Sociology constructivist

Constructivist sociologists of science, more than historians, have entered where Foucault declined to tread, dealing not only with the "big science" of modem times but with the classical period of Robert Boyle and the early Royal Society. Bruno Latour, Steven Shapin, and Simon Schaffer have emphasized social and discursive strategies of coercion and persuasion, marshaled by scientific protagonists who mimic codes of behavior ordinarily associated with the battlefield or the salon.5 This is a sociology of confrontation and conquest that emphasizes the contingent personal and cultural forms that scientific discourse can assume. 

It should be noted at the outset that this identity schema for scientific disciplines runs the risk of superficially obscuring the differences among scientific communities and Seventh-Day Adventists, Daughters of the American Revolution, or Freudian analysts. In this, the construction of identity may look like an example of the constructivist sociology of science. However, the identity schema is capable of providing important demarcation criteria for science, especially in focusing on the problems scientists choose to study and the values by which scientists organize their solutions. 

G. Freudenthal, The Role of Shared Knowledge in Science Tlie Failure of the Constructivist Programme in the Sociology of Science , Social Studies o/ Science, 14 (1984), pp. 285-95, pp. 286-8. 

In her writing on risk Deborah Lupton (1999) identifies three major diverging sociological perspectives on how risk is conceptualised as a phenomenon. These are the risk society , cultural/symboUc and gov-eriunentality perspectives. Following Lupton, these perspectives can be positions along a realist - constructivist dimension that say a lot about their basic strengths and weaknesses as theoretical models or characterisations of risk ... 

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