Management, politics, and science: a nonseparable system

Abstract

Philosophy of science, as understood by most social scientists, has given us an image of the scientific enterprise as a large hypothesis testing machine. One key unit within this enterprise is the individual scientist. He has learned or intuitively understands a set of logical rules which he brings to bear in ordering his thinking about a problem. Since he was pictured as operating within an unconstrained environment in an organizationally and morally simplistic world, his goal (scientific ‘truth’) was unambiguous, the organization and conduct of his work frictionless, and his only concerns were logic and measurements. Management and politics had no relationship to his pursuit of truth or the possibility of uncovering it. The other key unit, the scientific community, was equally autonomous from the world of management and politics. It was a social system in which problem definitions and decisions on truth are the joint result of open interaction among autonomous, rational, driven men and the impersonal automatic, application of the rules of evidence and logic. What guaranteed that this marvellous hypothesis testing machine actually operated in this fashion? The character and socialization of the individual scientist and the fact that interference in or imperfections of the process will result in erroneous truths which will eventually catch up with the perpetrators and punish them through individual, system, or societal failure, as in the inexorable workings of the market place of classical economics. If this was ever a very accurate picture of the scientific enterprise, the emergence of ‘Big Science’ has placed its adequacy seriously in doubt. ‘Big Science’ involves a research system in which (a) a consciously articulated goal exists; (b) there has been a commitment of resources and the organization and coordination of skills and institutions on a scale which only national governments can undertake; (c) the decentralized structures of the scientific community are replaced by planned administrative structures; and (d) it is rare that research problems or goals correspond to the neat disciplinary boundaries within science. Recognition of these developments in the scientific community is uneven and the reaction to them ambivalent and the philosophy and sociology of science have yet to come fully to terms with them.