Tag Archives | Historical Sociology

Robust Science: Passive Smoking and Scientific Collaboration with the Tobacco Industry in the 1970s

Uri Shwed

Sociological Science, April 1, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a9

The first lesson from the history of research on smoking hazards is that scientists should be wary of collaboration with interested industries. This lesson, which is influential in the literature on science–industry relationships, comes from a historiography focused on the carcinogenicity debate of the 1950s and 1960s and the passive smoking debate of the 1980s and 1990s. Few studies have examined research in the 1970s. This article fills this lacuna using novel bibliometrical methods augmented with a qualitative analysis of the associations between periods and literary camps, as expressed in scientific texts. The mixed-methods approach identifies the temporal dynamics of the literature on smoking hazards to reveal that the well-documented attempts of the tobacco industry to stall and hamper science had unanticipated consequences. Specifically, an industry–science collaboration to develop a less hazardous cigarette put scholars on the path to discovering the hazards of passive smoking. The analyses supply a narrative that has room for actors’ complex interests and actions and demonstrates that such complexity may only be revealed in research whose outcomes are never known in advance.
Uri Shwed: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben Gurion University of the Negev.  Email: shwed@bgu.ac.il

  • Citation: Shwed, Uri. 2015. “Robust Science: Passive Smoking and Scientific Collaboration with the Tobacco Industry in the 1970s.” Sociological Science 2:158-185.
  • Received: August 17, 2014
  • Accepted: November 2, 2014
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen,  Delia Baldassarri
  • DOI: 10.15195/v2.a9

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