ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some recent work in the social history of science. It shows that when scientists enter social contexts outside the research community, such as the wider realm of political activity, they select from and reinterpret their cultural resources, both technical and social, in response to the social context and in accordance with their position in it. This brief and incomplete discussion of the movement of cultural resources out of the research community supplements the prior examination of external influences on the content of science. The important objective for the sociology of knowledge has been to explore how knowledge is used in the course of political activity. Scientific knowledge has been conceived as an objective representation of the physical world. The modern scientific community has been credited with an ethos which reduces social influences upon the production and reception of knowledge-claims to a minimum, thereby guaranteeing the accumulation of objective knowledge.
