SCIENCE AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION: CLASSIC AND MODERN INSTITUTIONALISMS IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE

The article refers to social studies that have dealt with science as a social institution. It draws on analytical frameworks From institutional sociology, both in its traditional version and in the so-called new sociological institutionalism. With this baggage, discussion in the area of the sociology of science regarding the rules, values, behavioral patterns and organizational traits that characterize science as a social activity is reviewed. In the analysis of the traditional view the limits of Robert Merton's normative framework is established and the excessive weight of functionalism is removed. Bringing the analysis closer to institutionalism's current school of thought not only provides a new reinterpretation of the normative framework of science, but also allows integration of the new organizational arrangements of R&D in the analysis, which arises from the influence of the environment and the intrinsic change dynamics of scientific institutions in advanced contemporary societies. The corollary indicates the existence of an "institutional turn" in the sociology of science which substitutes the "cognitive turn" which occurred in the lost two decades of the lost century.