Social Knowledge in the Making
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents

Contents
Preface
Introduction: The Study of Social Knowledge Making
Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michèle Lamont
Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michèle Lamont
Part I
Knowledge Production in the Disciplines
One / Library Research Infrastructure for Humanistic and Social Scientific Scholarship in the Twentieth Century
Andrew Abbott
Two / In Clio’s American Atelier
Anthony T. Grafton
Three / Filing the Total Human: Anthropological Archives from 1928 to 1963
Rebecca Lemov
Four / Academic Conferences and the Making of Philosophical Knowledge
Neil Gross and Crystal Fleming
Five / Practical Foundations of Theorizing in Sociology: The Case of Pierre Bourdieu
Johan Heilbron
Part II
Knowledge Evaluation Sites
Six / Comparing Customary Rules of Fairness: Evaluative Practices in Various Types of Peer Review Panels
Michèle Lamont and Katri Huutoniemi
Seven / Meetings by the Minute(s): How Documents Create Decisions for Institutional Review Boards
Laura Stark
Eight / An Experiment in Interdisciplinarity: Proposals and Promises
Marilyn Strathern
Part III
Social Knowledge beyond the Academy
Nine / Subjects of Persuasion: Survey Research as a Solicitous Science; or, The Public Relations of the Polls
Sarah E. Igo
Ten / The Practices of Objectivity in Regulatory Science
Sheila Jasanoff
Eleven / How Claims to Know the Future Are Used to Understand the Present: Techniques of
Prospection in the Field of National Security
Grégoire Mallard and Andrew Lakoff
Grégoire Mallard and Andrew Lakoff
Twelve / What Do Market Designers Do When They Design Markets? Economists as Consultants to the Redesign of Wholesale Electricity Markets in the United States
Daniel Breslau
Thirteen / Financial Analysis: Epistemic Profile of an Evaluative Science
Karin Knorr Cetina
Contributors
Index
Review Quotes
Chandra Mukerji, University of California, San Diego
“This is a fascinating collection that reveals to science and technology studies scholars how rich research on the social sciences can be and offers social researchers a site of reflexivity for considering their own practices of knowledge making. Picking up this book, I found it hard to put it down.”—Chandra Mukerji, University of California, San Diego
Steven Shapin, Harvard University
“It was once believed that a sociological understanding of the natural sciences was ‘hard,’ even impossible, while the human and social sciences were ‘easy,’ even obvious, sociological objects. Why ever did we think this? Much human scientific knowledge has a self-referential character, and almost all of it confronts complex problems of establishing its expert authority. That alone makes the sociological study of the human sciences both hard and important. Social Knowledge in the Making is an eclectic assemblage of state-of-the-art scholarship showing how we might go about interpreting the production and evaluation of human scientific knowledge. It is a considerable achievement.”
Randall Collins
“This volume reveals the heights of respected knowledge as practices on the ground. Libraries, archives, conferences, peer reviews, the annoying institutional review board—all these along with the intimate realities of surveys, regulatory agencies, and financial analysts are brought to the fore as they determine what gets produced or not produced as certified knowledge. Professionals are those who don’t just flaunt an identity but do their thing with mastery of details both banal and challenging: Camic, Gross, Lamont, and the rest of the contributors are professionals indeed.”—Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania
Helga Nowotny, president, European Research Council
“This book marks a significant step towards closing the gap in our understanding of the actual practices in the making of social knowledge, that is, knowledge in the social sciences and humanities. Covering a wide range of production and evaluation sites within academia and beyond, it undoubtedly will influence future empirical studies in this important domain.”
Craig Calhoun, president, Social Science Research Council
“Social scientists and humanists have been surprisingly inattentive to the institutional infrastructure and culture of shared practices on which our work rests. Social Knowledge in the Making changes this with a set of sharp and well-informed analyses.”
For more information, or to order this book, please visit https://press.uchicago.edu
Google preview here
Sociology: Theory and Sociology of Knowledge
You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, see our international sales information.