However, scholars of religion and modern politics have cautioned against this formulation. This reading is also consonant with studies of other technocratic environments, like commercial corporations or government bureaucracies (Bear, 2013 Choi & Mody, 2009 Khurana, 2002). What is the relationship between charismatic and rationalized authority in science? To the degree that scholars have investigated this dynamic, they typically position charisma as a kind of meaning-laden stopgap, providing affective and symbolic resources to augment the managerial processes enabled by workflows, protocols, or standardized deliberation (Gustin, 1973 Lorimer, 2007 Thorpe & Shapin, 2000).

More generally, our approach identifies contemporary processes by which scientific ideas can gain public authority even when their intellectual merit has been deemed dubious.

Using this perspective to study Jensen and his admirers demonstrates how the perennial race and intelligence debates gain a kind of symbolic power, unrelated to their scientific merit or racist appeal, which enables such debates to thrive and persist in the public sphere. To illustrate, we use the case of Arthur Jensen – a deceased intelligence researcher and the intellectual father to contemporary texts like The Bell Curve – and the circles of hero worship that admirers inside and outside academia have created to praise him. Description and elaboration of these figures and the folklore surrounding them sets in motion the interpretive processes by which some actors become charismatic leaders and others charismatic followers within science, ultimately providing alternative symbolic resources for an embattled research agenda to accrue legitimacy. In this mode, both professionals and lay enthusiasts portray involvement in the scientific process as a story of suppression and persecution, in which only a few remarkable figures can withstand scrutiny and take on challengers with dignity. We re-center charismatic authority as an interpretive resource that allows scientists and onlookers to recast a professional conflict in terms of a public drama.

In this paper, we re-theorize these relationships. When studying science contexts, scholars typically position charismatic authority as an adjunct or something that provides a meaning-laden boost to rational authority.

Misbehaving Science by Aaron Panofsky