Science and the Social Order

Merton's earlier essay — the companion to The Normative Structure of Science — on the relationship between scientific practice and the broader social order that either supports or undermines it. Written in 1938, the essay was shaped by Merton's observations of how fascist regimes treated their scientific establishments, and the historical context gives the argument teeth. For product direction the transfer is structural: the institutional conditions that make reliable knowledge possible are not incidental to the work, and an organisation that claims to "learn from data" is either creating or failing to create those conditions. Read the Merton pair together; they are short and complementary.