Institutions of belief and knowledge, studied sociologically.
9 topics · 14 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Do Artifacts Have Politics?
Langdon Winner · 1980
Argues that technical artefacts can themselves embody political arrangements -- Robert Moses's low bridges, designed to keep buses of poor and black…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Matthew Effect in Science
Robert K. Merton · 1968
Argues that scientific recognition is self-reinforcing -- eminent researchers get disproportionate credit for work done jointly with less well-known…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Max Weber · 1905
Traces capitalist discipline to a religious idea of vocation, and argues that ideas can be causes rather than only reflections of material interest.
+8 more at this level
12 of 14 works
Langdon Winner
Argues that technical artefacts can themselves embody political arrangements -- Robert Moses's low bridges, designed to keep buses of poor and black New Yorkers off certain parkways, being the famous case -- so choosing a technology is often already choosing a politics.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert K. Merton
Argues that scientific recognition is self-reinforcing -- eminent researchers get disproportionate credit for work done jointly with less well-known collaborators -- so reputation accumulates for the already-reputed in a pattern the Gospel of Matthew supplied the name for.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Melvin Kranzberg
Sets out six laws of the history of technology, chief among them that technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral, because its human, social and environmental consequences depend entirely on the context into which it is introduced.
link checked 17 Sept 2026danah boyd & Kate Crawford
Argues that the availability of huge datasets has produced a mythology that bigger data means more objective truth, and lays out six provocations -- including that data taken out of context loses meaning -- that big-data research routinely ignores.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Zeynep Tufekci
Argues that platforms' ability to run unannounced experiments on users and to target messages using behavioural data lets them shape political participation in ways that are invisible to the people being modelled and largely unregulated.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Max Weber
Traces capitalist discipline to a religious idea of vocation, and argues that ideas can be causes rather than only reflections of material interest.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert K. Merton
Argues that science functions as an institution only because its practitioners share four norms -- universalism, communalism, disinterestedness and organised scepticism -- and that violating them, not just getting results wrong, is what science treats as misconduct.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Lofland & Rodney Stark
Derives a seven-step model of conversion to a marginal religious movement from fieldwork inside a millenarian group, arguing conversion happens through accumulating social ties to existing members rather than through the doctrine's appeal on its own.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bruno Latour
Argues Pasteur's success came not from persuading people of a truth discovered in the lab but from redesigning the world outside it -- farms, hygiene practices, whole industries -- so that it behaved the way his laboratory already did.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gary T. Marx
Argues that new surveillance technologies differ enough from traditional monitoring -- in their low visibility, low cost and ability to categorise people automatically -- that they need their own ethical framework rather than an extension of rules built for watching a single suspect.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Rodney Stark
Reviews a century of failed predictions that religion would decline with modernity and argues secularisation theory should be abandoned as a general law, since religious participation has risen in some modernising societies and stayed flat in others.
Stephen Turner
Argues that expert knowledge poses a genuine problem for democracy because experts hold their authority through cognitive means voters cannot independently check, so trusting them requires a different kind of justification than trusting an elected representative.
link checked 17 Sept 2026