Mike Mulkay

Who is Mike Mulkay?

Michael Joseph Mulkay is a retired British sociologist of science. He worked as a reader and researcher at the University of Cambridge until 1966, he was then lecturer in sociology at Simon Fraser University 1966 to 1969, at Aberdeen University from 1969 to 1973, and then as Professor of Sociology at the University of York, from which he retired in 2001. A number of his students have gone on to take distinguished academic posts, including Nigel Gilbert, Steve Woolgar, Steve Yearley, Andrew Webster and Jonathan Potter.

Between the scientific positivism of Karl Popper and the revolutionary perspective of the Kuhnian school, Mulkay probably stands on a slightly left ground, follows Robert Merton who has been known partially as the predecessor of Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. He supports the methodological right of sociology to investigate the process of the production of scientific knowledge by means of comparing, illustrating academic influential social circumstance and the informative pattern of individual interaction among scientists who are in debate or cooperation. To analyse the effect on scientific research from inter-professional communication, Mulkay dedicated the significant book The Word and the World: Explorations in the Form of Sociological Analysis.