk about the 'agency' of individual scientists in relation

to a paradigm. A scientist cannot choose to commit themselves to a paradigm: a paradigm is

inculcated through scientific training, performed through scientific work, and represents

the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice"

(Kuhn, 2000: 318-319), in other words, the non-voluntary dispositions of an employable

scientist. Kuhn had identified this ‘tension’ between the desire for innovation (and

individual recognition) and the requirement for conservativeness in one of his very first

essays on the theory of science, "The Essential Tension” (1977). This clear-eyed, unromantic

focus on the conservativeness and problem-oriented nature of scientific work revolutionised

the study of science, and destabilised both the moral, normative view of Mertonian

functionalism, as well as the detached, rational, self-falsifying image popularised by

Popper.

So for Kuhn, the norms that structure science are not moral rules derived from social values,

but rather the methodological standards enshrined by the dominant paradigm, such as

logical coherence, scope, replicability, accuracy, methodological legitimacy, verifiability of

evidence. And the way paradigms influence scientific work is not straightforwardly

universal, the importance given to different aspects of a paradigm may differ according to



27 of 298

institutional context, policy and legislative context, cultural context as well as different

types of scientific specialisation. For example, a chemist and a physicist might operate with

different definitions of what a helium atom is, but these taxonomic or conceptual

differences still exist within the same dominant paradigm. For Barnes and Dolby (1970: 23):

"The groups of scientists showing the greatest degree of consensus are Kuhn’s paradigm

sharing communities. The cohesion, commitment and solidarity within these stem from

technical norms of paradigms, not from an overall scientific ethos.”

The vast majority of scientists will never formally or publicly question a paradigm. They

solve problems whose solutions reinforce and extend the scope of the paradigm rather than

challenging it. There are always anomalies that a dominant paradigm cannot account for,

and scientists are more likely to ignore these anomalies rather than challenge the paradigm

itself, what Kuhn terms “mopping up” (2000, p. 25). Cognitive consensus during periods of

normal science suppresses innovation, “Under normal conditions, the research scientist is

not an innovator but a solver of puzzles” (Kuhn, 2000, p. 39). When enough anomalies have

accumulated, this may result in a state of crisis which forces some scientists to push against

the boundaries of normal science and engage in "extraordinary research”, meaning new

theories, new experiments, new procedures (Kuhn, 2000, p. 92). For Kuhn, this state of crisis

represents a decisive moment in the history of science wherein, given an absence of

significant political, cultural or institutional barriers, the possibility of a paradigm shift

opens up. It is a period characterised by “the proliferation of competing articulations, the

willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy

and to debate over fundamentals” (Kuhn, 2000, p. 145).

By 'recourse to philosophy' Kuhn is referring to 'the blurring of the boundaries' of a

paradigm. Because a paradigm is defined by agreement on fundamentals, a paradigmatic

crisis destabilises a discipline at its very foundations, and as scientists begin to express

increasingly open dissent the field itself begins to look like something quite different.

Dissident scholars work to position anomalies as the defining subject matter of their



28 of 298

discipline, isolating and magnifying anomalies and pushing the rules of normal science to

generate speculative theories (Kuhn, 1977: 81). New journals emerge and special issues are

published, conferences and books are framed around the emerging paradigm, and the new

paradigm begins to attract the attention of the field’s more eminent academics. If successful,

a single revolutionary theory or body of evidence may open the road to a new paradigm,

such as the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, or Marie Tharp’s discovery of the

Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 1953, which eventually vindicated the controversial theory of plate

tectonics. If unsuccessful, the new theories can be abandoned relatively easily, and some

revolutionary scholars may instead turn to philosophical analysis, becoming

meta-theoreticians outside or on the very margins of their discipline. If the new paradigm

fails to stabilise, some of the new ideas may be assimilated into the dominant paradigm, or

else insoluble puzzles are isolated and left for future scholars to solve. Kuhn’s criteria for a

successful paradigm shift is that the new paradigm must retain and expand the puzzle

solving power of the preceding paradigm, while also providing a guide for the predicted

future problems within a field.

Crucially, Kuhn demonstrates the way that a paradigm shift is both “a destructive, as well

as a creative act” (Horgan, 2012, paragraph 7). The breakdown of a dominant paradigm

may be experienced on a deeply personal level by individuals whose education and careers

have unfolded within it, and a paradigm shift can threaten or destabilise ontological

security in various ways. Competing paradigms may have methodological, conceptual,

observational or taxonomic disparities that render them “incommensurable”, meaning

scientists habituated to the dominant paradigm may not completely understand the

emerging paradigm, or may be unsure of what criteria to employ when evaluating its

comparative merit. Like the choice between competing political ideologies, that between

competing paradigms proves to be a choice between fundamentally incompatible forms of

life, ”the normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only

incompatible but often actually incommensurable with that which has gone before” (Kuhn,

2000, p. 104). Kuhn’s striking statement that “Unlike art, science destroys its past” is often



29 of 298

put in juxtaposition with Newton’s famous aphorism, "If I have seen farther, it is by

standing on the shoulders of giants" (Toren, 1983: 1668). Perhaps Kuhn’s most radical

insight is that science does not move towards anything, rather, it moves away from its own

past.

When the dust of a scientific revolution has settled, people, problems and information that

were central to a dominant paradigm may become obsolete or unscientific. Conversely,

problems, people and information that were previously thought unimportant or irrelevant

may become central to the new tradition. Kuhn drew on Gestalt psychology and

Wittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit image to show how a paradigm shift could mean seeing

the same information in a completely different way (Kuhn, 2000, p. 111-121).7 It is not

surprising then that so many interpreters of Kuhn have emphasised the way that paradigm

shift mirrors the process of generational, cultural and political change, such as Max Planck,

who argued that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and

making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new

generation grows up that is familiar with it” (1950, p. 33). As Wittgenstein would say, this is

an agreement "not in opinions, but rather in form of life” (2008, p. 241). Although paradigm

shift is a political and subjective process which will often involve a defence of entrenched

interests and deep division within a field, Kuhn argues that once the new paradigm is

established, this history of this conflict and contingency is largely erased from the training

that habituates students into the new paradigm. The new paradigm invalidates and

replaces the preceding one, so while chemistry or physics students may be introduced to

7 For example, it is well-known that the information that would form the basis of germ theory was apparent to
microscopists as early as the late seventeenth century. As Wootton argues (2006, p 110) "An intellectual
revolution that should have taken place failed to occur”. There are complex paradigmatic and
political/cultural explanations for this historical lag between the observance of bacteria and the emergence of
bacteriology as a discipline. For example, doctors operated by the doctrine of Hippocrates, believing disease
was caused by an imbalance of the “humours”, which could be caused or exacerbated by miasma (bad air)
and were largely resistant to new information that would destabilise their status or practice (Wootoon, 2006, p.
195-221). The idea that tiny organisms could cause fatal disease among humans also contradicted the doctrine
of the great chain of being, the hierarchical structure of all matter and life derived by mediaeval Christianity.
As late as the 1840s, doctors like Ignaz Semmelweis and John Snow were arguing for the link between bacteria
and disease, but were largely ignored (Wootton, 2006, p. 195-221). Although the existence of bacteria was
evident to doctors and scientists, this information would remain suspended in a pre-paradigmatic state until
the very late enlightenment period.



30 of 298

the ideas of Lasovier, Newton or Aristotle as the founding figures of their field, the history

of scientific revolutions is mostly irrelevant to their training, and is largely relegated to

'specialist' disciplines such as the philosophy and sociology of science.

2.3 The turn to practice

Today Kuhn is ranked among the giants of philosophy, a figure who irreversibly changed

the way we all think about science, and, like Marx or Foucault, a thinker whose influence

has grown much larger than the content of his original writings. It’s not difficult to see why

the arguments in Structure were seductive to social scientists: he complicates any claim to

the semi-autonomous position of the physical sciences, and topples the pedestal that

allowed science to position itself as above politics or society. Kuhn brought science down

into the profane world of politics and self-interest that we all inhabit, and destabilised the

myths that scientists and philosophers of science told about themselves since the very

beginning of the Enlightenment. More than this, by introducing conflict, politics, culture

and history into the study of science, Kuhn made scientific practice interesting to social

scientists, and also to a popular audience. 8 But as Horgan explains, most interpreters of

Kuhn have tended to avoid the more radical extension of his conclusions:

"[Structure] fomented the now trite idea that personalities and politics play a large role in

science. [But] the book’s most profound argument was less obvious: scientists can never truly

understand “the real world” or even each other" (2012, para 5).

This idea that scientists inhabit ‘different words’ was perhaps the most controversial part of

Structure, and was the point latched on both by critics who were disturbed by the seemingly

8 Referring to the adoption of Kuhn as a guiding-light for British opponents of Merton, Ben-David (1978:
205-207) remarks: “They [British Kuhnians] did so not because Kuhn’s model was more congruent with
observations (that they did not try to check) but because it dealt with scientific communities as defined by
their members intellectual and scientific concerns, which for everyone except professional sociologists was a
much more interesting point of view than an analysis of the norms and reward system of science … Sociology
becomes interesting only if it can show that actually there is no consensus in science and that decisions about
what is at any moment accepted as scientific ‘truth' are arrived at through a process of conflict of interests,
power struggle and negotiations, as in many other fields of behaviour.”



31 of 298

irrational and relativist characterisation of scientific progress (such as Popper), as well as a

few that felt that Kuhn did not take this relativism far enough (such as Paul Feyerabend). To

note that scholarly interpretations of Kuhn are ‘diverse' would be unhelpfully clichéd. But it

is useful, as Read (2013: 34) has done, to think of Kuhn’s influence in STS as comparable to

Wittgenstein’s influence in philosophy: both Kuhn and Wittgenstein direct us away from

any philosophically abstract explanation of practice and instead towards the material

conditions of practice (Read, 2013: 34).

While it took decades for the social sciences to absorb and respond to Structure, its

publication greatly accelerated the critique of Mertonian functionalism, and gave scholars a

new theory to position themselves against pre-Kuhnian approaches. Here a key work was

Mulkay’s (1976) “Norms and Ideology in Science”, in which he argued that Mertonian

norms fail to even describe scientists own understanding of scientific work:

"In recent years, there has been much criticism of this kind of functional analysis of

science. One reason for such criticism is that detailed study by historians and

sociologists has shown that in practice scientists deviate from some at least of these

putative norms with a frequency which is remarkable if we presume that the latter are

firmly institutionalised" (1976: 639).

Mulkay’s central argument was that Merton had mistaken norms for ideology, and had

confused the moralisations put forward by individual scientists for a scientific morality.

When Mertonians followed behaviour they found that norms were often in coexistence with

counter norms. Merton himself acknowledged the existence of counter-norms in his original

essay, and later emphasised the workings of sociological ambivalence, which results when

people are subjected to two or more normative systems. Counter-norms are not necessarily

a threat to a functional normative system and in some respects are an inevitable byproduct

of these systems, as Ziman has noted, if there were not counter-norms then there would be

no need for a social system to assert preference for actions aligned with original norms. But



32 of 298

Mulkay argued that neither norms nor counter-norms represent a normative structure of

science, rather:

[Mertonian norms] are better conceived as vocabularies of justification, which are

used to evaluate, justify and describe the professional actions of scientists, but which

are not institutionalised within the scientific community in such a way that general

conformity is maintained (1976: 653).

Mulkay had looked to Kuhn for a non-moral basis to ground his analysis of scientific

practice, noting that “Kuhn does not explicitly state that scientific theories operate as norms,

but such a conception is implicit in his scheme” (quoted by Toren, 1983: 1668). Kuhn had

tried to explain that he had introduced the concept of paradigms as an alternative to norms,

and while any community of practice will obviously involve shared technical and

behavioural norms, this community cannot be reduced to any normative structure and a

normative structure is not a sufficient basis to understand practice.9 In other words,

paradigms are much bigger than norms, but how exactly norms influence practice, and how

they work within a paradigm is something that should be investigated empirically, rather

than theorised in advance.

Here the question of what exactly Kuhn meant by paradigms, how his view changed during

his lifetime, and how faithfully the model has been interpreted and applied by social

scientists over the decades could potentially lead down a dizzying rabbit-hole. Highly

influential STS scholar Steven Fuller (1999) has been almost wholly dismissive, arguing that

Kuhn reified one particularly brief moment in the history of science (scientific revolutions)

9 In a preface for a collection of essays also entitled The Essential Tension (1977), Kuhn explains why he
conceived of paradigms as encompassing but not reducible to norms/rules: “The term paradigm … entered
into The Structure of Scientific Revolutions because I, the book’s historian-author, could not, when examining the
membership of a scientific community, retrieve enough shared rules to account for the group’s unproblematic
conduct of research. Shared examples of successful practice could, I next concluded, provide what the group
lacked in rules. Those examples were its paradigms, and as such essential to its continued research.
Unfortunately, having gotten that far, I allowed the term’s application to expand, embracing all shared groups
commitments, all components of what I now wish to call a ‘disciplinary matrix’. Inevitably, the result was
confusion, and it obscures the original reasons for introducing the special term. But those reasons still stand.
Shared examples can serve cognitive functions commonly attributed to shared rules”.



33 of 298

and used that as the basis of a general model of science. In doing so, Fuller argues, Kuhn

uncritically reproduces a Cold War version of the traditionalist mythology of science, an

"elitist myth" of “visionary geniuses”, heroically shifting paradigms through revolutionary

struggles, a model which has little to no relevance in a globalised, democratised,

technocratic world (Fuller, 1999, quoted in Rothstein, 2001). Here, arguably, Kuhn's elitist

focus foreshadows Bourdieu's (2000) elitist focus on revolutionary 'misfit 'geniuses' like

Pascal and Beethoven in Pascalian Meditations. Without ignoring these kinds of arguments,

and without ignoring the socio-political context of Kuhn’s writings, any prolonged

evaluation of the 'accuracy' of Kuhn’s model is beyond the focus of this thesis. In avoiding

endless reinterpretation it is again useful to look to Read’s Wittgenstinian reading of Kuhn

for guidance. Read rejects the idea that Kuhn has a 'model of science’, rather, he provided a

"simple schematic” comprised of a systemic but flexible terminology to aid historical

investigation (2013, p. 84).

Read’s point is that the value of the concept of paradigms is primarily methodological and

heuristic. For Read, paradigms have a value and purpose similar to Bourdieu's 'fields': a

way to conceptualise practice in opposition to the overly 'internalist' accounts of Merton

and Popper. Kuhn is, as Wittgenstein would say, is “drawing a boundary around a

concept” (cited in Kitching, 2008: 109). Kuhn was much less interested in finding a universal

model of science than he was in grounding the philosophy of science in history and

practice, 'jumping over the boundary' of Popperian empiricism and Mertonian

functionalism, and during his lifetime, again like Bourdieu, he repeatedly urged his

students and interpreters to avoid dogmatism or any overly rigid application of his ideas.10

10 Here again it is useful to consider Kuhn’s paradigm alongside Wittgenstein’s language-game. A language
game is a specific set of discursive practices tied to a specific set of purposes, which are structured around an
internally coherent set of rules. Although these activities are rule-governed, and these rules are more-or-less
unique to each game, Wittgenstein argues language-games do not derive their legitimacy and internal
coherence from these rules, but rather from the 'form of life' that sustains them. In this sense rules only exist
as a ‘second-best’ method of formally codifying the ways of thinking and behaving that we already share.
What gives definite normative content to a rule is how we all use it in actual practice: “the point is that we all
make the same use of it” (1974: 183). For Wittgenstein, therefore, rule-following requires ‘consensus of action’
or ‘agreement in forms of life’. This requirement emphasises Wittgenstein’s contextualist point about
intelligibility: what we do and say acquires significance only against a background or context provided by a
practical way of doing things. This is not to imply that the way we apply normative rules is unconscious;



34 of 298

As Bourdieu puts it, (2004: 18), Structure “shook up some essential things in the academic

order, in particular the cognitive structures of those who dominated the academic and

scientific order … the Capitoline triad - Parsons, Merton and Lazarsfeld (who never got

over it) - to assign itself the monopoly of the legitimate view of social science (with the

sociology of science as its false closure and reflexive crown.)”11

2.4 Bourdieu and STS

The history of the emergence of both SSK and STS could be simplified as an attempt to

reconcile the influence of social factors on the production of scientific knowledge with the

idea that science is (or should be) the objective pursuit of truth (Kale-Lostauvli, 2016: 274).

Mertonians theorised science as a rule-governed, unitary institution where external and

internal factors may have some influence, but did not compromise the functionality of the

system itself. Kuhn’s account of scientific paradigms broke down the boundary between

social factors and scientific knowledge, undermined the idea of linear, rational scientific

progress and laid the foundations for a new sociology of science grounded in the

researcher’s own observation and interpretations of practice. The two major sociological

'schools' born from the turn to practise - ethnomethodology and the STRONG Programme -

11 In Science of Science Bourdieu is generally an admirer of Kuhn and very briefly reinterprets paradigm shift
within a field theory framework (2004: 14-18, 80). He is however critical of Kuhn’s failure to conceptualise the
relative autonomy of science, as well as the irrationalist or relativist interpretation of paradigm shift via
'revolutionary science’. Explaining the context into which Structure was born, Bourdieu adopts a
characteristically reflexive position: “… the central theme of his work, namely the tension between
establishment and subversion, was in tune with the 'revolutionary' mood of the day, Kuhn, who was in no
way revolutionary, was adopted, somewhat in spite of himself, as a prophet by the students of the University
of Columbia and integrated into the ‘counterculture' which rejected 'scientific rationality’ and proclaimed the
supremacy of imagination over reason. (2004: 17)

following a rule entails a practical consciousness, as opposed to cognising them in a detached and theoretical
manner. Some theorists have perceived a parallel between Wittgenstein’s comments on ‘interpreting’ a rule
and Gidden’s theory of tacit knowledge – the mental repository of rules, norms and conventions that we know
have a determining influence on our behaviour, but would have difficulty in verbalising: “know--how” as
opposed to the “know--why” (see Pleasants, 1997). The type of knowledge at play here seems closer to
Bourdieu’s le sens practique, “the sense of the game”, the kind of prereflective correspondence between our
dispositions (inherited from our social position) and the logic of a particular social field. As Bourdieu
emphasises, le sens practique entails creation and innovation – within limits – and is an active relation. To be
successful in a social field requires “not just knowledge of the rules, but a constant awareness of and
responsiveness to the play at hand: it requires improvisation, flexibility and above all an analysis of the
strengths and weaknesses of one’s team--mates and adversaries” (Hillier and Rooksby, 2005: 20).



35 of 298

had major conceptual and methodological differences. But both schools rejected

philosophical foundations for scientific truth as well as the functionalist prioritisation of

norms over practice. Both ethnomethodology and the STRONG programme sought, in

different ways, to construct an explicitly sociological account of science informed by

empirical observation of different types of scientific work in different institutional settings

(Barnes, 2009, Bloor, 1976; Lynch, 2000, Mulkay, 1979).

Although Bourdieu and Latour started publishing on the sociology of science around the

same time (Bourdieu, 1975, 1976; Latour and Fabbri, 1977), today, Latour’s influence within

STS is vastly greater. Over the past two decades, scholars have questioned and

contextualised Bourdieu’s absence within STS (e.g. Nelson, 2014; Tucker, 2007; Albert and

Klienman, 2011), and a number of compelling articles on the value of Bourdieusian

field-theory value the study of science have been published (e.g. Kale-Lostauvali, 2016;

Schinkel, 2007; Albert and Kleinmann, 2011; Jeon, 2019; Sismondo, 2011, Hess, 2011; Lave,

2012; Albert and Kleinman, 2011,). But while it seems that some scholars are increasingly

ready to reconsider Bourdieu’s relevance to the sociological understanding of science,

applications of Bourdieu’s thinking to real-world scientific conflict, change or practice

remain relatively rare. For Nelson (2014) and Tucker (2007) the Bourdieu-Latour conflict has

significance far greater than the average academic turf war; it has been constitutive of STS

as a field, to the point that it is sometimes difficult to separate Bourdieu’s theory of science

from Latour’s critique of Bourdieu, and the type of outmoded structural-functionalism that

Latour has repeatedly argued Bourdieu represents.

The next section outlines Bourdieusian field theory as it relates to science and law, which is

primarily derived from "The Specificity of the Scientific Field" (1975); "The Forms of Capital"

(1986); Outline of a Theory of Practice (1997), "The Force of Law: Towards a Sociology of the

Juridical Field" (1987); "The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason" (1991) Bourdieu and

Waquant's (1992) Invitation to a Reflexive Sociology, and his last publication before his death,

The Science of Science and Reflexivity (2004), alongside a wealth of secondary literature.



36 of 298

2.5 Habitus, field, capital

Similar to his account of agency in other social contexts, Bourdieu argues that scientific

achievement is the result of interplay between scientists and the structure of the field in

which they are working. This interaction is conceptualised with three interrelated concepts:

1. Habitus: a set of dispositions that incline actors to act and react in specific ways;

2. Field: arenas of activity within which actors engage and compete with each other to

achieve their objectives;

3. Capital: the range of resources, linked to and often directly derived from an actor’s

habitus, that can be applied in given fields.

Actor’s enter a field with different degrees of cultural, economic, social and symbolic

capital, and they deploy this capital according to their understanding of what is valued

within a field. Each field represents a relatively distinct social space – occupational,

institutional, political, cultural – and is governed by more or less structured norms, values,

rules and interests. For Bourdieu, it is the habitus that provides the capital that will

influence success or failure within a given field, although capital is also accumulated within

a field (Sismondo, 2011). Social capital is very simply the measure of the value of relations

an actor has with others, which can range from the British ‘old-boy clubs’ designed to

differentiate and advantage members over those from excluded groups to the extensive

familial networks among poor migrants which serve to provide a measure of financial

security (Bourdieu, 1986). Cultural capital is a more complex form of capital, and is broadly

related to an individual’s social position. Cultural capital may cover an individual’s cultural

tastes, their way of speaking, their education, the social and practical competencies, as well

as socio-psychological factors such as ambition, self-esteem and perceptions of others

(Bourdieu, 1986). Cultural capital is thus closely related to a person’s social status, and

often forms the basis of the pre-reflective understanding of the logic or nomos of a



37 of 298

particular field. Unlike social and economic capital, cultural capital takes years to acquire

and is a foundational element to our sense of self (Hillier and Rooskby, 2004). Symbolic

capital refers to those forms of capital that are accorded the highest social prestige and

legitimation, and hence which may be the most powerful in accruing status and advantage

(Sismondo, 2011). These four forms of capital interact together to determine a person's

position within any given field, and actors' interplay within a field usually has a

self-interested or competitive aspect. Although Bourdieu does define fields in disciplinary

terms, a field is much broader than disciplines, rather, “[fields] are a space of engagement,

or a structure of relationships that bounds the practices relevant to [an agent]” (Sismondo,

2011: 84).

Bourdieu (1986) maintains that symbolic, cultural and social capital are extended forms of

economic capital. Although economic capital is foundational to all forms of capital,

Bourdieu has been criticised for neglecting to fully theorise economic capital or extend it

beyond Marx's notion of capital as a relationship of class exploitation (Desan, 2013). In

Distinction, Bourdieu defines economic capital loosely as “actually usable resources and

powers” (1986: 111); the wealth, physical resources and productive means that can be

institutionalised as property rights and converted into the other forms of capital. While this

definition is simplistic, it will suffice for the purposes of this study, in which economic

capital refers to the monetary resources an agent can use to engage scientific and legal

expertise. 'Meta-capital' refers to any form of capital that is powerful enough to influence

the relative value of other forms of capital and the exchange rates between them, and is

often an expression of the interests of power-blocs within the field of power (Bourdieu &

Wacquant, 1992, p. 112). The state is the primary mechanism for universalising meta-capital

through legislation, policy, funding structures and the reform of public institutions:

The constitution of the state goes hand in hand with the constitution of the field of

power, understood as the space of play in which holders of various forms of capital

struggle in particular for power over the state, that is, over the state’s capital over the

different species of capital and over their reproduction (Bourdieu et al, 1994, p. 3).



38 of 298

While Bourdieu does not use the phrase 'neoliberal metacapital', here it is used to refer to

the ideological components of the public sector reforms that produced Aotearoa's current

science regime: public choice theory, agency theory, new public management theory. While

these theories are not discursively hegemonic in the way they were when they were first

introduced, we are living in a world that is in-part created by them. Neoliberal metacapital

is the assemblage of ideologies applied to the public sector, operationalised by the state, and

influences the value of different forms of capital within the state apparatuses, inflected in

different ways via the nomos of each particular field and its degree of relative autonomy.

Finally, habitus is the set of dispositions that incline actors to act and think a certain way.

Habitus has constitutive power: it governs what is an acceptable move within a given field

while also influencing the actor’s own dispositions. Bourdieu writes, although habitus

pre-exists the field, it is the field that imbues habitus with “sense and value” (Bourdieu,

1992: 452). So it is possible to talk about both the habitus or nomos of a particular field, as

well as the habitus of individuals within a field. As a “matrix of dispositions”, habitus can

include empirical tendencies, preferences, tastes, emotions; a kind of world view or

cosmology held by actors; skills, education and practical skills; social competencies as well

as the formal and informal norms and rules that influence behaviour and determine status

(Howe and Langdon, 2002: 215). Habitus is therefore a socially constructed, socially learned

and institutionally-bound set of characteristics that are partially common to a group of

people and are closely related to shared material and institutional circumstances (e.g. rural

small-farmers, urban manufacturers, humanities lecturers etc.). It is not just the way an

actor thinks and behaves, but also the entire cultural and professional repertoire we bring to

a given activity or environment: “a way of walking, a tilt of the head, facial expressions,

ways of sitting and using implements, always associated with a tone of voice, a style of

speech and … a certain subjective experience” (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 85). As Wacquant puts it,

habitus is "the way society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions,

or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways,



39 of 298

which then guide them" (Wacquant, 2005: 316). Bourdieu emphasises that habitus has a

systemic character without ever being fully determined, and is durable while still remaining

fluid and transposable (2004, p. 45). Crucially however, except in exceptional circumstances,

our relationship to habitus is usually partially prereflective – it is primarily a practical,

rather than a theoretical mastery, as Bourdieu phrases it, le sens practique: a sense of the

game.

In contrast to le sens pratique - practical knowledge - is reflexive knowledge, a higher form of

knowledge in which represents a "development of this practical sense away from automatic

or habituated practice to a more aware and evaluative relation to oneself and one’s contexts"

(Schirato & Webb, 2002, p. 255). Reflexivity and agency can be taught, learned or developed

in a dialectic fashion through the interplay of habitus and field. While habitus is durable it

is not static or eternal, and the extent of misfit between habitus and field may produce

varying degrees of negotiation, improvisation, adjustment, and perhaps subversion. While

reflexivity is not the privilege of scientists or academics and can emerge in any field and in

multiple ways, following from Bourdieu's fragmentary comments of misfits (discussed

below), it is more likely to emerge in fields with a degree of relative autonomy and in

conditions that produce a contradiction between habitus and illusio, either through a

temporary crisis, or a fundamental shift in the objective conditions of a field (Bourdieu,

2000, p. 121-125; 2005; p 47).

2.6 Scientific capital and the scientific field

There is a vast amount of research that has developed and reformulated notions of capital -

both within and outside a Bourdieusian framework. From emotional capital (Reay, 2000)

and linguistic capital (e.g., Stanton-Salazar & Dornbusch, 1995), through to

social-psychological notions of identity capital (e.g., Côté, 2002), economics-based

conceptualisations of human capital (Becker, 1993), to Putnam’s (1995, 2000) redefinition of



40 of 298

social capital as the ‘cement' for political unity and social cohesion. 12 But it is only recently

that scholars have paid sustained attention to scientific capital (for example Lave, 2012;

Archer et al., 2015; and Jeon 2019).

Bourdieu framed his theory of capital, field and habitus around empirical data derived from

the humanities. In his final text, Science as Science, he does provide a brief definition of

scientific capital:

Scientific capital is a set of properties which are the product of acts of knowledge and

recognition performed by agents engaged in the scientific field and therefore endowed with

the specific categories of perception that enable them to make the pertinent distinctions, in

accordance with the principle of pertinence that is constitutive of the nomos of the field […]

Scientific capital functions as a symbolic capital of recognition that is primarily, sometimes

exclusively, valid within the limits of the field (although it can be converted into other kinds of

capital, economic capital in particular) (Bourdieu, 2004: 55).

Bourdieu thus defines scientific capital as primarily social and symbolic capital that is able

to be applied within and from within a field, which may be embodied by particularly

high-profile scientists, or particularly high-profile forms of scientific discourse, method or

expertise. In relation to the scientific field itself, Bourdieu writes that:

… the field is a site of two kinds of scientific capital: a capital of strictly scientific

authority, and a capital of power over the scientific world which can be accumulated

through channels that are not purely scientific (2004, p. 57)

To say that science is a field is to say that it is “a system of objective relations … and a locus

of competitive struggle in which the issue at state is the monopoly on scientific authority …

in the sense of a particular agent’s capacity to speak and act legitimately in scientific

12 For Swartz (2006: 89) the popularity of Putnam’s reformation (some might say appropriation) of social
capital is probably at least partially responsible for Bourdieu’s comparative absence in American political
science and political society.



41 of 298

matters'' (Bourdieu, 1975, p. 19). These "objective relations'' include relations between

“isolated scientists, teams or laboratories, defined by the volume and structure of the

specific capital they possess” (Bourdieu, 2004: 33). Agents must acquire a level of

competence prior to entering the field (scientific capital and a sense of the game), as well as

a commitment to participating in a field and an investment in its ‘stakes’, what Bourdieu

terms illusio, or the belief that the game itself is worth playing. In this way Bourdieu

constructs an alternative to the Mertonian vision of science as a self-contained system in

which the internalisation of norms allows science to progress according to its own logic.

But this does not mean that the scientific field is simply an arena of individual competition,

but rather a field of struggles where agents compete to attain monopoly of scientific

authority, which is principally and but not exclusively related to peer recognition, and

bounded by a shared nomos. As Kale-Lostuvali explains (2016: 280), “In the place of

Merton's concept of "organised scepticism” as one of the norms governing scientific practice

Bourdieu proposes a mechanism inherent in the definition of the field: the struggle for

scientific authority.”

So while it is possible to map the concept of fields onto different disciplines, a Bourdieusian

field is not defined in disciplinary terms, but rather by its nomos, the specific structure of

relationships and the set of constraints on agency that govern the legitimate moves an actor

may make. Fields are a space of 'objective relations between positions' which are "structured

in a hierarchical ordering and are occupied by agents possessed of different amounts of

field-specific capital" (Camic, 2011: 277). When actors commit to a field they also commit to

illusio, a practical acknowledgement of its stakes which is implicit in the playing of the

game. Fields operate according to an identifiable nomos which are the principles of "vision

and division" or "fundamental laws" of experience that govern practices and experiences

within the field (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 23). Like Wittgenstein’s language-game, the nomos

structuring one field can be incommensurable to those structuring another. In this way it

becomes less meaningful to talk of a general or universal 'scientific field’, instead the

researcher must study and describe the nomos of scientific practice in different institutional



42 of 298

and practical settings (universities, industry science, consultant science, regional and local

government science, science deployed in legislative and policy planning processes, Crown

Research Institutes, or special research units such as the Cawthron Institute and the

Institute for Governance and Policy Studies at Victoria University).

In explaining the 'relative autonomy' of science, Bourdieu insists that the sociologist must

conceptualise science “in its two fold relation.” He writes:

… science must be examined in its two-fold relation, on the one hand to the social cosmos in

which it is embedded – the external reading – and on the other to the social microcosm

constituted by the scientific universe, a relatively autonomous world endowed with its own

rules of functioning which must be described and analysed in themselves – the internal

reading (quoted in Camic, 2013, p. 187).

For Bourdieu, "social cosmos” refers to the “general economic and social conditions’’ that

are external to a field, including, "economic crises, technological change, political

revolutions, or the demands of a given group” (Camic, 2013, p.189). The 'social microcosm'

is the scientific field itself, the space of hierarchically structured objective relations in which

actors compete for scientific authority. When Bourdieu says that researchers must

understand science 'in its two fold relation', he his referring to an analysis that can account

for both the internal structure and nomos of the field, the subtle shift in practices and habitus

displayed by actors as they move across different institutional and practical contexts, as

well as the external factors from the political, economic and field of power influence the

structure of the field, such as the political economy of the academic publishing cycle,

research funding systems and broader political, policy and economic forms of meta-capital

that determine what types of scientific knowledge is authoritative, and to what extent.13

13 For Bourdieu any analysis that is too strictly focused on either internal or external factors is guilty of
sociological reductionism, which his concepts of field, habitus and capital are designed to prevent (Bourdieu,
2004, p. 4-9). Both 'externalist' and 'internalist' approaches are reductive in the sense of explaining social
relations in terms of interactions between empirically perceivable elements, such as between interest groups in
policy networks, between universities and the state or among actors within an institution. As Bourdieu argued
in "The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason" and Science of Science, Mertonian sociology is 'internalist' in the



43 of 298

Although Bourdieu emphasises that science must be understood in this two fold-relation,

much of his writings on science (as well as literary and artistic fields) are focused on the

internal dynamics of fields. This is because he held the scientific field to be "relatively

autonomous with respect to the encompassing social [cosmos]” (Bourdieu, 2004: 45). This

relative autonomy is not a given, but a result of the historical development of science as a

discipline. Bourdieu emphasises that the degree of autonomy of any disciplinary field is “a

historical conquest, endlessly having to be undertaken anew", but “easily forgotten in the

case of the natural sciences, because their autonomy is inscribed both in the objectivity of

the structures of the field, and also in scientists' minds, in the form of theories and

methods” (2004: 47). The degree of relative autonomy of a professional, disciplinary or

aesthetic field is in proportion to the costs of entry: the stricter the costs of entry, the more

autonomous the field, and the more “the system of forces that are constitutive of its

structure is … independent of the forces exerted on the field”, and the more the field "has

the ‘freedom'