The Social Use of Science

This article is a written version of Pierre Boudieu’s lecture he gave at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) in 1997. His argumentation developed in his article The scientific field nearly a quarter of century before reappears here in a slightly different form. By applying his arguments defending the autonomy of the scientific field to the case of the INRA, he intends to put his theory of field into practice. In the present article he reaffirms his central statement that scholarly strategies are always and inseparably a combination of scientific and political strategies, however, an undoubtedly new element appears here in his perception of the scientific field: he emphasizes the indispensable role that administrators of science (who have on one hand only a small amount of scientific capital, but on the other a significant amount of capital in its institutionalised form) play in the division of labour of all scientific activities. Besides this, Bourdieu makes an eff ort to overcome the usually assumed opposition between fundamental and applied forms of science pointing out that the demarcation line is far from being as clear as it is frequently thought to be.