The paper offers a distinctive reading of Popper’s work, suggesting that his Logic of Scientific Discovery (LScD) might be re-interpreted in the light of his Open Society. Indeed, Popper can be interpreted as criticising certain aspects of his first book, and as a result improving upon them, in his second. It suggests translating what Popper says about ‘conventions’ into his later vocabulary of ‘social institutions’. Looking back, I believe that Popper never intended the language of conventions and decisions to be read individualistically. I remain unsure whether Popper was himself quite as clear about this as he could have been.  My reading makes Popper a pioneer in the sociology of science. Scientific institutions are arenas of political power; but Popper did not discuss the structure and inter-relations of the social institutions of science, or offer a politics of science in the context of his methodology. What is missing from the skeletal sociology of LScD is the politics. We could put it in Popperian terms this way: scientific institutions are both open and closed. They are closed, firmly, to the inexpert, to the non-members; supposedly they are open to the qualified, provided the prerogatives of seniority and leadership are acknowledged. Despite these shortcomings, Popper’s critical and rational approach and his insistence on openness and intellectual honesty are still important today.

The assertion on fusion of science and technology, society and nature, inter-, trans- and multi-disciplinary nature of knowledge production, and futility of cleavages between human and no-human phenomena, social and natural sciences, and other prevailing polarizations in sociology of science and Technology Studies (STS) are the most important characteristics of post- Mertonian and post-Khunian sociology of science or the sociology of techno science. For this genre of sociology, the key mission of techno science is to increasingly create stronger, wider, and larger networks through societal and physical process of translation. This agenda is the reflection of new modes and procedures driving knowledge production, dissemination, and consumption, particularly in new areas like biotechnology, nanotechnology, nano-biotechnology, information and communication technology (ICT by and large in universities and other institutes of the North or the developed world. Reflecting upon the history and development of sociology of science, this article aims to draw attention to the current trends and developments of the social theorizing on science and technology after two Godfathers, namely Robert K. Merton (1910-2003) and Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) with special emphasis on actor-Network Theory (ANT), as an integrated, well-organized, leading, and promising approach evolved from/into the STS. Moreover, the article touches on some lessons and/or potential implications of such developments which can be relevant to policies of knowledge production, dissemination, and consumption in the universities and other research institutes of Iran as a developing (South) country.

In the evolution of human knowledge in the humanities studies arena, subjects like political thought was based on less critical tendencies and was copied and affected by translations of humanities. So, their intellectual, Political and Social foundations are not very strong. Even after Islamic revolution, we can't find any reliable division of works and movements in the field of political thought. How ever, the Production of knowledge and the importance of creating theories, are the Strategic aim of the political system and because of its necessity in the Islamic Society, some elites study in this field. But in spite of appropriate conditions, requirements and changes at the level of social demand, proposing following essential question is welcomed by elites and intellectuals:Why intellectual stagnation and evolution of thought in contemporary Iran prevent creative and up to date confronting with the concepts and discussions in "political thought?"

Politics as a new concept in Iran is a subject that has involved various classes, statifications & groups. It has embraced different areas of Iranians’ living. For existing researches have studied classes, Iilat & some groups in Iran’s political sociology, this research studies a group that political literature don’t give pay attention to that or belong on social history and very hard to study its political behavior. However the main question of the present essay is studding of political behavior of doctors of medicine & presence of them as interest group in & on Iran’s politics. Generally, the presence of medicine (doctors) in politics environment have been because of new developments in politics, social status, attention of society to them & some accidents, the luck of the game. The presence in new politics of Iran has been started in Qajar era. The most feature of the period was use of medical concepts for general understanding of political concepts in Iran. In the first Pahlavid, medicine tried to influence on politics & did not participate in that. In the time, medicine was a new job and an instrument for modernization. Medicine tried to introduce itself as necessary job with a high level in the society of Iran. In the 1940- 1980 decade, they participated in politics as prime minister, minister, MP & opposition. The essay tries to explain the hypothesis with statistical indicators to show relationship between medicine & politics. On the whole, medicine couldn’t affect politics similar to engineers.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine and analyze the critiques of the theory of the “ Matthew effect" with the existing laws in physics and their approach to each other to clearly and objectively generalize the debates of critics of this theory in the sociology of science. Methodology: The approach of the present research is qualitative and the library and document methods, evidence-based, and content and comparative analysis (bibliometrics) were used to answer the research questions. Findings: There are factors and norms in beings, including the dimensions of the Jones model in scientific communities (scientists, universities, and journals), as well as temperature and pressure in the density of objects, which affect them through changes and transformations. So, scientific communities and the density of objects are not subconsciously different in forms and degrees. For example, the density of copper at a temperature of 100 degrees Celsius is lower than the density of copper at a temperature of zero degrees Celsius, and similarly, the progress of the scientific community of third world countries is less than developed countries due to lack of quantitative and qualitative indicators. Conclustion: Just as the density of an object changes as the motion of its molecules with increasing and decreasing temperature or pressure, different communities are not spontaneously at lower and upper scientific levels. Rather, each of the scientific communities, under the received scientific benefits, is expected to gain a worthy position according to their set of factors and talents; and visibility is achieved according to the capacity of each scientific community.

Formerly most sociologists of science and technology did little to research in the formal literature of the Sociology of Culture and may even were resistant to cultural analysis. The sociologists of culture have also written little analysis on the process of knowledge and technology production. This is contrary to the basic charactersitic of the new sociology of knowledge and science that is emphasis on culture and cultural analysis in science and technology studies. In this article, we trace and analyze how sociologists of science and technology have performed cultural analysis. More recent moves to extend studies of science and technology “outward” beyond formal scientific settings have created new possibilities for the sociology of culture. They have also attracted more attention to the place of culture in knowledge and technology studies. Of these recent attempts are the studies on materialistic culture, scientific citizenship, macro- epistemics (culture in knowledge society), and finally civic epistemologies.

One of the applications of sociology of science, as a specific branch of sociology of knowledge, is to advert the interplay between society and science, especially sociological problems of science institution. This article tries to review some statistics concerning brain drain in Iran and the world, to present the typology of these migrations, and to analyze the brain drain issue by using documentary research and re-analysis of statistics methods, and applying the synthetic approach of sociology of science. In general, some of the most important theoretical findings of this article are as follow: 1) In spite of increasing in the contribution of science production and scientific progresses of the country, the statistics of Iranian brain drain is still high. 2) In light of the interplay of society and science institution, 10 types of Iranian brain drain can be discovered and found. 3) According to the sight contained in sociology of science, it is necessary to advert the examples of the effect of scientific communities’ norms on elites, the effect of socio-economical structures and norms on the scientific work, the role of researchers’ networks, and the role of social and cognitive structures. The synthetic approach attends simultaneously to two elements of agency and structure in its analysis.

The relationship between Historical Sociology (HS) and International Relations (IR) is one of the relatively new fields of study, which has attracted the attention of researchers and activists of both fields during the last few decades. In other words, the impact of the international environment on internal developments is the basis for the emergence of this field of study with general titles such as International Historical Sociology (IHS) or Historical Sociology of International Relations (HSIR) during the first years or decade of the current century. The theoretical research on the book “Global Historical Sociology” (GHS), raises the question of whether it is possible to know global historical sociology as a conjuncture point between the mentioned fields of study. The authors of the book criticized this tenet as a transdisciplinary branch that includes three areas: World Sociology, Historical Sociology, and World History. The studies carried out show that ambiguity in the possibility of methodological integration of the fields of sociology and history on the one hand and neglecting the position of the state in global transformations or its overlapping with the newly emerging field of Global Studies causes the current deficiencies in the content and methodological coherence of the book. However, the mentioned attitude can be more carefully considered and developed in the future. In this article, it will be tried to express the strengths and weaknesses of this work with a critical view.