“This is a fascinating collection that reveals to science and technology studies scholars how rich research on the social sciences can be and offers social researchers a site of reflexivity for considering their own practices of knowledge making. Picking up this book, I found it hard to put it down.”—Chandra Mukerji, University of California, San Diego

Chandra Mukerji, University of California, San Diego

“It was once believed that a sociological understanding of the natural sciences was ‘hard,’ even impossible, while the human and social sciences were ‘easy,’ even obvious, sociological objects. Why ever did we think this? Much human scientific knowledge has a self-referential character, and almost all of it confronts complex problems of establishing its expert authority. That alone makes the sociological study of the human sciences both hard and important. Social Knowledge in the Making is an eclectic assemblage of state-of-the-art scholarship showing how we might go about interpreting the production and evaluation of human scientific knowledge. It is a considerable achievement.”

Steven Shapin, Harvard University

“This volume reveals the heights of respected knowledge as practices on the ground. Libraries, archives, conferences, peer reviews, the annoying institutional review board—all these along with the intimate realities of surveys, regulatory agencies, and financial analysts are brought to the fore as they determine what gets produced or not produced as certified knowledge. Professionals are those who don’t just flaunt an identity but do their thing with mastery of details both banal and challenging: Camic, Gross, Lamont, and the rest of the contributors are professionals indeed.”­­—Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania

Randall Collins

“This book marks a significant step towards closing the gap in our understanding of the actual practices in the making of social knowledge, that is, knowledge in the social sciences and humanities. Covering a wide range of production and evaluation sites within academia and beyond, it undoubtedly will influence future empirical studies in this important domain.”

Helga Nowotny, president, European Research Council

“Social scientists and humanists have been surprisingly inattentive to the institutional infrastructure and culture of shared practices on which our work rests. Social Knowledge in the Making changes this with a set of sharp and well-informed analyses.”

Craig Calhoun, president, Social Science Research Council