The disciplinary stake: the case of chronobiology

The differentiation of knowledge is a problem that in the sociology of science has mainly been treated in terms of units of innovation known as `scientific specialties' or `research networks'. These units have thus achieved the status of sociologically constructed concepts. Disciplines, on the contrary, have been relatively ignored and their conceptualization has, for the most part, remained at the level of common sense. In this paper, an attempt is made, with the aid of the quite particular case of chronobiology, to confront the problem of disciplines, starting within the theoretical framework of Bourdieu's `scientific field'. In this light, the conquest of the disciplinary form appears as a kind of struggle in the `field'. The derivative institutional frontiers can then be understood as the consequence of the reification of what one may call the `disciplinary stake', which corresponds to an attempt to exercise a professional mode of control in a particular domain of knowledge. The `disciplinary stake' is further distinguished from other stakes or goals which arise within the environment of the already constituted discipline.