New Modes of Knowledge Productions and Doing Science:A Sociological Reflection on Shift in Ethical Standards and Scientific Conduct in the Epoch of Technoscience

Fusion and co-constitution of science and society and blurring their traditional frontiers in conjunction with some essential transformations including commercialization, privatization, bureaucratization, objectification of technoscience and declining autonomy of science and academia have jointly formed a new paradigm in knowing and doing technoscience and technoscientific inquiries. Therefore, this paper to deal with various implications of this paradigmatic shift in knowing and doing technoscience, with a focus on its ethical and conductive implications. In this article, the notion of ethos of science in Mertonian paradigm and some its critics was first examined. The paper, then, aimed at contexts of evolution and configuration of new paradigm in doing technoscience and creating knowledge and its implications for ethical behaviors in science, took two leading approaches of this paradigm, namely "post-academic science" and "new production of knowledge production". Comparing two approaches of this new paradigm reflected that there existed in chorus two radical and moderate narratives one the ethical implications of new development in knowing and doing in technoscientific activities. While the Radical approach (Post-Academic Science) claimed emerging and establishing a new constellation of ethical and conductive standards, stemming from radical discontinuity and rupture between the traditional and the emerging new mode of knowledge production, the second approaches (New production of Knowledge) took a moderate stance on the subjects. The first approach believers asserted that this shifts certainly made threats traditional values and ethical standards of academic science, whereas clime-makers of the second approaches called attention to coexistence of new values and ethical standards. In this view, the new constellation of technoscience values and ethical standards werent threat to traditional values and/or ethos; they were just to accentuate on public and social responsibility and further reflexive nature of technoscience and technoscientific activities.