“The Social Context of Science”: SOC SCI 119 as a Way of Life and Learning

Abstract

This essay discusses the personal impact and contemporary relevance of Everett Mendelsohn’s Harvard course on the ‘Social Context of Science’ — first offered in the 1960s, and continuing to attract large numbers of students today. In homage to its originality, the course is assessed as a testbed for developing teachers, initiating research, and fostering educational innovation. What was not obvious in the Sixties was how relevant the vision underpinning Mendelsohn’s program would become to an increasingly cosmopolitan and knowledge-based form of capitalism in the 1990s. Business interest in such concepts and practices as learning communities, paradigms, knowledge management, scenario planning, self-organizing systems and environmental models of ‘natural capitalism’ are reviewed. These developments suggest the need for a new generation of historians, social analysts (and activists), management teachers and consultants to be exposed to the program and methods underpinning ‘The Social Context of Science’, with a mission to bring critical thinking and scholarship to bear on the needs and practices of a rapidly globalizing business community.