The New Politics of Science

How science gets done in today's world has profound political repercussions, since scientific knowledge, through its technical applications, has become an important source of both economic and military power. increasing dependence of scientific research on funding from business and military has made questions about access to and control of scientific knowledge a central issue in today's politics of science. In The New Politics of Science, David Dickson points out that the scientific community has its own internal power structures, its elites, its hierarchies, its ideologies, its sanctioned norms of social behavior, and its dissenting groups. And more that science, as a social practice, forms an integral part of economic structures of society in which it is imbedded, more boundaries and differences between two dissolve. Groups inside scientific community, for example, will use groups outside community-and vice versa-to achieve their own political ends. In this edition, Dickson has included a new preface commenting on continuing and increasing influence of industrial and defense interests on American scientific research in 1980s.