This article analyzes the varied niches of an emerging academic field, Science and Technology Studies (STS), as a means of understanding intellectual and professional development. As a new, upstart entity in the established and inertial field of academia, STS has carved out a successful and expanding niche in the ecology of higher education via a variety of unique intellectual and institutional strategies. By adapting and reconfiguring organizational and professional structures of traditional liberal arts, the case of STS exposes three main themes in the organization of knowledge and higher education: reinvention, accounting, and professionalism. STS scholars endeavor to reorganize the distribution and organization of knowledge turfs, which often involve idiosyncratic, symbiotic, or competitive relationships with sciences, social sciences, and/or humanities. This often creates dilemmas regarding how to account for scholarly work using new, divergent, or incommensurable merit criteria or professional values. The article concludes with empirical analyses of the emergence and content of STS departments throughout the world and of Social Studies of Science, the flagship journal of the field. Data and evidence were gleaned from a variety of semistructured interviews with STS scholars, archival sources, and detailed citation records. As STS continues to grow and develop with its diffuse and eclectic foci, this raises questions of whether and how the field should or will be coordinated intellectually or professionally. These multivalent professional logics and values are sources of both vitality and tension in STS and illuminate larger issues of professional and intellectual organizational strategy in developing fields and realms of knowledge.
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