Conceptual Displacement and Migration in Science: A Prefatory Paper.

The article describes conceptual displacement and migration in science. In the last few years there has been growing agreement among sociologists studying the scientific community that one of their central aims should be to describe systematically the connections between social processes and intellectual development in science. This concern on the part of sociologists with scientific knowledge is very recent, however, and most of the studies at present available deal exclusively with such social aspects of science as the system of professional rewards, the patterns of communication among research scientists, and the nature of social control within the research community.