One relatively unnoticed consequence of this arrangement is that, against
conventional economic wisdom, the industrialists-and the general public-
came to believe that the sheer stockpiling of advanced weapons was ipso
facto a sign of strength, not weakness. Of course, if one's model of achievement
were a full, albeit unused, library, rather than a cleared warehouse, then
it made good sense. In this respect, endless technoscientific expansion became
both the means and the ends of the Cold War. Moreover, this policy has continued
largely unabated with the fall of the Soviet Union. The only difference
is that the state no longer occupies the role of central planner and coordinator.
Nevertheless, the cross-national metrics of techno scientific achievement
devised in the Cold War remain in place, most notably the Science Citation
Index, only now enhanced by related measures of intellectual property. Yet, as
in the Cold War, there remains an enormous gap between counting articles,
patents, and citations, on the one hand, and measuring the effectiveness of
these quantities vis-a-vis their target realities, on the other ( Fuller 2002a, chap.
l ) . Only the most sociologically naive academic administrator or science
policy manager would presume that there is some straightforward connection
between such counts and measures. Luckily, at least for the employment
prospects of STS researchers, sociological naivete is never in short supply (e.g.,
Etzkowitz et al. 1 998) .
Steve Fullers - 2006 Philophical foundations of sociology of science