On the occasion of the publication of: ‘A Vital Rationalist. Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem’, edited by François Delaporte, with an introduction by Paul Rabinow and a critical bibliography by Camille Limoges. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. MIT Press, 1994.
*The worst bit is the self assuredness. Canguilhem’s writing is severe and calm. Sharp and authoritative. He’s a doctor. One story follows the next. A case is unravelled, then another. Get into the details. And then there’s his diagnosis, each of his words a final word. The sentences sound as if they seek to incorporate history. And to transcend it. This is a breathtaking rationality - but, and this is exceptional, not one that denies pain. Even pain is included.
*An essay review? I am to write an essay review of A Vital Rationalist. Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem, a volume with translations of fifteen of Canguilhem’s texts from French into English. But I can’t. I do not want to. How ever to judge this work - which is about the very act of judging, about handling norms. It tells that pointing out error in what went before, is what finding truth is all about. But escaping from that place can hardly be done by calling it error, can it?
*Canguilhem knows what a science is. “If medicine has attained the status of a science, it did so in the era of bacteriology. A practice is scientific if it provides a model for the solution of problems and if that model gives rise to effective therapies. Such was the case with the development of serums and vaccines. A second creation of scientificity is the ability of one theory to give rise to another capable of explaining why its predecessor possessed only limited validity.” (p.146) So. That’s how it is. And he knows so much more.
*Is writing down questions a sin? Must writing be affirmative, ordering a chaos that will retreat to the fringes of what is articulated?
*The attractive side is that there’s so much about objects. The big guys of the Vienna-Cambridge philosophy of science tradition were obsessed with method. They wanted guarantees for the trustworthiness of science. And therefore transformed the characteristics of a nineteenth century gentleman into something that had to be as impersonal as possible. Method. The obsession was so strong that even their enemies got caught up in it. The enemies denied that method can ever distinguish real science, because (1) all methods can be productive in their time - which implies we do not need to hold on to a single method (2) that methods do not guarantee or demarcate anything at all since they leak and (3) that methods are not used anyway but reconstructed afterwards.
Method doesn’t keep the social world out of the scientific domain - science is social. Good. All right. Take your constructivism and run. But then. What about the world that’s made? What about the quarks and the genes and the pain? It is at this point that a moderate dose of Canguilhem may help.
*Be careful. Especially those in crisis (and who isn’t after having lost so many of the certainties they were raised with?) might be in danger of succumbing to his voice. A father? A schoolteacher? Philosopher, doctor. Man.
*About objects. The Comptian pyramid holds the promise that knowledge of the smallest particles at its base may - once - help to explain events in the higher, more complicated layers. (Some in STS turn this around. They dream that the most complicated layer, which they call society, helps to explain small particles - or at least the non-methodological production of scientific knowledge about them.)
Canguilhem shows that there are cleavages in the pyramid. And loops.
Cleavages: biochemistry may talk about macro-molecules, but it cannot understand disease. Some mutations are adaptive, others lethal. Since survival, illness and death happen to a living organism in its surroundings, biochemistry can never understand that. Loops: the physicist may dream of explaining life. But at some point, inevitably, he, the physicist, as a person, a body, will suffer illness. Death.
*Canguilhem writes history. With judgements. He hands out credit, takes it away. Meanwhile concentrating on the way objects are framed. On the concepts delineating them. No, Descartes didn’t come up with the concept ‘reflex’. For in the body Descartes described, the sense that ascends from senses to brain was different in nature to the instructions that descend from brain to muscles. This makes the analogy with a mirror that reflects a light beam inconceivable. It only became conceivable at the moment Willis described anima spiritualis that do ascend, reflect and descend again. Willis: a vitalist, who talked about anima spiritualis. Thus, Canguilhem writes, an ideology, vitalism, may produce science. But the theory of the reflex only became scientific a long time after Willis, when the spirits were chased away while the reflex remained.
*That’s his desire. To be subtle in his judgements. To redistribute credits. To look for the good in the bad and vice versa. But then there’s the verdict. And that’s the end of it.
*Social scientists talk endlessly about the boundaries between ‘machines’ and ‘people’. They forget about bodies. They forget they have bodies. And if they mention the body, it is usually in some psychoanalytic erotic version. No beating hearts, bleeding wounds, coding genes.
*Canguilhem puts bodies in the center. He writes about life. About life and the life sciences. Their specificity. “At all levels, biologists have identified ordering structures that, while generally reliable, sometimes fail. The concept of normality is intended to refer to these ordering structures. No such concept is needed in the epistemology of physics.” (p. 215)
Canguilhem doesn’t believe that after Kant a philosopher could ever hope to write about objects directly. He makes the detour into the sciences. It isn’t Canguilhem who knows what life is. The life sciences do. Canguilhem writes their history as a history of the shifting delineations of their objects.
*And Canguilhem writes the history of the norms by which to judge the sciences, too. Even norms don’t fall under the jurisdiction of philosophers. A science creates its own normativity. Objects, methods and norms are intertwined. (They can be pointed out. By Canguilhem, the historian, the epistemologist. This is the object, not that. This the method to study it and the norm that distinguishes good from bad science at that time. No doubt about it.) Writing the history of science is, according to Canguilhem, different from writing other histories precisely because of the normativity of the scientific project. Because science is about breaking with error, and establishing norms, its history cannot be neutral.
But Canguilhem doesn’t write Whiggish history - the present wasn’t what the past was aiming at from its very beginning. History could have taken a different course. And yet for Canguilhem writing history begins in the present. It is not just anything in the past that is of interest to the epistemological historian, but only those things that are steps - errors, findings - towards the present.
*Not Whiggish but starting from the present all the same. Canguilhem’s writing is bereft of many of the dichotomies familiar to those whose education largely consisted of reading books in English.
As a Dutch student of philosophy at the end of the seventies, I was taught Popper-Lakatos-Kuhn. But being Dutch (and a student of medicine, too) allowed me to read Canguilhem in French. What a relief it was. How subtle. How many words that opened up the body of medicine and made it analysable.
Disillusion came in the early eighties when I went to study in France. There this rebellious author appeared to be severe. He wasn’t undermining the foundations of science, but laying foundations. They were merely different ones. What will be the reading experience of others (Scandinavian, Japanese, American) whose language skills only allow them to read Canguilhem in this English translation, now, years later, after so much iconoclastic work has been done? I cannot tell. Try, if you want to.
*Canguilhem even attends to materialities, to the very experimental set ups of the life sciences he studies. And he relates these to the societal content of the questions they must solve. “Did the technique of in vitro culture of explanted cells (…) offer experimental proof that the structure of the organism is an analogue of liberal society?” (p. 300) The answer is negative. For while Canguilhem carefully explains how analogy was used as a method in the life sciences of the nineteenth century, he also shows the limits of this method. Society and bodies are different objects.
In vitro cultures do not tell us what organisms have been all along, they create something new. They make ‘organic elements’ that didn’t exist before. “An organic element can be called an element only in its undissociated sate.” (p.300) In its associated state, an organism isn’t a set of separate elements, linked up. It’s an organised whole.
*The body and society are different. “For an organism, organization is a fact; for a society, organization is a goal.” (p. 302)
It comes back again and again. A body isn’t a physico-chemical assemblage of elements because it is organised. And the organisation of a body isn’t like the organisation of a society. Both organisations are characterised by norms. But the body lives its own normality. Each organism may deviate from all others, but as long as it maintains some norm or other, there is organisation, and the organism lives. When no norms are maintained there is chaos and chaos is death. In a society norms aren’t given, they are actively set. They may be altered, too.
Normalisation: making order by setting norms. Everyone and everything that doesn’t live up to the norms, ends up at the fringes. The chaotic unconcious that is constantly created and respressed. Norms are concomitant with order.
*You’ve read Foucault? Then you knew this story.
*Canguilhem, as a philosopher of medicine, defends the lived suffering of patients against objective data. He defends clinical medicine against the outcomes of laboratory measurement. It is not because a number is deviant, that the patient suffers. It is because there are patients who suffer, that we built laboratories. And call them in.
“The abnormal, being the a-normal, logically follows the definition of the normal. It is a logical negation. But it is the priority of the abnormal that attracts the attention of the normative, that calls forth a normative decision and provides an opportunity to establish normality through the application of a norm. A norm that has nothing to regulate is nothing because it regulates nothing. The essence of a norm is its role. Thus practically and functionally the normal is the operational negation of a state which thereby becomes the logical negation of that state; the abnormal, though logically posterior to the normal, is functionally first.” (p. 383)
*The question is this. Reader. Canguilhem follows biology and medicine judgementally. Finding errors makes him come up with norms. But if one leaves the judgements out, what happens? We might try. For after so many years that we, in STS, have anthropologised method, have looked into the way facts are produced, we might try this. To anthropologise objects. Life. Bodies. To look at what’s produced in practive. What is sustained, what altered. To look not into mechanisms (associations, translations) but into products. What is made. Objects.
Canguilhem defends the clinical assesment of disease against that of the lab. Anthropologising disease, would imply suspending judgements about clinic and lab in order to study how they work and relate in practice. In detail. When and where do doctors currently take complaints as their lead? What precise role do they give to laboratory numbers? Where do pain and numbers clash? That is: where does the way pain and numbers are handled clash? And what is the interdependence between them? Links, gaps, resonances, analogies, shifts, struggles.
*To judge is not an error. It is no mistake. It can be done, and in current medicine a defence of the clinic against the lab isn’t such a bad move, either. But what does postponing judgement yield? What is there to learn? The reality, not of the body as it should be known, but that of the body as it is practiced.
What are bodies made to be in the hospital around the corner? Go and take a look. Beating hearts make graphs and graphs make heartbeats. Wounds bleed, are closed, covered with cloth. Genetic codes are read from long printouts. Diseases attributed to the codes. Patients scream. They tell a story. Series of blood sugar values are scribled down in files. Doses of insulin are increased, decreased, adapted. Vessels opened up, stripped clean. All this. And a lot more.
*All criticism is partial: “theoretical themes survive even after critics are pleased to think that the theories associated with them have been refuted.” (p. 177) No doubt some of Canguilhem’s theoretical themes are still alive. In different guises. They might even go through a revival in the work of those who do not know what science is. Non-doctors. Non-philosophers. Non-teachers. Non-fathers. Non-men.
(Thanks to Marianne de Laet for the immediacy of her reactions. Thanks to John Law for his help with the language.)
With this contribution we want to join the theoretical discussion about shifting contents and new perspectives in the social studies of science. Despite all its differences, the social studies of science once shared a coherent perspective, namely to relate the knowledge content of science to social factors.
From the very beginning, a strong emphasis had been put on the social construction of science. Meanwhile, however, “constructivism” as a methodological and theoretical device is slowly disappearing. Michael Lynch, in his recent book states a “crisis in relativist and constructivist studies” (1993: 103), and for Karin Knorr-Cetina “constructivism … is not … a world view or a life-time occupation.” Therefore she presumes that “there will be a time when it is more useful to take the questions and run from constructivism” (1993: 561-562). Others, like Andrew Pickering (1992) and Bruno Latour (1987), simply do not mention the term “constructivism” any longer in their book indices.
The term “social” is even more contested. Especially in empirical studies on scientific practice and in the actor-network approach a sharp criticism of social biases in previous science studies is put forward. Our argument with regard to this heated debate is threefold:
First, we will give a brief introduction to basic assumptions and common features of those science studies, which claim to have overcome what Andrew Pickering, Bruno Latour and others call “sociological reductionism”.
Second, we will draw attention to the inherent limitations of the post-sociological alternatives presented. Apart from the problem that the constitution of single phenomena has to be taken for granted, the question remains open, how all the observed phenomena and their outputs are related to each other if not by cognitive and social factors. Third, we will show that the shift towards practice and the actor- network approach are, despite their claimed newness, a direct consequence of the limited and rather metaphorical use of social theory, which characterize the social studies of science in general.
Basic assumptions and common features of recent science studies One main objective of the present studies is to focus on all dimensions of scientific research. Therefore the traditional limitation to social dimensions seems to be too narrow. Entities which previously were neglected are included in the analysis. See, e.g., Ian Hacking: “I am not to argue for idealism but for a rather down-to-earth materialism. Mine is a thesis about the relationships between thoughts, acts, and manufactures” (1992: 30).
The so-called shift towards scientific practice focuses on the amount of equipment and technology, which is relevant in a laboratory setting and which is taken as an actively shaping part of scientific research. As a consequence, equipment and technology are regarded as a cause for the production of scientific knowledge in the same way as the scientists` cognitive contributions. Karin Knorr- Cetina, for example, has even emphasized in a case study on particle physics: “The production, measurement and description of the relevant particles takes place in an integrated way in the inside of the apparatus. The surrounding “laboratory” (in quotation marks) is the service station for the machine, which is the true laboratory” (1988: 328-329). In a similar vein, Andrew Pickering tries to attribute a constitutive role to the material world in science. Scientific results are then seen as inherently shaped by what he calls “maneuvers in the field of material agency” (1993: 581).
A second emerging trend can be identified in the actor-network approach of the Paris School. Bruno Latour, its most prominent representative, aims at blurring the boundaries of the distinction between the social, on the one side, and technology and nature on the other side. These a priori distinctions have to be substituted, since a network is composed of different actors and their interactions, all of which contribute to its strength or weakness. As a consequence, microbes are introduced as new social actors (1988a: 35 ff.), scallops are understood as beings with ends (1988a: 167), and even “reflexion” is transfered to nonhuman living beings and technical artefacts (1988b: 173).
To sum up, both developments have a common objective. Namely, the complete representation of the interactions of single components. However, this ambitious modification causes two conceptual problems: First, the constitution of each of these components usually is taken for granted. It remains implicit why microbes are not treated as a result of molecular processes, and why technical artefacts are not broken into single subcomponents like nuts and bolts. The second problem refers to the question how the components relate to each other. This is grounded in the claim that the approach avoids to consider technology and nature only as a function of human activities.
This stands in sharp contrast to the former social constructivist dogma, where causal priority was assigned to the social. As a consequence, these older science studies focused on the social shaping of nature and technology. No matter whether society as a whole or local thought collectives of single research groups were considered to be relevant, in each case social contexts were assumed to be the location where not only the negotiation of scientific results takes place, but also the production of technology and the definition of nature. Hence, social reality served as a key to open up all other phenomena and their relationship to each other. This perspective has been abandoned.
Limitations of the shift towards practice and the actor-network approach
Recent science studies document directly visible phenomena. Each component is taken as an independent factor. Single components are interesting only as far as they produce material outcomes. Internal characteristics of single components are left out of consideration in the same way as those relations between them which lie beneath the surface.
Such a material and outcome-oriented perspective could have been integrated by a physical theory of science, focussing exclusively on movements, emissions and noise of scientists and other components. Instead key terms of the social sciences, like agency, actor and interaction, reappear and are employed for the description of single components and their relation to each other. Cognitive dimensions like intention and reflection are ascribed in the same way. These concepts are no longer limited to the analysis of scientists and the relations between them, but transferred to all visible phenomena - computers, detectors, and microbes. Unfortunately, they are employed in an ad hoc and arbitrary manner, without careful consideration of the rules and obstacles of such transformation, or of the repercussions on the content of the concept involved.
Two examples illustrate this point: First, in a completely desocialized definition of action, the relevant dimensions of intention and meaning as well as normative and cultural aspects, are sacrificed in order to treat all observable entities in the same manner. As a consequence, scientists do research in the same way as the sun shines, planes fly, taps drip water and test-tubes break. Second, also the underlying concept of interaction is an extremely reductionist one. Aspects which lie beneath the surface and which can be reconstructed only from an internal point of view, like the process-character of interaction and the mutual structures of meaning and expectation within the interaction, are sacrificed. As a consequence, not only can scientists interact with computers but a toaster can interact with a piece of toast.
The symmetrical consideration of all kinds of phenomena is common ground for the post-sociology of science. Beyond that, there are differences. While those who advocate the shift towards scientific practice pursue an empiricist ideal, Latour`s actor- network approach is characterized by theoretical and ethical aspirations. In a brutishly anticonstructivist manner networks are treated as an objective structure, and Latour can present himself as its legitimate and independent speaker. His language contains both: an excessive use of terms borrowed from social theory and, correspondingly, a devaluation of the content of these terms. The implications have been shown above.
Social reductionisms in the Social Studies of Science
The shortcomings of post-sociological science studies have also been discussed by others. Some critics even have argued for a return to the more traditional paths of the social studies of science (Collins/Yearley 1992 a,b). Our point is that this will not suffice, since the problems experienced now - namely the lack of a theory which allows for an understanding of how things are structured and processed - can be traced back to the core assumptions of the social studies of science. Therefore, continuation, not revolution should be the right term to characterize the development. Though less obvious and hidden by an excessive use of social metaphors, the former approaches were already characterized by a very narrow understanding of the social dimensions in science.
Shortcomings with regard to the social dimensions are characteristic of the two perhaps most influential, but entirely different schools in the social studies of science, namely the strong programme and the ethnomethodological approach. The strong program started with the social environment, which was supposed to determine science (Bloor 1976, Barnes 1977). Here, social dimensions were reduced to broader societal interests without specifying the mechanisms which transform these external forces into the social structures and processes of science. In contrast, the ethnomethodological approach by Knorr-Cetina (1981) and Lynch (1985) started with individual scientists. Here, social dimensions in science were reduced to scientists’ negotiations. Science now appeared to be like an unstructered vacuum, without a past and without a future.
While the ethnomethodological approach by Knorr-Cetina (1981) and Lynch (1985) had at least an idea of the dynamics of social interaction, Latour and Woolgar (1979) in their book on “Laboratory Life” employed an entirely desocialized concept of human action and interaction. The main unit of analysis, individual actors, was conceptualized as nothing but strategically operating and manipulating entities. Though the study is subtitled “The social construction of scientific facts”, common features of social constructivism like routines and habits, collective belief systems, and processes of integration and identity formation (Berger/ Luckmann 1967) seem to be of minor importance. Likewise, all kinds of symbolic dimensions (Douglas 1982, Goffman 1967) were neglected. Instead, their oversimplified and reductionist model of man allowed for the observation of the scientists’ actions and interactions as if they were automata, programmed to pursue their individual interest. From this point of view, the social character of knowledge production is reduced to aggregate outcomes - of human actors. This leads rights back to recent trends in the social studies of science. The purified concept of action as employed by Latour/Woolgar (1979) can be - and apparently has been - transferred plainly to all kinds of entities, regardless of whether they are human. As a consequence, men, machines and microbes likewise appear as acting entitities. All differences disappear, and everything becomes possible in the new, enriched world of science studies.
References
Barnes, B., 1977: Interests and the Growth of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Berger, P.L./ Luckmann, T., 1967: The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday.
Bloor, D., 1976: Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Collins, H.M./Yearley S., 1992a: Epistemological Chicken, in: Pickering, A., ed., Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 301-326.
Collins, H.M./Yearley, S., 1992b: Journey into Space, in: Pickering, A., ed., Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 369-389.
Douglas, M., 1982: Cultural Bias, in: Douglas, M., ed., In the Active Voice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 183-254.
Goffman, E., 1967: Interaction Ritual. Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior. Chicago: Aldine.
Hacking, I., 1992: The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences, in: Pickering, A., ed., Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 29-65.
Knorr-Cetina, K., 1981: The Manufacture of Knowledge. An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford: Pergamon.
Knorr-Cetina, K., 1988: Laboratorien: Instrumente der Weltkonstruktion, in: Hoyningen-Huene, P./Hirsch, G., eds., Wozu Wissenschaftsphilosophie? Positionen und Fragen in gegenwŠrtiger Wissenschaftsphilosophie. Berlin: de Gruyter, 315-344.
Knorr-Cetina, K., 1993: Strong Constructivism - from a Sociologist’s Point of View: A Personal Addendum to Sismondo’s Paper, Social Studies of Science 23: 555-563.
Latour, B., 1987: Science in Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B., 1988a: The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B., 1988b: The Politics of Explanation: an Alternative, in: Woolgar, S., ed., Knowledge and Reflexivity. London: Sage, 155-177.
Latour, B./Woolgar, S., 1979: Laboratory Life. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Lynch, M., 1985: Art and Artefact in Laboratory Science. A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Lynch, M., 1993: Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action. Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pickering, A., ed., 1992: Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pickering, A., 1993: The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science, American Journal of Sociology 99: 559-589.
Science and technology studies is a curious field of inquiry. While it purports to be integrative, drawing on disciplinary analysis in history, philosophy, sociology, political science, economics, innovation and management studies, psychology, literary and textual analysis, cultural studies, anthropology (and maybe even more), it had better be seen as oriented toward its subject matter, science and technology and their roles in society. Whatever seems relevant to the subject can be taken up, and a certain looseness of method may well go with such an open-ended approach.
The avowed roles of science and technology scholars are linked up with the nature of our field: a mixture of distantiated analysis and a strong engagement with our subject matter, science and technology. This runs from intellectual engagement with the icons of rationality and modernity, and an interest in the broad sweep of history with science and technology as integral factors, to a sense of mission, defending or criticizing progress as it is predicated on the continuing role of science and technology. In both cases, we are modernists, and partake in the modernism of science and technology, as well as the complementary modernism of social science. Sometimes, the sense of mission is put up front, and contrasted with distantiated analysis. One of my aims in this paper is to replace such a sense of mission with a reflective or ironic engagement with our subject matter, science and technology and their role in society.
I will start with diagnosing our field as being better at micro- and meso-analysis than at macro-analysis and tracing long-term transformations. This can be seen as a strength: we are better at something; but also as a weakness, when we limit ourselves to it, or fragment ourselves in endless case studies. In any case, it is certain that we have achieved something that we can build upon, if we want to. With the benefit of the micro-studies of the last 15 years, we are in a position to see and understand how patterns and structures emerge and stabilize. It is not necessary anymore to just posit structures.
This detour through the micro is what constructivism is all about, I would argue. True, constructivism (and especially social constructivism, as it was called for some time) has been pre- occupied with demolishing naive views about science and technology, and has been distracted into polemics about relativism, machiavellism, and “epistemological chicken.” While one may have to destroy before one can build, I prefer to put my efforts into what I call, for emphasis, constructive constructivism.
Still, one can be hesitant about the turn to the micro, as it swept our field. Isn’t there a contrast with the interest in the broad sweep of history and the integral role of science and technology in it, that engages us? Does the focus on the micro indicate a loss of engagement? The recent debates about the loss of the normative in science and technology studies revolve around this question, but it is too easy to just call for more engagement. The real question is what kind of engagement is in order, intellectual and otherwise.
To address this question, I will offer a further diagnosis of our field, as well as use my own and others’ work in the area of constructive technology assessment (CTA) as an occasion to explore varieties of engagement.
The move towards the meso- and micro-level of analysis is not a matter of intellectual fashion among an inward-looking community of science and technology scholars. It reflects the evolving nature of their subject matter (immediately or with some time lag). Science, definitely, and technology to some extent, have become differentiated and somewhat separated subsystems of society.
Especially after the second world war, science, as the “Endless Frontier,” became a quasi-autonomous activity, and its disciplines and specialties proliferated, and became subject of attention of science managers and science scholars alike. Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms and their related scientific communities opened up a field of specialty studies in the 1970s, which continues until today. There is a continuity between the 1950s interest in scientific creativity as one aspect of scientific practice, and the laboratory ethnographies of the late 1970s onwards. All are predicated on the existence of a quasi-autonomous scientific community. The shift is very clear in the contrast between the work of Merton in the 1930s and 1940s, where scientific values and norms were linked with emerging or threatened contracts between science and society, and his work in the 1960s, where the same norms were used to explain the inner workings of the scientific community.
Technology is a much more heterogeneous domain, but one can see a similar movement in the treatment of technology by economists, from a ‘residual’ in the analysis of productivity growth, to its partial un-blackboxing in Nelson and Winter’s and Pavitt’s sectoral analyses, and in the rise of detailed contextual histories of technologies in the same period (1970s and 1980s). In my perspective, this is related to a growing interest in technology as such, as reflected in innovation competition and the emergence of explicit technology policies in the same period.
In the 1980s and 1990s, re-integration of science and technology occurs. Science is scrutinized for its relevance, scientists become active in society, disciplines interact and fuse into new combinations; science and technology become integrated in ‘strategic’ science and technology, and link up with expectations in policy and in society. In addition, scientific and technological development is becoming reflexive: scientists and technologists, as well as science and technology policy makers (note that the concepts of science policy and technology policy, themselves an indicator of a reflexive attitude, are recent: in the case of science, of the 1960s, and in the case of technology, of the 1980s), have become interested in and knowledgeable about the nature of science and technology and the dynamics of their development. The concept of ‘paradigm’ is now regularly used in scientific conversation and in discussions about awarding grants and shaping science policy. Insights in the dynamics of technological developments are taken up in policy documents. Nelson and Winter’s evolutionary model of variations and selection environment, for example, has shaped the text as well as the thinking of the 1989 innovation policy memorandum in the Netherlands.
Neither scientists and technologists, nor science and technology policy makers are naive any more. At least, they need not be naive, if they reflect on what is happening. Of course, as actors, they will be focussed on their situation, their problems, and their interests, and not necessarily be interested in the more general insights from science and technology studies. They may even be right in neglecting these insights, if these have been developed for internal purposes of the community, and/or focus on aspects of science and technology that are no longer important.
If we want to follow our subject matter, science and technology, we should turn to the macro and the long-term again, but with the benefit of the detour through the micro. This allows us a better perspective on the vicissitudes of what is happening with science and technology. In addition, we should have more respect for the insights that reflexive practitioners of science and technology come up with. The contributions from such practitioners, with a lot of experience in science and technology, have always been important in our field, especially if they seriously turn to science and technology studies. John Ziman is a good example here. By now, almost all scientists and technologists have lost their naivet. They may still be biased, according to our cosmopolitan standards, but we might sometimes learn from them, instead of assuming that they should learn from us.
My two diagnoses of the field of science and technology studies have led me to indicate an agenda for further work. I also noted that the role of the science and technology scholar could be changing: the nature of the engagement with the subject matter can be further articulated. Specifically, I would argue that we need not depend on the sympathetic understanding of scientists, technologists, and policy makers only to insert science and technology studies in the real world of science and technology. Recent experiences with constructive technology assessment allow me to develop this point.
Constructive technology assessment (CTA), born of the renewed interest in TA in the 1980s, is not a mature area yet by any means. In a recent book, we speak of a paradigm, but only in the sense that exemplary achievements are recognized and are being articulated. The basic idea is to shift the focus of TA away from assessing fully articulated technologies, and introduce anticipation of technology impacts at an early stage in the development. Actors within the world of technology become an important target group then, but the insight of recent technology studies - that impacts are co-produced in the implementation and diffusion stages - implies that technology actors are not the only ones to be involved. Within the world of technology, the preferred strategy for CTA is to broaden the aspects and the actors that are taken into account. More generally, one should work towards societal learning in handling, and sometimes managing, technology in society.
Interestingly, within the world of technology de facto CTA, in the sense of broadening of aspects and actors, is increasing. The attempts at concurrent (or simultaneous) engineering, where product development, production, implementation and marketing are worked on in parallel, instead of sequentially, are sometimes extended to include work on social acceptance and adoption. This happens emphatically in the biotechnological firms, which have encountered legitimation and acceptance problems that they could not solve by traditional means. It is also in biotechnology (and in telematics and for environmental aspects) that consumers have become interested in a CTA which is consumer-oriented.
From the beginning, CTA emphasized the necessity of insight in, and analysis of, the dynamics of technological development and how technology gets embedded in society. It drew on science and technology studies, and was able to paint a persuasive picture, in spite of the fragmented nature of the field. By now, one can also see the benefits of the detour through the micro: the emphasis on contingency, on seamless webs has led to various theories about how patterns, technologies, and socio-technical orders are constructed. The key point for CTA is that a collusion of actors and factors is needed to have a reliable and otherways “good” technology. And here technology should be recognized as working at more than one level: from the ‘immutable mobiles’ (to use Bruno Latour’s felicitous phrase) to sociotechnical orders and the ‘landscape’ of our society.
Science and technology studies are important for CTA, and in two ways. First, to critically articulate and strengthen the analytic and intellectual basis of CTA; this fits our role as science and technology scholars. Second, to do the specific analysis and often also articulate some advice necessary for concrete CTA projects; here, we must assume a professional role, which we are less used to. The experience of CTA is an example, and in my view, an inspiration for a broader role of science and technology scholars.
When the world of science and technology itself is becoming broader, integrative, and more reflexive, the role of science and technology scholars must change as well. In any case, the opportunities for interaction increase, and collaborative efforts with actors in the world of science and technology become a real possibility. Let me give you an example from an ongoing CTA study (on product development in biotechnology firms).
A recurrent phenomenon is the asymmetric alignment that one associates with technology push, and often corrective action at a later stage (or just luck) is necessary to create the collusion of actors and factors necessary for a “good” technology. How is this possible in a world where planning, management and market orientation are keywords? Let me make a little detour. Michel Callon introduced the notion of an ‘actor world’, a scenario of a new world around a proposed technology (say, the electric vehicle in France). Actors proposing a new technology or development of a new product present a diffuse scenario of the benefits and some of the barriers that have to be overcome. It is an actor world in which the co-production of impacts is not specified yet, even if some of the positive effects are already claimed. When the proposal is accepted and development work starts, very little attention is given to the diffuse scenario. It remains unarticulated, unless something happens that obstructs progress or is otherwise seen as a barrier to be overcome. The point of CTA is that one should articulate the diffuse scenario in parallel to the internal development work, and gradually fill in the actor world. The processes of co-production of impacts is envisaged, and partially implemented at the same time. Here, in this extension of concurrent engineering, the science and technology scholar has an important contribution to make, mobilizing general understanding, doing specific studies, and involving himself in the development over time.
Here, we have a clear example of what I would call the professional service role: there is identification with the problem of the client, but critical contributions based on the professional competence (here, of science and technology scholars) remain in order. This is even necessary, if the science and technology scholar is to provide added value to what actors themselves can do already.
The example is specifically relevant for work on CTA, but other examples of professional service that I have encountered can be phrased in more general terms. That science and technology studies have something to offer that the actors in the world of science and technology cannot produce themselves, can be shown in at least two ways. One is because science and technology studies, when offering concepts like path dependency, or co-production, or paradigm, helps practitioners in ‘naming’, i.e. using a name (a concept, a label) to mobilise one’s own and others’ experience and items from the literature to understand one’s own situation better and derive action strategies. The other value-added benefit is that of ‘circulation’: science and technology scholars can move about as observers and aggregators of data, while actors cannot, because their movement will be as a player, and encounter strategic reactions.
In offering these examples of professional service drawn from my work in CTA, I am arguing that the role of the science and technology scholar can and should be broadened. In addition to intellectual engagement, and the sense of mission, a third component turns out to be viable: professional service.
In conclusion, I would argue that my diagnosis of the field of science and technology studies should lead to action, and that my articulation of the role of the science and technology scholar should be seen as generally applicable, not just to CTA.
Macro and long-term studies are necessary, not just because we should cover all aspects of our domain, but also because the increasing importance of these aspects in the present world in which science and technology play an integral role. It is, in addition, the only way to overcome our helpless feeling with respect to big issues like the situation of less developed countries and their increasingly dependent situation; now, we address the issues out of sympathy rather than analytically.
The small scale of most academic work, however, and especially so in institutionally marginal areas like science and technology studies, is not conducive to concerted attempts to broach bigger questions. One or more consortia, like the political scientists in Europe created more than ten years ago, might be the way to go. In addition, I know that interesting work in our field is already being done in non-university contexts, and I suspect that this will expand. If productive alliances can be formed, and if the intellectual goals can be maintained, a major move forward could be made.
The sense of mission, which is such a pervasive feature in our field and structures our questions and approaches, would profit from the more detailed underpinning that macro and long-term studies would provide. Too often, the mission is put up front, and derives from a position (critical or otherwise) which is not articulated in interaction with concrete studies — exactly similar to the modernist push of scientists and technologists which makes them neglect the articulation of their diffuse scenario about the wonderful world they will help create. I am not arguing for a quasi- neutral approach. The sense of mission should be retained, but it should not be separated from intellectual and scholarly engagement, and be part of a more interactive, sometimes collaborative effort which I discussed under the label ‘professional service.’ So let us remain modernist, by all means, but it must be a reflexive modernism.
I am not arguing that every individual scholar in science and technology studies should be a reflexive modernist. One may very well concentrate on one of the three components that make up the reflexive modernist stance. But it should be a positive choice, in full recognition of the need for all three of them, rather than a dismissal of the other components as irrelevant, or bad. Ideally, the three components should inform and improve each other. Individual scholars like Helga Nowotny and Brian Wynne have done so in their work, and could be taken as role models.
While I have argued my case with the help of examples from technology studies and technology assessment, it would be equally possible to take the study of scientific and engineering practices, or the study of science policy, or the study of controversies, and come up with the same points: the need to add macro and long-term studies (and seeing the first signs of such a movement), and the possibility of a productive combination of three ways to engage with our subject matter, as an intellectual, missionary, and professional, especially now that the world of science and technology is becoming more reflexive. So science and technology studies can and should move with their subject matter, following its evolution, and be engaged with it.
Notes
The existence of the Society for Social Studies of Science in the USA, in parallel to various disciplinary societies for the study of science and/or technology, and the nature of its activities, can prove my point. While the field of science and technology studies has come into its own since the late 1960s, its history is usually taken to start in the 1920s, and I will follow this usage. Thus, the critical movement of the 1960s has helped shape the field, but is not its source.
A similar point was made by Aant Elzinga in EASST Newsletter 13(1) (March 1994), at p. 10. Note that I (much more than Aant Elzinga) here concentrate on the core of science and technology studies, as it becomes visible in the scholarly journals, conferences, and scholarly societies. Things are different elsewhere, in what we consider as periphery (but are cores in their own right). It is for the core of science and technology studies that my diagnosis of the focus on micro, and my later points about constructivism and the detour through the micro, holds.
See Hans Radder, ‘Normative Reflexions on Constructivist Approaches to Science and Technology,’ Social Studies of Science 22 (1992) 141-173, and Richard Rogers’s report on a lecture series on `The Normative Quandary in Science and Technology Studies’ in EASST Newsletter 13 (2) (1994) 17-22.
The so-called Brooks Report, Science, Growth, and Society. A New Perspective (Paris: OECD, 1971), is generally considered to mark the transition. Subsequent developments are discussed and analysed in Susan E. Cossens et al. (eds.), The Research System in Transition (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990).
Arie Rip, Tom Misa, Johan Schot (eds.), Managing Technology In Society. The Approach of Constructive Technology Assessment (London: Pinter Publishers, forthcoming, 1995). The book is based on the third Twente Workshop in Technology Studies, September 1991.
Think of the path-dependency theories, evolutionary and quasi-evolutionary theories, and the “Borodino”-type theories (after H. Rom Harré, ‘Images of the world and societal icons,’ in Karin D. Knorr, Herman Strasser, and Hans-Georg Zilian (eds.), Determinants and Controls of Scientific Development (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975) 257-283) including the recent interest in expectations and stories (Harro Van Lente, Promising Technology (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Twente, 1993), Bryan Pfaffenberger, ‘Technological Dramas,’ Science, Technology & Human Values 17 (3) (1992) 282-312).).
One example is the work of Johan Schot, who combines contextual history of technology, socio-economic theory of technological development, management- and policy-oriented studies, with an attempt to position CTA intellectually (in his view, as a present-day Luddism).
Michel Callon, ‘The Sociology of an Actor-Network: The Case of the Electric Vehicle,’ in Michel Callon, John Law, Arie Rip, Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology. Sociology of Science in the Real World (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), 19-34.
So I am not talking about the “jobbing” that is sometimes required by policy makers and other actors commissioning science and technology studies. This can run from simplistic data collection jobs, to “appeals to social scientists to help lubricate the public acceptability of science and technological change.” I quote Howard Newby, ‘One society, one Wissenschaft: a 21st century vision,’ Science and Public Policy 19 (1) (Feb. 1992) 7-14, at p. 11, because his overall theme is very relevant to my discussion: “.. social science is an integral, not merely a marginal, activity in understanding the process whereby scientific excellence and technological innovation may lead to economic and social well being. There remain formidable obstacles to achieving this integration.” (summary, p. 7).
The notion of `naming’ is drawn from Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner. How professionals think in action (Basic Books, 1983). Here, I am not interested in the cognitive aspect, but in the way ‘naming’ locates situations, problems, options in the landscape of our society as reconstructed by science and technology studies. There is an intriguing link with Paul Carter’s ideas: “To name [places] is to bring them into cultural circulation.” “…names … are rhetorical lighthouses for getting on” (The Road To Botany Bay. An Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), at p. 28 and p. 9). David Edge pointed out to me the Biblical echoes, including God, being jealous of his power, refusing to be named.
See further my paper Following the actors, moving about … and then? A social theory of social research, extended version of a paper presented to the 4S meeting at Purdue University, 19-21 November 1993.
Ron Giere’s notion of an ‘enlightened postmodern synthesis’ is similar. He starts from the intellectual perspectives in the field (and focusses on the ‘destructive’ version of constructivism), and then calls for a modernist relation between knowledge and policy, the “enlightenment gamble” that knowledge and understanding help, even while we know that things may go wrong. See Ronald N. Giere, ‘Science and Technology Studies: Prospects for an Enlightened Postmodern Synthesis,’ Science, Technology & Human Values 18(1) (Winter 1993) 102-112.
In my own work, I combine intellectual engagement and professional service, and I see myself as an ironist, rather than a modernist.
An ironic reflection by John Ziman
Arie has fitted the key in the lock and tumed it boldly; but the gate needs to be opened wide. We should indeed make a conscious effort to unblock the pathways between science and technology studies and the obscure objects of our attentions. He is right in suggesting that the S&T are being re-integrated and linked more closely with society at large, but that has not made scientists and technologists significantly more knowledgeable about the nature of their work. Oh yes, they have learnt to parry Popperian falsifications with Kuhnian paradigms, but remain as naive as ever in their self analyses. I am a very bad ‘example’ of a reflexive practitioner. Who else was he thinking of? I gave up `practising’ natural science 25 years ago to devote myself fully to STS. The irony here is that I would count myself now with Arie, David Edge, and many other prominent members of our Association, who moved out of science and found their true intellectual home in this field.
Yet I have deep sympathy with the S&T worthies trying desperately to cope with the immoderate demands of society. With only the anecdotal tradition of the academic ethos to guide them, they are improvising erratically at every level of policy. Unfortunately, as Arie points out, the microsociological bias of STS has provided the policy-makers with no new insights about the social structures that they are expected to reform. They know that major changes are inevitable, but they naturally reject advice from scholars who seem intent only on debunking their cherished institutions, practices, and norms. This may be a misreading of the motives of STS experts. Yet even the established social sciences can find little policy guidance in research that mainly demonstrates the logical contradictions and human fallibilities embodied in all S&T - as they are in all forms of social action. Such findings are not only shallow and trite: they are as misguided and offensive as the fabled ethnographer’s report: “Manners none: customs beastly”.
Casting an empathic sociological eye on the manners and customs of S&T folk does not mean going native. Research commissioned by bemused policymakers to answer their own questions throws no light forward into a new era. What is now needed is detailed but independent study of S&T as a peculiar social institution in its own right, with particular attention to the features that differentiate it from other institutions of a similar kind. Those features are not uniquely purposeful, or uniquely successful in achieving these purposes, but they are seen as distinctive by those who are involved with them - including STS scholars themselves when they don their own academic robes.
There is a genuine intellectuel challenge in trying to understand a number of complex practices, such as the peer review of project proposais, that have evolved in and around S&T. These practices are shaped by purposes that are larger than the competing personal interests of those who are caught up in them. The actors themselves are often quite aware of these purposes, but lack the sociological insight required to articulate and explicate them. These could be ‘meso’ and ‘middle range’ rather than ‘macro’ or ‘long-term’ studies, and do not necessarily involve research on a heroic scale. What is important is that their findings should indeed be `named’ - that is, translated into concepts that ordinary scientists and technologists can grasp for themselves and incorporate into their reflexive and constructive practices.
Twenty-five years ago, S&T were carrying all before them. A critical modem mission for STS was appropriate. Nowadays, the whole scientific enterprise is at risk of being taken over by much grosser powers. Ironically, we should now be re-orienting STS towards a postmodem mission of helping S&T to reinvent themselves.
STS: Constructing the Client by Les Levidow
‘He who pays the piper, calls the tune.’
It is right to ask the question, ‘What kind of engagement should STS have?’, rather than assume that it could be neutral. Better yet, we could ask, `What kind of commitment is implied by a particular conceptual framework and terminology?’ In this regard, Arie Rip’s article begs crucial questions or even forecloses them. Here I briefly pose three such questions:
1)Where and what is the ‘constructive’? Often technological innovations encounter political disputes over how society should define the problem which is to be solved. This is because the supposed solution pre-empts the problem-definition, by imposing an implicit model of social relations, human needs, nature, etc. Some CTA approaches have left open these issues for democratic debate among diverse social forces. In Arie Rip’s article, however, such antagonisms disappear; they become flattened into mere dysfunctions, to be avoided through better planning. The task of ‘good’ technology becomes a matter of how to optimize the engineering design for intended users, and how to avoid negative external `impacts’.
2)Whose problems shall STS adopt? Yes, for example, biotechnology faces legitimation problems, which in turn lead innovators to anticipate and shape public attitudes. STS could respond in various ways: we could treat the legitimation problem as a dysfunctional obstacle for policymakers to overcome, or as an opportunity for critics to exploit, or as a topic for supposedly neutral study, etc. When Arie Rip advocates that we identify with ‘the problem of the client’, the implicit clients are high-level policymakers (who were the explicit clients in his Budapest talk). Who shall be the clients for our ‘professional services’? Can a particular STS framework serve all actors equally? Indeed, how shall STS construct `the client?
3) Who will define ‘value added’? Further to the biotechnology example above, industrialists have been developing ‘value-added genetics’, whereby they anticipate the market value of genetic ‘properties’ in order to set their R&D priorites. By analogy, if we are to promote STS as ‘value-added knowledge’, or even to use such terminology, then who decides what kind of analysis is valuable? Who calls the tune? Shall the pipers compose their tune in advance as a commodity?
Anticipating and Intervening by Andrew Barry Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London
The topic of time used to preoccupy historians and philosophers of science. When did modern science begin? What stages did it progress through? When and how did a ‘scientific revolution’ occur? Did science progress steadily through time or was it transformed in a series of radical epistemological breaks? And will scientific progress ever end?
As Arie Rip reminds us a concern with time and, in particular, the ‘long term’ has not marked recent work in science and technology studies. Studies in the sociology of science have, as he notes, been much better at micro-analysis than in tracing long-term transformations. Sociologists of science have sought to situate knowledge production, but the situations that they have analysed have not been temporal but spatial. On the one hand, the sociology of scientific knowledge has been preoccupied with the peculiar spatial locale of the laboratory: its instruments, skills, visual displays, architecture and so on. On the other hand, both economists and sociologists of innovation have emphasised how difficult it is to translate the ‘results’ of laboratory work into the rather different spaces of the outside world. The full implications of this spatial shift in the history and sociology of science have probably yet to be realised.
But if the ‘new’ science and technology studies has led us to recognise the importance of the spatiality of science, what about its temporality? Arie Rip’s paper suggests that we need to rethink the relation between science and time as well or as, he puts it “we should turn to the macro and the long-term again, but with the benefit of the detour through the micro”. In brief, science and technology studies has lost a sense of history.
There is a contemporary political context to this need to consider the question of time. As the paper argues, ‘science and technology’ are no longer granted the autonomy they once were. Instead they are surrounded by an array of institutional and technological mediations: technology assessment and foresight, industry-academic links, research evaluation studies, framework programmes and ethics committees. Rip himself makes the importance of time clear in discussing the notion of Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA). The development of CTA, he notes, involves a significant shift away from the assessment of the past - “fully articulated technologies” to the anticipation of future possibilities and dangers. In my own study of recent European science policy, I observed how the relation between the temporality of technological innovation and the temporality of politics had become an important focus for political and intellectual debate within the European commission. Was it desirable, commission officials asked, to carry out an evaluation study before the start of a research programme? Could the European Commission have a particular role to play in developing a long term strategy for European science and technology policy? What role could prospective studies of science and technology play in informing or in intervening in the political process? And even if it were no langer possible to forecast the future was it nonetheless possible to anticipate what might happen?
In investigating the ‘long term’ we can no longer return to the old models of the history and philosophy of science, just as we cannot return to a Hegelian model of historical change. As Bruno Latour has argued, the traditional categories of the long term in the history of science (such as ‘revolution’, and ‘progress’) need to be understood not as analytical concepts but as tools with which actors have intervened in the historical process.1 Today ideas of revolution may have gone out of fashion but, as Rip points out, concepts such as `path dependency’, ‘co-production’ and ‘paradigm’ are used increasingly by practitioners including, I would add, European Commission officials. His paper suggests that there is a complex route between the way notions of time are employed in science policy and the changing articulation of time in economic and social studies of science. This does not mean that ‘long term’ studies are impossible, but it does mean that analysts need to recognise the significance of intellectual work in defining and intervening in the process of historical change.
Note:
Review of: Cynthia Cockburn and Susan Ormrod, Gender & Technology in the Making, London: Sage, 1993; and Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology, Cambridge: Polity, 1991
The view that science and technology are socially shaped is a commonplace in SSTS: what is not yet commonplace (except amongst feminists) is the centrality of gender relations in that account. Yet that mapping of the mutual shaping of gender and technology over the last decade has fostered a beautifully written, theoretically sophisticated and often witty literature among which Gender and Technology in the Making by Cynthia Cockburn and Susan Ormrod and Judith Wajcman’s Feminism Confronts Technology will have pride of place. While those with an intellectual and political commitment to the analysis of gender relations and technology will read both these books with pleasure and immediately put them on their reading lists, they should also be immensely helpful tho those still all too many men in SST to enable them to overcome their gender phobia, a disorder typically demonstrated by an inability to cite, let alone draw on, manifestly relevant feminist research studies.
Thus Wacjman provides an indispensable overview of feminist critiques of technology indicating its linkages to and differences from feminist science theory, followed by chapters on technology in production, reproduction, the home and in the built environment. Cockburn and Ormrod offer a nuanced case study of the microwave - a technology which has always fascinated and repelled me as I could never see what it could do in my house other than heat up those many cups of coffee I absent-mindedly abandon to chill. Overview and case- study complement each other, the former even tempered and synthetic, the latter a mistress class in what can be achieved to build sociological theory by focussing on a single artifact.
Wajcman’s take on technology subtly unfolds throught the book. Thus in the production chapter her core argument is that far from technology changing the social it enters preexisting social relations of class, race and gender. Yet this is much more than a restatement of much sociology of employment which considers new technology often from a ‘use and abuse’ model, thus failing to address the politics in the technology itself. Wacjman reminds us of Langdon Winner’s example of Robert Moses the master public works builder for New York who for half a century systematically built low hanging overpasses on Long Island to exclude buses and therefore working class people, especially from racial minorities, from access to Jones Beach. She only gently chides him for missing out on the gender implications of anti-bus planning.
She documents the development of feminist research from a ‘women and technology approach’, with its often strongly expressed hostility to new technology as inexorably worsening women’s health and position to the current focus on the relationship between gender stereotyping of jobs and the shaping of technology. What I particularly like is the way in which she does not abandon the achievements of earlier work - for example she does not let go of the importance of the link between domestic responsibilities and employment - while she directs attention to the new. She gently but solidly criticises, both the time budget studies which focus on house work and ‘forgets’ people work and shopping and also the weakness of those labour process arguments which suggested that as mechanisation removed heavy labour, the sexual division of labour would lose its grip. She shows how particular technologies come to be preferred above others, steadily resisting both technological inevitabilism and technological determinism. Like Cockburn’s Brothers she is blunt about the historic role of organised male labor in shutting women out from technological skills and thus the chance of a decent wage. Unlike Cockburn and Ormrod her account criticisably - given that it is written subsequent to the immense political and theoretical challenged issued by black feminisim in the eighties - misses out on ‘race’ in the social shaping of technology.
Wajcman’s origin stories of the appliances of science dryly notes that far from being designed specifically for domestic use, many domestic technologies originated in the commercial or even military sectors, the automatic washing machine, the electric cooker and the microwave - developed for cooking in submarines- and are then transferred, with little other than superficial styling to the domestic. Her commentary on deliberately noisy (i.e., powerful) vacuum cleaners, over-elaborate stoves and washing machines, and the proliferation of electric motors in the home (12 to 20 in a US kitchen) is deliciously sardonic. In no way are these appliances of sciences dedicated to sustaining everyday life.
She is more enthusiastic about the politics of Finnrage (Feminist Network of International Resistance to the new Reproductive Technologies and Genetic Engineering) than I am, although I share her and Finnrage’s analysis of the politics in these technologies. I don’t think that just saying ‘no’ on behalf of the whole of womanhood constitutes an adequate political response any more than saying ‘no’ to Moses’s underpasses. The challenge of these new technosciences is that they appear to the individual woman as a matter of personal choice; thus for many, particularly in the North, the challenge comes from a consumer, not a state imposed eugenics. In this situation effective resistance (rather than publicising the dangers for which Finnrage must be given all credit) is necessarily complex and requires active engagement in the social shaping of technology at many levels. For a feminist sociologist such as Frances Price, the painful documentation of women’s experience of multiple-births following superovulatory drugs is one level which helps strengthen that social shaping in favour of women.
Wajcman is at her most pleasurably subversive when she discusses the possibility of alternative outcomes both in terms of technologies and women’s use of technology. No longer is there even a hint of a fixed technology entering settled existing social relations, but those relations are seen to shape/subvert the technology, as in the case of women using the telephone for sociability so that after long resistance to gossip the industry grudgingly accepted that the phone was more than a mere rational aid to business and domestic management. As I read this I began to wonder if those fragmentary accounts of women using teletext systems for gossip offer some hope against the propsect of pale males surfing the superhighway. Drawing on Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s pioneering analysis of the trajectory of particular domestic technologies Wajcman indicates how the success of the water closet, the electric refrigerator foreclosed other technologies which would have altered both the patterns of household expenditure and municipal services, and, I would add, use very much less energy. She also describes what for me has always been a utopian day dream - the self-cleaning house successfully constructed by Frances Gabe. Why haven’t more men who dominate engineering and architectural development produced such an obvious aid to everyday living? What is most heartening in the book is her stady insistence that the technologies that we have are neither the best nor the only possible technologies. Even in her concluding chapter where she scrutinises and largely sustains the argument that contemporary western technology is masculine - that Thatcherian view of the eighties as TINA (There Is No Alternative) is always, and at the same moment, simply wrong.
Cockburn and Ormrod also point the reader to the curiosities of the STS canon, how hugely socially important technologies not least the baby’s bottle with all its good and bad implications have been simply ignored in the classical histories of technology. Babies’ bottles and the like, they suggest, are best thought of as little technologies where as STS History has been largely about upper case\upper gender Technology. Like Louise Walden with her pioneering study of the sewing machine, they take a particular (lower case) technological artifact, its history, its production, its selling and its use, to disentangle the making of both gender and technology. The book is threaded with photographs taken by Cockburn, making no sociological claims for their analytic capacity but modestly suggesting they may add a parallel narrative with resonance in the text.
Sharing the general concern of feminists that domestic technology is designed by men but used by women they hone in on the microwave, delicately poised between the ‘brown’ and ‘white’ technological artifacts of contemporary domestic culture. While both brown and white are designed by men engineers and do not have radically different levels of technological sophistication, all the technophilia is directed towards the ‘brown’ sold by men to men. The selling exchange is couched in mutual technobabble and the accolade is reserved for those goods which are state of the art. White goods, those freezers, fridges and cookers, have little status wihin this technophiliac culture and are therefore sold often by women to women and to heterosexual partners shopping together. Joint decision making in domestic shopping is acutely observed: “He’ll make the decision but she’ll make him make the decision. The questions are asked by the woman, the decision is made by the man.”
They tell the story of the downward mobility of the microwave as it slid from state of the art gadgetry to equipment routinely used both by the woman shop assistant and her female customer. Only when men shop alone buying the microwave as a gift for their partners do they briefly restore the microwave to its former glory as they buy the most spohisticated ovens - so sophisticated that they are often found intimidating by their recipients.
When it comes to use the microwave is seen as a means to heat fast ( that cup of coffee again) rather than doing ‘real’ cooking (just my feeling!). Despite the efforts of the women Home Economists in the industry haute cuisine cooking with the microwave has largely not taken on. Instead the microwave took its place reflecting and supporting the fragmentation of eating. The account of one woman remains with me. She made endless plates of different food so that family members, particularly children, could zap their plate and eat when and what they liked. No wonder, as she observed, when it came to feeding herself she just threw in a potato. The ritual of families eating together becomes increasingly difficult to sustain with Sunday lunch the last battle ground.
The microwave took its place in that range of domestic technology which entered promising ease, indeed much of it did reduce hard physical drudgery. Boiling sheets in a fire lit copper, loading in the buckets of water and pullingout the scaliding dripping sheets with wooden tongs was dangerous and heavy work. But because shopping has become a major time user, the microwave has joined those white goods which have not been part of the charges within, rather than the diminution of, the hours spent on domestic chores.
One of the most attractive features of the Ormrod and Cockburn study is the way that a theme is opened up early then returned to and played with deeper insistence on theoretical implication. Thus early on there is an interesting discussion of the relationship between the Home Economists and the Engineers in the industry: the latter saw the former as `only cooking’, the former saw themselves as working very hard an in scientific way but as under recognised and undervalued by their colleagues and by their companies. This differential and gendered fault line ran between different competences through the history of the microwave. Not only did the engineers make divisions, but in the shop the men do the technological talk, at home male partners wired on the plugs even when the women used to them selves when they were single, heterosexual relations not for the first time draining women’s technological skills away. Yet before the study reproduces this wall to wall certainty that men do know more technically, the researchers draw back and acknowledge that some women are aware that their husbands are bluffing. Complexity and reflexivity, often demonstrated through a nice eye for the comic, are always present.
They are intensely sensitive to the diversity of people’s life styles and to the abundant evidence of resistance to gendering. This is tenderly brought out in accounts of individual women and men, such as the attention given to Ken, a man who in his respectful liking for the world of white goods and women revels his deep resistance to the world of gender.
But it is the theoretical reading of this complex contradictory world of the microwave that is most compelling. They argue that technology relations, that is the social relations within and connecting the sites in which technology is socially constructed, are also relations of gender and race. (I have not discussed this in the space of a short review but the account of the relationship between the Japanese and the British as collaborators in microwave innovation is going to be a must not least for those teaching industrial studies.) The point they make, and it has to be said again and again, not least in contexts peopled by one sex, for masculinity shapes the way men relate to one another and femininity shapes the way women relate to each other: gender and gendering are not contingent on mixed company. And there is a strong take home message for those STS researchers who have stayed this far with the review, for often they are men describing the activities of other men.
Cockburn and Ormrod fruitfully draw on Sandra Harding’s distinction between given and chosen gender identity: the given are the subjective identities lived and experienced by individuals, the chosen are selected from among the myriad projected identities generated by culture. Holding all these identities together rendering them coherent is seen as a personal and richly creative activity. This gives them a way of responding to the theoretical attractions of the fragmented identity of postmodernism without giving up on the sense of self. The self- identities of the men are about agency and being valued for that, for women their sense of self-identity is about nurturance an being valued for that.
At the same time they suggest that technology is also split into two. There is Capital - T - Technology where both the making and using of the equipment, tools etc., is masculine, and lower case technology where men engineer the technology but women use it. Despite a new diversity in heterosexual life styles they show how gender relations reverberate through every stage of the natural history of the microwave, from its engineering design to its use in family and household life. Yet perhaps because culturally there is a greater awareness, most restiveness about gender and technology which the study reflects, despite the unrelenting analysis of the long and deforming fingers of gender, Cockburn and Ormrod share the concluding optimism of Wacjman.
They insist that for women to control our own lives, we have to know more about how things work. They also observe that girls could acquire this effortlessly if home and school were not such bastions of masculine culture. Nonetheless, they see an advantage stemming from women’s feminine gendering in that it renders them relatively immune from the dangers of Technophilia, to which men as a gender all too easily succumb. This immunity is a potential resource in the struggle to get technology to sustain rather than overwhelm everyday life. Gender struggles (while not the only social struggles) are, in a highly technological society, also technological struggles.
A review essay inspired by Computer Ethics: Cautionary Tales and Ethical Dilemmas in Computing. MIT Press 1994 (1990) by Tom Forester and Perry Morrison, 2nd edition.
This review essay is supposed to be based on two books. The other book was The New Hacker’s Dictionary by Eric Raymond. This second book never arrived in my pigeon hole. It was dispatched by the publisher (MIT Press), along with Forester and Morrison’s book, but… it never arrived! This seems to be peculiarly apt. The New Hacker’s Dictionary, perhaps, got hacked off on route. Perhaps it was hacked off by a hacker (was ‘stolen’), or it might have been that the book itself got ‘hacked off’ (fed up, tired out) and opted out of the disciplinary procedure. It is probably out there playing around somewhere. Good luck to it.
But it might like to know that there are many different ways of disciplining something. Not all of them horrible. Some people go to yoga classes to discipline their mind/body/soul. Others join the army. Some people go to prison, others to university. The same word seems to serve equally well, but we all realise that under each different regime, a different kind of discipline is practised, and a different kind of relationship is practised between the disciples and the guide. That is, most yoga disciples can chose to stop being disciplined by simply not going to class. To choose not to be disciplined into the army might be an altogether more difficult thing (unless you happen to be British, or a Woman for example). At this level of discussion at least, we can all be sophisticated relativists: ‘discipline’ turns out to be relative to its time and place, and can be good and bad depending on your relationship to it. However, as Forester and Morrison are so quick to point out, the relativist’s position makes things complicated. If things change according to time and place (and probably a good many other things too), then how are we to draw up a universal moral code and enforce it (leaving aside for the moment whether the force is on ourselves, or others)? I shall quote a piece from the book in order to locate space and place for my review. This is the principle of the relativist reviewer:
“Ethical relativism, which says that there are no universal moral norms, need not detain us for long, for it offers no guidance as to what is correct behavior. Ethical relativists merely point to the variety of behaviors in different cultures and conclude that the issue of right and wrong is all relative. Ethical relativism is a descriptive account of what is being done rather than a normative theory of what should be done. While it is true that people in different societies have different moralities, this does not prove that one morality might not be the correct one or that one might not constitute the universal moral code. Ethical relativism is not much use when trying to decide what is the right thing to do in today’s world of computing.” (emphasis added) Forester and Morrison, p15.
And so, one long tradition of thought in this domain is introduced, described, and dumped. It took 11 lines of text on page 15. There are 259 pages in the main body of this disciplinary text. These other pages contain a wealth of poignant examples and careful questions situated in scanarios which are well placed to stimulate classroom discussions. My argument in this essay is that the ethical relativist is able to participate in this discussion. True: her point of view makes the picture complicated. But this is not good moral grounds for sending her out into the corridor on detention! There is a long tradition of moral superiority invested in hard work; it’s something to do with the choice between the wide, well-paved road, and the narrow, difficult, and overgrown path:
Facilis descensus Averni: Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis: Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est” (Virgil: Aeneid, VI 126)
‘The way down to hell is easy. The gates of black Dis stand open night and day. But to retrace one’s steps and escape to the upper air - that is toil, that is labour.’ The Penguin Dictionary of Quotations, p405.
Perhaps this is a clue to where the Hackers have gone [Hack: to cut, chop or mangle. Chambers Etymological Dictionary, p216]. They are cutting a new path through the undergrowth, towards the Light, and the Good.
As Claes Gustafsson (1994) argues “the discourse of business ethics … is always built on the possibility of moral criticism or moral praise: some act being ‘wrong’ or its leading to a state which is ‘bad’” (p115). The Right and the Good and the Wrong and the Bad are the governing force of an ethical discussion, and of a discussion about ethics. All dichotomies seem able to take on the characteristic of this primary ordering (eg, Black White, Man Woman, Inside Outside). As soon as a pair is brought into discussion, the Good Bad couple comes through the door with it. The question remains, however, what kind of place shall they have in the debate? On page 203, Forester and Morrison offer a very simple, very useful example which can serve as a frame for the remainder of the discussion of this essay. Several McDonald’s restaurants (famous for their highly formalised and predicted work routines) have begun to employ mentally retarded people - “These people never come in late and are rarely sick” says the manager (p203). Depending on your stance, this practice can be made to seem both Good, and Bad. I don’t want to go through the steps of that argument, instead I want to draw a parallel with the problem in the programming office. Perhaps the hackers are hacked off with the boring, mindless, humdrum, that is produced by the kind of ‘efficiency’ which structures the McDonald’s work place as much as it does the modern system’s design office.
Swept along by the force of dichotomies, I shall now categorise discussions about ethics into two in order to pursue this theme through to my conclusion. In fidelity to the theme of my essay, I shall not tell you which one is Good and which one Bad. I assume that you are neither naive nor stupid. I assume, that is, that I cannot make you comply with my own moral order. I assume that you bring your own ethical practice to my text, and your judgement will be the result of that relationship.
The first kind of discussion about ethics is framed in terms of the problem of inventing a set of rules. It is essential that these rules can and will be written down (on tablets of stone if that’s what it takes to make them long lasting). They can then be displayed in various ways in order to demonstrate the goodness of oneself (whose behaviour can be seen to match the rules) and the badness of the other (whose behaviour can be described as contravening these principles). These rules are external to the subject (which can be read either as the human - disciplined - subject, or the disciplinary - disciplining - subject). This externality is important for two reasons. First, the rules are of course above discussion; they come from a higher order. Second, the subject matter has no ethic in itself; it might be said to be ‘inherently naive’ and therefore in need of superior guidance. Left to its own devices (!) it will get into all kinds of trouble.
An example of this kind of ethics might be found in the debates and practice of building Methodologies in computer system design. The two governing principles are implied in this practice like this. First Method makers must refer to a Greater Go(o)d. An essentially a-social body (often logic, or mathematics) in order to derive the laws. Second, undisciplined subjects in the office, writing programmes and designing system architecture are inherently naive, and left to their own devices will get (us) into all kinds of trouble. The problem for the disciplinarians is to find ways of persuading the undisciplined Masses to become disciplined, to persuade the naive to let go their innocence and get a little knowledge. (Naive: with natural or unaffected simplicity, artless, ingenuous, from the Latin natus, nascor, to be born, Chambers, p333).
Because this ethical stance has placed Good on a higher plane, the disciplinarians can rest easily and just invoke power and label all non-conformists as Bad: thou did not complete user design on time and in budget. Thou did not complete Technical Design before embarking on Technical Detail. The person nearest Go(o)d is able to declare who fits the discipline and who needs to be cut (down) to size. Having declared what is Right and what is Wrong, the problem in this realm of ethics is just a question of how to enforce it: how to punish, how to reward. The overall image is of an omnipotent, omniscient being ‘up there’, and the rest of us, like sheep or children, down here, waiting to be led.
The second kind of discussion about ethics recognises the impossibility of declaring once and for all what is Right and what is Wrong. It realises that ‘acts’ can be described in a number of different ways. The late delivery of the system was not a bad act, but a good act, because it enabled the project leader to take time off work to nurse her ailing mother towards a dignified death. The ethics of the action is derived from the actors who are produced by their relation to the action being judged. This second kind of ethical discussion does not presume to Know Right and Wrong. It does not presume to set itself as Judge, claiming to be on speaking terms with the Higher Order and therefore well placed to dispense punishment and reward. Instead it embodies the principle of thoughtfulness and deliberation.
One cannot (a moral principle) set out the rules first, before action. This is not to say ‘there are no rules’. This review is not atheist. She is agnostic. She doesn’t trust people who claim to speak directly to Go(o)d; she prefers to look elsewhere for inspiration. She likes to consider the implication of moving from -ic to -os. The ethos of a community is a much richer place to situate a discussion about its ethics. She wants to see if the Mother has anything to say that is different to the Father. If God the Father resides ‘up there’ and speaks in terms of universal rules, where might Goddess the Mother be? How might she speak? Clearly, she would have a different relationship with her subjects, it is implied in the word.
Mother Tongue. There are two parts of this review that I’d now like to review. First, I would like to complete this essay with an account of the quote I offered towards the beginning from Forester and Morrison. Second I’d like to address the implied lack of responsibility in my suggestion that I wouldn’t tell you how to judge because you would be bringing your own judgemental devices with you. Having taken up my position to speak in this manner (as reviewer in a publication), I cannot claim naivete or stupidity, but must take on the responsibility that defines me as an adult in this community. I’ll do this by addressing the second point first, because it relates to the relationship I have, as a relativist, to my Mother (Tongue).
I said “I assume you are neither naive nor stupid. I assume that you bring your own ethical dimension to my text and your judgement will be the result of this relationship.” Within this statement you could find the whole debate which gets rehearsed in many of our texts in STS (or whatever we call it). In general this debate is couched in terms of an either or choice (the Good/Bad moral order). EITHER. The text/technology contains the Goodness/Badness inherently. OR. The use to which it is put is inherently Good/Bad (see Kling 1992, Grint and Woolgar 1992, and Kling 1992a for a display of the steps involved in this dance). The kind of relativism I am trying to practise though, produces an alternative step to follow. Vis: there are relationships to consider. There is one between me and what I write, and one between you and what you read. The text/technology becomes our mediator in three ways: it is in the middle, it is the medium by which we communicate, and it mediates between the parties.
My relation to the text is to try to treat the words with respect, to recognise their place as my Mother. I am endeavouring to look into the words, the text, the situated discourse, to hear what she might be saying. This requires extra effort because her words (in the patriarchal order of things) are often drowned out or treated as irrelevant. I trust that what I am trying to argue does not need me to spell it out. My Mother is available for a dialogue.
Within the quoted excerpt I highlighted a number of words. In the following discussion of these words, I shall try to exemplify the ethic of my discipline. Forester and Morrison characterise Ethical relativism as ‘a descriptive account of what is being done rather than a normative theory of what should be done’. Descriptive accounts, in their moral order are Bad, whereas normative theories are Good. The Good should stick with the law as laid down by the Method Makers up there, and leave the Bad to tangle with stories about things that happen amongst the flock. Looking at what gets done won’t tell you what is Good, because the action is being done by naive subjects who are like unshepherded sheep, or like unschooled children.
To say “While it is true that people in different societies have different moralities,that these accounts might be ‘true’” is interesting. It implies that the descriptive account might have a close relationship with the action being described (to maintain the resonance between relativism and relationships I would like to draw your attention to the role of Truth in love: being ‘true’ in a relationship is a matter of fidelity, faith, and trust). To say that the account has pledged its truth to the action is to dignify the account with a Good morality. But to then say “this does not prove that one morality might not be the correct one or that one might not constitute the universal moral code” reveals the ethic of Forester and Morrison in a different moral order. The morality in question here, then, is not whether the account loves the action (is true to), but whether the account loves the Monotheos. If the account is not Monogamous with the Monolithic Go(o)d Up There, then the account must be Wrong. That is to say: Bad. Questions: who do you love? how do you love them? Finally, I highlighted the sentence “Ethical relativism is not much use when trying to decide what is the right thing to do in today’s world of computing”. The moral order of efficiency is used to shore up the moral order of this particular Monotheos. Forester and Morrison do not go into details about how to recognise usefulness when you see it, nor do they take the trouble to explain what purpose the use is supposed to achieve. The Ethic of their work is left obscured, it is not available for discussion, it goes without saying. My dictionary suggests that ‘Efficience is the power to produce the result intended’. Perhaps the Hacker knows what this result is, and has a Good reason for slipping out of that disciplinary machinery?
Without the New Hackers Dictionary I am not able to take this part of the argument much further. However, my old etymological dictionary has made a few suggestions which I would like to leave you with.
Hack: to cut, chop or mangle (see my earlier reference to the kind of action required on the Road to Heaven) Hack: a broken troublesome cough (perhaps they are off sick) Hack: Hackney, especially a poor and jaded one: any person overworked on hire: a literary drudge (and who wants to pursue that as an option?)
Hackney: adjective: Hired, to offer for hire, to use roughly (suggesting mis-use, rather than use) Hackney: noun, a horse for general use, especially for hire… to make commonplace. (not particularly respectful is it?) Hackney: let out for hire, devoted to common use: much used. (this is all beginning to sound a little like prostitution)
Actions embody moralities. Actions have consequences. Prophesies fulfill themselves. The Good need the Bad in order to know themselves as Good. Who do You Love? How do you Love them?
Bibliography
J M & M J Cohen, (1960) The Penguin Dictionary of Quotations. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.
Findlater, A (ed) (The People’s Edition) 1905 Chambers’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. London: W & R Chambers, Ltd.
Grint, K and S Woolgar (1992) “Computers, Guns, and Roses: What’s Social about Being Shot”. Science, Technology and Human Values, v17 n3, Summer.
Gustafsson, Claes (1994) “Moralisation as a link between idealism and naturalism in the ethical discourse” in Lewis, A and Karl-Erik Warneryd (eds), Ethics and economic affairs. London: Routledge.
Kling, R (1992) Audiences, Narratives, and Human Values in Social Studies of Technology”. Science Technology and Human Values, 17 n3, Summer.
Kling, R (1992a) “When Gunfire Shatters Bone: Reducing Sociotechnical Systems to Social Relationships”. Science, Technology and Human Values, 17 n3, Summer.
The refereed journal is the formal mechanism for scientific communication. The articles they contain form a link between the scientist and the scientific community. Bibliometricians use publication databases derived from these journals to examine and evaluate the activities of scientists and their community. What effect might the replacement of the printed journal by the electronic article have on bibliometric research? Could we be standing in bibliometric quicksand?
Briefly, the current process (1) by which bibliometric information is derived proceeds as follows. A researcher submits a paper to a journal editor who passes it to a group of peers for review. A collection of refereed papers, the number of which is determined by the limited number of pages available in each journal edition, is given to the publisher for text and journal layout. At regular intervals (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) the printer is provided with camera-ready copy. Finally, the journal is printed and a distributor sends the printed journal to service providers (e.g. libraries) and individual subscribers. One such service provider is the indexing service (e.g. Institute for Scientific Information). They use the journal as a data source for constructing various database products (e.g. Science Citation Index) which they sell to customers such as the bibliometrician. As long as the links between the article, the author, the editor, the publisher, the printer and the distributor remain intact, the indexing service will have access to journals containing quality controlled papers and bibliometricians will have access to bibliographic databases.
The times are changing! The information era is here! Many documents are available electronically on the international networks. Already, Current Clinical Trials, an electronic journal started by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has been the first electronic journal to be indexed in Index Medicius and Med-Line. What impact will these developments have on the publishing of scientific articles? Could the scientific article be delivered directly to your desktop computer? Will the journal as we currently know it disappear? What will happen to the indexing services? Is bibliometrics a dying research area? Suspend your disbelief and your criticism for a moment. Envisage the following sequence of events, only one of many possible sequences, where all transactions occur on a digital network.
A researcher writes an article and formats (2) it using standard document production software and the document is stored in a standard file format (3), one that is readily viewable on a computer screen (4) or printable on a laser printer. The file is transferred to a certification service (5) - a service that combines the editor, publisher, printer and distributor into one. The certifier forwards the document to reviewers and then sends their remarks (6) with layout modifications back to the researcher. Finally, the article is certified as accepted for publication, perhaps using an encrypted authentication signature, and electronically distributed to the other services and readers. Subscribers would not have to pay for the journal but could purchase only individual articles of interest (7). Before examining the effects of this development on bibliometric research let me make some general observations. The obvious change is that articles will be disseminated more rapidly (8). The publication bottleneck resulting from printing deadlines or page limitations will be eased and refereed articles will delivered to the scientific community quicker. The role of the publisher, printer and distributor will be modified but exactly how is unclear. However, they will most certainly face competition from small, specialised certification services that will emerge world-wide. Essentially, an individual with an Internet connection, a background in a scientific speciality, access to good reviewers and moderate business skills will be able to operate a certification service. In essence, as we move from the synchronicity of the journal to the asynchronicity of the article disseminated from an amorphous collection of specialised certification services, the number of papers published annually may increase significantly.
What are the implications for bibliometric research if there is a shift from the printed journal to the electronic article? Currently, most bibliometric work is based on journal classification schemes. No techniques are available for automatically classifying large numbers of articles (9). It is unclear how indexing services will collect bibliographic information from articles that are disseminated from an amorphous article distribution system. Instead of dealing with a relatively few publishers they may have to make arrangements with many thousands of small certifiers. Finally, in the longer term there may be no need for indexing services. Some professional associations are experimenting with hypertext documents. The reader receives an electronic article and simply by clicking on a cited reference with a mouse the abstract or complete reference article appears on the readers screen - a self-indexing document delivery system.
Do bibliometricians stand on the precipice of extinction? It is difficult to determine but we are definitely standing in the quicksand of change. Soon bibliometricians and the users of their research information will have to plot a new course. The sooner we begin, the more prepared we will be to handle the profound impact of revolutionary changes in the publishing industry that will engulf us.
Notes:
The events I outline are simplified, but reasonably approximate the general process. However, the relationship between some of the players (e.g. publisher and indexing service) may be more intricate than reflected here.
The layout may be specified by the certification services or it maybe be left to the writer’s ingenuity.
The postscript format is an example of such a format. Many word processors can store documents in postscript format. Furthermore, public domain programs exist that can convert a standard word-processing file into postscript file which can be displayed on a computer terminal or printed on a laser printer.
Higher resolution screens provide better viewing quality.
Professional organisations publish a great deal of the scientific literature and they are likely to make the transition to a certification service quite naturally.
It is likely the reviewers will embed their remarks directly in the original document, perhaps in a different font.
There are many ways that subscribers might pay for this service. For example, they may pay an annual subscription fee for all articles in a particular field distributed by a certification service or they may pay a small amount to receive the abstract and a larger amount if they request the full article.
Digital communication will not likely effect the refereeing bottle.
Scott Cunningham, a SPRU graduate student, is developing co-word techniques for classifying article titles.
(J. Sylvan Katz is at the Science Policy Research Unit, Mantell Building, University of Sussex).
As the social study of science and technology has become institutionalized and in many parts of the world been given the status of a full-fledged academic department, something inevitably, but also unfortunately, has gone lost. That something, for me anyway, is a sense of commitment or intellectual partisanship: an interest in taking sides. In seeking to become a discipline, all too many students of science and technology have retreated to the ivory tower from which our field once strived to emerge. And it is all too seldom that practitioners in our field attempt to use our knowledge to take part in broader public debates about the role and direction of science and technology in society. There has developed in our field a growing sense of professionalism, and of specialized competence, which has tended to relegate normative and generalist approaches to the dustbin of history. Fine, readable - and highly political - works like Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, John Desmond Bernal’s Science in History, Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital, David Dickson’s Alternative Technology and the Politics of Technical Change, and David Noble’s America by Design and Forces of Production are conspicuous for their absence from the literature lists of our field’s courses, as more limited and specialized works have tended to take over.
To my mind, the most serious mistake we can make in further professionalizing our curriculum is to give up studying and utilizing the pioneering writings of Lewis Mumford, and in particular to take Technics and Civilization off our reading lists. Of course, it is a difficult, opinionated book, full of references to names and places that are not at all familiar to contemporary students. And of course, Mumford is dated, in the sense that his book reflects a response to a previous set of technological opportunities. Technics and Civilization was written in the age of radio and silent film, of 78 rpm phonograph records and Model T Fords. Are his analyses therefore not anachronistic among our personal computers and compact discs, as we traverse virtual reality on our way to nowhere? Is his interwar organicism and political optimism not outmoded in our postmodernist condition, in a world of thought torn asunder by particularist knowledge claims and relativistic epistemologies?
What I want to do today is to recall the context in which Technics was written, and to suggest that not only has Mumford’s approach not lost its relevance for our field, but that in important respects, his book is even more relevant than when it was written. Mumford gives us in one readable book a powerful and comprehensive way to structure our discourse; he gives us concepts, methods and most especially a committed style of writing that are not only worthy of emulation but of passing on to our students.
It all apparently started in 1930, when the 35-year-old Lewis Mumford was asked to give a course at Columbia University’s extension division on the Machine Age in America, which Arthur Molella has suggested was most likely the first such course held anwhere in the United States. Then as now, Mumford was unique among American intellectuals for combining what were already separate fields of inquiry, distinct specializations - science and technology on the one hand, culture and society on the other. The two cultures did not exist for Mumford in separate spheres; as a boy he had enjoyed fiddling with radios as much as reading classical literature, and for most of his long life, he saw his main task as bringing the infamous two cultures or at least bringing inquiry about them - together. He didn’t combine the cultures by reducing one to the other, but by transcending them both and operating on what might be termed a meta-level of reality, where totality exists. It was by trying to be all-encompassing, by seeing the world in terms of patterns, processes, cycles, that is, by adopting an organismic world view that one could overcome specialization. In this respect, Mumford was inspired by Whitehead, as well as by Patrick Geddes, in thinking of society and its activities through biological concepts, in terms of life processes.
In the 1920s, as a young man with one year of college education - he had dropped out to join the Navy - he had written two books of literary criticism, one on the “golden day” of American letters, which focused on Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, and one on Herman Melville, perhaps his favorite writer of all. But he had also written three books on what might be considered scientific and technical subjects one on the history of utopias, one on the history of American architecture and one on the history of the arts in the second half of the 19th century: The Brown Decades.
It had been an article in Scribner’s magazine, one of the many now defunct popular journals which, in an earlier time, supported independent writers like Mumford, which had led to the invitation to give the course at Columbia. There he had written:
If we wish to have any clear notion of the machine we must think about its psychological as well as its practical origins; and similarly, we must appraise its aesthetic and ethical results. For a century we have isolated the technical triumphs of the machine; we have bowed before the handiwork of the inventor and the scientist; we have alternately exalted these new instruments for their practical success, and despised them for the narrowness of their achievements. When one examines the subject freshly, however, many of these estimates are upset. We find that there are human values in machinery that we did not suspect; we also find that there are wastes, losses, perversions of energy which the ordinary economist blandly concealed. The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture. (Mumford 1979, p. 227)
Here already are the ingredients of Mumford’s cultural approach to technology: psychology, aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy. Mumford wanted to investigate the “spiritual contributions” of the machine, its effects on life, and not as an alternative to economics and engineering but as a complement, a necessary corrective to the dominant materialist approaches. The machine, for Mumford, was always as much an idea and an ideal as it was a physical artefact.
Mumford would spend a good part of the next four years collecting material and then writing his magnum opus, Technics and Civilization, which was published in 1934. In what follows I want to briefly discuss what we might term the “making” of Technics and Civilization, and attempt to place it within the context of its times. As perhaps the single most valuable work ever written in the field of science and technology studies, it remains nonetheless a product of its particular cultural conditions, and I think that if we are to appreciate it today, it might be helpful to return to the personal and intellectual contexts in which it was written.
In 1923, when Lewis Mumford published his first book, The Story of Utopia, he had already begun to sketch, in the words of John Thomas, a “plan for the regional reconstruction of the United States which [he] would develop, expand, modify, elaborate but never essentially change” (Thomas 1990, p. 79). Mumford was an active public intellectual - one of Russell Jacoby’s famous last intellectuals - writing for the progressive journals, the New Republic and the Dial, and serving as secretary for the Regional Planning Association of America. While he shared many of the prewar concerns of the so-called progressive era, Mumford brought something new into the discursive framework: an ecological sensibility that he had adopted from the Scottish biologist and urban sociologist, Patrick Geddes. For Mumford, as for Geddes, culture was primarily the geographical landscape, what we today would call the environment. After reviewing visions of the ideal society from the ancient Greeks to the late 19th century conceptions, or from Plato to William Morris, Mumford concluded not with a new utopian vision of his own but rather with a proposal for a new kind of scientific practice, which, following Geddes, he called the Regional Survey. It was the regional survey that could overcome the divisions into disciplines, and link the social with the natural and physical sciences.
Mumford’s own utopia was a new form of science, or what might better be called a new kind of sciencing. He was critical of the limits that most scientists placed on themselves, their refusal to reflect, evaluate, and contribute to social reform. Science, he wrote, had “provided the factual data by means of which the industrialist, the inventor and the engineer have transformed the physical world; and without doubt the physical world has been transformed. Unfortunately, when science has furnished the data its work is at an end …. So far, science has not been used by people who regarded man and his institutions scientifically. The application of the scientific method to man and his institutions has hardly been attempted” (Mumford 1921, pp. 271-272).
Mumford went on, as he would continue to do throughout the interwar period, not merely to criticize science, but to suggest ways to complement its cold truths with a sense of, or a feeling for, human life. On the one hand, he argued that the specialized knowledge of the scientist needed to be placed within a more holistic or general viewpoint, and that the factual orientation of the scientist needed to be balanced by the emotional and subjective wisdom of the artist. Most importantly, the abstractions of science had to be connected to real life. There was a danger in separating thought from action in that scientists lost any sense of limits or values, and the general public lost any contact with the truths of science. “The upshot of this dissociation of science and social life is that supersitition takes the place of science among the common run of men, as a more easily apprehended version of reality” (p. 275).
The Regional Survey, as Mumford outlined it, was a way to cultivate a more socially useful and relevant technological development:
The aim of the Regional Survey is to take a geographic region and explore it in every aspect. It differs from the social survey with which we are acquainted in America in that it is not chiefly a survey of evils; it is, rather, a survey of the existing conditions in all their aspects; and it emphasizes to a much greater extent than the social survey the natural characteristies of the environment, as they are discovered by the geologist, the zoologist, the ecologist - in addition to the development of natural and human conditions in the historic past, as presented by the anthropologist, the archeologist, and the historian. In short, the regional survey attempts a local synthesis of all the specialist ‘knowledges’ (p. 279).
Mumford thus developed a notion of culture and of cultural study that combined ecology and history, geography and sociology. He emphasized the region, or the local context, as the basis for all development; and as he explored American history over the next few years in search of a “usable past” and worked as secretary of the Regional Planning Association, he would continue to develop what might be termed an ecological critique of modern American civilization. Mumford’s perspective resembled that of other groups of human ecologists which emerged in the interwar years, such as the “southern regionalism” developed by the sociologist Howard Odum at the University of North Carolina and the sociologists of the Chicago school. In the 1920s, their position was opposed both to Thorstein Veblen’s technocratic vision, on the one hand, with the corresponding notions of social engineering and expert rule; and to the cultural elitism of T.S. Eliot and Henry Adams, on the other, with their glorification of the past and their idealistic rejection of the “modern temper” - the title of Joseph Wood Krutch’s book of 1929. The human ecologists were in between the technocrats and the traditionalists, trying to mobilize regional cultural identities as constructive resources for development, much as Gandhi was trying to do in India, at much the same time.
Mumford’s most influential text in the 1920s was The Golden Day, which he published in 1926. By then there had developed something of an intellectual movement amongst literary and artistic critics to reevaluate the artistic achievements of 19th century America. The movement began before the war, in the writings of Waldo Frank and Van Wyck Brooks, and continued with the American Caravan yearbooks and in a number of other works. What distinguished Mumford’s book from those of the literati was, on the one hand, his ecological view of culture, and, on the other, his active use of history to evaluate contemporary writers and standpoints. Even though there is a great deal in the book that was new and interesting, it was Mumford’s critique of the pragmatisms of William James and John Dewey that apparently attracted the most notoriety at the time. Mumford took issue not with technology itself but with the materialism that it had inspired, both in philosophy and in life, and he saw that materialism as being most clearly formulated in the writings of Dewey.
His book sought to affirm the significance of the classic writers of the 19th century, as the creators of an American culture; Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman represented the emergence of a distinct national culture, framed by the natural environment, but, in particular by the interaction of an older, European sensibility with a new environment. The writers whom Mumford would continue to praise throughout his long life had been the morning of the golden day; by the end of the century, with the closing of the frontier, night had come, and the engineer had become the cultural hero: “The Edisons and Carnegies came to take the place in the popular imagination once occupied by Davy Crockett and Buffalo Bill” (Mumford 1926, p. 118). The “note of the period was consolidation. The great captains of industry controlled the fabrication of profits with a military discipline: they waged campaigns against their competitors which needed only the actual instruments of warfare to equal that art in ruthlessness….” (p. 119).
He criticized Dewey and James and other writers of the progressive era for their “acquiescence”, their acceptance of the new technological society; in trying to control its excesses, they succumbed to its materialist values. “The evils of privilege and irresponsible power in America were of course real,” he wrote, “but the essentiel poverty of America was a qualitative poverty, one which cut through the divisions of rich and poor; and it has been this sort of poverty which has prevented us from projecting in the imagination a more excellent society.” (pp. 124-125).
There were, and would continue to be, important differences between Mumford and Dewey, but Mumford was not always justified in his critique of Dewey. What was at work, it seems, was more a difference in generational sensibility than a difference in standpoint (cf Westbrook 1991, pp. 380ff). Mumford, coming of age in the 1920s, saw Dewey and Veblen, as well, for that matter, as part of the problem; his criticism of pragmatism was a critique of the older generation. But it was also a critique of an overly positive, or adoptive attitude to technology. Mumford for all his utopian envisioning of an alternative technological order, remained throughout his life a critic of the values which he saw as intrinsic to modern technological civilization. If, as we shall see, he pointed to some positive potentials in technology in his writings of the 1930s - the writings that brought his own position closer to Dewey’s - he nonetheless remained a cultural critic of technology. The same cannot really be said of Dewey or Veblen. In the course of the 1920s, however, the two elder statesmen of progressive thought responded rather differently to the increasingly technocratic climate of the times. While Veblen became a kind of prophet for the young turks of technocracy, Dewey rethought the relations between democracy and philosophy. They both remained, as it were, faithful to the power of technology, but they looked to different actors for the necessary social and political renewal.
Mumford, for his part, delved deeper into the meanings of the machine. As the 1920s wore on, he grew more interested in the creative potentialities of the new science-based technologies. One can see in his writings of the late 1920s, and in particular in Technics and Civilization, which he published in 1934, a far more sympathetic view of the industrial civilization than he had expressed in the 1920s. In the wake of the depression, he realized that technology’s promise was still largely unfulfilled and its human potential largely unexplored; the task of a cultural critic was not merely to identify problems, but to provide constructive ideas for bringing the machine under human control, and even more, using machinery to enrich human life. It had become clear that the machine needed a conscious program for its guidance; and it was this that Mumford aimed to provide, by so doing pioneering in the social study - and constructive assessment - of science and technology.
Mumford’s recent biographer, Donald Miller, has pointed to the significance of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West in the development of Mumford’s thinking. In 1926, Mumford reviewed the English translation of the first volume for The New Republic. Spengler offered to Mumford a view of history as moral prophecy, as well as an organic way of thinking about the development of civilization that well fit Mumford’s own ideas. As Miller puts it, “Mumford agreed with Spengler that Faustian culture had entered the ‘winter’ of its development; but where Spengler peered into the future and saw only spreading blackness and blight, Mumford saw a brilliant post-Faustian world, a great revival of the regional and organic outlook.” (Ibid, p. 302)
It is important not to exaggerate the similarity between Spengler and Mumford. While they shared an organic approach to human history, Mumford was much more sympathetic to modern science and technology, and much less opposed to the tenor of modern technological civilization than Spengler or other “traditionalist” critics. He explicitly renounced the attitude of despair that he saw in Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Modern Temper, which he reviewed in 1930. “We would not destroy the rigorous method of science or the resourceful technology of the engineer,” Mumford wrote in his review. “We would merely limit their application to intelligible and humane purposes. Nor would we remove altogether the mechanical world-picture, with its austere symbolism; we would rather expand it and supplement it with a vision of life which drew upon other needs of the personality than the crude will-to-power” (quoted in Pells 1993, p. 31).
When Mumford was asked, in 1930, to give a course on the Machine Age in America, he made it the occasion for a much more ambitious project than any he had previously carried out. He read widely in the history of technology and he obtained a fellowship to visit the technical museums in Europe, in order to prepare himself for what he increasingly saw as his great book, his new synthesis (Technics and Civilization was actually the first of a series of four books, which Mumford, in his typically immodest way, would label the Renewal of Life). The first result, in any case, was an original, exceedingly stimulating, if highly personal, reflection on the history of technology which provided a new role for culture and for cultural analysis in the understanding of technical change.
In Technics and Civilization, Mumford applied an organic philosophy of history to technology; and he drew both on his ecological, as well as his humanist background. He described the rise of the machine as a cyclical process, and showed how the development of technology was itself a product of culture - and of cultural criticism. The machine civilization had been prepared through centuries of institutional and intellectual developments; he referred to the medieval monasteries, the Renaissance artists, the scientific revolution, and the rise of capitalism, and a great deal more as having been cultural preconditions for the development of the technological universe. But he also distinguished the waves of mechanization from one another, borrowing from Patrick Geddes a terminology and a historical framework, which Geddes had adopted from archeology (Williams, 1990). First had come the eotechnic wave, based on water power and primarily using wood as the working material, when technics were well integrated into the surrounding landscape; then had come the paleotechnic nightmare of the industrial revolution, when coal and iron had brought about a totally different, and far less attractive technical regime; and, in the 20th century, a third period, a neotechnic epoch could be distinguished, in which technological innovation was based on applied science, and a new organic guiding principle could be discerned in relation to technical development. As Mumford wrote:
[W]e have now reached a point in the development of technology itself where the organic has begun to dominate the machine. Instead of simplifying the organic, to make it intelligibly mechanical, as was necessary for the great eotechnic and paleotechnic inventions, we have begun to complicate the mechanical, in order to make it more organic: therefore more effective, more harmonious with our living environment …. [O]ne can now say definitely, as one could not fifty years ago, that there is a fresh gathering of forces on the side of life. The claims of life, once expressed solely by the Romantics and by the more archaic social groups and institutions of society, are now beginning to be represented at the very heart of technics itself (Mumford, 1934, pp. 367-368).
His aim was to humanize technology, to give the machine a life of its own, a lifecycle: from the infancy of the middle ages, through the wild aggressive youth of the 19th century, to the potential maturity of the 20th century. He saw, in many of the new science-based technologies, a biological or organic vision, which was superseding the mechanical philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries. He saw opportunities for assimilating the machine into patterns of regional organization - opportunities which he would discuss in more detail in The Culture of Cities in 1938. The great promise of the science-based technologies was that they were amenable to decentralization and to democratic control.
Perhaps most significantly, Mumford saw a new esthetics emerging, a new kind of art that was not only embodied in the technological products, but was made possible by the new instruments of artistic reproduction. For Mumford, photography, recorded music, moving pictures expanded the human personality: “Whereas in industry the machine may properly replace the human being when he has been reduced to an automaton, in the arts the machine can only extend and deepen man’s original functions and intuitions” (Mumford, 1934, p. 343). Modern man expressed himself by means of technological instruments; he could record his feelings and portray his environment in ways that enhanced his experience of life, and that, for Mumford, was always the main goal of all activity.
Mumford’s contribution was to provide a personal, some might say eccentric, reading of the multiple meanings of the mechanical order. Through his organic philosophy, at one and the same time humanist and ecological, Mumford could characterize the social and human problems of technology in a more comprehensive way than any other single individual. The book itself created a new field of study: history of technology. While there would be many who would follow Mumford in subjecting technology to historical analysis, particularly in the postwar United States, no one, not even Mumford himself, would manage to take so much into account as he did in Technics and Civilization. If its personal and opinionated language can irritate, and its lack of references can annoy the academic reader, the sheer amount of thought continually fascinates at least this contemporary reader. Mumford succeeded in placing technological development in a human context; after Technics and Civilization, the debate about technology moved to a new level of constructive ambition and seriousness. It would never be quite the same again.
Review of John Ziman, Prometheus Bound. Science in a dynamic steady state, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994
What should one expect from a book that takes up the metaphor of Prometheus, the human challenger to god whose unbinding has long stood for the unleashing of the technological forces? If Prometheus is to be regarded as bound again, what can have happened? There are two evident expectations which John Ziman’s book will not fulfill. Readers should not await a science-critical treatise arguing that Prometheus needs to be bound to save humankind from science-inflicted disaster. Nor should they, inversely, count on any denunciation of the regulatory effects of science-critical movements of the past two or three decades, of Prometheus being bound by externally imposed restrictions. None of this at all is the focus here. John Ziman adopts the term ‘scientific advance’ straightforwardly and without otherwise abundantly present quotation marks. And he sees such advance not only as ‘unabated’ (p. 16) but also as continuing to offer opportunities, even ‘on an unprecedented scale’ (p. 26).
To a considerable part of the EASST audience, thus, Prometheus Bound may appear not to be exactly discursively correct. Late in the book, John Ziman addresses the ‘metascientists’ as a species to which he does not claim to belong himself. Although he grants those people that ‘they have revealed many things about science and technology which have to be taken very seriously into account in the present study’ (p. 275), the penultimate page of the book seems to be just a bit too late to follow up on this declaration of intent. Indeed, Ziman’s real attitude throughout most of the book is quite different. He reasons on the assumption that scientific activities are generally valuable and could and should be healthily pursued. His problem is that in any real-world situation impediments may exist to such fruitful pursuit, binding Prometheus, so that a need arises for ‘direct guidance to the person faced continually with practical decisions, small and large, on how to keep the system going’ (p. 275). And we do know enough about research processes, he implicitly postulates, to reason and communicate about such issues of practical decisions. Science studies just cannot shy away from science-policy matters; such is the message to colleagues at the very end. To be interested in the book, you have to share the view that ‘fundamental principles for the advancement of knowledge’ (p. 274) are an issue not only of interest, but also amenable to intelligent and enlightened reasoning.
So, what is at stake then in science and science policies nowadays; why is Prometheus bound? We experience nothing less, Ziman argues, than a ‘transition to a new regime’ (p. 67), a secular change from long-lasting expansion to stability and stagnation in terms of resources. The appropriation of the term ‘steady state’, limited as the analogy may be, is exactly meant to indicate a situation in which there can be no further material growth, but at the same time high intellectual dynamics. Even if the exact description of the current state may be doubted (and Ziman’s knowledge of academia worldwide is so comprehensive that he raises all the doubts himself), it is a very useful thought-experiment to imagine a situation in which no desire could be fulfilled, no problem solved in the world of research by recourse to additional resources, but only through internal shifts.
The ‘steady state’ situation demands a rethinking of all orientations and regulatory arrangements in science, from the allocation of resources to the understanding of a scientific career to the national basis of most science funding mechanisms. Ziman’s reasoning pursues a difficult double strategy. On the one hand, the need for reorientation is readily acknowledged. Ziman even dramatizes the current changes (which is not an easy task given his assumption of a fairly long, thirty-year transitional period; more on this later), and thus opens the door for radical interventions into the rules of scientific institutions. On the other hand, he severely criticizes practically all currently fashionable tools for making science more responsive to a situation of limited resources and high social responsibility. ‘Accountability’, ‘evaluation’, ‘selectivity’, ‘manpower’, ‘exploitation’, ‘priorities’, ‘competition’, ‘management’, are the science-policy buzzwords the inflationary and careless use of which drove him to write this book. He recognizes that they point to actual problems, but he emphasizes that they are all just a bit, an important bit, besides the point. If they were seriously applied as they are used, they would get it all wrong.
John Ziman is angry. He fears that the forceful and inconsiderate introduction of misconceived steering mechanisms could destroy science. In the beginning, he warns the reader that his ‘deep misgivings’ had made him resort to ‘intemperate and ungainly’ (p. ix) use of language. But that is about all there is to come. It is very much a gentleman’s anger that can be felt in the text. Reasons why science cannot just go on as it used to do are expounded at length, and reasons why some time-honoured principles should remain in place despite their seeming untimeliness are elaborated with great caution and modesty, with a kind of hidden firmness. Readers may just consult his timid defences of pure science (pp. 35-38) or of scholarly autonomy (pp. 189-95); the stronger statement comes only at the very end (p. 276).
What exactly is it that Ziman fears and detests, but of which he recognizes some necessity at the same time? In short, it is the introduction of formal rules of operation into an activity which is essentially creative, open-ended and unpredictable and, thus, not amenable to formalization without loss of some of its specificity and driving motive. Ziman himself speaks of the risk of industrialization or bureaucratization (e.g., p. 195) or of the ‘change from a customary to a legalistic framework’ (p. 99) in the governance of science. Now, this is not exactly a new phenomenon. Max Weber, for instance, gave a brief early account in his lecture on ‘science as a vocation’ in 1919. Still, there is evidence enough to assume that major changes in ‘academic regimes’1 have occurred during the past three decades, the period to which Ziman repeatedly refers. This is the period in which there is an explicit science-policy debate, in which science-policy institutions are created in many countries, and in which talk about ‘criteria’ for scientific development spreads to become ubiquitous from the government agenda to the Ph.D. proposal. It is unfortunate that Ziman does not discuss in any detail changes within this period, namely changes to which a number of available criteria are to be applied. At least one major shift has occurred, from the grand state design for science planning during the 1960s and 1970s to the idea of the reign of the market with only mild state support during the 1980s and onwards. While both types may be interventions into science (of a bureaucratic or of an industrial — I would prefer the term ‘market-oriented’ — nature), their effects, which are conflated in the present analysis, may widely differ. Thus, for instance, policy-drivenness (p. 269) may no longer be the main problem for the social sciences, as it was during the 1970s, but rather market disinterest.
Problems from the lack of differentiation emerge also at other points in the analysis. To support the main background argument, namely that science is getting too costly, CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research near Geneva, is cited ten times (according to the index), often as the prime example for a general trend. But CERN probably should be treated as an extreme case, or maybe even as a very specific exception. Science is getting more sophisticated and more collectivist, Ziman argues (chapter 3), and thus more dependent on expensive infrastructural arrangements. But in many fields costs for experiments and field research do not at all increase outrageously. And new technologies, such as electronic networks, may well allow the development of a basic information infrastructure at some, but not too high cost, and which may enable easy universal access to the latest research as well as to data archives. If well deployed, such infrastructure could revitalize the role of the individual researcher, who would need a connection to the system but not really the physical presence of an institutional agglomeration. Ziman, it seems, is so impressed by the alleged exigencies of the ‘cruel modern realities’ (p. 276) that he does not always fully explore the possibilities for the openness, initiative and creativity that he so desires, for he constructs his trends too one-dimensionally.
Despite such limits, Ziman’s analysis of the state of the scientific enterprise gets to an extremely important point. There may be a novelty in the current situation, which is rarely spelled out anywhere, but which his attempt to remould science to ‘fit the needs of a post-modern world’ (p. 275) touches upon. Historically, debate on science has always been about imposed limits and the need to overcome those limits — limits due to constraints of permissible inquiry into god-given nature, limits due to available technical instrumentation, limits due to class bias. While there are obviously still limits, the current situation is instead marked by the possibility and necessity of choice (p. 29). We moderns have always run up against constraints and have considered overcoming them, naturally, as our mission and inclination. Over the long run, this has been a successful undertaking and many constraints have been removed, but now we could fail in a situation when there is no natural direction of our project any longer and when we have to reflectively choose how to deploy our efforts on paths not yet walked.2 And worse than selecting the wrong paths (we would anyhow never know which they were), our inability to choose wisely might impair our very ability to walk. It is such a threat, it seems, that underlies Ziman’s extremely considerate, knowledgeable and pragmatic reflections.
To respond to his concerns, I might just try to put the issue in other terms. It is part of the modernist ideology to assume that some activities, such as science or also the production of goods, would just have to be left on their own to develop most fruitfully. They have their own rationales whose workings should not be disturbed. This has always been an ideology, and science has never existed in complete separation from other concerns. However, arrangements have been constructed historically, with variations between countries, that have temporarily arrested the mode of weighing different criteria. These arrangements are being reconsidered practically everywhere, and what is ‘post-modern’ about these reconsiderations is that it can no longer be taken for granted that one single criterion will have foundational character for future arrangements. Throughout most of this book, Ziman tries to assess the relative merits of industrial-bureaucratic, market-oriented and inspirational modes of justification for the governance of science under current conditions.3 His own leanings are towards the inspirational mode, focusing on autonomy and creativity (and I would strongly agree), but the other important point is that he does not dare to offer a foundational criterion any longer.
Science, like most other activities, is no longer enclosed in a modernist project. There is a plurality of modes of justification, and the only tool one can work with is the striving for reflexivity, for awareness about oneself and the situation - to develop an attitude of sober distance to a project to which one nevertheless remains committed. In this context, Ziman seems to write in and for the hope that both scholars and science-policy makers could develop such an attitude, that they are not stubborn promoters of, or resisters to, exigencies for change but knowledgeable agents having their own valuable and unique understanding of the situation and of their needs. We shall see in the future whether the hope is justified.
Notes
1 A term I borrow from Michael David-Fox and Gyorgy Peteri, Academia in upheaval: the origins and demise of the Communist academic regime in Russia and East-Central Europe, mimeo, 1994.
2 In sociology, it is currently fashionable to talk about “reflexive modernization” as the hitherto latest stage of modernity. Against such jargon, it needs to be emphasized that such reflexivity has always accompanied the so-called modern project, especially during periods in which major institutional arrangements are being reconsidered.
3 Cf. L. Boltanski & L. Thévenot, De la Justification, Les économies de la grandeur, Paris, 1991.
A Review of Technology, Pessimism and Postmodernism edited by Yaron Ezrahi, Everett Mendelsohn and Howard Segal, Sociology of the Sciences, Yearbook, Volume XVII, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 1993.
This volume of essays is mistitled. Apart from some wonderfully sharp comments by Leo Marx about how one form of postmodernism embraces a particular version of technological determinism, there is little else in this book about postmodernism. The essays are more about technology and pessimistic responses to it than anything else. Postmodernism presumably sells books.
Pessimism. That is the feeling I have as I glance at the “The Table of Contents”. It looks as if it came straight off my childhood John Bull Printing Set. Surely Kluwer can produce better books these days than Pinch’s daisy-wheeled effort on solar neutrinos back in 1986. Well it doesn’t look like it. One of the author’s names is unaccountably in bold print and then one word in the middle of one of the titles is in bold. How appropriate, that word is: Pessimism. Sorry. Got it. That was the postmodernism.
Turning now to the editorial introduction written by Howard P. Segal. Not much grounds for optimism here. Mind you, I have some sympathy. This is a difficult collection to edit as the papers are rather disparate and uneven in quality. What do you say, for instance, about the piece by Klaus Reichert on the Cambridge platonist, Joesph Glanvill, and his attempt to include witches within the purview of the Royal Society? Interesting stuff, but hardly germane to the book’s theme. Segal, perhaps wisely, ignores it altogether. His introduction, like his own rambling contribution to the volume, seems off the point. He sets up the debate in terms of a clash between today’s pessimists and the views of various techno-fixers and techno-optimists like Alvin Weinberg. It all sounds very dated and unilluminating.
There are, however, some moments of optimism to be found. One of the most thought-provoking contributions comes from Leo Marx who notes how the word “technology” came to replace the more traditional term “mechanic arts”. Writers like Marx (the other one) and Toynbee, when writing about the industrial revolution, did not use the word “technology”. Toynbee, for instance, in his 1880-81 lectures preferred uses like “machinery” and “factory system”. Marx suggests that the word technology in today’s inclusive sense was not widely accepted until after World War I or even as late as the Great Depression. Terminology is important because the modern usage is much wider in its scope of reference than the material or artifactual aspect usually associated with the mechanic arts usage. With the growth of large scale technological systems, people experience technology in a very different way. It is no longer specific artifacts they interact with, at least not artefacts on their own, but rather a whole mishmash of institutions, people, concepts and so on.
This combined with the wider scope given the word, Marx argues, has led people to invest “technology” with a range of metaphysical properties and potencies. It is these properties which, in Marx’s marvellous phrase, lend technology “hospitality to mystification” and which has contributed most to today’s pessimism. When reacting to technology, people cannot quite put their finger on what is to blame for their dissatisfaction; they tend to overreact or at least fail to pinpoint what the exact nature of their dissatisfaction is. As Heidegger noted long ago “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological”. Perhaps as this is slowly realized there is a silver lining to be found in the current cloud of pessimism.
Everett Mendelsohn takes us down memory lane in his account of the late 60’s reaction to technology - the making of the counter culture and all that. Mendelsohn’s chapter is mainly descriptive. One thing he usefully addresses is the relationship between Lewis Mumford and the 60’s movement. Mendelsohn notes that Mumford, despite the profoundness of his critique of technology, never became the “cult figure” for the counterculture that Marcuse became. One can see why. Apparently Mumford sent a message to a protest meeting at Berkeley praising his youthful audience for having “awakened your country” but admonishing them: “No angry shouts, no ugly threats, no childish obscenities … no mutilation of your minds by drugs.” Mendelsohn’s account is rightly pessimistic - after all where is the counter culture now?
These authors are wrestling with the problem of how to come to grips with science and technology such that the political response is adequate to the phenomenon. In hindsight the counter culture’s almost complete condemnation of science and technology, a condemnation which seemed so seductive and important at the time, appears ludicrously grandiose.
A much more measured response is that offered by Yaron Ezrahi who advances the interesting and important argument that recent reactions against science and technology say more about the failure of the political process to cope with science and technology than anything to do with recent changes in science and technology. This argument will surprise no one in Science and Technology Studies. Ezrahi makes some welcome recommendations for how the political process can better cope with science and technology. Unfortunately his exposition here is too brief to judge their likely effectiveness (but see his important book Science and the Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.)
Another route into the whole problem is to pursue it empirically. Which specific historical forms have pessimistic reactions to technology taken? This book has two marvellous empirical studies which explore this issue. One by Ido Yavetz, on the debate produced by Oliver Lodge’s challenge to the predominant theory of lightning conduction, cautions us against drawing any grand conclusions about technological pessimism. It all depends on the technology and the particular group you are talking about. One person’s optimism is another person’s pessimism. The chapter by Menahem Blondheim on the diffusion and perception of American telegraphy adds to our rich knowledge of how users adopted and adapted the new technologies of the nineteenth century. His account should be read alongside David Nye’s Electrifying America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), Claude Fischer’s America Calling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) and, on the Canadian case, Michele Martin’s Hello Central? (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1991). As we understand more and more about the diverse responses of users to new technologies we start to get a better feel for the subtleties of technological responses. Pessimism on the grand scale starts to recede. The human face of technology starts to reappear - small grounds for optimism even emerge.
Universities and industry, up to now relatively separate and distinct institutional spheres, are assuming tasks that were formerly largely the province of the other. The role of government in relation to these two spheres is changing in apparently contradictory directions. Governments are offerring incentives, on the one hand, and pressing academic institutions, on the other, to go beyond performing the traditional functions of cultural memory, education and research, and make a more direct contribution to “wealth creation” (HMSO 1993). Governments are also shifting their relationships to economic institutions, becoming both more and less involved. In some countries with a laissez faire capitalist tradition such as the U.S., government is playing a greater role in innovation in the civilian economy (Etzkowitz 1994a), while in former socialist societies government has withdrawn from its previous position of total control of science and technology policy; adopting a stance more in accord with laissez faire principles. Multi-national institutions such as the European Union, the World Bank and the U.N. are also moving to embrace concepts of knowledge based economic development that bring the knowledge, productive and regulatory spheres of society into new configurations. In this conference theme paper (see also elsewhere in this issue), we wish to study the role of the sciences in this changing environment with a focus on the university’s position in the newly emerging knowledge infrastructure.
The university, the sciences and the new economic environment The modern university, which combines teaching and research, emerged in the early 19th century. Historically, the institution went through a revolutionary transition in the late 19th century; from being largely a higher-education institute, the universities increasingly came to have social functions in both research and teaching. With hindsight, this differentiation of functions can be understood in terms of changes in the knowledge infrastructure. The emergence of the industrial research laboratory and the scientification of industrial production had created a labour market for experimentally trained academics (Noble 1977; Van den Belt & Rip 1987). Universities offered a specific place for integration and differentiation among functions in the knowledge infrastructure like scholarly learning, theorizing, and experimental practices.
The first half of the 20th century has sometimes been characterized in terms of the extension of this higher-education system under the patronage of the nation states (e.g., Parsons & Platt 1975). During much of the latter half of the century, the expansion served to accomplish these purposes on a larger scale, with expectations of long-term practical relevance (Bush 1945). Increased international economic competition, the end of the Cold-War and the emergence of new models of knowledge based economic devleopment have called this taken for granted “ivory tower” role of the university into question.
A new social contract between the university and the larger society is being negotiated in much more specific terms than the old one (Etzkowitz 1994b). The former contract was based on a linear model of innovation, presuming only long term contributions of academic knowledge to the economy. Now both long and short term contributions are seen to be possible, based on examples of firm formation and research contracts in fields such as biotechnology and computer science. A spiral model of innovation is required to capture multiple reciprocal linkages at different stages of the capitalization of knowledge (Etzkowitz 1994c; Leydesdorff 1994). What dynamics are involved? How are industrial and R&D policies affected? Should government strategies focus on channels of information, in the hope of creating systematically effective and dynamic interdependencies without becoming directly involved in specific technologies or projects? Alternatively, should government policies focus on encouraging and subsidizing strategic alliances among companies and universities to overcome blockages or “reverse salients” in particular technologies with significance for future product development? Mixing and matching both of these strategies in different scientific disciplines, technological fields and industrial sectors is a further possibility. Such a “hands on” strategy, however, requires a greater science and technology policy capacity on the part of the state, industry and academia since judgements of the level and type of intervention in particular areas become more critical. These are the central questions of academic, industry, government relations in societies of different traditions of political-economy, and level and type of economic development - all of which we wish to raise in this workshop.
Theoretical framework
A “triple helix” of academic-industry-government relations is likely to be a key component of any national or multi-national innovation strategy in the late twentieth century. The focus on interactions between institutions of fundamental research “on the supply side” and corporations has not only been reflected in technology policies, but also in technology studies. Linear models of “demand pull” or “technology push” have been superceded by evolutionary models that analyze the developments in terms of networks (e.g., Nelson & Winter 1982; Dosi et al. 1988; Leydesdorff & Van den Besselaar 1994). Non-linear dynamics has provided us with co-evolutionary models: How do technologies and institutions co-evolve (Nelson 1994)? Under which conditions do they “lock in” (David 1985; Arthur 1988)? When can a “lock in” be considered as part of an emerging infrastructure and when should it be avoided (cf. David and Foray 1994)? And over time: How is the social infrastructure adjusted to cycles of emerging techno-economic developments (Freeman and Perez 1988; Barras 1990)?
Three sources of variation have been acknowledged in technology studies: (1) industrial sectors differ with respect to their relations to the technologies that are relevant for the developments in those sectors (e.g., Pavitt 1984); (2) different technologies induce different patterns of innovation and diffusion (e.g., Freeman & Perez 1988; Faulkner & Senker 1994); and (3) systems of innovation (e.g., national systems of innovation) integrate and differentiate the various functions differently (Lundvall 1988; Nelson 1993). The variations, however, are both functional and institutional. The functional communications can sometimes be codified in new institutional settings; the institutional sectors (public, private and academic) that formerly operated at arms length are increasingly working together, with a spiral pattern of linkages emerging at various stages of the innovation process. Institutional and national boundaries may be transcended in the course of creating a new innovation environments, including the development of new (inter-)disciplinary discourses. At the other end, start up firms are a common outgrowth of the integration among the three sectors, arising from academic research groups, national laboratories, and the laboratories of large corporations. National innovation systems are regionalized and internationalized as innovation processes take place across national boundaries, through cooperative arrangements among regions and firms (Kohler-Koch, 1993).
Innovation systems, a characteristic of the nation state (Nelson 1993), are being supplemented by regional and multi-national innovation systems within the European Union and elsewhere. At the regional level, this is not a new development. The New England regional innovation system, named after a post war ring-road “Route 128”, originated in the mid-nineteenth century with the founding of MIT, a new type of technological university designed to infuse industry with the results of what is now known as “strategic research” (Etzkowitz 1993). At the cognitive level, however, scientists from different disciplines and specialties are challenged across established boundaries, in order to reflexively search for new forms of (functional) integration.
What is new is the spread of technology policy to virtually all regions, irrespective of whether they are research or industrially intensive. The various systems, which previously could be considered as functionally differentiated, tend to be integrated at various levels of structure. Grasping the competitive advantages seems to require the purposeful adjustment of the various levels of integration and control (Porter 1990). Many international and multi-national programs of the UN, the OECD, the World Bank and the European Union assist economic development by relying on academic-industry-government relations to achieve their goals (Nelson, 1993). Thus, a new mode of production is emerging based on linkages among academia, industry and government.
Another indicator of this development is the growing convergence among North America, Japan and Europe of science, technology and industrial policy. The Europeans, having concentrated on assisting larger firms through pre-competitive research initiatives, are moving toward greater emphasis on startups, a U.S. specialty until recently. The Japanese, having brought the art of targeting “critical technologies” representing future industrial growth to a high level, are developing their academic basic research and graduate training capacities. The U.S., with an overcapacity of basic research supply and undercapitalized intellectual property resources, is acting to assist larger, as well as smaller, companies to take technologies off the shelf and into the factory for production, both as defense conversion and economic development policy. For its part, Europe will spend 13.1 billion ECU on its Fourth Framework Program (1994-98) to become more competitive with the U.S. and Japan.
Policy programmes tend to call for collaboration and integration. However, one expects a complex dynamic system to reproduce also differentiation, since differentiation allows for more complexity. Along which dimensions or at which levels does one observe integration, and along which differentiation? How are the two mechanisms balanced and reflexively optimized? And by which actors in the network? Is the newly emerging network system a further differentiation on top of the existing systems or is it a new (e.g., more complex) mode of knowledge production and control in itself? How do changes in the knowledge infrastructure affect the intellectual organization of the disciplines? What are the consequences for reshaping of the university system: which are the emerging functions, and which are the contexts? What are the implications for higher education?
Institutional implications
The need is felt for a broad, multi-faceted relationship between organizations, to carry innovation forward and bring new products to market in the stringent international competitive climate of the 90s. The director of R&D in the U.S. for Henkel, the German chemical firm, has concluded that, “Technology transfer is dead…. The old 1950s model doesn’t work anymore; the old way of hoping R&D came up with something brilliant only works if you are the only game in town,” as the U.S. was in many technologies during that era (Giorden, 1994). The new paradigm is based on meshing the disciplines of marketing, development and research, creating teams within and across internal and external organizational boundaries.
For IBM, and other firms like it, the issue is not so much the amount spent on R&D but the disconnection that often exists between R&D and product development and marketing in these companies. In their growth period, during the early post-war era, such firms typically expanded by separating R&D, organizationally and geographically from more mundane corporate functions. It is no longer clear that by just subsidizing R&D the Clinton administration, or the companies themselves, are sufficiently addressing the need for developing technology transfer and commercialization capabilities for their research campuses, within and among firms.
In this regard, various European Union programs provide some partial models (Malerba 1993: 254-255). In addition to traditional industrial technologies, such as chemicals in which Europe has maintained great strength, the European Union’s Fourth Framework Program proposes to emphasize the life sciences, especially biotechnology, medicine and health as well as agricultural reform and rural development. Environmental concerns, including lowering the pollution levels of transport systems, are also driving the direction of Fourth Framework R&D programs. These initiatives run parallel to proposals for green technology development in North America.
Given the noted sources of variation, however, the ambitious programs are expected to lead to unintended consequences. The interactions evolve by operating: functions are differently differentiated and integrated during cultural evolutions, and balances seem delicate. The level of standardization is low in newly emerging systems (cf. Blauwhof & Leydesdorff 1993). Examples like “Route 128,” “Silicon Valley” (Saxenian 1994), the “Cambridge experience,” or national experiences like Scandinavian examples point to historical conditions which do not seem to be easily reproducible. How then can policies reflexively reshape the co-evolution between technologies and institutions? Who are the strategic policy actors? Does the national state still play a vital role or has the reshaping to be left largely to market forces? Are neo-corporatist arrangements at the meso-level crucial? Do non-standard actors (like consultants and liaison officers) play vital roles? In which stages is which type of effort most likely to push the development in the direction of emerging technologies and competitive advantages?
Niches can be maintained only in specific contexts. Furthermore, the anticipation of niche formation as breeding places for new developments requires reflexive management of the social conditions of knowledge production and control. Hence, university-industry relations may play a key role: they have become a laboratory for the conscious reshaping of the knowledge infrastructure under conditions that theoretical uncertainty adds to the uncertainties of the markets. What have these quasi-experiments taught us about the dynamics of the emerging mode of production? Additionally, issues about the role of the state and private investors, and consequently about the nature of the property rights on results, are placed on the agenda, given the various uncertainties in the strategies and the corresponding risks in the investments.
Perhaps, newly emerging network functions in relations between universities and industry have been codified sufficiently at some places in order to carry new scientific discourses which combine, for example, theorizing, engineering, and management perspectives. Under which conditions is inter-organizational discourse specific enough to carry intellectual development (cf. Rosenberg 1982)? Can these interdisciplinary discourses develop into specialties or are they temporary missions which will be torn apart among existing disciplines in the longer run? How are the large European programmes (e.g., ESPRIT) evaluated from this perspective? What is the effect of the U.S. industrial policy (e.g. ATP) and defense conversion (TRP) programs? How has the decline of “import substitution” policies in Latin America affected local academic-industry relations? Did these programs and policies lead to new standards of scientific and technological achievement which may provide us with models for the further development of higher education? What might, for example, a “European,” “Latin American” or “Eastern European” entrepreneurial university look like which attempts to institutionalize at the network level?
While a number of studies have focussed on experiences in the US and the UK, less empirical information is available about the effects of the assumed transitions from national systems to international frameworks of S&T policy making in the emerging European Union (Nelson 1993 and 1994; cf. Blume and Leydesdorff 1984). After a period of rapid growth of structures at the relevant interfaces (e.g., transfer agencies, university-industry networks) a tendency to leave selection to the market (e.g., by means of patenting) can be observed. It has been noted that the new dependencies may lead to deprivation of the university from its autonomous and cultural functions, and thereby endanger the economy in longer-term respects (e.g., the qualification structure; cf. Rosenberg and Nelson 1994). Is university research increasingly commercially driven? Has scholarly education become obsolete? Is the theoretically oriented intellectual gradually replaced by the experimentalists who has learned to `manage’ theoretical knowledge pragmatically?
We are witnessing the transformation of the role of state in academia, the role of corporations in innovation and of the university in the economy (Etzkowitz 1983 and 1995). Coming from the three sectors, the members of this workshop are participants in the creation of a new innovation environment—a triple helix of academic-industry-government relations. In summary, we envisage contributions from the following perspectives:
from evolutionary economics focussing on the functions of the knowledge infrastructure in advanced (industrial) systems, and on the consequences for R&D-policies;
from the sociology of science and technology and the sociology of higher education about experiences with reshaping parts of the knowledge infrastructure like technological sciences and university R&D systems; and its in-depth consequences for the intellectual reorganization of the disciplines;
from policy analysis with an evaluative perspective on efforts to bring about changes at the relevant science-technology-industry interfaces.
Empirical contributions which combine two of these perspectives are particularly welcome as are case studies of individual academic institutions and the development of their industrial relations, and historical-institutional analyses of the transformation of national academic/science systems and modelling efforts which use methods (e.g., from non-linear dynamics) in relation to the subject (e.g., Brunner 1994).
References
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Barras, Richard. 1990. “Interactive Innovation in financial and business services: The vanguard of the service revolution,” Research Policy 19 (1990) 215- 37.
Blauwhof, Gertrud and Loet Leydesdorff. 1993. “New developments in technology studies: evolutionary economics and chaos theory,” Science and Public Policy 20, 417-23.
Blume, Stuart S. and Loet Leydesdorff (eds.). 1984. Special Issue on “The Role of the University in Today’s Economy”, Int. J. of Institional Management in Higher Education 8 (1984, nr. 2) 97-181.
Brunner, Hans-Peter. 1994. “Technological Diversity, Random Selection in a Population of Firms, and Technological Institutions of Government,” in: Leydesdorff & Van den Besselaar 1994, pp. 33-43. Bush, Vannevar. 1945. The Endless Frontier: a report to the President (New York: Arno Press, 1980).
David, Paul A. 1985.”Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” American Economic Review 75, 332-7.
David, Paul A. and Dominique Foray. 1994. “Dynamics of Competitive Technology Diffusion Through Local Network Structures: The Case of EDI Document Standards,” in: Leydesdorff & Van den Besselaar 1994, pp. 63-78.
Dosi, Giovanni, Chirstopher Freeman, Richard Nelson, Gerald Silverberg, and Luc Soete (eds.). 1988. Technical Change and Economic Theory (London: Pinter).
Etzkowitz, Henry. 1983. “Entrepreneurial Scientists and Entrepreneurial Universities in American Academic Science,” Minerva 21, 198-233.
…..1993. “Enterprises from Science: The Origins of Science-Based Regional Economic Development and the Venture Capital Firm”, Minerva 31, 326-60.
…..1994a. “Technology Centers and Industrial Policy: the Emergence of the Interventionist State in the USA,” Science and Public Policy 21, nr. 2., 79-87.
…..1994b. “Die Kapitalisierung des Wissens: Die Rolle des Staates und des Wissenschaftlers bei der Grundung von Wirtschaftsunternehmen.” In: Ulrich Hilpert (ed.), Zwischen Scylla und Charbydis? Zum Problem Staatlicher Politik und nicht-intendierter Konsquenzen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag).
…..1994c. “Academic-Industry Relations: A Sociological Paradigm for Economic Development,” in: Leydesdorff & Van den Besselaar 1994, pp. 139-51.
…..1995. “Beyond the Frontier: The Convergence of Military and Civilian R&D in the U.S.,” Science Studies (June 1995; forthcoming). Faulkner, Wendy, and Jacqueline Senker. 1994. Knowledge frontiers: public sector research and industrial innovation in biotechnology, engineering ceramics, and parallel computing (Oxford/ New York: Clarendon Press).
Freeman, Christopher and Carlota Perez. 1988. “Structural crises of adjustment, business cycles and investment behaviour,” in: Dosi et al. 1988, pp. 38-66.
Giorden, J. 1994. “Managing Strategic Alliances,” Conference, Rutgers University, Center for Technology Research Management, Newark, New Jersey, June 30.
Government White Paper. 1993. Realising Our Potential: Strategy for Science, Engineering and Technology (London: HMSO).
Kohler-Koch, Beate. 1993. “Regions as Political Actors in the Process of European Integration” Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, University of Mannheim, Germany.
Leydesdorff, Loet. 1994. “New Models of Technological Change: New Theories for Technology Studies?” in: Leydesdorff & Van den Besselaar 1994, pp. 180-92.
Leydesdorff, Loet, and Peter Van den Besselaar (eds.). 1994. Evolutionary Economics and Chaos Theory: New directions in technology studies (London: Pinter).
Lundvall, Bengt-&aAing;ke. 1988. “Innovation as an interactive process: from user-producer interaction to the national system of innovation,” in: Dosi et al. 1988, pp. 349-369.
Malerba, Franco. 1993. “The National System of Innovation: Italy” In: Nelson 1993, pp. 230-59.
Nelson, Richard R. (ed.) (1993). National Innovation Systems: A comparative analysis (New York, etc.: Oxford University Press).
Nelson, Richard R. 1994. “Economic Growth via the Coevolution of Technology and Institutions,” in: Leydesdorff & Van den Besselaar 1994, pp. 21-32.
Nelson, Richard R. and Sidney G. Winter. 1982. An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).
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Parsons, Talcott, and Gerald M. Platt. 1975. The American University (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
Pavitt, Keith. 1984. “Sectoral Patterns of Technical Change: Towards a Theory and a Taxonomy,” Research Policy 13, 343-73.
Porter, Michael E. 1990. The Competitive Advantage of Nations (London, etc.: Macmillan).
Rip, Arie, and Henk van den Belt. 1987. “The Nelson-Winter-Dosi model and synthetic dye chemistry,” in: W. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, T. Pinch (eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).
Rosenberg, Nathan. 1982. “How exogenous is science?”, pp. 141-59 in: Inside the Black Box (New York: Cambridge University Press).
Rosenberg, Nathan, and Richard R. Nelson. 1994. “American universities and technical advance in industry,” Research Policy 23, 323-48.
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On 2-4 December 1994, a conference was held at Durham University on ‘Science’s Social Standing’ which attracted over eighty participants, ranging from undergraduates to professors, who between them represented virtually all the major natural and social sciences in the UK. The conference was sponsored by the Times Higher Education Supplement (or THES), EASST, leading publishers in the natural and the social sciences (Sage and Taylor & Francis), as well as the Philosophy, Physics, Psychology, and Sociology Departments at Durham. I organized the conference under the auspices of the Centre for the History of the Human Sciences, whose director, Irving Velody, lent invaluable material and personal support to an operation that was only eight weeks in the making. The amount of enthusiasm generated for the event from ‘high places’ in such a short time (e.g., the managing editor of the THES attended the first day of the conference) suggests that the ‘public understanding of science’ is finally becoming a publicly contested issue, with ‘science studies’ being one of the recognized contestants.
In the interest of space, I will not review what is already a complicated history of the issues surrounding the conference or speculate why 15-20 year old doctrines in science studies are suddenly perceived as posing a threat to the scientific establishment. Readers can probe these issues for themselves in the bibliographic guide appended to this report. A convenient point of departure is the appearance of The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science, by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge 1993), now available as a trade paperback in bookstores throughout the UK. The book is little more than some well-known case studies shorn of their controversial philosophical implications. However, the effort is presented as a contribution to the public understanding of science, and hence an implicit challenge to the monopoly that scientists have traditionally enjoyed in this area. Moreover, the authors argue that it is in scientists’ own interest to leave behind inflated talk of ‘rationality’, ‘objectivity’, and ‘truth’, and to promote instead the more ordinary image of science described in the case studies. In that way, the public will learn to have more reasonable expectations of science, and scientists won’t feel a need to promise what they cannot deliver.
While it is clear that Collins & Pinch meant to give friendly advice to scientists, the book — and Collins in particular — were taken to be hostile by the scientists most closely identified with the public understanding of science. At least part of the misunderstanding here can be traced to a subtext of The Golem that became increasingly prominent in Collins’s public exchanges (especially a position paper published in the 30 September 1994 issue of the THES). Collins was at least as interested in defending the autonomy of science studies as in advising scientists on how to improve their public image. This led to a positive feedback loop: the more that Collins insisted on drawing a sharp distinction between the sociologist’s and the scientist’s work, the more that scientists took him as in fact encroaching on their work, and thus the more they felt emboldened to reciprocate by pronouncing on what sociologists of science should be doing. What this shows, quite vividly perhaps, is the fundamental incompatibility between offering advice and remaining autonomous. As science studies practitioners move increasingly into the public sphere, we will have to learn to be accountable to groups — like natural scientists — on whose livelihoods we impinge but whose mindsets may be quite different from our own. The dispute over the dispensability of ‘truth’ to an understanding of science is a good case in point. In science studies, we tend to judge the matter purely on the basis of Ockham’s Razor: why appeal to inflated epistemic terms, when more down-to-earth social ones will do as well for understanding how science works? However, scientists approach the issue much differently, which I only came to fully appreciate in the course of organizing the Durham conference.
Words like ‘truth’, ‘rationality’, and ‘objectivity’ are rallying points around which scientists can show solidarity, no matter how disparate their particular fields of study. This point is easily lost on science studies practitioners because of the great emphasis that we nowadays place on the ‘disunity’ of the sciences, which is too quickly interpreted as an empirical refutation of scientific realism or logical positivism. On the contrary, a big challenge for us is to understand how scientists can believe that science is both ‘one’ and ‘many’ — that science strives for unity while pursuing distinct paths of inquiry.
This belief has important practical consequences, too. During the conference, the people associated with science studies were continually distancing themselves from one another, displaying their disunity with a vengeance: Feminists castigated Strong Programmers, macro-sociologists and micro-sociologists crossed swords, and various schools of ethnomethodology interrogated each other’s practices. (It is also worth noting that however much private sympathy there may have been for Collins, no one from ‘our’ side ever publicly defended him.) In contrast, among the physicists, chemists, and biologists at the conference, whenever one of them made a claim, you can be sure that another would prop it up from his own distinct angle, sometimes ‘creatively reinterpreting’ what the earlier scientist had said. Often this occurred as acts of collective remembering of the grand narrative of scientific progress (to which I will return below).
Another way in which the scientists displayed their strength was by making it seem as though the mere refusal to engage in appeals to ‘truth’ et al. was a sign of moral failure, as if one were hesitant to declare Jesus Christ one’s personal saviour. I learned this point the hard way on a BBC 4 radio debate with Lewis Wolpert a few hours before the conference began. My strategy was to say that professions of faith to ‘truth’ et al. did not bring us any closer to solving the problem of unemployed scientists, setting research priorities, or designing the high school science curriculum. (Too many truths, but too little money.) Wolpert then proceeded to accuse me of using these details to obscure the larger fact that I was committed not to ‘truth’, but to a ‘political agenda’. Even the otherwise sympathetic moderator gasped at the charge, and the debate soon disintegrated.
Luckily for ‘our’ side, scientists’ depth of emotional commitment to the epistemic virtues seems to be matched by a superficial understanding of what is entailed by those virtues. For example, an effective strategy for short-circuiting the virtue of ‘objectivity’ was to show that its practical accomplishment — the construction of uniformity in belief and action — has often been at the expense of other virtues such as creativity and critical judgment. When this point was placed in the mouth of a scientific icon — as Graeme Gooday did in his account of T.H. Huxley’s qualms about standardized lab training — it wasn’t long before the Professor of Physics at my university bemoaned the tendency for students in his courses to think that uniform methods must produce uniform results.
In general, scientists were receptive to science-studies-like reflections when science was shown to work against itself. An example would be the incongruity between the formulaic character of most scientific training and the open-ended inquiries associated with scientific research at its best. The more one could find precedents for revisionist views of science in things said by historical members of the scientific establishment, as in the Huxley case, the more scientists were likely to entertain the idea that change has not always amounted to progress. Indeed, if it were possible to write a plausible history of science in which science studies reflections were presented as ‘always already’ part of scientific thought, practicing scientists would probably be happy to insert science studies into their professional training programmes. At least it is an avenue worth exploring.
What I don’t think worked so well were the case studies around which we focussed three panels in the conference. Harry Collins suggested the idea, which in principle sounded fine: take three episodes covered by science studies and then ask a historian, philosopher, and practicing scientist to comment on them. The relevant science studies texts would be circulated in advance, so that panel members could keep their remarks on point. Michael Lynch offered the additional twist of making Wolpert’s account of the history of biology in his popular book, The Unnatural Nature of Science, one of the cases, to which a sociologist (Lynch) would then be one of the respondents. While I think the weakness of Wolpert’s historical and philosophical reasoning was brought out nicely, other sorts of weaknesses were revealed in the sessions centering on the sociological case studies.
What is an adequate response to the charge that the N-Rays episode is ‘trivial’ for understanding the overall trajectory of modern physics? What does one say to a dismissal of a contextualist account of quark research on the grounds that quarks were eventually accepted by scientists who operated in contexts quite unlike the original one? These are two questions that the sociologists did not answer especially well. The problem, as I see it, is that case studies can always be accepted ‘on their own terms’ but ultimately dismissed as lacking clear implications for the grand narrative of scientific progress. Since science studies practitioners have been loath to develop their own counter-narratives of the history of science, there is no alternative macro-context in which to situate the case studies, and hence prevent them from simply being reduced to diversions from what scientists regard as the main story.
As this was the first time scientists and science studies practitioners met with the explicit purpose of coming to terms with one another, much of the conference resembled the first moments of family therapy: pent-up frustrations giving way to outbursts. However, after a day of hearing each other out, topped off by a convivial dinner, the discourse situation improved markedly, and I think some real progress was made toward understanding what each side fears and loathes of the other. However, more conferences of this kind are needed, and so I would like to close with some advice for planning Durham’s successors.
(1) The conference should focus on a relatively specific topic, not only to keep the discussion on point, but also to avoid charges that various groups are ‘under-represented’ in the discussion. Our conference tried to maximize the diversity of disciplinary perspectives, but one could just as easily tried to maximize the diversity of class, gender, or political perspectives. And several thought that this would have led to a better outcome. In any case, quite a different conference chemistry would have resulted. Depending on the topic, one principle of representation may seem more appropriate than another.
(2) The conference should have a clear aim, and maybe even a collective project to which the discussion is seen as contributing. One obvious model is a ‘constitutional convention’ whose ultimate aim is a statement of principles for the interaction of natural and social scientists in areas where both groups have an interest.
(3) The conference organizers should do some spade work to find out just how far apart the participants are likely to be on a host of relevant issues. One suggestion along these lines was that each participant be asked to draw a ‘cognitive map’ that represented his or her sense of the interrelationship among disciplines and their relationship to substantive problems.
(4) Uninvited members of the audience (about 2/3 of our conference) should have ad vanced access to whatever written materials are made available to the invited members. Some of the best discussion was prompted by the uninvited members, especially when the invited speakers gave ‘canned’ lectures that made it hard to ask exploratory questions.
(5) The conference organizers should not be afraid to court the media as promoters and reporters. Throughout the UK controversy, the media has been quite even-handed in its coverage, with a tendency to lean toward the science studies point of view. Our ‘underdog’ status vis-a-vis the scientific establishment (imagine David vs. Goliath) helps here. I became convinced that the conference was a good idea when I read the THES editorial for 30 September 1994, which undercut a pseudo-serious criticism that Richard (‘Selfish Gene’) Dawkins had offered of the sociology of science. He argued that sociologists presupposed the validity of scientific knowledge every time they stepped on board an airplane en route to a conference. Be that as it may, the THES retorted, sociologists can probably flourish under a wider range of funding regimes than most scientists, and hence are not nearly as tied down to the fancies of a particular society as the scientists themselves are! However, it must be said that scientists deal with the media more effectively in terms of spending time with reporters, serving up soundbites, and writing letters to the editor on a moment’s notice. Because we have yet to master these skills, we often do not appear as well in public as we might. But I imagine that will soon change.
A Bibliographic Guide To ‘Two Cultures II’
Although scientists have been privately grumbling about science studies for years, 1992 marked the appearance of two works of science popularization that did more for the public visibility of the field than anything science studies practitioners themselves had done up to that point: Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon), and Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science (London: Faber & Faber). Between these two books, the one written by an American theoretical physicist and the other by a British experimental biologist, the impression was quickly given that science studies provided an omnibus threat to all of science. I reviewed them both in the February 1994 Social Studies of Science, to which their authors then replied in the November 1994 issue. The May 1995 issue will continue the dialogue with ‘Science as Culture: A View from the Petri Dish’, by Jay Labinger, a Caltech chemist who responds to a wide range of science studies works and is himself responded to by several of the authors of these works.
Also published in 1994 was the first booklength critique of science studies practitioners, who were now lumped together with feminists, ecologists, AIDS activists, multiculturalists, and assorted postmodernists as ‘academic left’ critics of science: Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). My review of this book, along with a response from the authors, appears in the February 1995 History of the Human Sciences. The book was also reviewed by Michael Ruse in the November 1994 issue of The Sciences, the official magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences. Gross and Levitt, along with several science studies notables, respond to the review in the March 1995 issue. Also of note is the cover story on Bruno Latour in the October 1994 issue of Lingua Franca (a slightly lurid American humanities magazine), which includes his response to Gross and Levitt.
In the UK, ‘Two Cultures II’ has been documented on a weekly basis in articles and letters published in the Times Higher Education Supplement. This started with the 16 September 1994 issue, which reported the eruption of symbolic violence between Wolpert and Harry Collins at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. By the end of the year, the THES was proclaiming the dispute to be the hottest news item in British science for 1994. The Durham conference itself has been subject to a full-length article (‘Science Friction’) in the 13 January 1995 New Statesman. A report of the conference from the Lancaster University delegation appears in the Winter 1995 Technoscience (the 4S Newsletter). The opening position papers from the conference — representing the perspectives of a practicing scientist, an historian, a philosopher, and a sociologist of science — appear in the May 1995 History of the Human Sciences.
There has yet to be comparable mass media coverage in the US, but that may soon change with the publicity surrounding the recent annual meeting of the National Association of Scholars, which was devoted to a defense of science and featured as keynote speakers Gross and Levitt, Weinberg, Joshua Lederberg, and Gerald Holton. (The NAS, which had previously focused on the humanities, is the leading organized academic opposition to ‘political correctness’ on US campuses.) Media coverage included Anthony Flint, ‘Science Isn’t immune to Cultural Critique’, Boston Globe (15 November 1994) and Scott Heller, ‘At conference, conservative scholars lash out at attempts to “delegitimate science”’, Chronicle of Higher Education (23 November 1994). A follow-up conference, sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, will be held at the end of May 1995 and promises to include feminist, multiculturalist, and other leftist thinkers who side with the scientists in their opposition to science studies. That should prove to be a memorable event.
A Report on the “Working Disparate Knowledge Systems Together” Seminar/Workshop, 26-7 November, 1994, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia.
One beginning for this workshop lies in the call, some years ago, for suggestions for chapters in the proposed “STS Handbook”—a ‘state of the art’ of STS, published this year by Sage Publications. We were sufficiently irritated by the lack of any non-Western content in the first draft of proposals to volunteer a chapter that would bring together work we had both been doing juxtaposing science and non-Western knowledge traditions. After finishing that we realised we needed to go beyond developing a theoretical framework within STS, and to begin to look for ways of enabling other knowledge systems to contribute to the discourse of STS.
Feeling we should build on the well established practice of including non-Western knowledge traditions in the curriculum developed by the Deakin Social Studies of Science Unit1 we put out the word that Deakin’s Science in Society Centre would hold a seminar/workshop entitled “Working Disparate Knowledge Systems Together” to see if there was anyone ‘out there’ interested. At the same time we talked about holding a meeting of the Comparative Scientific Traditions Conference in Australia. We had both been involved with this conference since its beginnings in Hampshire College in 1990. No sooner had we started on that than we heard about the Australian National University’s Humanities Research Centre theme for 1996 “Science and Culture”, and its plan for a Cairns conference involving indigenous peoples talking of their knowledge traditions in the light of this theme. We proposed joining forces and running a joint conference in Cairns in August 1996, “Science and Other Indigenous Knowledge Traditions”—the title of our chapter in the STS Handbook.
We got the WDKST seminar/workshop going in the expectation that we would have a lot of networking to do and problems to solve before the ‘96 conference. We had little idea how to structure the seminar/workshop and asked Wendy Brabham and Peter Ferguson, Koori Aboriginal Australians, at Deakin’s Institute of Koori Education to be involved and tried to make the workshop/seminar as widely known as possible in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. The event was structured around responses we got from Aboriginal Australians, Maoris and people interested in the Chinese knowledge tradition. We planned for twice as much time to be given over to talking and workshopping compared to formal presentation of papers. The seminar was to be opened by Wade Chambers (Deakin University) who would explain the presence of video cameras and camera woman as our (last minute) decision to video the proceedings as a way of recording the event. To turn on the video cameras was to be a decision made by the workshop participants in each session. The formal sessions were to begin with David Turnbull and Helen Verran explaining the approach currently developing within STS. The first afternoon was to be given over to Paul Brown (University of New South Wales) and Cath Laudine (Macquarie University) giving papers and Peter Ferguson leading a workshop. The second day would start with the Chinese tradition with Henry Chan (University of Newcastle) and Rey Tiquia (University of Melbourne) and finish with the Maori session with papers by Pam Ringwood (Univ of Auckland) and Mere Roberts (Univ of Auckland) and a workshop run by Kiri Jacobs, Marie-Ann Selkirk, Pat King, and Pauline Waiti from the Faculty of Maori Education at the Institute of Technology Auckland. At least that was the plan, and people did listen politely to Wade Chambers, David Turnbull and Helen Verran for an hour. But things got going in the four working groups we broke into before lunch. The formal papers were ignored in the discussion in these groups, as they would continue to be ignored throughout the workshop. The real action was in the discussions. Kooris brought up epistimicide' as a way of working knowledge systems together; Maoris strongly objected because the seminar/workshop is not opened by Kooris. The Chinese participants wondered about their legitimacy because they are speaking about the dominant Han traditions, what of the many other indigenouschinese’ traditions?
A central issue emerges during the afternoon. Can white Australians can talk meaningfully of Aboriginal traditions? Paul Brown and Cath Laudine both try to do so. But after their papers it is obvious to all that we have to try to give a greater voice to Aboriginal Australians. Peter Ferguson leads us outside to a nearby grassy area. A distraught plover squawks above us. Peter confronts us with the reality of the white invasion of southeastern Australia. There is not one member of the Wutharong people who formerly owned the land we are seated upon still alive. Not one person who can welcome us to this land. Pain and hope, guilt and anger flow through the group in confused waves.
Sunday morning begins with the Chinese section. Henry Chan gives an entertaining paper arguing contra Joseph Needham, that the Chinese did indeed have a scientific revolution in which they deliberately gave away the Western agenda and devoted themselves to studying good leadership. He argues that this is the archetype, and that Western science is the deviant form that needs explaining. Then Rey Tiquia, an Australian Chinese practitioner of TCM shows us that practice as local knowledge with various strategies which constitute it as a system. It is this characteristic he suggests which enables TCM to be worked into the medical establishment of contemporary Australia.
At this point a large group of Koori Aboriginal Australians arrive in company with their elder Dawn Wolf - a significant event for the seminar, and one which probably originated in the support Peter Ferguson drew from the presence of the Maori women. In fact these women transformed the seminar/workshop later that afternoon when they took control and gave a series of speeches in Maori led by their elder Kiri. They explain that they have told us about themselves by naming their mountain their river and their canoe.
Following their lead, and at their insistence, we all tell of “our mountain, our river, our canoe” - the place we are located, how it relates to other places, and through what historical happenstance we got there. It is profoundly moving. Many of us are in tears. Going around the room we are Maori and Scottish, Chinese and Philippino, Iranian and Australian, Yorta Yorta, Wuradgeri, Men of Kent (or is it Kentish men?), Jewish, German, Hugenot, and Cherokee. We are all of many parts, managing and balancing those parts with varying strategies and tactics. Where previously we had been disunified by the political difficulties of working disparate knowledges together, this session shows us that unity is possible. There could be common discourse. In the last formal session Pam Ringwood explains the relationship between Maori and white concepts of law, and Mere Roberts explains how she teaches co-ordinates the teaching of Maori knowledge in the Science Faculty at Auckland University.
Much of this unity dissolves as we go into the final session where we talk of what next and the ‘96 conference. Some of the Maori women wade in strongly again saying that no conference should go ahead without Aboriginal control. In fact it has already been agreed that Aborigines will have full charge of the agenda for one of the three days of the Cairns Conference. Clearly there is a strong feeling that whites had failed to cede any power and control and that here we are agenda setting as usual. Turning to discuss what might come out of this seminar/workshop we all agree that the important part of the seminar/workshop has been in the non-formal parts. A collection of papers would in no way be a valid representation. We ask everyone to write a response to the weekend, and submit these to the Sciences in Society Centre of Deakin University which would seek the assistance of the Institute of Koori Education in editing both the video and the multivocal ‘report’. This process is now underway and will hopefully produce some interesting examples of disparate knowledge traditions So what of science and other knowledge traditions? Has any concensus on how we might usefully juxtapose these or work them together come out of the weekend?
Some years ago a group like this might have been concerned to show that Maori knowledge, or traditional Chinese medicine is really' scientific. Taking science as the apothesis of truth, spokespersons forother’ knowledges then try to validate our' knowledge as science. With science as some sort of benchmark, this endeavour struggles to show that this or that knowledge tradition has always been scientific. This is to remake the debate about the boundary between science and non-science, so beloved of old-time philosophers of science.We’ show that our' knowledge is on the science side of the boundary. At our workshop there was very little of this endeavour. Yet many were in the business of drawing boundaries: science is to be kept asthe other’. A neat inversion of that former enterprise. It is understandable for those who have suffered at the hands of science - and many Aboriginal communities have suffered terribly in many ways, under a regimen of scientific treatment - to want to distance themselves from what they see as the polluting effects of science. And there is no doubt that having science as other' is useful. It provides protection; possibilities for establishing a community of knowers united in elaborating a form of knowledge that isnot science’.
One problem is the view of science that goes along with this. It is a view of science without hands. Science as other' is all about abstraction and theory - the belief system of science. It's the old philosopher's view which gives no possibility of critique. It goes along with a pecular obsession with keeping science black-boxed and monolithic. Science needs to be both knowable and unknowable with respect toour’ knowledge - the familiar paradox of relativism. Another problem is that as politcal strategy it is costly. It strengthens the sciences to render them as untouchable'. It denies the possibility of identifying which scientific hands engaged in which scientific practices lead to violence and domination, denial and silencing. And of course it brings contestation over the possibility ofworking’ knowledges together. To celebrate' disparate knowledges would be more appropriate some suggested;working’ things together implies pollution. And here’s a rub. It seems peculiarly Western to be concerned with keeping things pure. The concern for essences' so dear to Western traditions, is, at least in our experience, something remote from many non-western knowledges. But the refrain ofkeep them quite separate if you please’ is sung often and loud during the workshop: in separate columns; different departments; examined in different sections of the exam paper. Celebrating' disparate knowledges leads us to a focus oncommunication’. But this is communication as a swapping of slogans, assertions and attributions: “I (we) believe this”; “scientists (science) believe that.”
But there is another view of the matter circulating in the workshop, a minority position, which refuses science’s stories of itself and insists on telling other stories about science as doing, not a set of beliefs. Beliefs of course are part of what we do, but there is no reason to priviledge beliefs as somehow the be all and end all of knowledge traditions. Knowledge, scientific or otherwise, is never just words. This position is risky. Not only does this remove the high ground of certainty from science, it also removes the high ground of certainty (albeit taken as originating in quite different foundations) from other traditions.
Science and other knowledge traditions can be revealed in telling ways by working them together. Translation from both sides is involved, throwing light in both directions, and translations are not just about words, but about fitting our practices together. “Whose translations?”, and “For what (whose) purposes?” must be asked again and again. The workings of diverse practices of knowledge making are thrown open for scrutiny. To claim that disparate knowledges can be worked together acknowledges contesting cognitive authorities and looks for ways to work responsibly within these disparate and contesting authority structures, treating them as of equal significance. Elders in Aboriginal communities regularly challenge the cognitive authorities located in the Australian academy and those of us in Australia who see ourselves as working these disparate knowledge traditions together need to find ways of recognising and respecting the dual intellectual spaces. Working knowledges together is to recognise the inevitable locatedness of all knowledge.
This implies a reflexive concern with the research process itself, an unmasking of the politics of intellectual life and work. It is to foreground the lack of innocence in any discourse, including the working together of disparate knowledge traditions. It is to keep a corrective moment, a safeguard against dogmatism, a continuing displacement. Strategically the practice of working disparate knowledge traditions together becomes the site where we learn to attend to the politics of what we do, and do not do. And in this perhaps the notion of working disparate knowledge traditions together has a special contribution to make to STS.
References
Review of: Jenkins, Virginia Scott, The Lawn, A History of an American Obsession, Smithsonian, Washington, 1994.
Readers of Harper’s magazine, the American monthly, are familiar with its provocative and sometimes blackly humorous ‘Index’, in which factoids are artfully juxtaposed to make a series of damning statistical statements, often about the American culture of consumption. To illustrate the pride of place assumed by the green, velvety outdoor carpet in American society, the following index, much in the spirit of Harper’s, has been culled from the pages of The Lawn1:
Estimated number of lawns in the U.S. in 1989, in millions: 45
Estimated amount of space covered by lawns in the U.S. in 1989, in millions of acres: 30
Estimated annual revenue of U.S. lawncare industry in 1987, in billions of dollars: 2.8
Estimated amount of money spent tending American lawns in 1989, in billions of dollars: 5.3
Recommended amount of nitrogen fertilizer applied to an American lawn in 1940, in pounds: 1
Recommended amount in 1970: 8
Approximate number of golf coures in the U.S., in 1902: 1,000
Number of golf courses built in the U.S. in 1964 and 1965: 1,000
Estimated amount of chemicals applied to American lawns in 1989, in millions of pounds: 70
Maximum estimated annual increase in amount of chemicals applied to American lawns since 1989, in percent: 8
Estimated amount of water required in summertime to maintain a 25-by-40 foot lawn, in thousands of gallons: 10
Estimated annual water consumption on lawns in some western U.S. states in 1990, as a percentage of total water consumption: 67
Maximum estimated percentage of American landfills consumed by yard waste, in 19892: 50
Number of states having or considering laws restricting the dumping of yard waste, in 1991: 34
Number of electric-powered mowers produced in the U.S. in 1989, in millions: 5
Number of American companies producing manually-operated (push) mowers, in 1987: 1
Number of people treated in American hospital emergency rooms for lawn-mower related injuries, in 1989: 60,000
Average annual number of mower-related deaths in the U.S., in the 1980s: 100
Over the past century, the phenomenal growth in the number and expanse of lawns in the United States is attributed to the technoscientific capacity to grow and maintain green swards as well as to the potency and endurance of the aesthetic symbolism of the perfect lawn. A well-kept front lawn is the outdoor symbol of indoor stability, an indication of domestic tranquility. All over the country, even in the most arid states, residents of homes with untidy lawns or no lawn at all are considered lazy, morally derelict, even unamerican. As many foreign residents of the U.S.A. have learned, not only is good neighborly peer presure high to tend the grass, but many local communities have statutes on the books punishing offenders for unkempt yards. Especially first-time American homeowners are well aware of appearances, so the first step in making a home is making a lawn, and that’s dad’s job. Putting in and regularly tending a lawn keeps dad fit, raises the value of the property and signals civic pride, especially on Flag Day and other patriotic holidays, when the Stars and Stripes is appropriately framed by a picture-perfect home and lawn. The front lawn is a showpiece to be admired by the neighbors, before they’re invited over for a glass of tonic and sandwich wedges without the crusts. Once inside, the neighbors are ushered into the indoor equivalent of the front lawn, the immaculate, rarely trespassed living room, which shouldn’t be confused with the family room or the den. That’s the indoor extension of the backyard, where children may play by day and parents watch TV in the evening. The backyard, like the family room, is there to be used — for 4th of July barbecues, wiffle ball games, dad’s attempt at a hardy vegetable garden and such like. The toolshed, the swimming pool, the birdbath and the weeping willow tree are to be located in the backyard or, just maybe, a recessed side yard. Only the neatest and firmest accoutrements belong in the front yard, as cigar store indian shrubbery, the flagstone walkway and the mailbox, ideally with the red signal flag raised. The paperboy’s been and the mailman’s on his way. That’s a veritable American home, p.c. disclaimers and Tom Waits not included.
Fittingly, George Washington had America’s first publicized lawn. Modelled after an English country estate’s rolling (and bowling) green, the lawn in front of Mount Vernon, at least as portrayed in a famous eighteenth century lithograph, was characteristically traversed by grazing sheep, dogs and other natural ornaments. By the 1970s most every American suburban homeowner, and many urban dwellers besides, were coveting and attempting to cultivate the perfect lawn, the widely accepted definition of which was a green, velvety carpet — perfectly trimmed, edged and weed-free. Sheep had been replaced by riding power mowers and dogs by artificial pink flamingos. Perhaps the crowning achievement of the perfect lawn has been its 70’s-style simulation: a even bed of set concrete painted lawn green (p131). Since the rise of the synthetics industry, Americans have dignified their front yards with green indoor-outdoor carpeting, Neo-turf (green vinyl), Perma-grass (green plastic fibers), Polyloom II (‘grasslike surfacing’), TailorMade lawn (cellulose), Astroturf and other ‘hassle-free’ real grass substitutes (pp143-145). Just as naturally unnatural was the great horticultural event outside of Detroit at soccer’s World Cup ‘94, when special ‘natural’ turf was laid inside the enclosed Silverdome for the opening game. While the 1980s and early 1990s have witnessed the emergence of the chemical-free ‘natural lawn movement’, an apt oxymoron (for there is nothing natural about a lawn) (p180), the “vital aesthetic component” of the American landscape seems to be as difficult to dislodge as the automobile, Middletown’s measure of man.
How, then, have proverbial white, middle-class suburban Americans become so ‘obsessed’ with increasingly unnatural home lawn aesthetics between the days of George Washington and the natural lawn movement? The answer, roughly speaking, lies in the cultural confluence of lawncare equipment industrial advertising, home and garden magazines, golf, garden clubs, government-leisure industry research alliances, golfing presidents and ‘consumption communities’. All have had a hand in manufacturing the ‘ability and desire to grown and tend lawn grasses’ (p183), which incidentally are not indigenous to North America. The constitution of a lawn, both technoscientifically and aesthetically, has been progressively perfected over the years. Akin to rising standards of household cleanliness and family and personal health and hygiene,3 notions of the perfect lawn have undergone transformations from rolling greens well before of the turn-of-the-century to velvety fairway turfs and seasonal lawns to year-round green swards and artificial turfs and grasses. Apart from especially World War I but also World War II, when, much to the chagrin of what we now call lawncare specialists, many Americans mangled the aesthetic by growing vegetables in the front lawn cum ‘victory garden’, perfectionism has increased, as have the amount of money spent, grass seeds imported and scientifically manipulated, equipment manufactured and procured, chemicals invented and applied, refuse produced and discarded and water, gas and electricity consumed. One of the main players in the historical growth of the lawn aesthetic, the United States Golf Association (USGA), founded in 1894, now has on display the pice de rsistance at its headquarters. The USGA building in New Jersey is surrounded by perfection itself: “acres of weed-free, insect-free, disease-free grass of a uniform color and height, made possible by eight decades of research” (p15).
Manufacturing consumer demand through power politics has been a subject of the social study of science and technology for some time. Eventual success in the marketplace is sometimes a product of prior political alliance-building between developers, producers and distributors of the components of a technological system, who themselves are supposedly reacting to consumer demand — a virtuously circular argument to vindicate vested interest.4 Especially in gendered STS, we also read about the concommitant project of imbuing technology with powerful symbolism through advertising, industry-sponsored community programs and other industrial outreach. Here, it seems, something similar is at work.
Gardening and lawncare advice was available for the well-to-do in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as naturalesque urban park designers as Olmsted and the more formalist stylists of the fledging City Beautiful Movement lent credence to the beauty and necessity of lawncare for residents of the old estates, already accustomed to the English aesthetic, and the new late nineteenth century suburban communities, themselves dubbed “Parks”, as West Orange, New Jersey’s Llewellyn Park of Thomas Edison fame.5 The aesthetic caught on, not necessarily owing to an Eliasian civilizing process of imitation by the would-be bourgeoisie, but also, in part, by design. City beautification projects of the first decade of the twentieth century encouraged civic participation. The general public was urged to pitch in for the good cause, and public lawn projects and contests were organized by progressive clubs, affluent women’s groups and large companies, which promoted “welfare work” as an alternative to labor unrest. Beginning in the 1910s, the United States Department of Agriculture, who had been applying their fruits to federal lawns, and the USGA forged alliances for scientific research on new grasses and hybrids. Funded in whole or in part by the Golf Association, Government Agriculture Experiment stations, beginning in the 1920s, produced new hearty seeds and turfs for immediate application on the links of America, many of which were now public or municipal and thus open to motoring Americans with weekends free for leisure activity. A cash crop, grass was big business as was its biggest customer, the golf industry, which according to a 1926 magazine article, was valued at a billion dollars (p59).
Putting greens and fairways, of course, require management: fertilizer, grass seed, lawn equipment, mowers and tenders. In their advertising, Toro and Scott, then profiting from the interest in golf and large lawncare equipment manufacturers to this day, compared the golf course to the suburban lawn. The same held for the great catalogue merchanisers, as Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, and golfers returning from their 18 holes, together with their catalogue-consumer families, began rethinking their landscape design. Gradually, “the image of a velvety carpet became ubiquitous in twentieth-century advertising” (p80), as lawncare company publications, mail order catalogues and home and garden, women’s and general interest magazines promised the lawn-tending homeowners and families that they’d be the envy of every neighbor. While lawncare advertising took many forms, generally speaking wives were invited to purchase lawn beauty supplies, such as fertilizer, to improve appearances, while their husbands were tempted by the newest power technologies, such as gas and electric mowers. Women were encouraged to prod their husbands to do the real work. Women could then take pride in the beautiful landscape aesthetic, and men would be reminded of the long fairway of a par 5 hole. Even in power mower advertising directed at both men and women, the assumption remained that dad would mow the lawn. If he couldn’t get around to it one weekend, the power mowers were supposedly easy enough for mom to use. Jenkins suggests that this sort of phraseology discouraged women from even trying (p128), thereby reinforcing their role as decorator of the interior as well as the exterior of the house. Mom pictures the perfect arrangements, and dad moves the furniture and pushes the lawnmower. Only much later would the lawncare service industry partially liberate dad from yardwork. American lawns and the lawncare industry also suffered from the war, even though the Department of Agriculture urged Americans to restrain from “spading up front lawns (…) to grow vegetables. Too much of this (…) was done in the last war, and most of it paid pretty poor dividends” (p95). The lawncare industry, according to one advertiser, was “standing by” and waiting for “V Day”. As the lawn aesthetic returned gracefully after the war, frustration set in, owing to dad’s inability to root out weeds and pests and achieve the called-for standard of the velvety, green carpet, now of a single type of grass. Enter the chemical industry, which had been experimenting with inorganic fertilizers in the 1930s, and entire lawncare regiments advertised by industry, as Scott’s “whole lawn program”, which included power mowers, equipment, seed, food, and chemicals to feed and care for the lawn (p103). By the mid-fifties, the power mower had become a fixture on the American lawn, and “war” was raging between the male homeowner and any number of new pests as Japanese beetles, ants, animals, insects, worms, diseases, weeds and so forth, now residing in the novel grasses. If dad lost a battle, there were chemicals recommended and at his disposal to kill every living thing in the front yard and start afresh. Tested by Government Agricultural Stations during the war and injected in weed guns, weed bombs, and similarly belligerent lawncare supplies from the end of the war until it was banned 1972, the ‘killer of killers’, DDT, not to mention other herbicides and pesticides, made their ignominious presence felt across the lawns and homes of America (p153). This is a capsule pre- and proto-history of Silent Spring, which for all its impetus to the environmental movement has not impeded Chemlawn from posting sign after sign indicating “Another Satisfied Customer” as well as “Please Stay Off the Grass Until Dry”.
Attempts have been made to persuade the now former President George Bush, another in a long line of golfing presidents beginning with Woodrow Wilson, to rip out the White House lawn and landscape the tone-setting terrain in the style of a meadow, wetland, vegetable garden or fruit orchard (p181). Rejoinders from lawncare advocates revolve around the environmental and psychological benefits of the front lawn; it reduces noise and air pollution, absorbs heat and glare, processes carbon dioxide, beautifies the surroundings and affords peace and serenity. Jenkins concludes with the aforementioned natural lawn movement, members of which are said to be considered “organic cultists” (p180), and what I take to be an invitation to social scientists: “A new landscape aesthetic is a cultural creation, and it remains to be seen whether the environmental movement in this country can enlist as potent a group of supporters and teachers for the twenty-first century as the lawn industry, the Garden Club of America, the U.S. Golf Association, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture did during the twentieth century.” (p187) Initiatives are afoot to study and challenge the automobilismus and birthright mobility of Americans, but what of strategies to “imperfect” the lawn?
NOTES
The page numbers of the statistics are 187, 187; 168, 181; 142, 142; 31, 60; 186, 186; 186, 172; 173, 173; 112, 179; and 114,115, respectively.
A team of garbologists has determined this figure to be around 7%. See Rathje, W. and C. Murphy, Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage, HarperPerennial, New York, 1992. Cited in Rheingold, H. (ed.), The Millenium Whole Earth Catalog, HarperCollins, New York, 1994, p. 111.
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother, Basic Books, New York, 1983.
See Braun, H.-J., “Introduction”, Symposium on ‘Failed Innovations’, Social Studies of Science, vol. 22, 1992, pp. 213-230. See also Wajcman, J., Feminism Confronts Technology, Polity, London, 1991. For the “National City Lines” alliance between General Motors, Standard Oil of California and Firestone Tyres, which was instrumental in eliminating 90% of America’s trolley networks by the early 1950s, see page 128.
See Wilson, W., The City Beautiful Movement, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Baltimore, 1989.
Review of: Lars Fuglsang, Technology and New Institutions, A Comparison of Strategic Choices and Technology Studies in the United States, Denmark and Sweden, Academic Press, Copenhagen, 1993.
The initial phrases of the book point towards the potential of technology studies to influence organizations active in the development of new technology. Organizations become more open as a consequence of two developments. First, new initiatives emerge in the management of technology that are underpinned by new infrastructures and new educational initiatives. Second, new visions of technical change are promoted by new networks of financial and industrial actors that challenge existing cultural and institional structures. The focus of the book is narrowed down to put into perspecitve the development of technology studies in the United States, Denmark and Sweden. Thus the stated aim becomes to compare the institutional embeddedness of technology studies in these three countries. The initial broader question is thus reduced to a comparative understanding of the technology studies community within the wider perspective of influencing technology development. In a way the efforts made by technology studies are to be understood as a conscience way for the three societies to cope with the dilemmas of the societal steering of technology development.
The book is divided into five parts: the rationale behind the book, a section on the motivation behind technology studies, the comparision of technology studies initiatives in the three countries, an attempt to paint with a broad brush the social embedded development of technology, and a concluding section where the case studies are located in this broader picture. This construction of the book demonstrates that the approach is an ambitious attempt. And it is between the various parts that I find tensions which make the reading sometimes quite difficult. The wide ranging descriptions of technology development in society raise broader questions than can be answered through the cases studies and are not always required for an interpretation of the case studies. In part this is a consequence of neglecting some of the developments in academic and consultant organizations that also relate to the theme. I will come back to this point later.
The first part deals with an outline of the authors’ involvement in the subject, a wide (and perhaps too broad) variety of social theories are addressed that are of relevance to the subject. The main thrust is that the preferred way of dealing with technology development consists of addressing organizations as open systems. This claim is followed by a discussion of technology development in three phases: (initial) flexibility, momentum and senility. The arguments are not developed very far and do not relate to the initial point of view introduced. The three phase model is not explored and remains a fremdkrper within the book. The main point to come out of this part of the book is to look at the development of technology studies as reflecting the institutional relations of particular societies. The second part of the book does provide a clearer focus for the comparative study of the cases. Three levels of critique are distinguished, that of cultural norms, of cultural criticisms in a broader sense at the social level and those related to strategic choices. Fuglsang goes on with that last type of analysis.
The third is the most interesting part of the book. Technology studies are interpreted along two lines of comparison. The first dimension is provided by organizational choices and intentions for technology studies. These organizational choices relate technology studies to the ideas and options of its practioners vis—vis the influence of social groups. The second dimension consists of the relation between the actors of technology studies and the emergent institutional concerns and the institutionalization of collective social and cultural concerns. In the case studies empirical material is presented along these dimensions. The empirical material itself is organized through descriptions of programs and units at universities and programmatic inititatives at the societal level. In each case studies can be found which deal with university-based STS groups. Next to it societal inititiatives, such as the Office of Technology Assessment in the US, working life programs in Sweden and Ministry of Education intitiatives in Denmark are described.
In the case of the US the main elements of the development of STS are formed by the presence of strong technology cultures with supporting ideologies. Therefore, intellectual debate and cultural criticism of technology are important elements. The community has engaged in the development of methods to support the societal criticism of technology development through new methods and modes of interpretation. It is concluded that its development has been spurred by a drive towards professionalization. Because of the local differences in academic institutions, STS has not developed as a unified professional activity. For example, three versions of history of technology are distinguished. (1) Technical institutions are characterized by a drive towards public oriented explanations of technology. (2) Critical groups in universities aim at a more fundamental understanding of the role of science and technology in society. (3) Professionals in history departments are drawn towards conceptualizations of different conditions for the emergence of science and technology. In general the conclusions are that STS in the United States has moved from being based in a social movement through a combination of technical questions with societal concerns to a situation where STS is focusing more directly on strategic choices in technology development. The basis of STS is within educational institutions and because of its academic professionalism is subject to centrifugal forces.
In contrast to the United States Danish technology studies are related to political culture. It is characterized by a fragmented institutionalization. The main thrust is a link with a broader political culture in which technology criticism is a central concern. Most STS professionals have worked together with social groups such as trade unions and the environmental movement. Their impact at the level of society is linked to the political interests and power of such groups. A central role is played by social experiments linked with technology assessment. The way in which technology assessment was performed by various social groups provides a guiding example. TA tends to be seen as an instrument of the various social groups to organize experiments and social debate. Experts do not provide the process but coach the social groups. The more active role is linked to the Danish political structure which, compared to the US and Sweden, more decentralized and experimental. The main focus in technology criticism is thus scepticism toward technical change, social innovation and institutionalization at the level of policy culture and debate. This thrust also implies the lack of university institutionalization which is described.
Sweden is more characterized by top-down approaches. Research communities that do policy relevant research are usually connected quite closely with these policy areas. Attention in this area is therefore more drawn towards professional support of policy development. Some of the subjects covered relate to social control to the effects of public policy. The direction of attention towards technology development in Swedish society accordingly is linked to attempts to modify the impacts of technology. There is not so much attention to the origins of technology development and constructive attempts to guide its creation. While there is a high level of public participation in policymaking it tends to be more orchestrated than in Denmark and critique of technology impacts is therefore fragmented in different specific programs and top-down initiatives. The state itself pulls technology studies in different directions, and coordinating efforts to institutionalize STS groups at the level of academia are relatively weak.
Finally, this book provides a useful set of three case analyses of STS communities. The development of technology studies thus provides us with an interesting meta analysis of the emergence of our own field. In a way it is argued that STS groups are as much a product of their social and instituional environments as most other scientific fields. In itself this is not surpising but it is good to remind us of this situation. It also interesting to follow Fuglsang’s argument that we need to consider the societal purposes and alliances in order to contribute to the social guidance of technology development.
However, I found this argument of the broader potential of the STS community to influence technology development in need of better tools and information than provided in the case studies. With regard to the US, for instance, it is quite clear that the thinking of numerous individuals and groups outside the STS community has provided the policy and institutional thrust of technology management and policy. In my opinion the relative lack of attention in the STS community towards organization of the main organizational drivers (industry, government and international organizations) of modern technology development suggests a rather marginal position of STS academic communities. In line with Fuglsang’s description of the Danish case the fluidity of strategic issues should warrant input in policy and management debates from a more dispersed set of experts with a greater variation in insights than the STS community can provide.
A Report on the Erasmus/EASST Workshop in Bielefeld, May 1995
Do social theories offer science studies the opportunity to analyze general trends in science and society? Or has STS taught us that we should give up attempting to construct such theories? These were the kinds of questions addressed at the May workshop in Bielefeld on ‘Social Theory and Social Studies of Science’, which was organized by the Erasmus Network of Centres in Science and Technology Studies, EASST and the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld. The various answers showed attachment as well as alienation.
In attendence at the workshop were around fifty participants from all over Europe, with a slight overrepresentation of Germans. In order to present four different social theories - microsociology, systems theory, actor-network theory and new institutionalism - lectures were held by researchers who could be considered representatives, although some of them protested, pro forma or in earnest, against the label pinned onto them. During the week there were four sessions in which the big shots tried to defend their own research lines. The questions of cooperation and integration of these various approaches were left to the younger STS generation. We have tried to address some aspects of the field and its future in the closing discussion, where we review the sessions.
Micrsociology: The Reentry of Materiality
For the first session - microsociology and the turn to practice - Karin Knorr-Cetina of the University of Bielefeld and Andrew Pickering of the University of Illinois were invited. Knorr-Cetina’s lecture explored the possibility of a framework for theoretical constructionism, or at least a basis for constructionist intuition. According to Knorr-Cetina such a constructionist intuition would be founded partly on a merging of Kantian ideas of symbols and Marxist ideas of labour, which would provide a framework for social actions, a sort of sociological bedrock. The other part of a constructionist basis would be a combination of Nietzsche’s ideas of deconstruction and non-rationality, and ideas of Berger & Luckmann, such as the objectification perspective. According to Karin Knorr-Cetina this foundation leads to the view that things do not exist except through the processes of construction, including social processes. Theoretical constructionism in this sense provides a framework for describing the construction machinery, i.e., what goes into fact construction.
The lecture by Andrew Pickering introduced the concept of the mangle - non-human agents transforming human actions, as in goal-setting. Pickering’s case was formed by the developments around the bubble chamber, an instrument to detect particle tracks. These bubble chambers mangled the career of its inventor Donald Glaser into new fields of physics. Andrew Pickering argued that the bubble chambers ‘acted by themselves’ and thus that the non-human agents cannot - and should not - be reduced to human agents. The notion of the mangle leads us from a pure social perspective to a social plus material one. This is a post-human perspective, which states that human agents and material agents differ and should not be described as one category. This perspective does not imply a demise of the social but it displaces the social, the human agency, from the centre of action. Pickering suggested that one should understand STS by writing a history of encounters between human and non-human agency. In the discussion, however, the question was raised how this can be done symmetrically, without writing a human history of the material world.
An interesting question to both Knorr-Cetina and Pickering is how their methods or frameworks influence traditional motivations in natural science such as ‘understanding nature’ or ‘searching for final truth’. Both Pickering and Knorr-Cetina reintroduced a materiality and seemed to acknowledge resistance from non-human agents or a material reality. This, however, questions the notions of construction and anti-realism with regard to scientific theories and facts, since these cannot be without constraints from the material reality. Thus one cannot construct anything solely within social constraints since theories and facts - to the extent that these describe natural phenomena - are also constrained by material reality. This would lead to the view that theories that do account for resistances from material reality must be preferred instead of those which do not.
Systems Theory: The Abstract Models
Since the ‘spectres of Luhmann’ are still very much present at Bielefeld, the workshop would be incomplete without a session on systems theory and self-organisation. The first lecture was presented by Rudolf Stichweh, the successor to Niklas Luhmann, and was much in line with his theory. Stichweh stated that science can be regarded as a closed, autopoietic system, because it operates with specific communications - scientific publications - and uses a specific binary code - true or false - to evaluate these communications. He proposed that STS could analyze the evolutionary mechanisms that steer the dynamics of this science system. Examples of the history of science show that in different periods the focus was more on retention problems (i.e., the production of encyclopedias), on inventing new variation mechanisms (the scientific paper) or on selection.
In contrast to Stichweh, Wolfgang Krohn and GŸnther KŸppers, both of the Institute of Science and Technology Studies in Bielefeld, presented a model of the science system that does not refer to communications but to actions. They made a distinction between the research group, directly involved in the production of knowledge, and the broader science system, providing the conditions for this production. The research group, the basic unit of the model, has to deal with different requirements concerning the formation of the group, resource acquisition and problem solving. It strives to find a solution that satisfies various constraints. According to Krohn and KŸppers this process can be considered a form of self-organisation.
A still more abstract model was presented by Loet Leydesdorff of the University of Amsterdam. This was not a empirical model, but a model of models, a second-order theory. In order to get a hold on the different approaches to the dynamics of science, Leydesdorff introduced a four dimensional model. Interactions, for instance, between social and cognitive aspects of scientific practice can be represented in a matrix, a two dimensional model. Adding the time axis as the third dimension, one can track trajectories or paradigms. However, since we know from STS that there are different paradigms, different histories, we can in addition reflect on these alternatives. This implies a fourth dimension. A consequence of this theoretical frame is that it is likely to find different scientific approaches, representing this fourth dimensional reality. The important question is how they still can communicate. This question also referred to the workshop and the different views presented during the week.
The discussions in this session were mainly directed at the basic assumptions of the models presented. For instance, how exclusive is the binary code if one considers science as an autopoietic system? When people in everyday life talk about the truth or falseness of the weather forecast, are they also operating in the science system? And if the research group has such a central role in the model of Krohn and KŸppers, how should such a group be defined? This, for example, is the case in molecular biology, where the researchers work highly individually, as Knorr-Cetina argued.
The Betrayal of Actor-Network Theory
Two presentations were formally subsumed under the title ‘Actor-Network Theory’ (ANT) - perhaps the most influential approach in the field of STS in recent years. The first one acting for ANT was John Law of the University of Keele, who provided us with a highly sophisticated but also rather idiosyncratic overview of recent developments of ANT. Law showed how ANT, originated from its Parisian fathers Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, spread in the 80s, became modified, and finally somehow also disappeared as a distinctive theoretical approach - by being successfully applied. Law confronted us with adaptations of ANT in four different case studies, conveying them in the vocabulary of ANT itself, i.e., as the “translation” of the original, which to some extent also has betrayed it. This led Law to the conclusion that ANT has turned itself ‘from signal into noise’, and that ANT is in dissolution.
Unlike Law’s proclamation of the demise of ANT, Johannes Weyer from Bielefeld presented a ‘still going strong’ conception of it. In the light of Law’s presentation one seemed to be confronted with a true betrayal of Parisian ANT. In Weyer’s reconceptualization classical features of social theory were predominant, like institutions, human actors, interests and expectations. The “natural” somehow was excluded again in his framework, which is intended to fit for other domains than science and technology as well. After Law’s lecture there was the question whether this was not an all too moderate presentation of the strengths of ANT, a presentation with too much artificial understatement. Weyer was confronted with questions with regard to the demise of the “natural” or the “technical” in his conceptualizations, in contrast to the possible demise of the social in the micro-sociological approaches.
New Institutionalism: The Interplay with the Environment
The last session of the workshop was reserved for a recent trend in Social Theory, New Institutionalism. Adding the ‘new’ prefix distinguishes it from the older approach of Parsons and Merton. The German hosts, Sheila Jasanoff of Cornell University, and Aant Elzinga of the University of Gothenburg presented some of their recent work relating to this. Aant Elzinga presented a case on global climate change research. He described the multiple and complex interplay between several organisations on a local, governmental and international level in a scientific and political context and explained how institutionalized programmes deal with the orchestration of these various actors. In the research on the ozone layer and on the greenhouse effect, there is a process of world-wide consensus formation, with consequences for the demarcations between science and politics. One of the conclusions Elzinga put forward was that we could not speak of an interaction between ‘pure science’ and ‘pure politics’. Globalised earth science gives us a model of the world that can be regarded as a ‘real map’ of the world for both political and scientific organisations, that is, as heuristics for their future actions.
Sheila Jasanoff’s case study theme was about the reliability of DNA fingerprinting used as a ‘scientific witness’ in US legal disputes. She illustrated the question of reliability of this scientific proof in the O.J. Simpson trial. A representation of the relationship between the legal system and science in view of the law’s dependence on scientific expertise followed, and aspects of its credibility, validity and actual value in legal disputes were discussed. Like Elzinga, Jasanoff stressed that there is no clear boundary around science. Between science and law there is a constant process of ‘hybridisation’. Therefore we cannot just analyze scientific practice. “To understand an American expertise and the role it plays, we must understand American economy, American law, in short, American society.”
The common trait of both works is that they emphasize the mutual interplay between expectations, credibility, social and scientific values and the actions of individuals and organisations. They shape each other in an ongoing process. The main ideas of this New Institutionalism were presented by Peter Weingart, Georg KrŸcken and Raimund Hasse and illustrated by case studies on high temperature superconductivity, cold fusion and bio-technology. They focussed on the relationships between the resource dependency of science and expectations of its utility and suitability. They stressed the mutual shaping of an action system like science and its social environment. The former depends on the latter by conforming to the expectations of the environment. This forms the basis for the legitimation of science, which is a basic requirement for access to material resources. On the other hand, Weingart stated that “the active shaping of the social environment by the action system results in changing conditions of legitimacy and possibilities of access to material resources.” The multiple and eventually contradictory expectations of the environment comprise “rules of appropiateness” that restrict the pool of social practices, and influence the internal dynamics of science.
Mapping the differences
A question that cut through all the presentations and which also came up in the final discussion was the tension between empirically illustrated theories and theoretically inspired (and inspiring) case studies. Indeed, what was presented in the theoretical May days in Bielefeld ranged from approaches, in which the “empirical” was hardly to be seen, to case studies, in which some theoretical insights of STS were just guiding principles for the analysis. With regard to the national academic styles one could see a certain inclination towards theorizing among the German hosts, whereas the Anglo-American style of some visitors seemed to be more oriented to case studies. For example the system theorists focus on general concepts as self-organisation and evolutionary mechanisms, whereas their critics in microsociology stress peculiarities found in their case studies. The question of course was unresolved whether there was a German overestimation of theory or an Anglo-American underestimation - “ein klassisches Problem fŸr second order Beobachtung”, the theoreticians would perhaps argue. “Please don’t”, the others certainly would counter. But it seemed that this different role of the “theoretical” did not only correlate with the national or cultural academic style but also with the relation to sociology. The more theoretical approaches were preferred by those who were stronger connected to the sociological tradition. The differences between theoretical developments in social theory and STS were and are not bound by their “cognitive” differences. In fact, some STS approaches clearly seem to be conceptualized as a challenge to institutionally established sociological traditions.1 Hereby we should not forget that the institutionalization of STS as a “transdiscipline” largely differs from country to country, and thus the tensions between sociology and STS have different backgrounds.
The complicated relation between social theory and social studies of science also became obvious in the discussions about the very notion of science at stake and how material or non-human agency is integrated in the various theoretical approaches.2 Here a strange paradox could be observed. On the one hand, the more sociologically oriented presentations (i.e., systems theory and neo-institutionalism) seemed to claim that there is a specific institution or system of science - but nothing very specific about the technical contents of science. It is just as specific as other social institutions like economics, politics or law. On the other hand, more STS-oriented presentations were arguing that science has to be conceived as part of a seamless web. At the same time these approaches claim a specific relation between the “natural” and the “social”, which should be in the centre of attention for science studies.
But perhaps observations like these also tend to dramatize the cleavage between social theory and social studies of science and technology. For us it seems clear that they should benefit from each other and not denunciate their respective blind spots - be it the “natural” or the “social”, the “empirical” or the “theoretical”, “micro” or “macro”. Seen in this light, the boundaries between social theory and social studies of science became visible during the workshop, and we think that this was one of the important tasks of the conference. It became clear that there are some important issues at stake - for instance a better integration of the social and the natural aspects of science, and the balancing of theoretical generalizations and empirical work. But, in view of the rather scattered field of STS, there is also the task to rethink our audiences and the political commitments of our research. What does STS have to say to the natural sciences and to the social sciences? Which approaches do account for the link with science policy? What can STS offer in terms of education and career opportunities, inside and outside the academia?
Finally, a word about the format of the Erasmus/EASST workshop. As youngish graduate and Ph.D. students, we were a little bit sorry that at the workshop there was a lack of integration of the younger generation. Perhaps one could envision less frontal presentations, smaller groups and so on. Nevertheless the social programme was very well organized and helped to integrate us on a more personal level. We met old friends and made quite a few new ones - what more could be expected from a workshop on social theory and social studies on science?
NOTES
For a challenging comparison cf. John Law (1991): “Introduction: Monsters, Machines and Sociotechnical Relations”, in: Law, J. (ed.), The Sociology of Monsters. Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination, Routledge, London, pp. 1-23.
For an interesting overview, which also would have clarified the differences in the presentations in Bielefeld, see Michel Callon (1994): “Four Models for the Dynamics of Science”, in: Jasanoff, Sheila, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen & Trevor Pinch (eds.), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Sage, London, pp. 29-63.
To my surprise, the “stars” at the ERASMUS/EASST workshop - those who laid the foundations of STS and are still shaping it - looked as young as the field. Watching them as an outsider, I soon perceived a tacit mutual understanding, often due to taken-for-granted goals, shared experience and a familiarity with the ideas. When I finally came to feel like an insider, I discerned an encounter of at least three profoundly different currents, both in methodological commitments and in approaches to the analysis of science. A polar disparity split the foundational axiom concerning the “proper nature” of science - the outright denial of the latter vs. the assumption that the nature of science is elusive and indefinable in spatial terms, in “boundaries”, and insoluble within the “social”. The constructivist paradigm cannot cross swords with its weaker rival, the systems approach, until it manages to find persuasive terms and explanations for the specific, now still axiomatically conjectured. Both schools are nurtured at the Bielefeld University - the hospitable place of this meeting - but their initial departures are rooted in non-intersecting grounds. The hosts did their best in preparing the starting point of the theoretical discussion, targeted at the basic axiom - a “demise of the social” - by publishing a provocative standpoint in the EASST Newsletter last year (vol. 13, 3).
At the workshop, they still insisted on the “internal dynamics” of science, penetrated by external orientation (P. Weingart et al.). A. Pickering’s answer to the challenge seemingly went astray, as the discussion drifted along the track of familiar formulations, conceptual attitudes, practised vocabulary. One gets the impression that after a cannonade of tentative, inventive conceptual “turns”, STS is now cruising - defending its achievements so far, but still not venturing to plunge into the axiomatic depths of its foundations, which a next theoretical turn would probably re-construct.
The unanswered questions, formulated by the “new generation” of post-graduate students who had the floor at the Panel session, hit the soft underbelly of STS - its meta-cognitive purpose and the “what problem”. The question “What is Science?” is still a concern, but it’s gone undercover and, thereby, has been eliminated. A still inexperienced response on new larger grounds surely requires a reconsideration of the bundle of axioms, now taken-for-granted, together with a stronger methodological rearming, for which one is still not ready. What would the new generation venture doing?
Review of Gregg Mitman, The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900-1950.
At the end of his highly commendable, well-researched monograph, Greg Mitman draws a pessimistic conclusion with regard to the life-long project of the main protagonist of the book. Warder Clyde Allee, the Chicago ecologist, saw cooperation as the basis of animal behaviour, up from the simplest protozoa, and sought to ground ecology on it. Mitman treats Allee with sympathy, but nevertheless feels forced to conclude that Allee was mistaken. Close to invoking G.E. Moore’s condemnation of the naturalistic fallacy, which purports to derive a moral value from a natural state of affairs, Mitman concludes that the appeal to nature as cooperative rests on a variant of biological determinism. Allee failed to recognize how far nature can be bent to man’s purposes, to the extent that nature has become a piece of art. Surely, there are decisions to be made in what direction nature should be changed, but such decisions need political choice by humans. `Humans, not nature, are the sole arbiters of their fate.’ That is a very strong affirmation of Enlightenment values.
The origin of Allee’s conception of cooperation in nature suggests itself all too obviously: born in a Quaker family, like his wife, he was a life-long church member. Yet Allee’s views on matters biological were to a large extent shaped by his university education and by the scientific concerns of his teachers and, after 1921 when he had joined the faculty, colleagues at the University of Chicago. Generally, Allee adopted the mechanistic way of thinking about biological processes. A particular feature of plant and animal ecology at Chicago was that both were largely unconcerned with evolutionary theory. The famous plant ecologist Henry Cowles himself was tied in various ways to the programme of Chicago geography, a discipline with a newly acquired departmental independence from geology. Geographers Thomas Chamberlin and Rollin Salisbury championed a strong environmental determinism placing physical geography in command of the development of… almost everything, but certainly plants and humans as well.
The Chicago zoologists, in contrast, placed a strong emphasis on the mutual interaction between environment and organisms, and thus did have a place for an organism changing its environment. Charles Manning Child and Frank Lillie investigated the physiological response of the developing embryo to determining influences from its environment. Ecologist Victor Shelford, still at Chicago around 1910, was highly critical of Darwinism as it then existed, precisely because it ignored the experimental study of response'. Allee's earliest researches share many of Shelford's concerns by focussing on animal behaviour and the concept ofphysiological life histories’. The suspicion against evolutionary theory was by no means an idiosyncratic feature of the Chicago biologists, as Peter Bowler’s book on The Eclipse of Darwinism has made abundantly clear. Mitman relates a rather peculiar story of how American biologists (and not only them) were horrified by the Germans who allegedly justified their war commitments in the First World War by appealing to evolutionary theory. German civilization would prove itself as the fittest. According to Mitman, the story was an American invention, with a large impact.
In 1931, Allee published his book Animal Aggregations: A Study in General Sociology. The term sociology' may seem strange to modern readers, but again its use was rather mainstream. Many important American biologists assumed that research on animal communities would be relevant to human sociology. Allee himself may have been directly inspired by the work of the French-Swiss vegetation scientist Josias Braun-Blanquet, author of Pflanzensoziologie (1928, English trans. 1932). One might expect that this link to human society provided an entrance to Allee's pacifist Quaker's outlook. In fact, Allee introduced the subject of cooperation in anominalist’ way, devoid of moral content, or indeed substantial premisses about the nature of society. Cooperation starts in a mere `aggregation’ of individuals, of protozoa for instance, for the sole aim of enjoying better chances of survival for each. Mitman reports about an interesting set of anthropological theories on how and under what conditions a society may be formed out of an aggregation. Contrary to Allee, his Chicago colleagues, notably his former teacher Child, upheld a view in which cooperation was the result of competition, which in turn was constrained by patterns of dominance. Dominance itself was rooted in sexual dominance (of the male).
In 1929 a second ecologist joined the Department of Zoology at Chicago. Alfred Emerson’s appointment marked a subtle but important change in the research direction of the group, including Allee. Emerson’s commitment to evolutionary theory was outspoken. We may note that during the 1930s the synthesis of evolutionary theory and genetics was beginning to take shape. At any rate his presence contributed to a more favourable attitude of the other Chicago biologists toward Darwinism. Allee himself shifted his attention from the ecological community to the population which, as Mitman points out, in the 1920s was still absent in animal ecology texts, but of great importance to evolutionists.
Although Emerson is not usually regarded as one of the architects of the modern synthesis, his contribution is not negligible either. Mitman devotes an important part of his book to discussing Emerson’s work on the status of the population. According to Emerson, it was a superorganism, a concept which William Morton Wheeler had first applied to insect societies such as bees and ants and which was now given a much broader meaning. Emerson implied that it was the population rather than the individual on which natural selection acted. He saw the population as capable of controlling its environment to a higher degree than the individual organism could. Indeed, the level of homeostasis which was thus realized by the population confronted with a fluctuating environment was considered by Emerson as the goal to which evolution moved. Communities and societies would accomplish further what populations could not. Emerson felt he had thus arrived at a naturalistic basis of ethics. Mitman considers the hierarchy of levels, all geared toward greater functional efficiency, as a reflection of the values of a managerial capitalism in which `the notion of cooperation was embedded in a organicist view of society’ (p. 212).
Allee’s new focus on the population brought several interesting investigations guided by his focus on cooperation. One was a critical examination of the classical scheme of the pecking order among chicken, developed by T. Schjelderup-Ebbe. Allee discovered cyclical pecking order patterns, and on their basis argued for the non-identity of dominance and leadership in a group.
In the wake of and during World War II Allee was forced to defend himself against charges that his ideas on cooperation were similar to those of totalitarian ideologies. Although Allee discharged himself of such accusations, and finds a sympathetic biographer at this point, this and similar episodes provide fuel to Mitman’s thesis on the impossibility and undesirability of all naturalistic claims.
Mitman fails to notice here that his own richly layered historical analysis of scientific development brings him close to a position where all distinctions between culturalism and naturalism are erased. Of course, Mitman doesnot even consider a radical non-metaphorical language, a way to uphold that distinction, since his own analysis demonstrates the pervasivess of metaphorical language. Indeed, nature is itself a cultural construct, according to Mitman, and any argument derived from nature would be in fact derived from culture through a loop hole. Mitman’s own invocation of `man alone in the Universe’ is indeed as much a cultural (Enlightenment) as a naturalistic anthropological assertion.
Mitman is writing as if the modernist projects of science are still pursued without checks, and, somewhat regretfully, he acknowledges the unfettered logic of their development. But the discovery of the ozone hole and of global warming have installed fears that humanity might not after all be able to shape the environment at will. Now these new concerns might very well be the expression of new cultural myths. Far from denying their reality', we may note that both phenomena are heavilyconstructed’ as well, the ozone layer by sophisticated data handling and visualization techniques, global warming by the biggest simulation models that supercomputers can sustain. But it seems that again we have found in nature a player, rather than the mere dumb object of the human will to power. And if some parts of nature can turn itself against us, why couldnot other parts cooperate? Both ecology and social studies of science are well advised to take the possibility into account that nature doesnot always bend itself to human scheme.
Review of American Technological Sublime by David E. Nye, MIT Press, MA (1994), 362 + xxii p.
It’s always entertaining to generalise about Americans, and in AmericanTechnological Sublime David Nye does it most engagingly. The topic is a born winner: Americans and their glorious toys. The picture on the dust cover says it all, with the Hoover dam apparently clamped into place by even more enormous gorge walls, in the distance an imposing butte and in the foreground several men in contemplation of the scene. The scale of the dam, indicated by a tiny sliver of road curving around a mountain next to the dam, is so vast that even the photograph evokes wonder, awe and speechlessness. Such feelings are the subject, indirectly, of this book. Here the reader will find sublimes of all types: the geometric (Brooklyn Bridge), the dynamic (the Hoover dam power station), the electric (New York’s Great White Way), the technological (the Corliss engine) and the arithmetic (the bliss of large numbers), in various combinations. American Technological Sublime can be appreciated on many levels: as a history of technology in America and to a lesser degree American politics, as a sociological analysis of American attitudes towards nature and themselves, and as an anecdotal examination of the sublime experience. Chapters 2-5 reach into early American history to explore the political, social and economic contexts of the canals, railroads, bridges, dams, skyscrapers and factories which made America great, at least as far as Americans are concerned. It becomes immediately obvious that from the very beginning of American history technology was referred to as a way of establishing American moral and political superiority in the world, but also as a way of establishing various rationales for capitalism, decimation of Native Americans, and obliteration of the environment. In fact, rationales weren’t even considered that necessary. I’m particularly fond of the quote by Andrew Jackson, “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute?” (p37).
What good man, indeed? Women don’t in fact play much of a part in this story. Granted, women are not immune to the pleasures of the technological sublime, as Nye establishes with stories and quotations. However, their major role seems to be in the domestication of technology — women are not the ones either designing the technology or dying in its construction, and they are not (for the most part) the ones surveying their domains from the top floors of skyscrapers. One can’t help wondering in what ways the story would be different if it were about women’s relationship to the technological sublime, but that is no criticism of the author. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss the city skyline and the fascination with lights that resulted not only in the Great White Way but also in the face now worn by most American cities at night. The night-time profile of American cities was apparently created by sign, electricity and lightbulb salesmen; given America’s entrepreneurialism, competitiveness and love of technology, the history of the electric cityscape seems as if it could have gone no other way. But Nye makes a deeper point as well, both about the electrical sublime and the sublime in general, when he says that the “the electrified landscape’s meaning lay precisely in the fact that it seemed to go beyond any known codification, becoming unutterable and ungraspable in its extent and complexity.” (p196) Part of its appeal, its sublimity, is that the “city as a whole seemed a jumble of layers, angles, and impossible proportions; it had become a vibrating, indeterminate text that tantalized the eyes and yielded to no definitive reading” (p196). Nye also discusses how the new electric advertisements used the technological sublime to elevate the status of both the engineer and the product being advertised, as well as to begin teaching people their new role in society as consumers.
Chapter 8 examines the World’s Fair held in New York in 1939, six years before America dropped nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Nye points out that all five of the most popular exhibits represented the future, and it sounds as if they did so with a degree of marketing sophistication (and disguised political fascism) that belies the American floppy, jumping puppy dog brand of enthusiasm for technology. Nye’s descriptions of the technological utopias created for that fair are fascinating, and provide a strange, oblique view of an innocence that seems almost wilful in view of the disasters awaiting.
In the following chapter things start to get lively with the atom bomb and Apollo XI, and the infatuation seems to turn into blind, destructive obsession, as infatuations will if they aren’t tempered by some developing realism about the loved one’s flaws. The innocence of American enthusiasm for technology begins to seem insane and show its dark side. The silliness seems, with benefit of hindsight of course, horrifyingly frivolous, with Miss Atom Bomb beauty contests, road maps to the best viewing sites, and calls from local businessmen for bigger, showier bombs to attract the tourists. Nye explores the emerging conflict between the attraction to technology and the growing threat it began to present after the bombing of Japan. This conflict still seems to be in full flower and getting more schizophrenic all the time, as shown by two recent movies that are being advertised together in the theatre in England. First Apollo XIII, with images of the earth from space, looking vast and evoking the quintessential American technological sublime, giving men a godlike viewpoint and liberation even from gravity. Then, The Crimson Tide, with images of men in a submarine, trying to decide whether they are about to be nuked, and whether they should go for what America called in the Viet Nam war a “pre-emptive first strike”. Here they are trapped by technology, not only physically in a claustrophobic submarine deep beneath the ocean, but morally, by the unresolvable dilemmas that accompany technology’s lethal potential.
The last two chapters, devoted to the Statue of Liberty and Las Vegas, examine the way in which America’s relationship with the technological sublime has descended more and more into sensationalism. Early celebrations of technology were marked by speeches that were intensely nationalist and racist and by modern standards thoroughly reprehensible, but these early speeches did invoke political ideas (revealing, in fact, how technology and nationalism were used to justify each other from the start) as well as sentiment. By contrast, the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 was marked by no political speeches; Ronald Reagan’s sole contribution was to push a button starting the light show. In the final chapter the author turns an unsentimental eye on Americans and their excesses, particularly in Las Vegas. Once again the photograph - of the MGM Grand entrance - says it all, with people streaming through doors lodged in the chest of a large lion. There has been no effort to make the lion either beautiful or, for that matter, ugly. It is representational only on the most iconic level, with some slight references to the sphinx, and is thus overwhelmingly banal. Yet it is magnificently large and must have involved some engineering ingenuity, and that is obviously the point. In this chapter also Nye discusses modern American reactions to such natural wonders as the Grand Canyon, which had always been appropriated as something uniquely American. Apparently one of the most common questions now asked by visitors is, what tools did they use to dig it? Sarcasm at the expense of such attitudes would be easy, yet they are frightening as well.
So what is the sublime exactly? It is an experience that is by its very nature difficult to define. Unlike Kant and Burke, two of the many philosophers he draws on, Nye does not feel that the sublime is any one thing nor that it is immutable. Central to Nye’s discussion is the idea that American superiority is a crucial element of the American sublime experience, and he convincingly supports this thesis. Over and over, in visitor books at the great natural monuments such as Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, in Independence Day speeches, at the openings of bridges, dams, railroads, skyscrapers and world exhibitions, Americans go on record with the sentiment that the object of their admiration and wonder could only happen in America and is a sign (often attributed to God) that America is the greatest country in the world. After the Apollo XI launch, a woman is quoted as saying “Great, great, absolutely great! There isn’t another country in the world that’s going to do this - you’ve got to say America’s first.” (Pg. 240) Okay, America’s first. And Nixon proclaimed it the greatest day since the Creation. Nye provides plenty of social, political and economic context for this phenomena. He points out that Americans needed something to bind them together in the early days of the country. It couldn’t be religion, and politics in those days was “expected to inspire vigorous debate and continual self-examination rather than automatic patriotism” (p35).
Furthermore, Americans could, and still can, find in mass contemplation of their own engineering prowess a way to experience the euphoria of belonging not only to a like-minded crowd but to one of the greatest nations in the world. Nonetheless, you cannot read this book without continuing to wonder over the scale of American technological silliness and self-delusion. What may be most sublime in America - at least in the sense of filling one with awe, rendering one speechless and provoking a profound sense of dislocation - is Americans themselves. Along with all his keen and fabulously dry observation of American foibles (and I maintain that they are an easy target, being apparently so unaware of their eccentricities), Nye backs up his thesis with a truly stunning amount of detail. Nye talks about how journalists throughout American history have tried to describe their sublime response by reeling off grocery lists of numbers, and then proceeds to do the same, and it is impressive. Tons of concrete, miles of steel spanning the continent, thousands of lightbulbs illuminating world fairs and expositions. It’s a historian’s dream and should win a prize for research, but sometimes the writing staggers under the weight of all the detail. The scope of the book is equally vast: added to the major categories in the chapter headings are small, meticulously researched forays into fire works, power stations, aeroplanes and the Corliss engine, among others. The chapter on bridges alone, with its fascinating description of the Eads Bridge and its construction, would make the book worthwhile strictly as a reference book. I doubt that there is any area of technology untouched in this book, and it will make an important resource for anyone studying science from an historical or sociological perspective.
When The Washington Post and The New York Times finally met the unabomber’s demand and The Post published his neo-Luddite manifesto in a special supplement on 19 September, it also was made available on Time Warner’s “pathfinder” site on the World Wide Web. Printed later that same week in the Oakland Tribune because of overwhelming regional demand, the document, entitled “Industrial Society and Its Future”, calls for the destruction of the “economic and technological basis of the present society” and a return to “wild nature”. The manifesto may be of more than passing interest to scholars of science and technology, if only for the connection the American FBI suspects between the history and sociology of science and technology and the views espoused by the serial bomber.
According to a New York Times article of 5 August, the bomber’s “35,000 word manifesto (…) not only corroborated that interest [in the history of science] but also gave the bureau insight into the issues that concerned the bomber, the depth of his reading and the authors he respected”. The NYT article goes on to explain how that “radical milieu seems to have been the breeding ground for the bomber” and points to the likes of Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul and Theodore Roszack as possible figures of inspiration. The suppositions in the article arose from the visit the FBI paid to the joint meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science and the History of Science Society in New Orleans earlier this year. The FBI invited selected scholars to read the manuscript for clues as to the bomber’s identity and even went so far as to pour over the membership records of both societies.
The bomber or group of bombers, who go by the name of “FC” or “Freedom Club”, has sent or planted 16 bombs intermittedly since 1978. Bombs have been placed in common areas at universities and have been posted to airlines, engineers and scientists, including academics at Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Yale, Berkeley, the University of Michigan and the University of Utah Business School. The unabomber’s pipe and newer letter bombs, concealed in handcrafted wooden boxes and occasionally mailed under false return addresses from American universities, recently have claimed the lives of a Young & Rubicum advertising executive in New Jersey and the president of California Forestry Association, described in the press as a timber lobbyist. In 1985 a computer rental store employee in Sacramento, California was the first to be killed by an FC bomb, disguised as a road hazard. Over the years 23 others have been maimed or wounded in the explosions. FC, who first claimed responsiblity for the bombings in a letter to the San Francisco Examiner in 1985, this year offered to discontinue the campaign in exchange for publication of the manuscript in The New York Times or The Washington Post. At the behest of the FBI and the federal Attorney General’s office, The Post decided to publish the manifesto in full in the interest of public safety. The FBI supposedly has launched its largest manhunt in history.
At least two scholars of science and technology have read and published on the contents of the manuscript. Daniel J. Kevles (in The New Yorker) and Kirkpatrick Sale (in The Nation) each in his own way have endeavored to distance the intellectual pursuits of science and technology scholars from those of the bomber. In “E Pluribus Unabomber” Kevles places the bomber’s passions in the broader, popular context. Kevles writes that not only has technology’s promise soured for an increasingly larger audience but the “critique of high-technology appeals to almost all of us in one way or another”. The unabomber’s romance of the pre-industrial past, he concludes, however, is not shared by the public at large, and few would wish to swap their present lifestyles for a small, autonomous communalism endorsed in the manifesto.
Kirkpatrick Sale, who, unlike Kevles, had read the entire manuscript before going to print, plunges deeper in his critique, at once expressing sympathy for FC’s “persuasive” case and criticizing his lack of originality and “convoluted reasoning”. The manuscript’s argument, which Sale also recounts, can be summarized more or less as follows. Modern man’s freedom has been constrained by the breadth and scope of the techno-economic system. The widespread frustration apparent in Western civilization owes to man’s inability to provide his material necessities for himself, satisfy his innate, psychological needs and control his own destiny. The decisions which affect our lives are taken at such a remote distance by so few that individuals and small groups have very little input in and control over the outcomes. Man has lost his personal and local “autonomy”, and for solace has turned to the mass entertainment industry and useless, “surrogate activities”, as stamp-collecting, spectator sports and even science. Without these palliatives for the people, the system, which has to produce them, would collapse.
Our sorry society is currently in crisis, though, and the goal of the revolutionaries, still to be recruited, consists in “heightening the social stresses within the system (…) so that a revolution against it becomes possible”. The revolutionary strategy is to frame the future as a clear-cut choice between technology and wild nature, so as to appeal to the environmentalist strain in the masses. The bomber continues this what-is-to-be-done? line of thought in paragraph 166 by saying that the “factories should be destroyed, technical books burned, etc.”. Thus the neo-Luddite tag.
Otherwise Sale is surprised by the bomber’s lack of familiarity with the “long Luddistic strain in Western thought”, for the manuscript neither cites nor relies on (his list of) Blake, Shelley, Mumford, Ellul, Goodman, Weber, Schumacher or Carson. According to Sale, the bomber’s inspiration may have come from the Fifth Estate, a long-standing anti-technology publication out of Detroit, while the New York Times article took aim at Science for the People, the 1970s “leftist organization” based in Chicago. The FBI suspects that the bomber studied in or around Chicago and now resides in the San Francisco Bay area. But the unabomber, for his part, spends a lengthy amount of space on the vacuousness of leftism and the spinelessness of its politically correct followers within and without academia, proclaiming the prospective revolution as apolitical.
STS readers will notice only a few lines of reasoning superficially consistent with a broader introductory literature, although, significantly, the semantics are off-line as are the assumptions about the workings of science and technology. The bomber, in paragraph 18, argues that leftist philosophers “insist that everything is culturally relative” and admits that the foundations of objective reality are difficult, if not impossible, to delimit. In paragraph 69 he distinguishes between the psychological effects of synthetic and natural risks. “Primitive” man accepted the risk of disease “stoically”, for it is natural, while modern man’s frustration and anger are a result of “MAN-MADE” threats “imposed” on him. These are the extent of any incipient, general resemblances.
The section entitled “The Motives of Scientists” does not seem to benefit directly from readings in the sociology of scientific careers and practices, current or classical. The bomber reasons that it is absurd that scientitists “are motivated by ‘curiosity’”, or by any clear benefit their work could have for humanity. Scientists, as the rest of the human race, work out of a need to “go through the power process”, which earlier in the work is defined as the cycle of “goal, effort, attainment of goal” and “autonomy”. Nowhere is there a hint of the notion of a reputational structure at work within science or, say, a systemic need to construct soluble, financible problems or to recruit like-minded scientists and graduate students for a growing, competing scientific program. For that matter, the words paradigm, construct and constructivism do not appear in the text, which considering the bomber’s stances towards university “leftists” would seem to be obvious, critical starting points.
As for the bomber’s views of technology, again they reveal little familiarity with much specialized STS reading of the last decade or, patently, with any of the field’s standard truisms or bogeys. Thus, in paragraph 129, we read that “technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed”. Technologies do not liberate; they do not empower. On the contrary, technology’s linear development takes away one individual freedom after another, and thus the only recourse is revolution. To the bomber, other historical or contemporary paths of development (the word “trajectory” does appear once) are not possible. “Never forget that the human race with technology is just like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine.”
In paragraph 215, with an accompanying footnote, FC calls himself an anarchist, who opposes technology as it “makes small groups dependent on large organizations”. Pre-industrial revolution technology, or “small-scale technology”, is preferable because it is not “organization-dependent”, and it is easier to control by the more naturally emerging, autonomous communities of up to 100 people, which he advocates. Considering the bomber’s philosophy of history and view of technological progress, it is rather obvious why he feels that under the current circumstances society is not in the position to rearrange itself in a pre-industrial or scaled-down mode. So “[i]t would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences.” Apart from those inferences mentioned above, there are few scenarios concerning what those future consequences may be. Apart from the goal of eliminating modern technology, there isn’t what may be called a grand design, which admittedly would seem to be far too communist, socialist or at least planned for FC’s anti-“collectivist” leanings. Indeed, the agitators are meant to take an “empirical approach” to revolution, discarding or supplementing the premises of the manifesto as they destablize.
The manuscript has its consumers. The Washington Post has no spare copies remaining, the demand for the manifesto, spurring The Oakland Tribune’s reprint, has been particularly strong around San Francisco, and at least one American university lecturer, at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has gone on the record in The Post as saying he’ll have his students study it this semester. He was quoted as saying the bomber has some of the trappings of a Henry David Thoreau. Personally, I would concentrate less on any similarities to a Thoreau and, following the bomber’s lead in one of his letters, take a more contextual and empirical approach to studying the manifesto, looking more closely at certain historical and contemporary utopian and/or communal experiments in the U.S.A., reading the non-Marxist and libertarian anarchist press, and snowballing far downfield from the respectable school of thought known as social ecology, with its emphasis on freedom, autonomy, communal living, organicism, spontaneity, human scale and revolution and its disdain for the academy and managerial leftism. While the manuscript departs from this school by overgeneralizing about and seeing no future in technology as well as by not dealing explicitly with such concepts as spontaneity and organicism, nevertheless it is there that those concerned may begin to learn something of the context. Without making mistaken innuendos reminiscent of The New York Times, I should like the reader to consider this a passing of the baton to someone more conversant with that or another literature or milieu more relevant than STS’s.
It was a good place to hang around. Very European. Multicultural. Witty people. A community of friends. It was always Sunday.
All of this seems to have ended by now. Hostility rages. Heard the latest news? ‘They are no longer on speaking terms.’ ‘There is a war going on.’
The first shots were fired during a small meeting in Bath, one Saturday, in February 1990. The meeting ended with dinner in a Lebanese restaurant. Soon after, email messages started to circulate, making it clear that deep differences had come to the surface. No Sundays any more, after this Saturday. Read the ravaging/outrageous review of Latour’s book Collins did for Isis. Listen to Latour. Watch Woolgar. Lebanese dinners are not good omens.
Let’s not dramatise. We’re talking about science and technology studies, not about the Balkans. This is a conflict of the size of one of former Yougoslavia’s stamps.
No one with a taste for intellectual matters should be scared by a few rounds of polemics. Pfeffer for the mind. There is nothing exceptional in a discipline splitting up after some time. Young Turks stand up against the old guard and start shouting. But nothing like that has happened here. The main combatants are scholars with long-standing careers. Old hands. A former President of 4S. A recipient of the Bernal Award.
Is the dispute between Harry Collins and Bruno Latour perhaps just a matter of egos in overdrive? The terms in which the debate is conducted and the issues that are at stake suggest that, at least, also more serious matters are involved. It is, among other things, a debate about the scope and ambitions of our business and about the way we should evaluate the achievements of the past decades. Is science studies one of many branches of sociology, a sub-discipline that studies the social process of knowledge production? Or does science and technology studies open a window to the modern world at large? Are we talking about the core of a future anthropology that will completely replace traditional sociology?
True, but the heat of the debate is on a different level. Observe the highly abstract and philosophical issues that are discussed: Humans and Non-Humans, Man and Nature, the Social and the Technical. Deep down, there are Weltanschauungen operating in this debate, which translate into differences in methods, ambitions and styles of writing.
Put shortly, the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) is heir to the English and German enlightenment, to a tradition that takes epistemology to be the core of philosophy. Collins is a Kantian dressed up as a sociologist, a rationalist who uses empiricist rhetoric. Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) does not start from this tradition. Its interest lies in the nature of the modern world and it comes with the claim that to analyse this world, one has to bypass epistemology. Latour is doing pan-semiotic ontology. Pardon me?
Let me try to describe the philosophical landscape and let’s see how it turned into a battlefield.
SSK
Harry Collins’s Changing Order brilliantly sums up the core of SSK. The point of departure is a simple observation: although the world comes to us in what William James once described as ‘blooming, buzzing confusion,’ there is concerted perception and understanding in science. Collins conceives the task of SSK as to analyse how such concerted perception and action come about, i.e., how scientists actually come to be certain about regularities in practice, how they organise the chaotic world of experience into structured knowledge. As such, Collins’s problem is a well-known, traditional philosophical one, viz. the problem of induction, the problem of how knowing subjects acquire knowledge about the world.
The particular version Collins works upon is drawn from the work of Nelson Goodman. It brings the problem of induction on the level of language rather than knowledge. Epistemological scepticism is translated into the problem of how we know the meaning of words and phrases. Enter Wittgenstein. In Philosophische Untersuchungen, the concept of rule-governed behaviour is introduced to explicate the meaning of words: meaning is rule-governed use. But rules do not contain the rules for their application. So, ‘something more’ is needed to guarantee our continuous correct use of language. According to Collins, ‘social conventions’ fill in this gap. Even in the case that we ourselves have forgotten what the correct application of a rule is, others will be able to identify a mistake. Ergo, the criterion for correct use rests with a community of rule-followers.
Meaning is thus constituted by a community providing agreement. This agreement is not an agreement of opinion but one of being socialised in a ‘form of life’, an agreement in doing things, i.e., to follow certain rules. For example, the physicists Collins is talking about agree on what counts as a good experiment, what counts as a valid argument, what counts as a good scientific paper, etcetera. This agreement is shown in the actual practice of physics as a discipline, in institutionalised beliefs.
At this point, all the essential connections for SSK have been made. The traditional epistemological problem of induction has been transformed into scepticism with respect to meaning. This scepticism cannot be answered as long as we hold a view on language that explicates meaning in terms of truth conditions, because that would bring us back to epistemological problems. Therefore we need another semantics, another philosophy of language: one that concentrates on assertibility conditions. These assertibility conditions are provided by a community that shares a form of life. Enter sociology. Sociologists are the experts on community life. They know everything about institutionalisation. So they can answer the problem of induction. There follows Collins’s solution to this problem: ‘It is not the regularity of the world that imposes itself on our senses, but the regularity of our institutionalised beliefs that imposes itself on our world.’
How much progress has been made? In philosophical respect, not much. Kant pointed to ‘transcendental categories’ where Collins thinks that the ‘regularity of institutionalised beliefs’ operates. What Collins has provided is in fact a sociologicised and dynamic version of rationalism: what marks out humans in nature is not - as Kant thought - the mind (rationality, consciousness), but socialisation. Kant’s formulation, however, has the advantage of not being circular, while Collins’s solution is: the phrase ‘the regularity of institutionalised beliefs’ introduces the induction-problem on a new level. This circularity can be neutralised by embracing epistemological relativism. (Philosophers generally don’t like that: relativism is a poor man’s philosophy. If we accept relativism, why bother about epistemology at all).
But in other respects, Collins’s approach has decisive advantages. It opens scientific knowledge to sociological investigation: to do what epistemologists used to do - i.e., to speak about the nature of knowledge, to account for concerted perception - we may study empirically, by describing the interactions in scientific communities, how beliefs become institutionalised and controversies closed. This is Changing Order’s main asset: detailed analyses of the ways beliefs become institutionalised in science. Philosophical epistemology is replaced by detailed sociological study of the development of scientific knowledge. The content of scientific knowledge is explained by its social context, SSK claims.
So, Collins is a present-day rationalist of sorts. However, the rhetoric in his work, the style of his writing and arguing, is definitively empiricist: the sociologist reveals ‘what everyone should know about science’. In this respect the spirit of David Hume’s famous peroration in the first Enquiry reigns over British SSK: Pick up any book about scientific knowledge. Does it contain detailed (sociological or historical) observation? If not, commit it to the flames.
This is SSK’s Weltanschauung and like any Weltanschauung, it splits the world up into good and bad guys. Who are SSK’s enemies? We can predict the answer. First, of course, all who fail to contribute to the solution of the basic epistemological problem: they do not seem to have any interest in science at all. In the second place, everyone who defends a non-rationalist epistemology: realists, mainly, whatever their further convictions may be. Thirdly, all rationalist philosophers whose insights are not based on detailed - sociological, or historical - observation. Popperians, for example, who dare to argue about science in logical terms, rather than base their ideas on such solid grounds as interviews conducted over lunch. Fourthly, all ‘reflexive’ sociologists and philosophers. They have to be kept at arm’s length. People who think that there might be something puzzling and even paradoxical in using empiricist rhetoric to answer rationalist questions, spoil the game. Last, but certainly not least, everybody who blurs the distinction between the human and the non-human world should arouse deep suspicion. This includes adepts of Artificial Intelligence, the chattering classes who have discovered that they are cyborgs, and also ANT. Rationalists are committed to the view that man has a special place in the world. Their epistemology is based on an inherent asymmetry: what can be said about the ‘non-human world’ is what is perceived by humans. We only have epistemic access to the phenomenal world, not to the noumenal world. The stuff we focus on and interact with are interpretations of the world, never ‘things-in-themselves’. To turn blooming, buzzing confusion into organised knowledge requires human accomplishment.
As we will see, Latour is guilty on all charges, except the fourth one. The problem is that he refuses to stand in this court.
ANT
Latour’s interests are definitively not primarily epistemological, but ontological ones. He does not focus on the nature of knowledge of the world, but tries to figure out the nature of a world in which knowledge plays a role our world, i.e., the world of science and technology.
To get a feel for ANT, think of the world as a staged play. How does an actor become a character in a play? Only by interacting with other actors and with artefacts, and by speaking about himself, artefacts, events, and so on. What character is he? Look for the artefacts and the actors that surround him and the plots he is involved in. Watch how artefacts mediate to define a character: a crown on his head translates an actor into a king, and vice versa. How does a prop become a particular artefact which plays a definite role in the world of the play? Look how it has become involved in interactions. On stage, each thing is only constituted solely through its interrelations with, and differences from, everything else. Nothing has any intrinsic features of its own. ‘The properties of a thing are effects on other “things”. If I remove all the relationships, all the “properties”, all the “activities” of a thing, the thing does not remain.’ (Is that a Latour quotation? No, but it could have been. In fact, this is Nietzsche). So, to answer any question about what anything is, and to answer any question about meaning, we have to study how the world in which it plays a role is built up as an effect of interactions, i.e., interactions in which both humans and non-humans are involved. We have to deconstruct the ‘scripts’ that brought actors and artefacts into existence, study their genealogy, and see how in that process they became bestowed with essences.
What is the philosophy behind this? First, call to mind the Saussurian idea (commonplace in semiotics) that there are only differences in language: nothing inherently suits a phoneme for its role in words, the only thing that matters is that it differs from other phonemes. (For example, the phoneme b enters in bat and bed, not in rat and red - that makes b into a distinguished phoneme, but nothing inherently affords b this particular role.) ANT follows up on this. It radicalises this idea, by applying the Saussurean principle to the whole world. Interestingly, ANT is not the first to have done this. In fact, Nietzsche already took - twenty years before Saussure - this step (from which Saussure explicitly refrained) to apply the intuition that language is a system of differences to the whole world. So, what we are talking about is a pan-semiotic ontology, a Nietzschean conception of the world as a text, or - as I would prefer - as a staged play.
No intrinsic features, but differences and interactions constituting a world - thatÕs the main idea. Even the ontological categories are subject to change. There is no a priori distinction between Man and Nature, Subject and Object. You want to know what the world consists of? Want to know the essence of what has come to exist through the actions of humans and non-humans? Join the audience, watch the play and see how the world evolves as a sequence of events, as an effect of interrelations. See how the world develops as a network of interlocking characters and artefacts. Just follow the play. Now, sit back and reflect on this for a while. Notice first that it is sheerly impossible to imagine a play without props. Even in En Attendant Godot, there is a rope. Artefacts are crucial elements of almost any situation in which humans interact. If we want to analyse the world, we should take human actors and non-human artefacts on a par. Perhaps we better use one term for both: actant. It will help us see how humans and non-humans may change places, how delegation of human action to a machine may occur. Secondly, observe that on stage, there is only local action. If a faraway, out of sight, event is supposed to affect the course of action we are looking at, the playwright has to introduce a messenger who or which mediates that faraway event for the actors on stage, and for us, the audience. Therefore, if you want to study the modern world, a world in which science and technology play a dominant role, study how texts and artefacts and scientific instruments circulate, how laboratories are built and statistics are collected. For these are the actants that mediate, that make up the extended, often global, networks that characterise our modern world.
This is what Latour is extremely good at: staging an episode in the history of science or technology, picking out the relevant actors and props, showing the work they do, reflecting on what’s going on, and thus turning thick description into philosophy. As an anthropologist of science and technology, Latour is playwright and literary critic in one. But aren’t we, as audience, interpreting the events on stage? Yes, of course, in a certain sense we are, but that is not the point. On stage, in normal cases, there is no ‘interpretative flexibility’. Props speak in a clear voice: ‘I’m a crown.’ The actors on stage take this for granted, as does the audience captured by the play. Of course, someone may begin to question whether this thing is the real crown or a forgery, but then the action of the play has already turned into a different phase.
Likewise in science. Instruments - and more generally: natural phenomena and things - speak in a clear voice. Outcomes of measurements are taken for granted as unproblematic units; they are ‘black boxed’. However, scientists can question outcomes, ‘open the black box’, by using interpretative flexibility as a rhetorical tool. When a scientist doesn’t believe an opponent’s claim, but has not yet found a conclusive countermove, he may weaken the opponent’s stand by pointing out that his claim is ‘(just) an interpretation’, suggesting that other views are possible as well.
For Collins and the rationalist philosophical tradition, knowledge consists of interpretations of natural phenomena. For Latour, ‘interpretations’ are the exception, not the rule. ANT focuses on the ways in which arguments (produced by humans) and data (produced by machines) become lined up into black-boxed ‘facts’ that can speak as one: measuring devices, field experiments, graphs summarising data, even the title of a paper - they all can be instrumental to this effect. Whereas the rationalist tradition perceives human scientists interpreting non-human phenomena, i.e., organising chaotic experiences through the filter of institutionalised beliefs into certified knowledge, ANT focuses on the mediation that is involved in enrolling and controlling both human actors and non-human props into a tight network. In this outlook, interpretation and hence the problem of induction are borderline phenomena.
ANT stresses that networks always involve two-way interaction: everything and everybody that acts, will also be acted upon. For ANT, there is no a priori distinction between something organising (scientists, transcendental categories, institutionalised beliefs, or social context, all being directly linked up with humans) and something being organised (nature, data, experience, etcetera). The difference between organising and being organised is only a matter of time. We have to watch how the play evolves, to see the work that goes into organising (human and non-human) actants into (temporarily) stable networks.
This Weltanschauung is more catholic (in both senses of the term) than the one we discussed before. But this one too, picks out its good and bad guys. Who are ANT’s enemies? First and foremost: the epistemologists. They commit complicated sins. They ignore ontological questions and as a result, they become victim of the rigid modernist worldview with its timeless ontological categories: subject and object, Man and Nature, Humans and Non-Humans. The outcome of the long process of the genealogy of the world is mistaken for an unproblematic starting point of analysis. As a result, epistemologists are seduced to think that they should answer the question as to how scientists organise blooming, buzzing and confusing experience into concerted perception. However, someone who experiences the world as blooming buzzing confusion is certainly not a scientist; he probably needs psychiatric help. SSK fails to see that the content and context of scientific knowledge are both outcomes of the work that goes into building networks of humans and artefacts, and that in this network scientists and the world they investigate mutually assume form.
The second class of enemies of ANT is made up by philosophers who take ontology seriously, but who lack the ability to feed this interest with detailed, empirical analyses: Heidegger, for instance. There are certainly similarities between Latour’s interests and those of this philosopher. But there is a crucial difference in style of writing that one should not skip over light-heartedly. For Heidegger, the modern world has lost something; its genealogy is a story of decline. No need, therefore, to bother with detailed examples. Heidegger has no interest in the modern world itself. Enough. Get rid of him.
The third group are the reflexivists. In criticising SSK, they accept too much of the epistemologist’s framework and problematic. What’s more, their approach often turns into unreadable writing. For somebody with a dramaturg’s eye, this is a deadly sin.
The dispute
From the point of view of SSK, Latour’s philosophy is metaphysical nonsense. For SSK, ANT just fails to take advantage of the critical attitude that came with the epistemological scepticism of Hume and Kant. As a result, as soon as Latour starts to discuss science and technology, he is either naive or wrong. He seems to think that scientists have unproblematic access to the world of facts, and that bacteria, Coquilles Saint Jacques or whatever object may draw his attention, speak in a clear voice. Naively, he falls back into the out-of-date realism of the philosophically and sociologically illiterate. As a result, Latour’s practice is reactionary. Uncritically, he embraces the winners in the social power games of science and technology. Admittedly, it took some time before all of this became clear. LatourÕs style of writing, which emulates the style of serious empirical work, misled SSK. But in Latour’s recent work, there is little left of the ‘empirical fulcrum that gave his earlier work its leverage’. The verdict is therefore clear: ‘[Latour’s] We Have Never Been Modern has nothing to offer on the question of the primacy of human society in the making of knowledge, nor on a host of other topics with which SSK still struggles.’ In fact, with hindsight, one may wonder whether Latour has ever been part of the great enterprise that SSK is.
Now that SSK has finished its plea, let us turn to the opposite party.
Of course things look different from ANT’s perspective. Latour is happy to admit that SSK has been very useful in the past, but only ‘for a split second’. SSK helped to transform sterile philosophical studies of science and technology into a discipline where an eye for empirical detail really matters. But Collins is wrong in thinking that the real work has already been done and that we can be proud of the achievements of ‘social studies of science’ in the past. It is true: ANT ‘has nothing to offer on the question of the primacy of human society in the making of knowledge’. But this is not due to a sudden weakness of the mind of ANT’s practitioners. The reason ANT has nothing to offer on this issue is that, on second analysis, the question is completely ill-framed. It takes for granted what has to be analysed: what is ‘society’?; what role humans and non-humans play in the making of knowledge?; etc. The topics with which SSK still struggles are hardly worthy of attention. Not ANT is the problem, but the other side. Because he fails to move beyond the epistemological problematique, Collins’s ‘social constructivist’ epistemology is by now brain-dead.
It is hard to imagine how this deadlock can ever be unravelled. In this dispute, SSK and ANT not only embody different philosophies, but, as a result of this, they also fundamentally differ on what the dispute is about. However, as in any war, the fronts in this conflict have in fact been less static than the rhetoric of the generals suggests.
Consider first ANT’s development. (Hey, I’m trying to be fair, so it’s time to reverse the order of presentation used so far.) There has been an interesting shift in Latour’s style of writing. Laboratory Life was written in the style of an anthropological site visit, with a few theoretical models and a couple of jokes to sum up the results. This was a style familiar to empirically oriented sociologists and for that reason they can be excused for failing to see that LatourÕs aims differed radically from both traditional sociology of science and SSK. In Latour’s later work, the double role of the (ANT) anthropologist as playwright and literary critic has become much more explicit. Latour’s Aramis is a good example. In this book, the history of Aramis, a French high-tech public transportation system, is cleverly and elegantly staged in a kind of Bildungsroman. A young student becomes a detective of sorts, and in the course of his attempts to answer the question ‘who killed Aramis?’, he learns what technology and society are made off. What mediates the past? Documents with technical details, evaluation reports, interviews with engineers and policy-makers, his professorÕs commentary. Out of these fragments, the student reconstructs the world of Aramis. From scattered splinters of the past, like an archeologist, he constructs how content (‘technology’) and context (‘society’) co-developed. He comes to understand that Aramis is not a thing ‘out there’ that is killed by a character (Capitalism, the Communist Party, Engineering Problems) waiting in the background to be discovered. He comes to know a network, and discovers why it disintegrated in the end. How do we, as readers, learn about all of this? In the same way: by constructing a plot out of the fragments in this book. The literary form of the book supports the (ANT) content. By emphasising mediation and by selecting a clever format of writing, the problems the epistemological tradition used to frame as ‘problems of method’ are tackled.
Now consider SSK. By the end of the 1980s, Collins became engaged in a shoot-out with Artificial Intelligence. The reason was obvious. AI’s claim that intelligent machines exist (or are at least at the point of becoming reality) is - if true - a clear refutation of SSK’s basic idea that there is a fundamental and unbridgeable difference between socialised human beings and the non-human world of machines and nature. In this debate, Collins used an argument that did wonderfully well. He claimed that whereas humans can (intentionally) mimic machine behaviour, the reverse is not true: machines cannot mimic normal human action. However, because of the former, we are tempted to think that there is overlap between human action and machine behaviour and that there are in fact certain types of human action that can be better performed by a machine. But this is false. Machines are generally better in performing machine behaviour than men are in mimicking this (machine) behaviour. But from this, it doesn’t follow at all that machines will ever have the capacity to mimic typically human, socialised, and rule-governed action. Machines are good in the area where machines are good: machine behaviour (humans are not so good in this domain); humans are good in the area where humans are good: socialised action (in this domain machines fail). The argument is a little tricky (because it begs the question that is at stake in the AI debate), but it worked. Collins then moved on to apply the same argument to tackle problems that are closer to ANT’s interests: the question as to which part - if any - of human skills can be delegated to machines and, more generally, the problem ‘how men and machines mix’. Observe that this is no longer an epistemological problem, but an ontological one, and that it comes very close to ANT’s interests. But as we will see, Collins’s views remained informed by the same (epistemology-based) philosophy that informed SSK.
The problem ‘how men and machines mix’ turned out to be much more difficult to answer than AI’s outrageous claims. A long sequence of papers (and a forthcoming book with Martin Kush) shows Collins’s adding new distinctions again and again to account for the supposed basic difference between socialised human beings and non-human artefacts. For some time, like the Ptolemaic astronomers, Collins made the impression of needing to add ever new epicycles to save a system that was about to collapse. Moreover, his style of reasoning changed: no more interviews with scientists and engineers over lunch, but elementary examples discussed in the style of good old analytical philosophy - a style that had been discarded in the early days of SSK as pedantic and useless. However, in the end, Collins’s answer came down to an interesting claim that - I think - can be summarised in a simple formula: Yes, men and machines mix, but men mix differently with machines than machines mix with men. With this claim, Collins sticks to SSKÕs point of view laid down in the 1970s (the asymmetry between socialised humans and non-humans), but he also allows some room for a role for un-socialised machines in our concepts of human society and human action. It took Collins a long detour to arrive at a point that is obvious to Latour: that it takes more than just ‘interpretation’ to account for the ways in which humans and non-humans (machines, nature) mix. But along the way, Collins has qualified Latour’s point. His claim points to the possibility that Latour has been too rash in using one category (actant) for both human actors and non-human artefacts. Even if we accept the idea of hybrid (human plus non-human) networks as the basic stuff the world is made of, it may be the case that human actors and non-human artefacts lock into these networks in ways that differ systematically in an interesting way. It is an hypothesis (it is an hypothesis) worthy to be discussed and tested.
Let’s set out two simple constraints for this debate. First, any future contribution to this matter will have to turn philosophy into thick description and back. Let us in that respect grant the ‘split second’ of SSK to last forever. Second, one has to cook up a clever format of writing. A straightforward empiricist phrase regimen (‘this is how I found the world to be’) will not do for the obvious reason that it presupposes the distinction between humans and the world that is at stake. It also entails too simplistic ideas about time and our relation to history. If the texture of the world is made up by a mix of humans and non-humans, we should expect the traces of that to come out in our texts.
No doubt, it will take the parties involved some effort to move, to imagine the opponent’s point of view, to shift style and leave behind philosophical (and national and egotistical) bases. Perhaps EASST can organise a conference. The airbase in Dayton, Ohio, seems to have excellent facilities that are vacant by now.
Notes
See the papers by Collins, Yearley, Woolgar, Callon and Latour in A. Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992
Isis, 85 (1994), 672 - 674.
There are more people involved in the debate than Harry Collins and Bruno Latour, including Steven Yearley and Michel Callon and Steve Woolgar. To reduce complexity, I will stick to Collins and Latour.
I use ANT because it is an established name by now, although “Actor Network Approach” seems to me to be more appropriate.
H.M. Collins, Changing Order, London: SAGE, 1985
Collins follows Winch’s “hermeneutic” reading of Wittgenstein. This reading is by now contested by Wittgenstein-exegetists. See e.g. G. de Vries, “Consequences of Wittgenstein’s Farewell to Epistemology.” In: L’étude sociale des sciences - Bilan des annŽes 1970 et 1980 et consequences pour le travail historique, ed. D. Pestre. Paris: Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques, Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, 1992.
F. Nietzsche, Aus dem Nachlass der achtziger Jahre, Werke III, Muenchen: Hanser Verlag, 1966, p. 502.
Cf. A. Nehemas, Nietzsche - Life as Literature, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1985, esp. Chapter 3.
A better view on the Nietzsche connection may help to save ANT from the often aired accusation that it embodies a voluntaristic ideology. This accusation (which in CollinsÕs review in ISIS takes the form of a wild association of LatourÕs work with Margaret Thatcher’s idea that there are only ÔindividualsÕ, and no such thing as ‘society’) is based on a simplistic interpretation of the concept of the ‘will to power’. Cf. Nehamas op.cit. for a more interesting reading of this concept.
B. Latour, La Clef de Berlin, Paris: Ed. la Decouverte, 1993
Collins, Isis, cf. fn. 2
B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life, London: Sage, 1979
B. Latour, Aramis ou lÕamour des techniques, Paris: Ed. la Decouverte, 1992. An English translation is forthcoming.
H.M. Collins, Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines. Boston: MIT Press, 1990
This paper grew out of a ridiculously long email message to, among others, Collins and Latour, sent in 1990 shortly after the Bath conference where the papers for the Pickering volume (cf. note 1) had been discussed. I refrained from publishing the argument because I was very pleased to see references to my email message in the printed press. The recent new outbreak of the dispute made me rethink my position. Several people have contributed to the argument, including the two main protagonists of SSK and ANT, and my colleagues Rob Hagendijk, Werner Callebaut, Ruud Hendriks and Annemarie Mol.
Review of: Angel Kowlek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women In the Corporate Office, 1870-1930, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994.
Angel Kwolek-Folland’s Engendering Business is an important exploration of the changing nature of gender relations in the United States between 1870 and 1930. It builds upon, contributes to and goes beyond the rich secondary literature in business history (Chandler, Wiebe), labor history (Braverman, Baron), material culture (Ames & Martinez, Upton & Vlauch) studies and women’s studies (Aron, Davies, DeVault, Rotundo, Scott). Part of a new series on gender relations in the American experience published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Kwolek-Folland’s book takes the transformation of the corporate office as the analytical focus. In industries of banking and insurance, the corporate office represented the bureaucracy par excellence: the industry’s office work did not merely support the business operation but occupied the center of the production. Bookkeepers, secretaries, stenographers, cashiers, file clerks, telephone operators, office machine operators, payroll clerks, receptionists, stock clerks, typists, sale clerks and managers ‘produced’ the intangible goods of the service industries. In the sixty years under discussion, the corporate office had become a site where middle-class men and women mingled, but did so through careful negotiations over time, space and job descriptions. By the 1930s clerks had become an icon of womanhood, while managers and salesmen represented the “central male figures of the new gender relations of the business world” (p. 70).
At first, the study seems to be an historical narrative, analyzing the growth of the financial industry’s office as a site of production. Kwolek-Folland closely examines the historical records of U.S. life insurance companies such as Metropolitan Life and other important corporate offices. Upon closer examination, however, the author has organized her book not in chronological order but in a topical manner to tell her almost anthropological story of gender. Instead of chronicling the history of office work from the small family run organization to the corporations, Kwolek-Folland shows how gender constituted the very fabric of the corporate office.
The increased numbers of young women — both ethnically white and African-American — found new employment opportunities in the emerging corporate bureaucracies. As many other scholars have shown before her, these structural changes altered working relations on the office floor in profound manners. Equally important, gender rhetoric smoothed the entry of women into office work and also created new male-defined job categories such as managers, executives and salesmen. Thus, the dynamics of gender did not merely involve women, but also was the business of men.
If the ideal office worker (as someone who could be subservient and selfless) operated as a middle-class male ideal in the precorporate office so long as men could hope for promotion, that ideal would become at once more appropriate for middle-class women and more threatening to men when possibilities for promotion became less a viable option by the early twentieth century.
More profoundly, perhaps, the author argues that gender had an impact far beyond the socialization of men and women and the structure of their work. For example, she shows how corporate America literally incorporated the idea of the family and womanhood in order to domesticate as well as mask the underlying hard-nosed competitiveness of their businesses and the subordination of their workers. The corporations, emphasis on feminine ideals of service and corporate domesticity was both metaphorical and material since “blood ties were present at every level of corporate experience, from executives to the clerical staff”. In particular, the corporate domesticity and kinship were created, expressed and integrated by corporate sponsored leisure activities such as soccer games, wedding showers, outings, and gift giving. Corporate domesticity went beyond the employment of gendered language, however. It took on concrete material forms in the architectural shape of the skyscraper. Within its concrete walls, office spaces echoed nineteenth- century female-coded parlors shaped as a new public domain.
Kwolek-Folland’s very important conclusion is that gendered language and practices shaped the corporate production process by suggesting that corporate work was based on the “natural hierarchies of gender rather than economic imperatives or class status”. It masked class tensions through the rich and elaborate employment of gender images and practices. “Corporate domesticity, with its symbolic images of womanhood and manhood, masked the hierarchical realities and paternalism of corporate organization” (p. 186).
The book marks an important synthesis of previous and emerging scholarship, not the least because its research lives up to and elaborates on the years of theorizing in gender studies. Through painstaking historical scholarship, it demonstrates that the employment of gender is more than a code word for women’s studies to include men, shows the changing varieties of male and female gender scripts in relation to each other, and employs gender a useful category for historical analysis (Scott). If that is not enough, it is through its critical use of footnotes that we learn the true import of the book. In many places, Kwolek-Folland provides alternative interpretations and elaborations of current scholarship. For example, she shows how the ideas of Scientific Management had been practiced within corporations decades before it became articulated as a system of belief in the 1910s; in another place, she takes issue with Chandler and Wiebe’s neglect of the theories of salesmanship in the development of professional management theory; and in a chapter on spatial arrangements of corporate offices, she has different readings of architectural historiography in her interpretation of the commercial buildings such as hotels, apartment buildings and the skyscrapers that insurance companies built for themselves. Insurance buildings built after 1870 did not move away from domestic imagery, but rather negotiated the increasingly fragile boundaries between domestic and commercial spaces by creating public spaces that incorporated the intimacy of the home into its design.
Anyone interested in the rise of the corporations, the history of gender relations and cultural history should include this significant book on the reading list.
Cited Works:
Ames, Kenneth L.; Martinez, Katharine (eds.), The Material Culture of Gender/Gender of Material Culture, New York, W.W. Norton, 1994.
Aron, Cindy S., Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1987.
Baron, Ava (ed.) , Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990.
Braverman, Harry, Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1974.
Chandler Jr., Alfred D., The Visible Hand: the Managerial Revolution in American Business, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1977.
Davies, Margery W., Woman’s Place is at the Typewriter, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1982.
DeVault, Ileen, Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and Clerical Work in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh, 1990.
Rotundo, E. Anthony, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era, New York, Basic Books, 1993.
Scott, Joan W., “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”, Journal of American History, 1053-1075, 1986.
Upton, Dell and John Michael Vlach (eds.) Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1986.
Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877-1920, New York, Hill & Wang, 1976.
Review of: Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science, Faber & Faber, London, 1992.
In the 1960s, E.P. Snow suggested the need to bridge the two cultures between the arts and humanities on the one hand and the natural sciences on the other. In recent times Steve Fuller suggests that Snow’s two cultures still exist and seem to be played out between science and sociology - the debate continuing more between practising scientists and those engaged in the social study of science rather than between literary intellectuals and scientists.
The new critics think those engaged in science studies have put science in the dock despite the fact that the latter as a group has not elaborated a shared and well-defined theoretical position with respect to science. In spite of the variety of approaches within science studies, these scientists claim that science studies has managed to achieve a shared tone which is unambiguously hostile to science. These natural scientists can be said to constitute a distinct culture owing to their mission to rescue science from this hostility and by the alternative social, moral, philosophical statements they often pronounce themselves in the process. These scientists can be distinguished from other scientists who are interested in positively engaging within the debates of science studies. The Unnatural Nature of Science by Lewis Wolpert has the distinction of being one of the earliest statements which triggered the new debate in the 1990s.
Wolpert defended scientific knowledge by constructing science as a unitary kind of thinking with distinctive virtues distinguishable from mere common sense. The five cases identified as having tainted science and from which science must purify itself and separate its identity are: a) the notion that every human being is a potential scientist, b) the lack of distinction between technology and science, c) the confusing of the Greek origin of science, d) the conflating of artistic creativity with scientific creativity, and e) the claim by anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers of science to regard scientific knowledge on a par with other knowledge.
Everyone a Potential Scientist
Wolpert asserts that the view that man is innately curious and thereby capable of critical and self-conscious reflection about knowledge about nature is a myth. Left to his own resources, he opines, man is only capable of curiosity up to matters that affect his conduct. He limits attainable knowledge to common sense and ordinary man’s curiosity to intuition. Both are thought unreliable for scientific thought. In fact Wolpert declares “if something fits in with common sense it almost certainly is not science” (p11). This is because the way the universe works is different from the way our common sense works in understanding the immediate world around us. Science is not a result of a simple interrogation of nature by intuitive thinking and every day experience. It is both counter-intuitive and outside everyday experience (pxii). Scientists are admonished to be aware of the errors of applying natural/intuitive thinking and theories in scientific knowledge production, and to recognise that it is precisely “the unnatural nature of science that historically made it so rare” (p11).
Wolpert employs the rhetorical distinction between thinking and common sense to divide humanity between a vast lay public and a few elite scientists. There are difficulties with this stance. First, the idea that thinking in science is “meta-unitarian” fails to recognise that there is not one kind of thinking which runs through different disciplines of science or within a discipline of science, and in different organisations or within an organisation of science. In physics, for example, there is theoretical and experimental aspects often evolving differing thinking methods depending on the historical development of the science. The Newtonian mechanistic thinking with the universe as a clockwork metaphor is not the same as relativistic-quantum physical thinking or the contemporary Santa Fe’s complexity theoretical thought. Cartesian mechanistic thinking from the seventeenth century has been replaced by the crude holism of late twentieth century contemporary complexity theory. Field theory in physics is different from geometrical kinematics and celestial mechanics. Wolpert constructs a meta-attribute to thinking whilst still recognising that science and scientific method are differentiated. He himself tells us that science does not fit a “simple minded description in terms of Kuhn’s paradigm or Popper’s falsification” (p108-109), adding that there is no such thing as the scientific method. Why is his attribution to scientific thinking a defining, distinctive and singular generality of “counter-intuition” less simple-minded than Kuhn’s paradigms or Popper’s falsification? How can Wolpert square his position of science and scientific methods as differentiated and plural with a single meta-unitarian thinking running through all of them?
Second, Wolpert uses the term common sense in a static and an undifferentiated manner. All kinds of common sense is described as “unconscious”. The self-aware thinking of science is compared to a common sense defined or lumped together in a single category as “unconscious”. Common sense in one culture could just as well be “counter-intuitive” thinking in other cultures.
The conflation of “common sense” with the term “unconscious” is also problematic because examples showing common sense as conscious are legion. Every day existence is full of such examples from crossing roads to making decisions on all kinds of problems. Wolpert seems to be “unconscious” of the contradictions of his own thinking here. The use of the comparison between a unitarian thinking of science and unconscious common sense helps him to build science as an elitist project which only special human beings from the western world with “self-aware” virtues can engage in. With it he classifies scientists as a special breed of men from the west by distinguishing them from the rest of humanity. Only some 15 per cent of the human race are said to be capable of doing science.
Third, ordinary people who carry out ordinary existences partake in conscious thinking. Modern complex societies demand self-aware living. The reduction of common sense only to unconscious reasoning radically simplifies the complexity of common sense experience. It is endlessly problematic to rank one as superior and another inferior - just as it would be to rank one kind of experience or knowledge as superior and another inferior.
Clarifying the Confusion between Science and Technology
His next move is to try to validate this distinction between common sense and science by classifying much of technology as requiring “no understanding or theory of the kinds provided by science” (p26).
The ancient cultures, especially the Chinese, have made significant achievements technologically, but their inventions were not based on science. They never managed, claims Wolpert, to theorise the process or give reasons why the technology worked. Science is said to have played no role even in such inventions like the compass, the telescope and steam engine. Chinese exports to Europe - gun powder, printing, the magnetic compass - “owed nothing to science” (p28). For technology neither learning nor literacy was relevant. The motivations of technology and science are different. The final product of science is an idea whilst that of technology is an artefact. Creators of technology want money, whilst scientists seek esteem. Technology succeeds if it correspond to wants and needs, whilst science’s success is measured when its results correspond with reality. The epistemological status of technology and science are radically different. Wolpert claims that “[t]he very nature of scientific and technological thinking is dissimilar. Many aspects of technology are visual and non-verbal, which is quite unlike scientific thinking” (p33-34). Much of the belief that ordinary intuition can understand science comes from a thinking which adulterates science with technology. There was no relationship between science and technology until the nineteenth century. “Engineering, even today, should not just be construed as merely applied science” (p34).
This position radically simplifies the ontological interpenetration of science and technology in present-day circumstances. The way science is done has changed from the Scientific Revolution to the present. Wolpert does not recognise that much of scientific research has become industrial activity. Much of science is done within corporations, research institutes and universities by specialists based on a division of labour using the latest technologies. The consequence of the industrialisation of science is the development of the “scientification” of technology and the “technologisation” of science.
The Greek Origin of Science
The next move focuses on Greece/West/Christianity and the rest. The author continues the epistemological purification by literally writing the non-West out of the history of science, and definitely science. Wolpert simply asserts that historians who mix science with technology have made two cardinal mistakes: first they deny the peculiarity of science and its radical difference with technology, and, secondly, they admit others and not Greece as the origin of science. Wolpert asserts that the unique Greek “origin is important for understanding the nature of science, since it makes science quite different from so many other human activities, for no other society independently developed scientific thought, and all later developments can be traced back to the Greeks” (p35).
Even the Chinese who are recognised to have developed a sophisticated culture, are merely described as having attained engineering not scientific knowledge. Though persistent and accurate observers of celestial phenomena before the Renaissance, the Chinese were said to have failed to develop planetary theory and geometry (p46). Wolpert thinks a large part to this failure lay in Chinese philosophy. Buddhism with its eternal returns, Taoism with its intimate link between nature and man, and Confucianism with its core emphasis on human conduct and personal cultivation probably prevented the origin of science in Chinese society. Perhaps this can be easily extrapolated to all other societies having belief systems like that obtaining in China. Paradoxically, Japan has been advised that it may not be able to develop science and technology without taking western values, languages and concepts. It was able to introduce selectively scientific knowledge into its culture without borrowing from the humanities originating from the west.
Wolpert claims that Christianity has had a positive influence on scientific development. Theological disputes on the nature of Christ had the salutary effect of helping those engaged in the debate to undertake logical consistency and reasoned argument. Christianity fostered scientific thinking. It provided “a system in which there was the possibility - even the conviction - that there were laws controlling nature. Such a conviction was unique to Christianity” (p48). Wolpert mentions the methodological difficulty “in looking for elective affinities between Christianity and science” (p48). What he means by this is the association of scientific pursuits with different forms of Christianity raises methodological difficulties; i.e., whether Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity, and both vs. protestantism facilitated science. In spite of this reservation, the importance of Christianity in fostering science is upheld.
Wolpert makes no reference to the historians of science who tried to establish the African and Egyptian connection to Greek science, as Martin Bernal demonstrated in Black Athena. He stresses the Western/Greek influence on Islamic scholars and not the Afro-Arab contribution to Greek science. In one paragraph consisting of less than three lines Wolpert concedes that Islamic scholars have “also continued the Greek tradition”. He failed to point out how Islamic scholars continued the Greek tradition. For someone who makes such play of the distinction between knowledge and scientific knowledge, it is not clear what epistemological status Wolpert assigns the “Islamic scholars’ contribution to knowledge”. On Islam this is what he says: “[i]t may not be irrelevant that Islam offers a unifying perspective of knowledge and considers the pursuit of knowledge to be a virtue” (p51). This could be any knowledge and may not include his epistemologically privileged scientific knowledge.
The Question of Creativity
Art and artistic imagination should not be confused with science and scientific creativity. Creativity in science is unique and has special characteristics different from art. Gifted scientists have “stamina, devotion, psychic courage and character”, and they work very hard at problems (p69). Even some scientists confuse scientific imagination with artistically creative imagination. This notion which equates arts and sciences - both as products of creative human imagination - must be debunked. In science flashes of genius and inspiration are based on painstaking work and perspiration. Scientific research is based not on chance or serendipity, but on highly focused thoughts (p79). It is the best scientists who seem to be the luckiest (p83).
Wolpert acknowledges the difficulty of explaining genius, and claims that in the long run the communal production of science would make genius irrelevant. Art is individual, and artistic genius would remain individualised. A Shakespeare and a Mozart are not replaceable, he suggests. The problem with his account is that he has not provided the criteria for distinguishing creativity in art as opposed to science. Both artists and scientists do hard work. Both do not depend on chance. The characteristics he describes for science apply to the arts.
Criticism of SSK’s Critical Scrutiny of Science
The most vehement opposition was reserved for SSK’s thesis which denies that science is epistemologically privileged or even a separate domain of activity or enquiry. Wolpert dismisses with an uncompromising tone all relativist and social constructivist accounts of the creation of scientific knowledge. Social thinkers of science, like Bloor and Barnes, suggest that scientific knowledge is not discovered but constructed/manufactured. It is not a passive mediated product of nature, but an actively negotiated social construct of the processes of research and enquiry. Constructivism suggests that the expectations, prejudices and interests of the various actors are embodied in scientific knowledge. It describes the social process in which actors involved in a variety of ways in scientific knowledge production manage to attribute the status of objectivity to the resulting knowledge. SSK’s Strong Programme regards science as one of the many belief systems. Its knowledge claims have to be empirically tested and validated. Wolpert selectively took empirical studies done by SSK from biology and physics and pronounced them unsatisfactory.
Wolpert recognises that social factors influence science. Nevertheless, his view of science as a “social process” is radically different from that of the sociologists of scientific knowledge. He complains that SSK studies have ignored the “core of the scientific enterprise”, by “ignoring the achievements of science, by ignoring whether a theory is right or wrong” and “by denying progress” (p122). He suggests that sociologists study the unnatural nature of science by generating research programmes on the external dimensions of science (e.g., funding, institutions, career structures and so on), rather than the intrinsic validity of its knowledge claims and theories (e.g., theorems, laws, methodologies and so on). SSK thinkers would react to this agenda as limiting the scope of social research to external social factors, and would argue that science’s claim to objectivity in discovery as well as the resulting knowledge validation is a proper domain for social research. In many ways they claim that the latter is in fact the more interesting problem to investigate.
So the dispute here is not because Wolpert does not recognise science as a social process (however limited that may be), whilst SSK recognises science as a social process. It is rather between the narrow and wider scope of the definition of science as a social process. By emphasising both the inclusion of context in the process of discovery and knowledge justification, SSK thinkers suggest that they do not disparage the object of their study; i.e., science and scientists. Perhaps the main result they seek is to encourage scientists to become self-reflexive about the work they do. There is room for a healthy debate in how to describe and understand the factors that shape scientific thought if there is restraint from purple polemic and labelling on both sides.
Social Responsibility of Scientists
Having carried out the epistemological purification of science, Wolpert can confidently pronounce it exceptional and unique to western culture. What is left as an issue is to describe the social responsibility of the scientist consistent with his story. Are scientists implicated in the ethical dilemmas which their creations generate? His view on it is consistent with his overall approach. Scientists are obliged to inform the public “about the possible implications of their work” and “must be clear about the reliability of their studies” (p152). Scientists should not be held accountable for the application of their sciences. His truncated view of science as a “social process” translates into a truncated view of the social responsibility of the scientist. Once again the social responsibility of the scientist is not denied, but it is merely qualified and strictly limited. Scientists have more of a social responsibility than that suggested by Wolpert. They are involved increasingly as experts and advisors to government. The position that scientists are free from being implicated in the application of their science exaggerates their neutrality, diminishing their growing and lucrative connection with politics.
From 30 November to 2 December politicians and academics convened at the Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin (WZB) for a major international conference on the public understanding of science, chaired by Meinolf Dierkes. Sponsored in part by the European Commission (DG XII), the conference aimed to evaluate the EUROBAROMETER, the European-wide public surveys on scientific literacy and attitudes towards science and technology conducted in 1989 and 1992, and to outline a research (and, in some respects, funding) agenda for the scholarly field. The presence of leading scholars and high-ranking European politicians lent an air of import to the proceedings, which was at its weightiest during the political speech-making on the final day. While they’re seemed to be vast divides between the proverbial qualitative and quantitative methodologists as well as a rather profound lack of understanding of the express purposes of surveys as the EUROBAROMETER, there promises to emerge a degree of consensus in the results of the conference, which will be reported by the WZB in the form of a book, a web site and the final memorandum to be drafted for the Commission. Public understanding researchers of all stripes eagerly await their appearance.
The EUROBAROMETER, inspired by similar scientific literacy and attitudinal studies conducted over the past couple of decades in the United States, has become practically synonymous with its most notorious question: “Does the earth go around the sun or the sun around the earth?” This and a battery of true or false questions, as “all radioactivity is man-made” and “the oxygen we breathe comes from plants”, are meant to measure national EU citizens’ knowledge of scientific fact. A basic knowledge of scientific fact and conventional scientific method, which is also measured, are supposedly essential for a community citizen’s ability to understand science and technology. Such an understanding, it was argued in Berlin, helps people to read newspaper articles on scientific controversies as well as to participate as democratic citizens in debate and decision-making on the subjects. The notion that Europeans, generally, or certain national citizenries, as the Portugese or Greeks, have lesser understandings of scientific fact and method than other nationals, a result arguably designed into and certainly confirmed by the surveys, has come to be known as the ‘deficit model’, which most everyone agreed is not semantically correct. In any case, the literacy surveys, as was noted in the presentations, measure educational uptake — a sort of level of high school book-learning — and do not measure, among other things, when or the extent to which this knowledge is relevant in various social settings and situations. There was some agreement, expressed in the call for “methodological pluralism”, that the analyses should be augmented by contextual research, more regional, open-ended and finely grained in character.
The surveys, which gather basic demographic information and pose questions about people’s interest in and sources of knowledge and information about science and technology (i.e., traditionally, through activities as media consumption and library and museum visitation), also guage the respondents’ attitudes towards science and technology in general and practical terms, their sense of the status of European research as compared to that of the U.S. and Japan, and their awareness of EU-sponsored research and research policy. The relationship between knowledge and attitude constituted the key finding, which has been known or surmised for some time. Contrary to the expectations of the surveyers and perhaps many others besides, a higher level of knowledge of science, as construed by the survey, does not lead to fewer reservations about science. Put differently, the more you know, the worse your attitude, which, as was also mentioned, has much in common with Ulrich Beck’s notion of the self-refutation of modernity. But there were abberations, as in the comparison between Danes and Germans, and much is being made of the fact that in certain cases the Danes, again in aggregate terms, are both knowledgable and optimistic, while the Germans are knowledgable and pessimistic.
This relates to what the surveyers call the “industrialisation paradox”. While, as the researchers maintained in the presentations, the EUROBAROMETER instrument is not meant to rank nations, it nevertheless does indicate an hierarchic disparity in national citizenries’ attitudes towards the promise of science and technology, depending on their country’s “level of industrialisation”. Thus the citizenries of “developing EU countries” (defined as Greece and Portugal) view science and technology as the way forward but are pessimistic about their ability to solve social problems, the “established industrialised countries” (Belgium, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands) generally do not believe in science as progress but readily assimilate the fruits into everyday life, while, finally, the “advanced industrialised countries” (Denmark and Germany), as mentioned above, both share a belief in progress but are split on the costs of assimilation. On an even more general plane, further presentations compared interest, knowledge and attitudes at work in Europe, Canada, Japan and the USA, where the most notable finding concerned a relative lack of interest on the part of the Japanese in new scientific, technological and medical inventions and discoveries.
Many of these European survey findings have been reported before, as at the ‘94 EASST conference in Budapest, and the approach and the findings have been subject to critical examination. The meeting, as discussed especially in the informal encounters, was more about whether room would be made in the Commission funding schemes for different approaches to the study of public understanding. While the final day seemed to witness the attrition of alternate approaches to the EUROBAROMETER, other agendas were drawn up in working groups and duly reported earlier. Here mention is made only of the results of the group dedicated to ‘mapping the knowledge on public understanding’, with special reference to ‘forgotten aspects’.
Addressing the social and policy-making purposes of the research, members of the group made a plea for attention to be paid to the contexts of use of the research. Instead of merely evaluating survey barometers methodologically or “internally”, enquires should be made into how the survey findings are interpreted, by whom and to which ends. So in contrast to running after the actors, the idea is to follow the results in national and European policy arenas, especially in educational policy. The same demand should be made of qualitative research findings. The key question, affirmative answers to which were provided in some of the presentations, is whether the research construction of the bearers of scientific knowledge reproduces painful stereotypes and merely legitimates science policy. More fundamentally, “understanding” may refer not only to the ability to demonstrate “cognitive performance”, i.e., to get the test questions right, but also to the capacity to use and interpret scientific knowledge in situations closer to home or, as it was put, in one’s “world of relevance”. The recommendation related to further social epistemological research, where, if need be, definitions of knowledge as well as understandings of science and technology emerge at the outset of the study from the users. There remains a need, however, for symmetrical treatment of the value of the experts’ and the publics’ knowledges, which, as a participant remarked, means not (normatively) granting the public some superior capacity to generate truth.
Trust was a much-discussed topic, given the survey finding that trust in public institutions continues to wane, while that in consumer organisations and other NGOs waxes. Turning the arrow from knowledge to trust around, research should concentrate on the extent to which mistrust could just as logically be a product of scientific capability, unrelated to formal learning.
Finally, the idea was put forward that exposing people to the sorts of qualitative public understanding research advocated could be a way of promoting personal engagement in scientific deconstruction and reflexivity. As is freely admitted, science and technology studies is hardly the only arena in which wide-spread deconstruction of science and regulation occurs. It may even be described as a normal feature of public scientific controversy, where vested interests are regularly exposed, especially in the USA. Perhaps the point of such research engagement is to improve the style of public debate and reconciliation of scientific controversy, and certain models, as Danish, Dutch and British “consensus conferences”, are under consideration.
In conclusion, it seems that the old “noble” aims of raising the public awareness in science have gone the way of modernity, leaving some researchers with the tools and the findings but not the rationale. Nevertheless it appears the surveys will continue to be conducted, their social value debated and their purposes reinvented. One might even be tempted to call them fun, but at whose expense no one’s quite sure yet.
NOTES
Italians scored highest on this question, while the British were at the bottom of the heap.
European Commission, Europeans, Science and Technology - Public Understandings and Attitudes, DG XII, EUR 15461, June, 1993, p. 19. The standard Eurobarometer 38.1 field questionnaire is found on pages 123-133. A conference paper on the subject was presented by John Durant and Martin Bauer.
These and other comparative results were presented by Rafael Pardo and Jon Miller.
Cf. Wynne, B., “Public Understanding of Science”, in S. Jasanoff, G.E. Markle, J.C. Petersen, and T. Pinch (eds.), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Sage, London, 1995, pp. 365-370.
The group, chaired by Brian Wynne, heard contributions by Sheila Jasanoff, Steven Yearley, Boudouin Jurdant, Knut Sorensen, Ulrike Felt, Aren Mortensen and Alexandros Kyrtsis.
See Joss, S. and J. Durant (eds.), Public Participation in Science: The Role of Consensus Conferences in Europe, Science Museum, London, 1995.
While in a wistful mood this Fall, I imagined that organising a lecture series resembled the quiltmaking work of my foremothers; a seasonal occupation meant to fulfill household needs but also significant as a community activity. A general motif must be chosen — and such a preference, any crafts historian will tell you, is highly determined by the maker’s geographical and historical setting. In the Fall of 1995 in Amsterdam, we wanted to reflect on the role of the researcher as insider/outsider, observer and actor in one’s field of study. We sought to work this motif into a recognizable pattern from our speakers’ contributions, keeping in mind that the pieces of material collected must provide some contrast if the motif is to appear, but the weights and textures must be compatible. Advice is given and the voice of experience is heeded in this endeavour, since artisans may wish to innovate but rarely to break with tradition. In the final steps, a quilting rack is set out in an appropriate location, friends and neighbours are expected to gather and lend a hand with the overall needlework in the form of the quilting bee, the locus for discussion of community affairs, transmission of news, gossip and of course, arguments over the best way to proceed.
The diamond pattern emerged from our four meetings, a pattern where background and motif (here to stand as objectivity and involvement) are forever competing for attention, since the areas granted to each are nearly equal. Speakers were sought who had experienced and reflected on the way to stich together their contributions to both academia and to the domain they research, asking them to give accounts of how they struggled with the distinctions between their status as activists and as scholars, between their political commitments and their methodological choices.
From Scholar to Activist and Back Again
The symmetry of the first two contributions to the series established a satisfying balance. Sharon Beder (Science and Technology Studies, University of Wollongong, Australia) spoke of her experience as a scholar mobilised by activists, and Anita Hardon, (Medical Anthropology Unit, University of Amsterdam) of the opposite route from activism to a more distanced position. For Beder, difficult choices arose in the course of her study of the sewage problems off the beaches of Sydney. She struggled against both her personal preference and mounting pressure from friends and activists close to her, to maintain neutrality in order not to compromise her access to institutional sources. Upon (near) completion of her Ph.D. work, she shared her findings, sometimes by collaborating directly with the media. Most significantly, she felt was able to bring into public debate issues of power and knowledge, and to support the attempts by lay (non-STS) activists to deconstruct official science. Yet, while Beder ackowledged her relief at being able to embrace a political position and forego neutrality, this neutrality of the social scientist also served to enable involvement in a subsequent environmental controversy, where Greenpeace activists were considered too radical to stand in opposition to the governmental representatives. In this second instance, neutrality was not opposed to involvement, but rather it enabled entering debate in a public forum.
Anita Hardon also contrasted her shifting role in two controversies. Trained in both STS and anthropology, she presented the possibilities open to the researcher using the anthropological trope of participant-observer. The researcher can place herself along this axis of involvement and neutrality, and its related range of discourses, from extreme, reflexive accounts to the ethnography as dialogue. Hardon told of her participation as a women’s health advocate in the first instance and of her subsequent move to a role closer to that of observer, distancing herself from the women’s health movement, while retaining privileged relations with this group of actors. From this second position, spurred on by (but also confirming) her awareness that advocacy work implies representation, Hardon has since attempted to involve both developers of contraceptives (corporate and governmental) and women’s health advocates to broaden their understanding of the life conditions, values and aspirations of the people for whom they claim to be working. The accounts of these researchers highlighted not only the fact that the boundaries set by academics and activists are in turn constraining and enabling, but also that these boundaries must be carefully negotiated to maintain one’s credibility on either side.
Annemarie Mol’s rejection of long seams in favour of multiple short stiches caused our motif to be exploded into fragmented harlequins. If our theme of involvement is to be taken as the political component of STS work, then the empirical is political and the political is empirical for this scholar. Rather than try to play at big politics and embrace schools of analysis that postulate specific modalities of politics (alienation, conflict between lay versus expert versions, issues of choice), Mol proposes that researchers rely on a set of units of analysis: topics, parties, sites, styles and relations. In discussion, it became apparent that there was significant resistance to Mol’s insistence on the local, and on foregoing aspirations to contributing to larger political agendas. Yet, Mol’s provocative combination of the highly theoretical and determinedly local may open up new avenues in STS.
Politics was also the starting point for Dick Pels (Sociology, University of Amsterdam and Groningen), for whom the political project in which we engage as academics is one of representation. This work, he argued is risky, and involves the gap between the intellectual and those in whose name she speaks. Pels pointed not to the mechanism of boundary-making, but rather to the strategies used to cover-up this work: the use of labels of strangeness and nomadism. Posturing as stranger and nomad thus serves as a cloaking device for the distinction-making that is at the heart of academic (and political) work, by positioning those who embrace such labels of otherness in a grey zone, beyond social codes. Furthermore, this discourse too often involves a claim to a better view of the state of things, because of this marginal standpoint. Nothing more than a healthy dose of reflexivity is needed to distinguish between the flaneur and the vagrant, between the uprooted refugee and the academic suffering from too-frequent jetlag. Yet, bemoaned Pels, this stance is accepted uncritically all too often, with the possible consequences of trivilisation of the state of those who are displaced and beset with exclusion, rather than willed (upward) mobility.
These discussions of the strategies for boundary-making, of the risks and perils of standing inside and/or outside have focused on the local and temporary nature of positions; a scholarly past does not preclude an activist future, and vice-versa. But certainly each of these decisions creates new tensions even as it resolves others. A quilt is not stretched out on a woodden frame for nothing: only through preventing one corner from being pulled more than the others is a proper pique achieved. While parallels may be drawn between the aesthetics of such a series and the activity of quilt-making, the nature of academic discussion precludes claims of completion, though, hopefully, not of usefulness.
Review of Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1995.
In many ways the sociology of technology is a sociology of obduracy. Much of the literature in this diverse field asks in one way or another, ‘Just how is it that artifacts reach and maintain their shape?’ Others ask a similar question, but - preferring to engage in a politics of obduracy - ask why such arrangements have occurred. In his new book, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs, Wiebe Bijker offers us a thesis that sits most comfortably in the latter camp. A detailed constructivist history of three important technologies, this book beautifully reviews and sets out the framework of the approach known as the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT). It gives us, as Bijker would argue, a political constructivist theory of technology.
Split into five chapters - an introduction, a conclusion, and three empirical chapters between - the book brings together the various threads of Bijker’s programme over the last decade. The empirical chapters are enlarged and heavily reworked revisions of three earlier papers on bicycles, celluloid and Bakelite, and high intensity fluorescent lighting respectively (Pinch & Bijker 1984, Bijker 1987, Bijker 1992) - all important in the so-called new sociology of technology. The conclusion revises a later paper in which Bijker calls upon scholars of science and technology studies to revisit the political relevance of their early endeavours (Bijker 1993). The first empirical chapter stems from the most influential of the earlier papers - Pinch & Bijker’s (1984) account of the social construction of the bicycle. In the book he sets out in much more detail the relevant social groups (RSGs) that were involved in fixing the dominant meaning of the bicycle. In the example of the stabilization of the Ordinary (or Penny Farthing), he shows how one of the RSGs - young adventurous men - saw the Ordinary as a sporting machine “that was rather hazardous to ride”. (p47) That the Ordinary was seen as risky to ride was however one of its attractive features, so that:
Young and often upper-class men could display their athletic skills and daring by showing off in the London parks. To impress the riders’ lady friends, the risky nature of the Ordinary was essential. Thus the meanings attributed to the machine by the group of Ordinary users made it a Macho Bicycle. (p75)
For another RSG, one that Bijker calls the ‘Ordinary nonusers’, this riskiness was an important reason to avoid riding the perilous machine: “… the machine was difficult to mount, risky to ride, and not easy to dismount. It was, in short, an Unsafe Bicycle.” (p74) Bijker thus deconstructs the Ordinary into two different artifacts: one with the meaning attributed to it by the young daring riders - a Macho Bicycle; the other, an Unsafe Bicycle:
This Macho Bicycle was … radically different from the Unsafe Bicycle - it was designed to meet different criteria; it was sold, bought, and used for different purposes; it was evaluated to different standards, it was considered a machine that worked whereas the Unsafe Bicycle was a nonworking machine. (p75)
Bijker shows here how the ‘working’ and ‘nonworking’ of an artifact are socially constructed rather than intrinsic properties of the object itself. This demonstrates one of the most important notions in the new sociology of technology - that of the interpretative flexibility of artifacts. In other words, in Bijker’s argument, there are as many artifacts as there are RSGs, and there is no artifact not constituted by a RSG. That we can demonstrate the interpretative flexibility of an artifact in this way allows for a sociological explanation of the development of artifacts. If no interpretative flexibility could be demonstrated
all properties of an artifact could be argued to be immanent after all. Then there would be no social dimension to design: only application and diffusion - or context, for short - would form the social dimension of technical development. (p76)
Once the delicate work of deconstruction and interpretative flexibility has been shown, argues Bijker, what then remains to be shown is the closure and stabilization processes of particular artifacts - whether particular technologies become dominant or are lost for ever in a technological scrapyard.
Closure and stabilization are then key concepts in Bijker’s theoretical framework. Aimed at answering the continuity-change requirement, they too first came to light in Pinch and Bijker’s (1984) paper on bicycles. However, Bijker now endows the terms, formerly used interchangeably, with different meanings. Closure is what is in progress when the interpretative flexibility of an artifact is diminishing. It can lead to convergence on a single dominant meaning. It is a social-interactionist process that goes on between RSGs. It is moreover virtually irreversible. In the case of bicycles, closure occurred around the Unsafe and not the Macho interpretation of the Ordinary. Thus the Ordinary became extinct and has next to no chance of being revived. Stabilization, on the other hand, goes on primarily within RSGs and is semiotic, as Bijker would have it. It can be detected when the names used to refer to an artifact become in time simplified. Thus an exhibition report from 1888 refers to “rear-driven safety bicycles” which can have diamond or cross frames. Stabilization in the ensuing years meant that by 1889 “safety bicycle” was enough and by 1895 “bicycle” all by itself would do to label essentially the same artifact, a low-wheeled machine with rear-driving chains and a diamond frame.
The technological frame (TF) appears to be the theoretical improvisation of which Bijker is most proud and its exposition comes appropriately in the longest chapter, which looks at the “invention” by Leo Baekeland of Bakelite. A TF is an arena in which the meaning attributed to an artifact by the members of a RSG is negotiated. It is where the problems of the artifact are identified, and where solutions are proposed and essayed through problem-solving strategies characteristic of that frame. It is the site also of goals, technological and scientific theories, tacit knowledge, testing procedures, as well as design methods and criteria. Is it a catch-all concept? No, says Bijker, because “it is possible to give a quite unambiguous characterization of the technological frame for a relevant social group” (p124). And “describing the technological frame of a relevant social group does indeed explain a particular course of events”.
The TF is to sociotechnical change what Kuhn’s paradigm is to scientific revolutions, though it differs in important respects. For one, it is not narrowly cognitive but materially and socially heterogeneous. Also it is a concept to be applied not only to scientists and engineers but to all RSGs. With the TF the analyst is able, according to Bijker, to breathe life into the sequence of snapshots that alone is possible with only the theoretical concepts of the RSG, interpretative flexibility, closure and stabilization. So it is much more than a symptom, or indeed cause, of artifactual stability. For Bijker it will be helpful in transcending the distinction between hitherto irreconcilable opposites: the social shaping of technology and the technological impact on society, social determinism and technical determinism, society and technology (p196-7).
Once he’s entered it into the drama, Bijker feels able to claim that he has met the four requirements for his theory of sociotechnical change that he laid out in his introductory chapter. Along with closure and stabilization as well as inclusion, it accommodates both technical change and continuity. It combines elements of agency and structure. It transcends the need to use a priori distinctions between the social and technical. And, finally, it allows for the question of whether an artifact “works” to be treated as explanandum rather than explanans.
Technological frames abound in Bijker’s Bakelite history. One develops around celluloid which prominently includes practices and problems associated with the solvents used in its manufacturing process. Another has synthetic-dye chemistry as its focus. The purification and chemical analysis of reaction products is central to this TF’s modus operandi. Other TFs, in which Baekeland becomes strongly included before his Bakelite days, are those of photochemistry and electrochemistry. Early in his career Baekeland, a keen amateur photographer in the early days of photography, worked on innovations in photographic paper and its development. So successful was he that he sold his photographic paper affairs (and an undertaking to stay out of the photographic business!) to Eastman Kodak in 1899 for the then enormous price of $750,000. He became involved in the then burgeoning electro-chemistry TF later, when he worked as a consultant to a firm intent on producing caustic soda from brine. Both frames notably favoured meticulousness and systematic investigation.
His low degree of inclusion in the TF of the synthetic-dye chemists and his high degree of inclusion in the electrochemistry TF meant that Baekeland worked unusually when he eventually turned to experimenting with the phenol-formaldehyde reaction. It had already attracted synthetic-dye chemists but they had dismissed it because its products proved impossible to purify and analyse. Baekeland however paid little attention to analysis. Instead he went about varying the reaction variables systematically. He managed thus to produce several promising chemicals. Some were soluble and interested him and his assistant as potential varnishes; others were insoluble and came to interest him as potenial moldable materials. It was some of the latter which later he and the interactions of multiple RSGs through their TFs stabilized as “Bakelite”.
It is ironic that Baekeland’s retrospective account of his “invention” portrays it in a very different way, as a more or less single-minded journey towards the goal of creating a moldable plastic. Bijker’s tells us why. Refusing psychologism, his is an explanation once more in terms of the versatile TFs. By the time Baekeland came to write his story, long after the “invention”, his inclusion in various TFs had changed:
His degree of inclusion in the celluloid technological frame increased, and the history of the invention of Bakelite was cast in terms that were in accordance with that frame: building on Kleeberg’s work [which had demonstrated an insoluble solid product of the phenol-formaldehyde reaction], aiming at a molding plastic, focus [sic] on the solvent (p150).
By the time we get to the fluorescent-lighting case study, we have seen all of the theoretical concepts that make up Bijker’s analytical framework. So at last we see his approach in its fullness as he explains why even today we use high-intensity and not high-efficiency fluorescent lamps. It is a story that tells of several relevant social groups. On the production side there were the Mazda companies, which dominated the market for electric lighting; the electricity utilities, which feared that high-efficiency fluorescent lamps would slash electricity consumption; the independent lighting manufacturers, burdened with prohibitive patent licences from the Mazda companies; and, later in the story, lighting-fixture manufacturers producing standard fixtures for Mazda lamps. Last but not least of the RSGs was the ‘general public’, which included a subgroup that bulked large in the calculations of some technologists - women. According to a 1940 article in Electrical Engineering green and yellow “mercury lines in the spectrum of fluorescent lamps” meant that “overemphasis of these colors in the wall finishes, the draperies, upholstery, and the complexion often results in unattractive effects very disturbing to the lady of the house” (p246).
We use those high-intensity lamps for a host of reasons, naturally. But one of the more salient ones is, for Bijker, the Nela Park Conference. Here representatives of the Mazda companies and the electricity utilities met to sort out their differences. They did this in an extraordinary way. They designed the now familiar lamp around the conference table. It was a design not yet built and not one whose feasibilty they could be certain of. But the new design satisfied their various interests. It went some way to settling the ‘load issue’, which had the utilities fearing that electricity consumption would plummet because of the high efficiency of recently developed fluorescent lamps. The increased efficiency was compensated for by a much greater brightness (and electricity consumption). It allowed for power-factor correction in the lamp fixtures. This had been another worry for the utilities, who did not want to provide extra generating capacity unnecessarily. And for the Mazda companies it meant they could get on with selling fluorescent lamps without continually worrying about how the utilities might react to their every move. This “amalgamation of vested interests” was a doubly conventional resolution, lodged as it was within both TFs.
Before he turns to his concluding chapter, Bijker explains how power fits into his framework. He takes as his starting point Giddens’s definition, “the transformative capacity to harness the agency of others to comply with one’s ends” (p262), which avoids the pitfall of seeing power as “stuff”. There are two sides to Bijker’s power coin. Semiotic power is a fixedness of meanings, which is apparent in the ways facts, artifacts, agents, practices and relations are articulated in TFs. It is the “apparent order of taken-for-granted categories of existence” (p263). Micropolitics of power, the other side of the coin, describes “how a variety of practices transforms and structures the actions of actors” (p263), and results in a specific semiotic structure, which, naturally, acts back on the micropolitics. The two aspects are related to closure and stabilization. Closure, the reduction of interpretative flexibility, comes about as an outcome of heterogeneous micropolitical actions to fix meanings and is a first step in making semiotic power. The remaining steps are made by the continuing stabilization process. In closure, the TF as a cage confining its members, exerts semiotic power; as a resource (problem-solving strategies, etc.) for its members, it lends micropolitical power to them.
Actually, power does not so much fit into the theoretical framework as overlay it. Semiotic power and the micropolitics of power do not work alongside the theoretical entities already introduced - the RSGs, interpretative flexibility, closure, stabilization, the TFs and inclusion. “Rather, a description in terms of power strategies functions as a neat summary of processes that were otherwise described in terms of “those entities (p266).
In an autobiographical vein early in the book, Bijker tells how he came to the academic study of technology and society. For him it was a detour. He had been in the science-technology-society movement popular among engineering students in the Netherlands in the seventies. They managed to introduce into school and university curricula critical ways of looking at the relationships between science, technology and society. Then they started to look for empirical and theoretical ‘ammunition’ to help in their struggles with technoscientific authority. Bijker thought he might find some in academia.
He may have been there ever since but he has not forgotten his old political motivations. He takes up the political strand again in the final chapter. For him, though, the obvious route into politics is not the one that leads to science and technology policy studies. That would be to ally oneself with the interests of a specific social group. Instead he advocates a “politics of technology”. It should be “emancipationist rather than instrumental”; it should “politicize technological choices rather than pacify them”, and “problematize rather than absolve” (p280). Bijker, it appears, is as radical as ever.
“Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs” is a river fed by two tributaries, Wiebe Bijker’s theory of sociotechnical change and the detailed historical case study. It alternately runs in twisting gullies - impatiently following unexpected courses - and coasts along in grand deep flows. It could serve as an excellent route for a first foray into the territory of science and technology studies. It will also repay renavigation by experienced hands, particularly in its fine reworking of the histories of the bicycle, Bakelite and the fluorescent lamp.
Perhaps it should be said however that while the book collects between two covers the theoretical framework adumbrated in his earlier papers, it does not greatly elaborate that framework. True, closure and stabilization are now distinguished from one another; the relationships between technological frame, relevant social group and artifact are fleshed out a little; and we get the mapping of semiotic and micropolitical power onto the framework. Bijker has lubricated his theory. But there is little else new here.
Moreover, Bijker deflects only some of the criticisms that can be made of this theory. In particular there is the argument that the RSGs used by an analyst are themselves the constructions of that analyst. Drawing boundaries around certain groups is always problematic. Given Bijker’s political intentions it is perhaps not surprising that he barely reflects on this. As we have seen he attempts to empirically justify the use of the RSG by adopting as analyst the categories used by the actors themselves. The world as it exists for the RSG “is a good place for the analyst to begin his or her research. Thus the analyst would be content to use “cyclists” as a relevant social group, but introduce separate “bicyclists” and “tricyclists” only when the actors themselves do so (p48). While we accept that Bijker provides such a strategy as a heuristic rather than in the form of some hard-and-fast rule - and we concur with him in his method - we feel it is valuable not to lose sight of the questions that can be raised while studying the fuzziness of boundaries between groups.
Bijker does this himself in many ways. Indeed central to his work is his explicit aim to fracture the traditional diffusionist image of technical innovation, with its black-boxed technologies passed linearly from engineer to user. He argues, “I have taken an additional step beyond this interpretation by suggesting that it is not only engineers … but all relevant social groups who contribute to the social construction of technology” (p273). Recall his interest in the Nela Park Conference. “At that meeting a third fluorescent lamp was designed - not on the drawing board or the laboratory bench, but at the conference table” (p238). In one move he rubs out the distinction between those who produce and those who use technology - casting the managers as designers. In a futher move he is happy to retain other distinctions, to maintain other boundaries - General Electric as a RSG with specific interests - and with it, the stability of the RSG. Bijker seems to shift between purity and heterogeneity to further his story.
Throughout his case studies he leaves vague his distinction between the social and the technical, but in the conclusion argues for other differentiations which are less reductionist. He argues, “Instead of technical artifacts, our unit of analysis is now the ‘sociotechnical ensemble’” (p274). Every time “artifact” is written, it is shorthand for “sociotechnical ensemble” and we should be able to trace the “[social] construction” of the artifact. Likewise, each time we write “social institution” we really mean “sociotechnical ensemble”, and we should be able to trace the “technical relations” that go into stabilizing that institution. Introducing such complexity (or irreduction) is seemingly at odds with Bijker’s political programme, but he argues for a need to produce “other differentiations between explanandum and explanans, between dependent and independent variable, between foreground and background - differentiations that are not based on the distinction between the social and the technical” (p274). Thus Bijker is arguing for other types of reduction (that which is not social and technical), of the sort where we stabilize enough of this sociotechnical ensemble, so that we can explain the Other against this background. Rather than talk of the social or technical we can talk of the particular configurations of TFs. If we know of the particular configuration (one in which there is for example a single dominant RSG that insists upon its definition of the artifact’s problems and solutions) we are then able to specify what process of sociotechnical change is likely to occur.
In telling his story, Bijker is willing to iron some new creases into the seamless web while ironing others out. For us what is interesting is why he is content to make firm the boundaries around the interests of RSGs such as General Electric - and at the same time unpick the boundaries around others, such as those around design engineers on the one hand and the managers at the Nela Park Conference.
At the very end of the book, Bijker leaves us with an unsettling double paradox. The first he acknowledges directly. Existence is a seamless web in which no individual or collective sociotechnical ensemble is privileged. What then can a theory of sociotechnical change do, he asks, “to help establish institutional and structural ways of guaranteeing the democratic nature of technological culture”? The answer he invites us to accept is to recognize that “there is [and, we presume, can be] no Leviathan” and simultaneously to propose “some form of institutional regulatory system”, even if that is paradoxical. The form of such a system is left entirely to the readers’ imagination. Before the pages ran out as we progressed through the concluding chapter - with its plea for political relevance in academic studies of technology and its advocacy of a politics of technology - we had begun to hope for a more explicit political programme. We were disappointed.
A very mild dose of reflexivity reveals the other paradox. Bijker tells us that his theory of sociotechnical change and stability is tantamount to neutral:
One might attempt to argue that the sorts of STS studies I have discussed, by highlighting the constructed nature of facts, artifacts, social orders, and sociotechnical ensembles, will allow those who are kept hostage by the semiotic power structrues involved … to sever these bonds and free themselves…. Although this may happen, there is no guarantee that it will always work out this way. First science and technology may also be fruitfully employed by the less privileged…. And second there is no reason why the powerful may not draw on the insights of the STS community (p289).
The social construction of technology in that case seems to mirror the technology so often pushed by technologists: something that can be used equally for good or ill. So it is the exception among sociotechnical ensembles. Unlike the technology told of by Bijker, it has no politics.
References
Pinch, T. J. and Bijker, W. E. 1984. “The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other”, Social Studies of Science 14, 399-441.
Bijker, W. E. 1987. “The Social Construction of Bakelite: Toward a Theory of Invention” in Bijker, W. E., T.P Hughes, and T.J, Pinch (eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 159-187.
Bijker, W. E. 1992. “The Social Construction of Fluorescent Lighting, Or How an Artifact was Invented in its Diffusion Stage” in Bijker, W. E. and J. Law (eds), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 75-102.
Bijker, W. E. 1993. “Do Not Despair: There Is Life After Constructivism”, Science, Technology, and Human Values, Vol. 18, No. 1, 113-138
Authors’ addresses: c.stokes@lancaster.ac.uk n.pollock@lancaster.ac.uk
Woody Allen has this joke. It’s about a man who tells his friend that his brother thinks he is a chicken. So this friend says: “Why don’t you turn him in? Bring him to an asylum?” But then this man replies: “No, I won’t do that because I want his eggs.”
Seeing oneself as a chicken and being chicken amounts to a minor difference of usage, but the practical difference is substantial. In the first case, you take the person to an asylum, while in the second you stop taking him seriously. It is very possible that privately the first option has crossed the minds of the combatants in the ‘Epistemological Chicken’ debate.1 Are they out of their minds? The written statements resemble the second option. SSK-adherents, Collins and Yearley, and ANT-adherents, Callon and Latour, seem to have stopped taking each other seriously, which is even more devastating for intellectual debate. We find this unfortunate, because, as Gerard de Vries has shown in the last issue of the EASST Review,2 important issues are at stake. But contrary to de Vries we will suggest to look for the eggs of this debate in a different place, beyond epistemology and ontology. More specificly, we will discuss two related issues featuring implicitly in the Chicken debate. The first is the problem of order. How seamless is the web between science, technology and society? The second concerns the problem of (science) politics. Using the insights of twenty years of STS, how are we to ‘re-center’ political and normative questions, raised in the sixties about science and society?
The common house of STS
The ‘Chicken papers’ should not be read in isolation - as a one-time debate between Bath and Paris, between British SSK and French semiotics of science and technology. There is more at stake here. The Chicken papers are part of an ongoing evaluation of about 20 years of productive science studies. What have we reached? Where do we stand now? And where do we go from here? This is how we read Pickering’s Science as Culture and Practice.3 Comparing this volume with its predecessor of a decade ago, Science Observed,4 we have to acknowledge what Lakatos would have called both theoretical and empirical progress in the field. The 1983 volume chiefly contains programmatic papers, or main lines of research. Moreover, these research programmes are presented side by side - as equivalents. Possible conflicts, contradictions and mutual competition are rarely discussed, apart from in a few footnotes and appendices. The various approaches are presented as belonging to one Wittgensteinian family. In the volume’s introduction Mulkay and Knorr-Cetina spell out the family resemblances. Since all of them were already around in Science Observed, ten years ago the Chickens papers’ discussants still lived together in a common house - although in different rooms: Collins on the SSK-floor in the central EPOR-room; Yearley, together with other Discourse Analysts, in the cellar space immediately beneath this floor, critically reexamining the empirical foundations of SSK; Latour and Actor Network Theorists in the entrance hall, near the front door where insiders go out and outsiders come in; and Woolgar in the garden, in the little summerhouse where everything that matters in the big house is ruminated upon, reflexively. In the Pickering volume not resemblances, but differences are emphasized. Take the discussion between Lynch and Bloor about rule-governed behaviour.5 Here Wittgenstein is no longer a shared resource, but a divisive element. Pickering’s volume is not about the common house but about the differences between the rooms. There is even a skirmish about which room is most important. Who will inhabit this room? There is much envy in the Chicken debate - the British king dethroned by a French emperor.
The metaphor of a common house points to two things. First, the participants in the Chicken debate still live in the same house. Not only in terms of organization (common societies, journals, conferences, etc.), but also according to their intellectual self-image. Just as in political or in religious circles, the most rigorous denunciations are pronounced between kindred spirits. In this respect the title, and, even more so, the closing sentences of Callon and Latour’s paper are illustrative. “We want to change the water, but to keep the Bath baby in, since it is also our baby.”6 Second, the metaphor raises an interesting question. In all these years, did the house remain more or less the same, or, due to all the internal turmoil, has it been completely reconstructed? Pickering, in his introduction, observes not only a sharpening of internal contrasts and discussions, but also a general shift in STS, empirically and analytically, from science-as-knowledge to science-as- practice, from language to action, from ‘linguism’ to embodiment and ‘materialism’.7 Here the authors of the Chicken papers disagree. Broadly speaking, Collins and Yearley, we would guess, want to keep the house as it stands in Science Observed. They are quite satisfied with the SSK-project. Their motto is: further refinement and extension to new fields of research. Callon and Latour, on the contrary, are only this close to leaving the house. And Woolgar? He still lives in the garden’s summerhouse, parasitizing, however interestingly (or irritatingly if you like) on what is going on in the ‘real’ house.
The heterogeneity of the Chicken debate
Why is this debate referred to as the ‘epistemological chicken’ debate? The chicken part of this title is clear. Apparently, intellectuals are accused of being chicken in theoretical matters. Collins and Yearley point to this phenomenon within STS, but after bringing it up they refuse to play the game of chicken at all. But why do they call this game epistemological chicken? Why not ontological, methodological, sociological, or even political chicken? Because all the participants, we would claim, make it an epistemological game most of the time. Even when other sociological or political problems are at stake, the debate is recast in epistemological terms. Subject and object, word and world, relativism and realism, the problem of representation - these are the central issues to which all other items are reduced. In the Chicken debate, epistemology still functions as the traffic island in the middle of the road - as an escape route to safety. In Woolgar’s case this is obvious. His reflexive project, and, in his view, even the whole business of STS is primarily concerned with epistemological issues: “The central significance of social studies of science”, he says, “is that it adresses fundamental questions about the nature of knowing.”8 His trade is the splitting and inversion of the relation of representation between subject and object. But he is not the only one with an epistemological bias. Discussing Callon’s paper on the domestication of the scallops and fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay, Collins and Yearley, for example, contest the way Callon puts the scallops on the stage, as actants, just as active as fishermen or marine biologists. This way Callon questions sociological and political common sense. But this is not how Collins and Yearley treat Callon’s paper. They immediately return to epistemology. In Callon’s story the things-in-themselves (the scallops) can speak once again for themselves. So Callon is an old-fashioned realist setting the clock back to the days before SSK. Collins and Yearley accuse Callon and Latour of epistemological conservatism! Who is playing the game of chicken here? Even Callon and Latour are not fully recovered from this epistemological disease. However much in a negative, critical sense, their ontology still uses Kant’s yardstick to structure the discussion; it’s a yardstick which is primarily epistemologically calibrated. In order to avoid epistemological reductionism, paradoxically enough, Callon and Latour reduce all interesting questions about science, technology and society to this Kantian yardstick. Nature versus Culture, Object versus Subject, Science versus Society, Facts versus Values, Knowledge versus Politics, Non-humans versus Humans, Behaviour versus Action, Natural versus Social Sciences - all these dichotomies are pinned down to that sole yardstick. No wonder it gets overloaded to the point of breaking down. There is no reason to read the Chicken debate in such a single-minded fashion. Not every problem raised in this debate can be reduced to epistemology, or to the battle against epistemology. There is more at stake than epistemology and ontology. The chicken debate, we would like to claim, can also be read from a political and sociological perspective. In the remainder of this paper we will concentrate on the political consequences of the different solutions of Collins/Yearley and Callon/Latour to the problem of (social) order.
The problem of order
Both Collins/Yearley and Callon/Latour acknowledge the heterogeneous character of order, consisting of humans, non-humans, social relations and natural ‘things’. They disagree about the mechanism that constitutes order, and, in particular, about the role of non-humans in this respect. Aside from humans, social relations, interests, etc., Collins/Yearley also acknowledge the existence of non-humans, but only through the accounts of humans. Their order is a social order. For Callon/Latour, order is quintessentially a hybrid order of humans and non-humans. For the former, there is no order without social mechanisms. In the wider network they perceive, social entities, like group interests, ultimately hold society together. For the latter there is no order without mixtures of humans and non-humans. In the Collins/Yearley perspective, order is constituted by commuting between science and the world outside science. It is the core set which ‘funnels in’ social interests.9 Their ‘social rea- lism’ works like a camera with a zoom lens. First, they zoom in on science. At this point their social realism is Winchian. The cognitive and social order of science is created simultaneously; the stabilization of scientists’ accounts of the natural world and the stabilization of social order within the scientific community is a single process. Subsequently, they zoom out from the inner scientific circle to the world outside. Now their social realism is more Durkheimian or Bloorian.10 This time the focus is on interests and other social ‘things’. This zooming device enables them to bridge the gap between science and society, between the internal, produced order of science, and the external, pre-given order of society, which is a Durkheimian social fact of its own. This is how they bring science ‘home’ to society by stressing common features and levelling out epistemological differences between scientific and cultural practices. They want to make science ‘smaller’ than it may seem from the perspective of its users or laymen. This is accomplished by detailed description, whereby epistemological mystery and wonder is dissolved. By commuting between these two kinds of order, scientists dealing with truth and nature in an authorative way become ‘ordinary’ experts dealing in competence and skills in society. Callon and Latour want to break away from this commuting between inside and outside altogether. If you stick to the scientists, you will see how they enroll others, and make them insiders as well. There simply are no outsiders in their network. Hence their motto: follow the scientists! See how they change the world, not just the social world, but the world of humans and non-humans. The scientists are not confronted with either society or nature, but with both of them at the same time, with tangles of humans and non-humans. From the perspective of the scientists there are nothings-in-themselves or humans-among- themselves. If anything, the natural and the social are the product of the activities of scientists after tangles have stabilized, so after scientists have already moved on to more ‘fluid’ boundaries of the social and the natural.
Reading their work one cannot escape the impression that society is almost completely swallowed by science. It is not science but society they want to make ‘smaller’. This is accomplished by elaborating on the dramatic impact of science and technology on society and by more or less implying that, apart from science and technology, there really isn’t much of interest that holds society together.
Now returning to the practical problems STS wants to confront, one might ask how far we get with Collins/Yearley’s strategy. Will debunking scientific authority be sufficient for understanding the role of (scientific) experts in society? Can we understand the social basis of their power any better? If we become social realists and try to understand the social world (including science), we may find out that scientific work looks just like any other kind of practical work. But does this also give us insights into the politics of science and into the power of experts, which is obviously not entirely based on the epistemological sacredness of science? In the old days of Science and Society the problem with experts was more complicated than just their scientific nimbus, which placed them effectively outside the political realm. So, after we have made science look like any other kind of practical work, we still have to figure out the differences between what experts do and other kinds of practical work.
It reminds us of the replacement of Latin by the vernacular in the Catholic Mass some decades ago. Although this might be considered as a sign of the waning power of the Church, abolishing spoken Latin certainly did not by itself break the power of the church. Epistemology may have been one of the ways to depoliticize science, but after destroying the epistemologically legitimized aura of scientists, we are still faced with the problem of understanding their power and bringing science back into the political realm. Just like Merton reduced the sociology of science to the sociology of scientists and the social structure of science, so Collins and Yearley reduce STS to the sociology of experts with specific skills. It is true that traditional sociology (to which Collins and Yearley turn for advice) has collected ample knowledge about professionals and experts. But traditional sociology also has been weak in understanding what it is that makes these experts special (let alone powerful). Even after they have lost their scientific nimbus, they mobilize non-humans. Just think of the difference between social workers and heart specialists. Both are experts with specific skills. But while social workers can only mobilize (some) other people (usually with very little power), heart specialists can mobilize not just various other, far more powerful, professional groups, but also, and more importantly, powerful machinery. So debunking the scientists’ epistemological hegemony and making ‘normal’, skilled experts out of them results in a sociology of experts which underestimates the basis of the power of at least some of them. Within the class of experts it makes quite a difference (also financially) whether you are a social worker, a pediatrician, or a heart specialist. Callon and Latour acknowledge this difference, based on the power-generating capacity of the non-humans. Our vocabulary has been too anthropomorphic, and in particular very inarticulate about the strong positions of (some) non-humans in our society. This deficient vocabulary made us utter incoherent curses on technology and science as a whole. It made us complain about the ‘scientization’ or ‘technologization’ of society in a way that left only two choices: embrace or reject science. Accordingly, Callon and Latour reject the time-honoured humanism that saw nothing but differences between humans and non-humans.
The problem of differentiation
But once this is granted, we are left with problems related to how Callon and Latour want us to take notice of non-humans, and to their implicit claim that, apart from science and technology, there really isn’t much of interest that holds society together. Starting with the last point, while Collins and Yearley have a dual notion of order, with scientists producing order ‘inside’ and a ‘given’ order out there in society, Callon and Latour reject this duality (actually, any duality). Their notion of order is ‘productivistic’ through and through. Scientists and the non-humans they represent produce order. All the dualisms they fight against (internal - external; science - society; social - natural, etc.) are the product of this activity, i.e., the product of a second-order process of purification in the hybrid networks of nature-cultures, as Latour calls it.11 Their translation model makes it clear that it is silly to assume that one can discuss the stabilization of science without the stabilization of society.
But the converse does not hold. The stabilization of society, even our scientific-technological society cannot be completely explained by the stabilization of science. This is what we mean when we say that they seem to imply that society is completely swallowed by science. We don’t suggest to look for regions which are ‘untouched’ by science and technology, but that scientists and technologists (and the non-humans they represent) are not the only producers of order. One doesn’t have to embrace a simple dichotomy between science and technology ‘here’, and society ‘there’, to acknowledge that modern society - again, not in the least as a result of the stabilizing power of science, but also of other forces - is internally differentiated in various relatively autonomous domains like economy, politics, culture, etc. Of course, these domains and their boundaries are contested permanently - especially in late-modern, reflexive societies.12 Nevertheless, we should not too quickly toss into one basket the humans and the non-humans, subject and object, society and nature, social science and natural science, science and politics. Even Latour’s Machiavellian scientist-in-the-making does better to acknowledge this differentiation. For example, the way a biotechnologist tries to convince his colleagues in the laboratory to accept his knowledge claims differs from the way he tries to get his biotechnological project financed in his negotiations with representatives of the Ministries of Economic Affairs and Public Health Care. Of course, both activities can be labelled as ‘enrolling allies’, but this common label should not conceal the difference between these activities. Both may be called ‘politics’, but our biotechnologist has to acknowledge the difference between the two policies. Stressing the importance of social differentiation is not to defend traditional social science, and in particular sociology against all too radical realignments such as Callon and Latour seem to have in mind.
There is another reason for acknowledging differentiations in the network of science, technology and society. From the perspective of the active, network-building scientists, the natural and the social may be fluid as long as they are in the business of producing order. But from the perspective of other parties involved - policy-makers, environmental activists, consumers, etc. - science just doesn’t look the same. For them science, or segments of it, has turned into a black-box; for them it is ready-made science. Opening this black box requires a different set of strategies than closing it. Let us stick to the example of biotechnology. The starting point of the biotechnological scientist (building up a biotechnological network completely) differs from the starting point of the environmental activist (criticising that very same network). Moreover, just as the biotechnologist uses different strategies to enroll allies on different levels of his network, the environmental activist will use different strategies to open up this network. Depending on his political goals he will start at different levels to break into the network. Sometimes he will be satisfied with a minor change in the social side-effects of biotechnology; sometimes he may want to go much deeper into the network, maybe even into the (for him) ‘hard core’ of biotechnological knowledge production, becoming a colleague-scientist (that is, becoming the dissident Latour describes in Science in Action).13 Surely, all these operations can be labelled ‘political’, but we think that Callon and Latour do not sufficiently differentiate between the different operations.
The problem of politics
Indeed, the whole concept of politics is under discussion here. One of the most striking differences between the two positions under review relates to their interpretation of politics. To understand Callon and Latour’s perception of politics, it might be useful to make a little detour into the history of political ideas. We will concentrate on Latour here. Latour places socialism along with naturalism at the centre of the modernism he rejects.14 Thus he can hardly be called a Marxist in whatever meaning of this word. But in spite of this, his conception of politics (and also his ‘productivistic’ notion of producing order we mentioned earlier) bears a strong resemblance to classical Marxist interpretations of politics. First of all, according to Latour, politics is about changing society, and not (as Collins and Yearley would probably assume) about balancing interests in the political realm. What happens in the laboratory is ‘political’, because the laboratory has the ability to change the world dramatically, or, to use his vernacular, to ‘displace society’ in a way that reminds one of the imputed revolutionary power of the working class. And just as the power of the working class established a ‘fresh’ and ‘pure’ kind of politics, so the power of things constitutes a ‘fresh’ kind of politics, directly associated with science, and utterly different from traditional (bourgeois) political powers. This ‘fresh’ kind of politics has nothing to do with the traditional politics of power and counter-power, of profit, predictable goods and evils, etc. If you want to understand how science and society are interrelated, you have to take the position of (the representatives of) this new politics. If you rely on traditional politics (which is what Collins and Yearley seem te be doing) you cannot even see the tangles of science and society, let alone understand them.
With classical Marxism Latour also shares the notion of spokespersons.15 Just like the workers needed spokespersons in their efforts to conquer the political realm, so the non-humans need spokespersons to conquer society. Scientists like Pasteur speak for the microbes and other non-humans.16 They constitute the avant-garde in our scientific- technological culture. We should not, in terms of traditional politics, attribute interests or even intentions to these scientists, because their political activities become clear and obvious if and only if we follow them around. So follow the scientists (and of course Latour himself - who positions himself in turn as their spokesman) and you will be “on top of the world”. As far as Collins and Yearley are concerned, it seems safe to assume that they adhere to what Latour calls a traditional notion of politics, with interests, ideologies, profits, etc. Their view of politics includes making an effort to enhance the public understanding of science (without embracing some simple notion of popularization) and in particular a more adequate understanding of scientific expertise on the part of the general public.17 Scientists are neither prophets, nor gods, but experts with specific skills. As prophets or gods they are rightly despised, but as experts they can and should be used (and certainly not despised). They can be used in the same way other experts or professionals can be used. Latour’s interpretation of politics is, like the activist Marxist interpretation, particularly suited for breaking open the traditional political domain, for emancipating the non-humans - to grant these a voice in politics, to conceive of a parliament of things. Here lies the attractiveness of Latour’s model, because we stuffed our political domain with nothing but social ‘things’ - people, groups, professionals, social structures, votes, etc. Since non-humans play an important role in our society and politics, not just as separate entities, but increasingly mixed up with humans, we should at least let our sociological and political vocabulary reflect this state of affairs. However, from a political point of view this emancipation model is too simple (and possibly even dangerous) in a society as scientifically and technologically advanced as ours (just as the Marxist model of emancipation was too simple and dangerous).
First of all, non-humans do not need to be emancipated in general. Just like the working class, non-humans do not constitute a single class, so to speak, but a mixture of all sorts of things and animals - some powerful, like the machines of heart specialists, some powerless, like trees or animals. Technological devices in our hospitals and factories have been used for a long time. They occupy strong positions of power in our society, even though our humanistic vocabulary has not been very perceptive about this situation. But our inability to have the actions of these non-humans properly reflected in our political debates should not lead us to believe that these non-humans need to be emancipated in the same way as some other non-humans as animals, or some humans as refugees need protection. Latour’s politics of emancipation is just not subtle enough to differentiate between the various positions non-humans hold, nor can it measure their positions against those of humans. The non-humans which play a role in science and technology debates usually don’t have to be emancipated. They (or better, their spokespersons, the scientists) have to be called to account for there actions. The politics of emancipation is not very useful in our technological culture in which mixtures of humans and non-humans hold powerful positions. This political model doesn’t solve what seems to us the real problem. How can we integrate both humans and non-humans, and in particular their mixtures, into a both normatively sensible and politically effective vocabulary that is not just suited for giving these various ‘actants’ a voice, but that enables us to include the non-humans in our deliberations about justice and distribution? Like classical Marxism,18 Latour’s politics of emancipation is insensitive to normative and political problems of choice, justice and distribution. Since both humans and non-humans have to be called to account for their actions, we have to enrich our political vocabulary with ways to discuss problems that are specific for our scientific-technological society.
NOTES
See Harry Collins and Steven Yearley, ‘Epistemological Chicken’; Steve Woolgar, ‘Some Remarks about Positionism: A Reply to Collins and Yearley’; Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, ‘Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley’; Harry Collins and Steven Yearley, ‘Journey into Space’, all in Andrew Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 301-326, 327-342, 343-368, and 369-398, respectively.
Gerard de Vries, ‘Should We Send Collins and Latour to Dayton, Ohio?, EASST Review 14 (1995) Number 4, 3-10.
Pickering, note 1.
Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (eds.), Science Observed. Perspectives on the Social Studies of Science, London: Sage, 1983.
See Michael Lynch, ‘Extending Wittgenstein: The Pivotal Move from Epistemology to the Sociology of Science’, David Bloor, ‘Left and Right Wittgensteinians’, and Michael Lynch, ‘From the “Will to Theory” to the Discursive Collage: A Reply to Bloor’s “Left and Right Wittgensteinians”’, all in Pickering, note 1, 215-265, 266-282, and 283-300, respectively.
Callon and Latour, note 1, 366 (emphasis in original).
Andrew Pickering, ‘From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice’, in Pickering, note 1, 1
Steve Woolgar, note 1, 329.
Harry Collins, Changing Order. Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice, London: Sage, 1985, 144.
Compare David Bloor, ‘Durkheim and Mauss Revisited: Classification and the Sociology of Knowledge’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 13 (1982), 267-297.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.
See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990; and Ulrich Beck, Risk Society; Towards a New Modernity, London: SAGE, 1992, or idem, Die Erfindung des Politischen, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1993.
Bruno Latour, Science in Action, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987.
See Bruno Latour, ‘The Impact of Science Studies on Political Philosopy’, Science, Technology, and Human Values, vol. 16 (1991), 3-19; and Latour, note 11.
It is because of this notion of spokesperson that we prefer the parallel with Marxism above a liberalist reading of actor network theory - as in Nick Lee and Steve Brown, ‘Otherness and the Actor Network: The Undiscoverd Continent’, American Behavioral Scientist, vol.37 (1994), 772-790.
See Latour, The Pasteurization of France, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
See Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Steven Yearley, The Green Case: A Sociology of Environmental Issues, Politics, and Arguments, London: Harper-Collins, 1991.
See Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Find fifteen natural scientists researching and regulating hazardous chemicals. Lock them up in a seminar room with a comparable number of social scientists working on chemical risks. Make sure they talk to each other for about two days. Here is why and how we did it, what happened, and what we learned. An account of a social experiment.
Why and how we did it
The workshop ‘The Politics of Chemical Risk’ was organized with a double agenda in mind. One set of goals was to investigate and construct possible futures of chemical hazard evaluation in Europe. The other set of goals was to attempt to create communication between natural and social scientists working on or in risk regulation.
First goal: devise possible futures
In order to conceive possible futures for the evaluation of chemical hazards and its organization, a first objective was to clarify some of the tensions in the evaluation of chemical hazards in both the workplace and the environment. Consequently, these tensions would then be used as anchors in the development of different scenarios for future chemical regulation.
One of the obvious and unavoidable tensions concerns the problematic internationalization of risk regulation. All industrial countries have developed regulatory systems to assess and manage the risk of chemical substances. International organizations such as the OECD or the EU are becoming more important actors in this field of policy, taking international harmonization ever more forward, often supported by internationally operating industries. These projects run counter to important and persistent differences in national regulatory systems. Such differences are not only due to political structures and styles, but also to different styles and approaches in regulatory science and assessment. Moreover, there are national differences in the way the boundaries between ‘science’ and ‘politics’ are drawn and organized. Some countries tend to rely mainly on expert advice in their regulations, usually in the form of highly discreet expert committees. Others have set up extensive negotiation procedures, in which a wide range of groups participate, even in rather technical discussions (Brickman et al. 1985). International initiatives, such as the North Sea Conference or the EU’s setting of Occupational Exposure Limits, continue to put these national mechanisms of science/policy coordination under pressure. As international initiatives intensify, they increasingly raise important questions of how these tensions will work out and about new alternatives for accommodating local differences with translocal integration. How will national consultation procedures relate to international decision-making on chemical risks? What are the possibilities for democratic participation in risk regulation on an international level? How will differences in national risk assessment procedures be accommodated? How will the international regulatory system be integrated with different national styles of regulation and government?
Second goal: cross the social/natural science boundary
The second goal was to stimulate the communication between natural and social scientists, in order to mobilize a broader scope of interdisciplinary experiences for devising regulatory futures. The regulation of chemical risk is a domain of policy that involves a wide range of actors. People in regulatory agencies - scientists such as toxicologists, epidemiologists, or ecologists, industrial researchers, and environmental organizations - all have a high degree of first- hand experience with the operation of regulatory systems. Especially the natural scientists involved in regulatory research (and policy) form a rather close-knit community that has ample opportunities for meeting and exchanging views. However, policy analysts and social scientists interact relatively little with this ‘regulatory community’. In spite of an impressive body of research on risk regulation, only a relatively small portion of social science research is fed back into the regulatory world. This is unfortunate, since the widely differing forms of integration and distinction of science and policy have been a central topic for the researchers in science studies (cf. Gillespie 1979; Gillespie et al. 1982; Jasanoff 1990, 1992; Wynne 1990; Landy et al. 1990; Limoges et al. 1992; Cambrosio et al. 1992; Rip 1992).
Organizing such feedback is not self-evident, since the tools and insights of social scientists do not enter in a previously empty discursive space. The social science approach to risk differs from the presently dominant one of the natural scientists in some crucial aspects. This can be illustrated sharply by referring to a recent report of the British Royal Society, Risk: Analysis, Perception and Management. The first section of the report is entirely devoted to quantitative approaches that interpret risk analysis as a purely scientific problem; the second section points to the close interconnection between culture, policy and risk and the impossibility of a “purely scientific” approach (Royal Society 1992, Levidow 1994; cf. Health Council of the Netherlands 1995). Our idea was to try and get beyond this gap, and to combine the advantages of practical experience and detailed technical knowledge with the power of social scientists’ reflexive contributions, in order to stimulate both to think about possible regulatory futures. Evidently, nobody expected this to be achievable within the setting of a two-day workshop, but maybe such an experiment could help us along.
We wrote all of this in a long starting document, specifying that we wanted one session on the risk management/risk assessment boundary, one on internationalization, and one on standardization. For each of these, specific questions were defined and topics suggested. We sent out this document for comment and snowballed invitations, contributions, and sponsors. We found it very important to take enough time for this early preparation. Especially by taking seriously the feedback from people familiar with the regulatory world, such as Wim Passchier, secretary of the Health Council of The Netherlands, we could make sure the project kept maximum relevance for all parties involved. Because we foresaw communication difficulties, we decided to send out a reader containing some ten basic texts on the regulation of chemicals, and reflections upon these regulatory systems. We thought it important to keep a close grip on the programme in order to keep the project on its intended track, e.g., by asking speakers to talk on specific subjects. We sent out abstracts of all talks to the participants beforehand, in order to keep presentations as short and discussions as long a possible. We included much time for informal gatherings, plenty of food and drink and even fitted in the obligatory Amsterdam canal tour in order to maximize informal contacts.
In short, we invested extensively in the forging of links between the participants. On 7 and 8 December, we all met in the capital of the Netherlands, delicately chaired by Wiebe Bijker.
What happened
The workshop had a difficult start. The first presentations on the risk assessment/risk management boundary clashed diametrically. On the one hand, regulatory scientists such as toxicologist Victor Feron of the Dutch Expert Committee on Occupational Standards felt the need to defend regulatory assessment procedures as being scientific and therefore independent. Critical accounts from policy analysts, such as former Greenpeace Head of Science Sue Mayer, on the other hand, repeatedly pointed at the politics' in thescience’ of risk management. This was perceived as an outrageous attempt to delegitimize the conscientious and meticulous work of the natural scientists. It took quite a bit of informal debate to overcome the polarizing confrontation of this first phase of the discussions, although the clash was probably a productive, necessary step.
By the next morning, when we turned to more detailed and concrete matters of standardization of chemical evaluation, some cracks seemed to have appeared in the natural scientists’ defensive shield. Peter Calow, professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Sheffield, presented his account of the development of standardized toxicity tests to indicate where exactly he saw the decisions in his practice as a scientific expert as ‘actually’ being political. The main issue he identified was the choice between the environmental ‘endpoints’ chemical regulation should protect. More concretely, he signalled the need for a political choice between the assessment of the environmental impact of chemicals in terms of protection of species or in terms of protection of the ecosystem, i.e., the choice between protecting environmental structures or functions. When the evaluation of such potentially contrasting goals of environmental assessment is left to the experts, they will have to make political choices. The risk assessment processes, normally portrayed as pure science, then, according to Calow, can no longer be portrayed as such. As a regulatory scientist, Calow wanted a clear mandate in terms of the goals of chemical regulation, in order to deploy his own specific skills and expertise to achieve these goals.
The presentation of Peter Calow marked the changed atmosphere of the discussions and the growing appreciation of each other’s position. However, even when one accepts that there may be some issues in regulatory science that are ‘really’ political, the consequences of this point are far from clear. Should one attempt to further `purify’ the scientific and the political? Or should the mix of science and politics be considered unavoidable? During the debates, two crucial and related issues in the organization of risk assessment processes were identified and recognized by most of the participants. First, the tension between the difficulty of dividing ‘science’ from ‘politics’ on the one hand and the need of somehow organizing such a divide for the purposes of policy making on the other. There was general agreement that substantial parts of the decision making process over the hazards of chemicals need to be delegated to the experts, the theme of discussion being how substantial this part should be and how this process should be organized. Some argued that if only the process of risk assessment would be ‘transparent’, that is, observable and controllable, there would be no problem. A particularly clarifying intervention in this debate was made by Sheila Jasanoff, of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell. She argued that the model of a sharp split between ‘risk assessment’ and ‘risk management’ was a very specific product of a very specific (American) political situation of the early eighties, not necessarily a universal solution to all regulatory tensions. Furthermore, Jasanoff contested the corollary notion of ‘transparency’ of the risk assessment, as a transparent mountain of regulatory red tape may not necessarily mean accessible, understandable, and meaningful regulation of chemicals.
The second issue identified concerned the tension between local and translocal knowledge, an issue put on the agenda firmly by Erik Millstone of the Science Policy Research Unit, using very concrete and adequate examples. Even if we could agree on what constitutes ‘science’ and what constitutes ‘politics’ in a specific area, which knowledge should be included in the ‘science’? Especially the attempts to harmonize risk assessment procedures on an international level seem to run the risk of ignoring important local variations that could radically alter levels of risk locally. Local knowledge about specific conditions of exposure or specific forms of natural environment could alter the parameters of the evaluations in such ways that an international assessment may obscure major local hazards. In order to be able to include such local knowledge under pressure of unifying markets, harmonized regulation, and multinational companies, new and creative forms of risk regulation seem to be required.
At this point in the discussion, we thought these two classic points of the Science and Technology Studies work on risk regulation would provide the input for a debate on the four ‘possible future’ scenarios we had prepared. However, proceeding so quickly to this primary goal of the workshop met with some resistance. Most participants insisted upon exploring the differences and resemblances in positions more profoundly. A very useful way to do this was a quick stock- taking of what participants considered to be the most important problems of risk regulation. This indeed showed an extremely wide variety of priorities. Concerns ranged from the difficulty of proceeding with harmonization, a problem especially for international regulators; over how to get rid of the politics in expertise, which mostly concerned regulatory scientists; to how to assure a fair balance of positions in the risk assessment process, especially aired by policy analysts; and how to avoid a gridlock of reflexive loops of analysis, a central problem for some of the science studies people present.
In the end, the tone of the discussions was clearly dominated by the attempts to communicate across interdisciplinary boundaries and between diametrically opposed conceptions of risk. The attempts to discover each other’s frame of thinking, differing problem definitions and especially differing strategies to convince each other were quite fascinating. Unless they were interculturally misunderstood acts of politeness, we registered a clear will to continue the debate. This is now happening in some of the spin-off activities of the workshop, such as the preparation of the Proceedings.
What we learned
As to the goal of the workshop to investigate possible futures of the European regulatory risk arena, the workshop raised a large number of crucial questions. Using the pre-distributed papers and abstracts, we tried to sum these up in the format of a series of scenarios. Our first draft of these scenarios also was sent to the participants beforehand. Put briefly, these scenarios indicate four different - admittedly ‘archetypical’ - models of organizing expert-policy integration on the international level, combined with expectations as to their respective developments.
Possible futures: four scenarios.
A first model is based on the centralization of European chemical risk assessment, performed by a centralized European expert institution. Using examples from case studies, we indicated that such a technocratic model has the tendency to be expansive: more and more issues tend to be drawn in to the sphere of the ‘technical’, as the experts develop calculative tools, such as cost/benefit systems. This in turn tends to lead to increased resistance of interest groups as such a model neglects interest integration. A second model tries to address this problem by prioritizing consultative procedures. Using experiences from the American context as examples, we argued that such a model has a tendency of becoming over- procedural and complex, without necessarily leading to effective policies (cf. Jasanoff 1990, Wynne 1992). In a third scenario, the experts try to harmonize chemical assessment bottom-up, coordinating different regulatory approaches while acknowledging national differences. In this scenario, the contingency of the science/ policy boundary is recognized by the experts, but the results of the negotiations are presented publicly as the results of regulatory expertise rather than the result of a political process. By referring to case studies, again the dynamic of such a model can be sketched: delegitimation of the experts is a constant problem, based on the inconsistency between the rhetoric of confidential scientific inference and equally confidential interest integration (cf. Abraham 1993). The fourth and last scenario starts of with the idea that the differing patterns of science/policy integration and risk regulation in different countries are important and persistent. Rather than to try and harmonize these, international institutions should try to clarify these distinctions and mediate communication. We have dubbed this scenario the ‘reflexive’ one and have based it on Jasanoff’s paper for the workshop. The dynamic of such a scenario may lead to criticism of lack of vigour in the international institutions’ actions and a risk of endless debates.
The scenarios are not yet finalized. The discussion on the scenarios provided valuable new material, but the debate continues in the correspondence and will probably do so even after the conclusions of this workshop will be presented in the proceedings. Within the setting of the workshop, they worked fairly well to focus attention at the very end of the second day, although focusing the attention was not everybody’s desire.
Communication: on organizing this kind of workshops
Especially with respect to the organization of the communication process between the conceptions of risk assessment of regulatory scientists and policy analysts, a few important conclusions can be drawn. Problematizing the boundary between science and politics may be a necessary step to get the discussion going. However, it is also quickly perceived as an accusation of partisanship by regulatory scientists. Since decision-making processes in the regulation of chemicals are so often built on a scientific legitimation, it is difficult to get beyond these two rigid positions. We found it helpful to indicate the problems that a rigid separation between science and politics creates, not only for the analysts, but most importantly for regulatory practices. For these purposes, it is extremely important to come up with very concrete and empirical examples rather than sharp but abstract analyses.
In this workshop, crucial steps were taken by what we called ‘bridge-builders’. Although we presented the participants as two camps, a lot of them brought more than one hat: some natural scientists had experience in policy analysis and some social scientists had experience in regulatory agencies. Not only could our bridge-builders come up with some of the most convincing and concrete examples, they also held intermediate positions that carried weight in ‘the other camp’. The detailed stories of an experienced risk regulator such as Emanuel Somers of WHO, leading to the statement that ‘the science just is not that clear-cut’ simply had much more of an impact on natural science colleagues than a similar statement by a policy analyst. The use of concrete and detailed material in the presentation of an historical and sociological analysis, combined with personal experiences of an occupational hygienist, made Mark Piney into an other key bridge-builder. The importance of these intermediaries can not be sufficiently stressed. Never organize a similar workshop without them.
In spite of the difficult and persistent differences in frames of reference, we found this workshop an extremely useful social experiment. Talking back to the communities we study under the pressure-cooker conditions of a workshop allowed us to appreciate the variety of problems in chemical regulation and to proceed with solutions for the problems we see from the analyst perspective. One could call this action research; we also see it as a way of ‘doing politics’. It is not only a way to learn more about regulation, it is also an attempt to re-formulate STS findings into messages understandable and viable outside our little circles. Call it STS extension work too, if you want. In any case, we would like to see more of such workshops happening and invite you to share experiences with us.
Acknowledgements
The workshop was supported by The Commission of the European Communities (DG V and DG XI), The Ministery of Regional Planning and The Environment of The Netherlands, The Science Foundation of The Netherlands, The Health Council of The Netherlands, The Department of Law and Public Policy of the University of Leyden, The European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, The Netherlands Graduate School for Science and Technology Studies, and The Department of Science and Technology Dynamics of the University of Amsterdam. Thank you Adrienne van den Bogaard, Chunglin Kwa and Richard Rogers for comments.
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If you walk straight into the Tate Gallery, right through to the back, you can still feel the thrill of a queue but without having to devote yourself to its principle (the Cezanne centenary is the Real Thing - out the front, round the corner, and practically over the bridge). Georgina Starr’s exhibition (Brit Pack superstarr) is right next to the ringing tills of the Cezanne exhibition - entrance to her room: no charge.
As the money circulates in exchange for static miniatures of old memories in the large white room, moving images of Georgina Starr circulate through video tape on tv screens, caravan windows, and the walls of a dark room. This young artiste is totally absorbed by screen-images from dreams and scenes of films and plays, mixed with mundane moments in the privacy of a kitchen, the isolation of a caravan.
The constantly looping video machines seem mesmerised by their memories; they don’t seem to care if anyone is watching. They don’t register your entrance and exit with cash transactions; they don’t wait till you’re seated, to start. Like the Man in the Caravan (part of the exhibition), they will use themselves as the audience, playing for their own edification. Like the dancers in the disco scene, they seem focused on a spot beyond anyone else’s gaze. But in fact, they care passionately about their audience. In seeming to look away, they invite you into their intimacy. In a dark room full of strangers, a quiet shift can take place in one’s attachment to the world.
Repetition, identification, rearticulation
If you had been in Milton Keynes last December, you could have come to a Software Symposium. Repetition identificaton rearticulation. ‘Ethnography and Software’ could well have been the third meeting in a series begun at CRICT (Do Users Get What They Want? 1992 and Do Users Get What They Want? 1993). Repetition. Where social scientists tried to explain (to each other, to practitioners, and to their colleagues in the Mathematics Faculty) what they are doing in the computer department. Identification. And computer department people wonder at the difference between their orientation and that of the ethnographer. Both seem to be focused on the same stuff, yet produce such different accounts of it. Rearticulation.
This meeting was organised by the SCoS Group (Social Construction of Software), an informal and dynamic research group within the Faculty of Maths at the Open University. They focused their energy on this symposium to persuade socio(-)logists and software specialists to take to the floor once more and see where their turn-taking took them this time.
Georgina Starr’s art is presented to you entirely through pre-existing familiar objects (kitchen tables, coffee cups, cornflake packets) including videotape on a tv screen. Come and sit on the bed and watch the artist perform a scene from Grease (the play) playing all four different women herself, rendering it real through careful cutting of the video tape. She invites your identification by placing you in the same physical location, and engaging you in the problems of the conversation, but leaves you in the dark to make your own articulation to the scene.
To what extent do ethnographers identify with their software subject, and how does this join in with the re-articulation of that subject? Georgina Starr’s art is expressed entirely through the medium of technical artefacts. She even becomes one herself as she appears on her screens in various guises. Her position in the Tate Gallery maintains her status as An Artist even as her work changes what that means.
Paul Benyon-Davies (Glamorgan University) considered each of the different positions an ethnographer can take as they practice in the field of Information Systems. An ethnography OF IS maintains the allegiance to anthropology and a distanced relationship with software. Ethnography FOR IS surrenders one allegiance to the other. And Ethnography WITHIN IS suggests a more productive relationship from both points of view.
Nevertheless, Symposiums IN Computer Science Departments themselves change the balance once more. And presentations THROUGH computerised machinery magnifies this problematic (Helen Sharp, SoCS group, Open University). Ethnographies that turned into computer software (Tom Rodden, CSCW Centre Lancaster University) through a HyperText tool stood in marked contrast to Ethnographies that devoted themselves to the possibilities of the body (Janet Rachel, University of East London). And finally, ETHNO(-)graphies which focused on the social machinery of software engineers took us back to the beauty of writing, and the skill of turning a phrase (Graham Button, Rank Xerox Research Centre).
The symposium as a whole offered a spectacle of different articulations on a theme. Each turn presented an image to reflect on, offering distinctive possibilities to think in. An attempt to bring two of these together simultaneously (Pat Hall, Open University, and Janet Rachel, UEL) reinforced the value of difference and reminded everyone of the necessity to decide. This point was revisited at the close of the day by Anthony Finkelstein (City University) who drew our attention to the circulation of money, and its place in the decisions to repeat, identify, and articulate.
The constantly renewing queue crawling towards the tills at the Tate Gallery reinforces the importance of the turn of the century - one hundred years of Cezanne, a revolutionary painter in his time. The thrill of the new takes off in his shadow, as Georgina Starr registers her difference in the small dark room next door. Repeating the revolution presents new opportunities for identifications, and invites us to join in differently each time.
Review of Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, 212 p, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Having returned from a trip to America in the mid-eighties Jean Beaudrillard wrote a small book with the simple title America. The book’s epigraph cites an inscription that you can find on the outside mirror of an American car: Caution - Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. We’ve read Dr. Lacan’s warning, so where are the desired objects of our technological mirrors now?
Finally we are back on the road again. The sorts of dangers we are facing in the days of the ‘information superhighway’ obviously have changed. We no longer have to be aware of the car trying to pass us. Crashes do not happen on the cross- roads in cyberspace. It is still the old American dream of open spaces, fast routes, the myth of freedom and the absence of a regulating governmental body which is haunting the postmechanical age. People who enter the internet are on a search without any destination in particular. They prefer to travel alone, but they also want to meet nice people, want to make friends ‘out there’, who speak the same language and share similar values. And don’t forget, people out there don’t like questions like ‘who are you and where do you come from’? Remember to be careful. Things and people out there may not be what they seem.
Our vehicles in this world are no longer a good horse or a T-Bird, but little packages of bytes attached to your e-mail address. The worst thing that could happen to the lonesome Datenreisender in the internet is that the university computing facilities crash. Seems to be quite a safe world.
But even here something is threatening us, and again it has to do with objects and space and Dr. Lacan’s prescription. Don’t let the objects come to close to you; keep your distance! Don’t fall in love with the mirror images, don’t touch them and be as untouchable as anybody else in this world. Control your desires, otherwise you could seriously be hurt by the objects in the screen.
There are tales of the nets that provide us with those examples of proximity and danger. Like the story of a New York psychiatrist named Sanford Lewin and his on-line counter-ego Julie Graham. Julie’s story, reported by Stone in considerable length and detail, begins in 1982 on the CompuServe on-line CB chat. A CompuServe user can log on those chat lines and write interactively to other users. Julie Graham first signed on in 1982. Soon she became a widely accepted member of this world of strong and long-lasting on-line friendships. After years of daily presence on the on-line services, these people had the impression that they shared their lives with each other, even though most of them never met face-to-face outside in the ‘real world’. But one day it turned out that everything was a big fake. Julie Graham never existed. She was nothing but the invention of Sanford Lewin. It began as a psychiatric experiment, but after a while Lewin realised that his masquerade had gotten out of control. Julie “no longer simply carried out his wishes at the keyboard, she had her own emergent personality, her own ideas, her own directions. Not that he was losing his own identity, developing a parallel one, one of considerable puissance. Jekyll and Julie.” (p76) For Dr. Sanford ‘Frankenstein’ Lewin there was only one solution - Julie had to die outside the net. Lewin in his role as John, Julie’s husband, told her on-line friends that Julie had become seriously ill and was hovering between life and death. “The result was horrific. Lewin, as John, was deluged with expressions of shock, sorrow and caring. People offered medical advice. Some people went into out-and-out panic. The chat lines became jammed. So many people got seriously upset, in fact, that Lewin backed down. He couldn’t stand to engineer her death. Julie recovered and came home.” (p76) Not only was Lewin terrified by this result of his little experiment, but he also couldn’t stand the fact that his Sanford persona “was being defeated by his Julie persona.” (p77) In the net, everybody was overwhelmed by Julie’s personality, while Sanford was a kind of net-nerd, nice but rather boring. So what do you do when the life of your images is much more fun than your own life outside the chat universe?
Lewin decided to reveal himself and thereby let Julie die. The result was almost more bizarre than in his first attempt to get rid of his stubborn and selfish electronic twin: “Perhaps to everyone’s surprise, the emotion that many of those in the chat system felt was mourning. Because of the circumstances in which it occurred, Julie’s unmasking as a construct, a cross-dressing man, had been worse than a death. There was no focused instant of pain and loss. There was no funeral, no socially supported way to lay the Julie persona to rest, to release one’s emotions and to move on… Whatever Julie was or wasn’t, she had been a good friend and a staunch supporter to many people in need.” (p78)
Another boundary story. It is about a woman called Sarah who has been diagnosed as having Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). It isn’t one of those funny stories about gender- switching in IRC or such, but a sad report of rape. Sarah charged an acquaintance of hers that he “raped her after deliberately drawing out one of her personalities, a naive woman who he thought would be willing to have sex with him.” (p45) Usually MPD is diagnosed as a mental disorder of traumatic origin, and it seems to be an inappropriate subject for a study of communication technologies. But Stone raises the question whether there is “any room for non traumatic multiplicity” (p58) in the common clinical accounts of this disease. Actually she wants to depathologize MPD, promoting communication technologies as means of “healing trauma, but preserving multiplicity; or perhaps more pertinent, creating discursive space for a possible transformative legitimization of some forms of multiplicity.” (p59) Enter cyberspace, and tell us about the others that share your body with you, because “the technosocial space of virtual systems … is a domain of non traumatic multiplicity.” (p60) But is cyberspace really an opportunity to decriminalise MPD? (p62) Stone thinks that the life of those ‘multiples’, “sharing a single body with several quasi-independent personalities, is emblematic of a fair percentage of everyday life in the world of virtual systems.” (63) The lonely crowd of the fifties nowadays seems to have mutated into the crowd in the lonesome.
What do those ‘borderland stories’ teach us? Could they be of any interest to us as students of science and technology? Reading trendy papers that blow up their usually not so breathtaking findings with überhyped titles like ‘Sex, Death and Machinery’ or (even more pretentious) ‘Cyberdämmerung at the Atari Lab’, I usually follow my sociological ‘Don’t believe the hipe’ reflex and simply trash ‘em. But let’s see what we can get out of it. Due to the lack of appropriate beaches in the old world, unfortunately we Europeans are usually not very skilled surfers, whatever sort of waves there are - ocean breakers or just discourse splashing. For a Californian “discourse surfer” (p165) like Sandy Stone this might be not a very promising perspective. We prefer to sit on the beach in the shadow, frightened by those ugly remains from the mechanical age like the ozone hole, and watch the surfers out there, gliding in the sun from wave to wave, always in motion ‘til the sun comes down on the Santa Monica boulevard’. Could we use this beautiful picture for the enrichment of our own academic entertainment back there in cold and usually rainy Europe? Okay, we can’t surf, but at least we are not afraid of the deep blue of ‘high theory’ as Sandy Stone obviously is. “Occasionally it’s wonderful, or necessary, to dive down. The depths are heady and beautiful, and if I linger too long, rapture of the deep sets in, and I begin to think I can stay down forever. Which is the signal that it’s time for air.” (p165) Let’s get a last deep breath of air, and dive down in the discourse on Science and Technology. Maybe thinking prevents us from sinking?
The War of Desire and Technology consists of eight chapters, all of which focus somehow on phenomena around the emergence of communication technologies. Besides the already mentioned two stories on identity and the concept of the self, Stone devotes three chapters to some early virtual communities among the first generation of computer freaks in California. These chapters are well written and quite informative, but rather like an appetiser that leaves you yearning for more coherent, detailed and conceptually ambitious readings. Especially the chapter on the Atari Lab1 is probably the most astonishing conglomeration of insider stories, cramped anecdotes and tiny fragments of the Atari Lab member’s theoretical work on interaction and presence that ever passed the publisher’s desk of MIT Press. Could it be that a diverse number of quite unique selves (scholars, surfers, anthropologists) “grounded in a body unit” have worked on these chapters? That of course would explain some of its variance. Squashed in between these chapters we find a coy part on “Reinvention and Encounter. Pause for Theory.” Laying down the surfboard for a moment, Stone joins the theorists on the beach. What is the book all about?
Living in a metaphor: Cyber this and that
This book “is about science fiction, in the sense that it is about emergent technologies, shifting boundaries between the living and the non living, optional embodiments … in other words, about the everyday world as a cyborg habitat.” (p38) It comes to mind that this book is not about science fiction but an example of the new genre fiction science, that is the scientific study of cultures living in a fiction. Enter the inevitable Oberguru William Gibson.[2] “As Gibson maintained from the beginning, to a certain extent cyberspace does exist now, as a metaphor for late-twentieth-century communications technologies, for instance, as data banks, financial systems, computer networks, military simulations and ATMs… Many of us live at least part-time in cyberspace already. We call it computer-conferencing, or phone sex, or virtual this and that….” (p35).
Let’s suppose there are people living in this metaphor (and obviously Stone considers herself as one of them). Suppose, too, that it’s promising to think about computer mediated communication in terms of entering a sort of ‘space’ where one can ‘meet’ other ‘entities’. What then does this world tell us about the current state of the ‘postmechanical age’? The book is “only partly about cyberspace. It is also about social systems that arise in spaces enabled by and constituted through communication technologies … new social forms that arise in a circumstance in which body, meet, place, and even space mean something quite different from our accustomed understanding.” (p38) If we agree with Stone so far, we can also agree that “the kinds of interactions we can observe within the spaces of prosthetic communication are … emblematic of the current state of complex interactions between humans and machines.” (p36) Questions: In what sense are these ‘social forms’ new? In which way do those things like body or place there ‘in cyberspace’ differ from ‘our accustomed understanding’? (Just as a reminder: Sociologists like Goffman or Garfinkel challenged these accustomed understandings ages before the first personal computer saw the light of day, and they didn’t need any Gibsons to come up with a vocabulary of their own for their findings.)
Third question: What precisely does it mean to speak of social forms that are ‘constituted through communication technologies’? It seems to me that this is a core question. Referring to positions from authors like Brenda Laurel and Sherry Turkle, Stone describes computers “not only as tools but also as arenas for social experience.” (p15) Confusingly enough she also talks about computers as ‘prostheses’ (with which she fell in love with). “In this frame of understanding, computers were prosthetic in the specific sense of the Greek term prosthenos - extension.” (p12) So a ‘prosthetic community’ is such an extension of other forms of communities, more used to us, but not better or higher or superior - just different. Thus the concept of the computer is not numbers but other people. “Computers are arenas for social experience and dramatic interaction, a type of media more like public theatre, and their output is used for qualitative interaction, dialogue, and conversation. Inside the little box are other people.” (p16) Unfortunately Stone does not even attempt to explain how they get in there, how these people overcome channel limitations and what it really means for these new social forms to be ‘constituted through’ a technology. Does it really hold that social systems like the few Stone describes are based on technologies? Why do some folks dig phone sex? Because they have a telephone? Or because they have sexual desires? Or maybe because they are socially isolated?
How far do we get with the assumption that social communities or cultural groups in general are not constituted through a technology, but through common interests, shared values, a common language or shared symbolic belief systems of whatever sort? Technical artefacts usually are part of these cultures; we interact with them and live in our cultures under the assumption that there are working techniques among us. Just as Anselm Strauss puts it, cited by Stone as an epigraph of her work: “A group constituted around a common symbolic structure is a ‘culture area’ of its own, the limits of which are set neither by territory nor formal membership, but by the limits of effective communication.” (pxi) If we carefully read Stone’s Sanford Lewin example, first we see no techno- logically constituted culture, but rather normal white male and female adults in their thirties, most of them college graduates with good salaries and their usual kind of happy-go- lucky lifestyle. Communication among these people works not because they all have a computer and a modem, but due to the fact that they already live in a common ‘culture area’ that is based in the social structure I just labelled as ‘educated middle-class’, etc. That life provides them with things to talk about, with interesting events and all those human experiences that you can’t make ‘on-line’. Julie’s on-line friends began to become suspicious because obviously Julie had no life outside the net: “(Julie) was always off at conferences, where presumably she met face to face with colleagues. And she and (her husband) spent a lot of time on exotic vacations, where she must also be seeing people face to face. It seemed that the only people who never got to see her were her on-line friends.” (p74) Those examples make me think that the relation between net-life and life outside could be just the other way round. Stone, however, just read the quotation of Strauss to mean ‘no territory’ and assumed that means an open space, thus misconceiving communication-in-space for culture area. Consequently, she establishes a new territory - the inside of the machine - taking the technological prosthesis for the cultural arena itself. If you want to join them, enter the space behind the screen. I doubt that this kind of technological reification of culture is a very promising way of researching these now technologies.
And fourth: How can we observe “the identities that emerge from these interactions - fragmented, complex, diffracted through the lenses of technology, culture, and new technocultural formations”? (p36) If we follow Stone’s advice, all we need to do is use the capture file facility of your internet software, and catch those stories like the one of Sanford ‘Julie’ Lewin. And there are quite a few Julies already around in cyberspace. “I want to see how groups of friends evolve when their meeting room exists in a purely symbolic state. I want to see how narrowing the bandwidth - that is, doing without customary modes of symbolic exchange such as gesture and voice tone - affects sharing and trust, and how inhabitants of virtual systems construct and maintain categories such as gender and race. I want to see how people without bodies make love.” (p38)
Overcoming the bandwidth problem, however, has been an intensively researched aspect of computer mediated communication over the last decade. That research has made a significant contribution to a better understanding of the construction of the self and his or her body in everyday life in the same way as for example considering the construction of transsexuality helps to uncover the ‘normal’ construction of gendered bodies. Stone’s work follows this route of research for a while. Unfortunately when it comes to the interpretation of her empirical findings Stone reveals a very different point of view. Cyberspace is borderland, tells us borderland stories, but according to Stone this borderland is also the promised land of liberation and collectivity. Insofar as cybersociety “involves communicating with other people through narrow-bandwidth media, it is about negotiating the tensions between individual subjects, virtual collectivities, and the physical bodies in which they may or may not be grounded.” (p35) Surfing the net and meeting more and more people “who engage in social interactions without ever meeting in the customary sense of the term … has given me increasing opportunities to watch others try on their own alternative personae.” (p2ff.) In places like CompuServe chat lines, these people “out at the margins who have always lived comfortably with the idea of floating identities” (p2) meet others “inward from the margins … who are beginning, just a bit, to question. What it is they are questioning is a good part of what this essay is about.” (p2)
They are questioning the concept of presence. Stone raises a variety of related questions that “include repeated transgressions of the traditional concept of the body’s physical envelope and of the locus of human agency.” (p16) Stone wants to make us see the variety of possible connections “between bodies and personae/selves/subjects”. (p86) Therefore she tells us about the woman who has been diagnosed as having MPD as well as Sanford Lewin’s story. Her subjects, however, are not MPD patients but people living in “technological communities” - a different ballpark entirely. She defines multiplicity as “sharing a single body with several quasi- independent personalities”, and, to Stone, a “fair percentage” of the inhabitants of virtual systems exhibit this new technological MPD. (p63) The empirical findings Stone offers to underline this statement are by no means very convincing. Can anyone in any of these stories be considered as ‘multiples’, in Stone’s sense? Sanford Lewin comes closest, but pretending to be someone else on-line is clearly different from being mentally confused about your personality.
Are there other possible cases? Does ‘a fair percentage’ of Stone’s examples match the profile? Watch the reactions of the betrayed victims of Levine’s masquerade. They are embarrassed, shocked and very, very disappointed - a rather strange way of reacting to something that, if we follow Stone, is supposed to be an everyday event in virtual systems. Again Stone is a victim of her own techno-narcissism. She is obsessed with Levin and Julie, because she identifies with both of them, but she doesn’t look at the larger community of which Lewin was just a very small part. “I tend to see myself as an entity that has chosen to make its life career out of playing with identity.” (1ff.) That may be a pleasure for her, but obviously nobody else in the community under study tends to agree.
How about the opposite reading of this borderland story? How about this interpretation: ‘Attempting to be oneself and defending this achievement against its tendencies to dissolve over time is emblematic of a fair percentage of everyday life in the world of virtual systems.’ This interpretation might be more helpful to explain why Julie’s friends where so desperately fighting for her. Being a friend of Julie, sharing common experiences with her - all that meant a lot to them. They simply fought for themselves when they rejected to accept that Julie was a complete fake. If they would have had a variety of net-selves right at hand, why then did they have so much trouble with their ‘being-friend-of-Julie’? I think that most people still have only one self, and that one self means a lot to them, because it’s the only one that has shared quite a long time with that body in front of the computer. Adding a net-self to that body may be playful and fun, but could it reach the intensity of the old relationship? It’s like in Coppola’s One From The Heart when Frederic Forrest says to departing Terri Garr: “You can be on that beach in Paradise, but you’ll still be carrying all your shit with you.” And why should people want to get rid of their cultural identities? That’s what makes them really interesting and very special and very unique people.
I propose to take these short cuts presented by Stone as first insights into the souls of Haraway’s cyborgs, a kind of psychopathology of the desire for identity in cybersociety. Apparently Stone considers herself a cyborg feeling quite at home in cybercommunities. But it takes a lot of distance to one’s own culture in order to get something out of it that might be considered ‘anthropological fieldwork’. It is precisely this complete lack of distance that makes this book a failure according to its own standards. For an novelist who introduces her work with a statement on ‘How I Fell in Love with My Prosthesis’ this might be forgivable; for an anthropologist it’s not. “The floppy disk has become the cyberanthropologist’s field notebook; in virtual social environments nothing escapes its panoptic gaze.” (p190) Capture filing the nets may be a cosy way to a promising field site (you don’t need to apply for visa, you don’t need any vaccinations and you can always escape just by turning off your computer), but ethnography just doesn’t work without any distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, even if this distinction is (like in most studies of science and technology) just a construction for the sake of encouraging one’s awareness of the strangeness of our own culture. Even a ‘discourse surfer’ cannot surf on her own board, be the wave and ride it.
Apparently Rosanne Stone is a culture narcissus in the sense of someone in love with her or his own self-constructed culture. It seems to me that Stone’s attitude toward cyberspace is the same as that of Julie’s friends. Every contrary finding that Julie might not really be what she seemed was rejected by those who were strongly engaged with her. Stone in the same way rejects everything that might not fit into her idea about reality in cyberspace. Consequently everything in her book turns out to be identical. The subjects are Cyborg (Haraway), Cyborgs are technology, technology is a prosthesis community, cyberspace is a prosthesis, prosthesis are (parts of) bodies, and bodies are cyborgs, etc. Devoting one’s work to the maxim “no causes, no effects, mutual emergence” (p21) sounds nice but should not invite sloppy theory.
Finally I want to cite the best paragraph of the book. “Electronic communication technologies, discourse networks, and social formations continue the trend toward increasing awareness of a sense of self; toward increasing physical isolation of individuals in Western and Western-influenced societies; and toward displacement of shared physical space, both public and private, by textuality and prosthetic communication - in brief, the constellation of events that define the close of the mechanical age and the unfolding or revealing of what, for lack of a better term, we might call the virtual age.” (p20) Unfortunately Stone is too much obsessed with the world ‘inside the net’ to be able to think about these new social forms with regard to “what we can learn from them about social problems outside the worlds of the nets.”(p38)
Notes
“The Atari Lab was a unique, controversial, and explosively short-lived organization for basic research in virtual reality and interactive multimedia in the early 1980s. It was a child of the Atari Corporation, one of the first manufacturers of personal computers and interactive game software.” (p124)
I suggest from now on to stay abstinent from quoting William Gibson. Defining technological territories along the line of being ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of some technological space simply was from the very beginning misleading and confusing sociological research on communication technologies.
A Review of Roslynn D. Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove. Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature
The first thing you notice about Roslynn Haynes’s book is the huge amount of notes and bibliographical references on which her survey of five hundred years of western literature is based. Let there be no doubt: the author is well-read on the theme of the scientist in literature. And what is more: she manages to integrate her discussion of the representation of the scientist in literature with a reconstruction of the major developments in science itself. On top of that, she pays a lot of attention to the larger societal setting in which both the history of science and its representation in literature are to be situated. The aim of the book is nothing less than to examine “the representation of scientists from the Middle Ages to the present, showing how the recurrent mutual suspicion between scientists and other members of society was developed and reinforced in Western literature and pointing to some of the fictional suggestions for overcoming what is arguably the most pervasive problem of our time, namely, communication failure.” (p6) The stakes are high. Perhaps too high. Inevitably, a price must be paid for such an enormous, historiographical enterprise. In her book, Haynes sacrifices the subtleties of literary analysis for the sake of a chronological, but above all classified, order: we begin with the sixteenth century version of the Faust-myth and end with Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). In between lies a rigid categorization of five centuries of western literature that I shall deal with shortly.
As for the relation between science and its literary repre- sentation, I doubt whether the author has even begun to reflect on the old, inescapable epistemological implications of such a conjunction: whether the very idea of the artist’s “representation” of the scientists of his day, does not falsely presuppose that there is a real preverbal (pre- artistic) realm of science to be portrayed. In view of Haynes’s own interest in the way art has contributed to the ambiguous reception - and functioning -of science in western civilization, such a hierarchical distinction between art and science seems untenable. One may even ask whether the concept of “representation” is adequate in a study which claims that “viewed chronologically [the fictional scientists] achieve an additional historical significance… as ideological indicators of the changing perception of science over some seven centuries… These subversive fictional protagonists have inevitably contributed to Western society’s ambiguous love-hate attitude towards science, which has resurfaced in recent decades in the debates over the use of public money for space research…” (p2). One need not be a radical anti- representationalist to find that such remarks point to a conception of science as culturally constructed. That literature has a role to play in the exposure of the hidden social implications of the scientific drive toward fact- finding - as well as toward objective representation - is one of the major contributions of postmodern (literary) criticism. Except for some occasional references to feminist criticism, however, Haynes never explicitly aligns herself with this school of thinking, let alone theoretically raises the question as to how the status of science, and of (its) representation, changes when viewed from this constructivist perspective. Regrettably, her book remains superficial in this respect. Her analysis is based on a simplified definition of literature as the reflection both of the writer’s opinions and of the predominant social - mainly critical - attitudes toward scientific development. Hence, to pursue my epistemological questions any further would amount to complicating the theme of the book in ways not directly relevant to it. Let me therefore turn to a brief discussion of what we do get from Haynes’s historical survey.
As said, Haynes has done her homework: one can only praise her firm grasp on the history of science and its literary re- presentation, from alchemy to nuclear physics, from Faust to Strangelove. Although the evolution of science portrayed is not new, the book’s encyclopedic gathering of scientists, novelists and their work, makes it a valuable resource for anyone interested in the central theme: how have writers responded to particular scientific developments and how have their representations come to provide the west with powerful cultural myths about the controversial role of the scientist in society.
The immensity of information given, however, masks an ex- treme rigidity of design. Taken as a whole, Haynes’s encyclopedia strikes me as too “scientific,” in her own sense of the term: as obsessed with order, efficiency and control. Dozens of literary works are stripped of their formal complexities, and reduced to mere representatives of the six (varying) stereotypes that the author recognizes throughout the history of literature. There is first of all the popular image of the evil scientist who thinks that he can side-step the God-given limits of man’s capacities (Faust, Frankenstein, Jekyll, Moreau and Strangelove). Other stereotypes include the stupid (absent-minded) professor, the emotionally deficient scientist, the heroic adventurer, the idealist and, finally, the helpless scientist who loses control over the (military) application of his knowledge. All of these categories Haynes explores from a historical perspective: when and why were they introduced and at what points in history did they recur. Together they constitute the frame that allows her to cogently categorize innumerable canonical as well as lesser known authors: Wells, Huxley, Eliot, Hawthorne, Brecht, Musil, Hoffmann, Swift, Zola, Kubrick, Holsten, Aldridge, Colby, Kornbluth, Zuckmayer, and many others.
If curiosity is what keeps a reader going from beginning till end, From Faust to Strangelove might disappoint. There is a certain predictability about the narrative path chosen here that did not stimulate my desire to proceed. A chapter on the bad (unfeeling, immoral) scientist tends to be followed by a section on the good (idealist, heroic) one. Although historical movements have traditionally been believed to generate their own counterparts, such a predetermined Hegelian script seems to me by now outdated. Furthermore, while Haynes’s investigation into the successive periods of literary history tries to do justice to the contextual differences, it is precisely her insistence on the shaping forces of the soci- al-scientific setting, that makes her account somewhat bloodless, if not mechanical. Thus she starts, for instance, her chapter on early twentieth century American literature with an invocation of the cult of discovery instigated by such prominent inventors as Franklin, Bell and Edison, only to conclude that “[g]iven this adulation of the inventor, it is not surprising that American writers at the turn of the century incorporated actual inventors as characters in their fiction” (p164). There follows an admittedly perceptive discussion of the Scientist as Inventor, followed by a portrait of the Scientist as World Savior, the Scientist as Detective, the Scientist as Utopian Ruler. Not unexpectedly, the next chapter counters this idealism with the following opening-lines: “The scientists’ reign as heroes of twentieth- century literature was always open to question, and even the promise of a limitless power source was not sufficient to prolong the idea beyond the 1940s” (p187). The myth of the evil scientist reappears - and comes true! - once science gets voluntarily involved in the machinery of the first and second world war: as the title of chapter twelve triumphantly pro- claims, “reality overtakes fiction.” That this fulfillment of the Faustian myth raises the complicated question as to where to draw the line between reality and myth, science and fiction, Haynes comfortably neglects.
In Haynes’s view, the function of art is to lay bare, and bridge, the gap between the scientist and his community. What Shelley’s Frankenstein teaches us, for instance, is that a scientific experiment conducted in total isolation, cannot but be expressive of the scholar’s lack of sympathy for the people closest to him. Hence the monster kills Dr. Frankenstein’s future wife. The much-debated feminist implications of this destructive gesture are eloquently re-articulated by Haynes: Frankenstein is a novel about a scientist who wants to usurp his future wife’s natural power of procreation. What is equally interesting in her discussion is the parallels she suggests between science and art: everything that is true for Dr. Frankenstein also pertains to the artist. Both are guilty of wanting to re-enact the omnipotent role of the Creator. Both thereby commit the crime of displacing reality (the original). Unfortunately, but perhaps predictably, Haynes does not explore her insights any further. What she leaves unsaid is that the artist works at the same distance from reality as the scientist that (s)he criticizes. Mary Shelley’s novel is as much an indictment of her father’s unemotional intellectual stance toward her, as it is a disconcerting inquiry into her own desire to replace the loss of her son with new, albeit artificial, life. If it is the fate of the isolated scientist not to foresee the destruction that his invention might unleash, it is no less the burden of the artist to produce a work of fiction that is necessarily different from—even intolerant of—reality. Given the fact that, not unlike the scientist, the artist is at odds with the world that (s)he recreates, how can one insist on the representative function of literature? How can Haynes on the one hand recognize that art subverts the scientific developments of its day, and on the other hand construe a history of literature that is totally determined by - and reflective of - those developments? Surely, if art questions the certainties produced by science, its meaning lies in its discontinuity toward it. How, then, save by the ambiguities of its form, can art bridge or reveal the gap between the totalizing order of the scientist and the irreducible contradictions of its long- term social effects. Unfortunately, Haynes has devoted little attention to this characteristic open-ended form of art. In the end, her interest lies in generalities rather than particularities; in stereotypes rather than subversions; in content rather than form. I could not agree more that science is a problematic model for the arts.
Science and technology, we all know, are constructed in laboratories, and so it is right and fitting that we in the STS community preoccupy ourselves with those haunts. Yet periodically, when suffering snow-blindness from staring at men in dazzling white coats, I close my eyes and fantasize about another planet: Planet XI. Like Earth, Planet XI is a place in which knowledge and technical artifacts are socially constructed, but in other respects it is utterly bizarre and exotic.
For example, on Planet XI a startling amount of knowledge about how the world works is produced by social groups comprising non-experts — that is, ordinary women and men. Sometimes they are organized according to their occupations (a little bit like our trade unions), sometimes according to their social concerns (like our environmental or women’s groups), and sometimes according to where they live (like our community and grassroots organizations).
Some of these groups produce knowledge entirely by themselves. For instance, if they fear that they have been poisoned by polluted water, they conduct their own surveys and empirical examinations to find out whether, how, and why. Farfetched as this sounds, they are able to do this without the benefit of university educations, research grants, or laboratory facilities.
But in other cases they produce knowledge in close collaboration with professionally trained researchers. Yes, it is hard to believe that there could be a place where men and women with professional credentials would even talk, much less cooperate actively, with others less educated. But on Planet XI, I insist, it is so. For instance, in one nation on Planet XI every university has established a set of research centers whose sole purpose is to facilitate studies conducted with or for popular organizations. Thus on Planet XI, understanding how knowledge is socially constructed sometimes entails studying laboratories, but it also means spending time with all kinds of women and men in all kinds of social settings. On Planet XI, knowledge creation knows no sharp geographic, class or other social boundaries.
Even on Earth, science and technology are not, of course, autonomous enterprises; they are strongly influenced, for example, by government policies. But since the only kinds of people who significantly influence those policies are the same people who otherwise wear white coats and busy themselves with laboratory inscription devices, studying science policymaking on Earth hardly requires shifting one’s gaze from the laboratory’s customary denizens. Thus it is both a relief from tedium — and yet also a bit shocking — that on Planet XI many other kinds of people influence science and technology policymaking.
For instance, there is another nation on Planet XI that, realizing that knowledge and know-how are not only socially constructed but also have profound social repercussions, convenes panels of laypeople — that’s right, everyday folks from all walks of life, including school teachers, homemakers and street sweepers — to publicly interrogate men and women in white coats and then reach their own policy conclusions. These lay panelists’ judgements have influenced popular political deliberations, business decisions, and government policies.
You might well imagine that this process is not only costly but leads to ludicrously ill-informed judgements. But a broad cross-section of the nation’s members — including its political and business leaders — claim that these irrational participatory methods actually result in greater social justice and even in real economies. This occurs, according to them, because there is relatively little costly opposition to innovation, insofar as a wide range of social concerns are reasonably well reflected in prior R&D and policy decisions.
In several nations on Planet XI, programs have begun to be established through which workers and consumers can even participate directly in designing alternative technologies better adapted to their life circumstances and aspirations. Workers, for instance, have consistently demonstrated both an interest and impressive capabilities in helping to devise production technologies that are not only efficient but also maintain safe, high wage, high skill jobs, protect the environment, and result in high quality products or services.
Many university students on Planet XI pursue educations and careers no different from the conventional student trajectories familiar on Planet Earth. But others choose to become actively engaged in the preceding participatory activities as an integral aspect of their studies. For instance, one Planet XI university has a community research center located within its academic Technology & Society Program. The center is staffed by STS professors, who also teach courses on participatory research and on participatory approaches to technological design.
Students who take these courses receive credit for conducting participatory community research projects. Their projects, in turn, influence the university to adopt new courses that reflect community concerns (such as sustainable economic development) and to establish new, socially oriented, interdisciplinary research programs that include faculty from many different departments and programs throughout the university. This university’s STS professors themselves hold graduate degrees in either natural science, engineering or social science — but disciplinary credentials turn out to be of secondary importance, because over time all the professors have become generally familiar with one another’s disciplines.
To read the mainstream STS literature currently being produced back home on Earth, one would have to conclude that Planet XI exists only in my fevered imagination. But actually, Planet XI is a real place. (In fact, it is the third planet out from the sun at the center of our own solar system.) I just returned from a brief trip to two of the nations on Planet XI; they are named “Denmark” and “the Netherlands.”
For instance, this past May 9th I was privileged to deliver a plenary address to the national meeting of the Dutch “science shops”. The meeting was attended by staff from the Netherlands’ 50 university-based community research centers, which together produce more than 1,000 studies each year in response to requests from community groups, trade unions, public-interest organizations, and local governments. [1] Other science shops, or related endeavors (not always based in universities), now exist in many other nations, including Denmark, Austria, Germany, Ireland, Norway, the Czech Republic, Canada, and the U.S. — although the Dutch system is the oldest and mostly highly evolved. In the developing world there is a somewhat analogous international network of indigenous knowledge resource centers; its newsletter is published in The Hague. [2]
I also met with staff from Teknologi-Rådet (the Danish Board of Technology), who since 1987 have conducted a dozen “consensus conferences” in which lay panelists become intensively informed on selected topics in science and technology policy and then, after participating in a public forum, announce their judgments at national press conferences that are attended by members of Parliament.[3]
I spent a day with several professors at Århus University, who are among the world’s leading practitioners of participatory technological design.[4] I was hosted for another day at the Danish Technological University in Lyngby, where indeed there is an 11-year old science shop located within an STS program and staffed by Professors Michael Søgaard Jorgensen and Børge Lorentzen.
And so one comes naturally to the question of why these, as well as other real-life examples that seemingly represent an important thrust toward democratizing science and technology, are so little considered within the conventional STS literature. The first Danish consensus conference was held in 1987, but the main STS journals, such as Science, Technology & Human Values and Social Studies of Science, have not discussed these procedures. How do the reports produced by Danish lay panels compare substantively with those produced by conventional technocratic approaches to technology assessment? Is their social and political impact typically greater or less? The bulk of the STS community has apparently not found such questions of interest.
During the mid-1980s Loet Leydesdorff and colleagues published several illuminating studies of the main science shop at the University of Amsterdam. [5] But at the time there were already about a dozen other science shops scattered throughout the Netherlands. What of them? Indeed, since that time the number of Dutch science shops has quadrupled, but apparently no one in the STS community has found this vibrant effort to democratize university research capabilities worthy of serious attention. In fact, when the very shop that Leydesdorff et al. studied was recently shut down, ostensibly owing to university budget constraints, did a single person from the STS community know, care, or do anything to try to help?
How do the four dozen remaining Dutch science shops vary from one another? How are participating students’ career decisions affected? Do the shops appreciably influence faculty research programs? What is the social impact of the shops’ research? How does their social utility and cost efficacy compare with that of conventional research systems? How do science shops in various countries reflect the different circumstances of their origin? Could science shops and the popular constituencies they serve evolve into a grassroots foundation for challenging other, non-democratic science and technology institutions? Is the Internet permitting transnational collaborations among science shops to emerge?
No one knows the answer to these and a hundred other such questions, for the simple reason that no one has asked them. The answers would not merely be of academic interest; they could help provide a basis for maintaining and greatly extending the practice of community-based research. (In the U.S. I have argued that a “National Community Research Network” ought, in principle, to supplant our vast national laboratory system, which includes over 700 labs spending more than U.S. $20 billion in tax dollars annually, largely as an anachronistic holdover from World War II and the Cold War.)
The pioneering anthologies on participatory action research have all been published by Third World activists or by social change-oriented sociologists, not by members of the STS community. [6] Likewise, the pioneering anthologies on participatory design in the workplace were compiled by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, an activist group, not an STS organization. [7] The latter anthologies are extremely useful, but other questions remain to be asked. For instance, if workers and users should participate in technological design, what about affected non-users? What are the cultural, institutional, and legal barriers to participatory design, and what types of political strategies might be used to soften them? [8]
Several years ago I noted that (at least in the U.S., with which I am most familiar) a majority of new STS graduate students arrive each year motivated primarily by awareness of some particular deep social problem involving science or technology. [9] They want to study that problem, and to contribute constructively and actively toward addressing one or another real social ill. Do our current STS programs nurture that eminently worthy desire? For the most part, no. These admirably motivated students are coopted into courses and research programs whose inadvertent (?) thrust is to remake their social commitment into a commitment to largely idle scholarship instead. This is good for academic careers, perhaps, but not for society. STS — as a codified profession, field or discipline — is now near-perfectly accomplishing just what Foucault claimed disciplines normally do: producing docile utile bodies.
Similarly, the STS community’s recent, intense preoccupation with establishing that technologies are contingent social products (a theoretical point that was actually pretty well established in the 1970s by social historians of technology and by appropriate technology practitioners) has meant that almost no one in the STS community is studying the other half of the coin: particular technologies and technological complexes specific social consequences. The relative inattention to consequences has been noted, for instance, by sociologist of telephony Claude Fischer, diffusion theorist Everett Rogers, and urban infrastructural historian Christine Rosen. [10] The embarrassing truth is that when I want to learn about the social consequences of emerging technologies, I do better canvassing human interest stories by New York Times reporters than reading anything in the leading STS journals. Recently in the U.S., the most influential scholarly claims about the social and political implications of technology have been made by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, who never cites any STS literature and has never published in our journals.[11]
A few others in the STS community have called attention to various expressions of depoliticization within our field — famously symbolized by the recent the shift in meaning of “STS” from “science, technology & society” to “science & technology studies” — but little has yet changed as a result of these critiques. [12]
So, why is STS relegating overt attention to democratizing science and technology to a back burner? One obvious hypothesis is that such attention would directly challenge current social power relations and so risk currying disfavor within the corridors of power, including those that provide funding. Servants of power are rewarded in our societies; challengers are frequently punished.
This hypothesis is unfashionably straightforward and simple, but there is also some evidence to support it. For example, two of the most gifted and inspiring STS professors with whom I studied as a beginning graduate student in the 1970s were David Noble and Langdon Winner; both were politically engaged, and both were, not coincidentally, denied tenure by MIT. Did these spectacularly unjust and irrational decisions function as early warning shots across the bow, teaching other aspiring STS scholars the career risks they might run if they didn’t depoliticize their research and teaching programs?
Perhaps one way to start reversing this socially damaging climatic chilling within our field would be for socially concerned STS professors — or, better yet, the leading STS professional societies — to establish standby mechanisms for quickly mobilizing external support to colleagues whose political commitments are jeopardizing their careers. We could also establish prizes to recognize and reward socially engaged research and teaching.
One of the interesting features of the studies conducted by science shops is that normally projects are never initiated unless there is an organized social group committed to utilizing the research results within some sort of emancipatory social practice. It seems today as though most STS research is only conducted under exactly the opposite conditions; that is, only when there is clearly no risk at all that any progressive social group will make constructive use of the results.
NOTES
Richard E. Sclove, “Putting Science to Work in Communities,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 41, no. 29 (31 March 1995), pp. B1-B3.
Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor is published by the Center for International Research and Advisory Networks (CIRAN), P.O. Box 29777, 2502 LT The Hague, Netherlands, e-mail .
Richard E. Sclove, “Town Meetings on Technology,” Technology Review, forthcoming July 1996; Simon Joss and John Durant, eds., Public Participation in Science: The Role of Consensus Conferences in Europe (London: Science Museum, 1995).
See, for example, Computers in Context: Joining Forces in Design, Third Decennial Conference Proceedings, rhus, Denmark, August 14-18, 1995 (Århus: Dept. of Computer Science, Århus University, 1995).
E.g., Loet Leydesdorff and Peter Van den Besselaar, “What We Have Learned From the Amsterdam Science Shop,” in The Social Direction of the Public Sciences: Causes and Consequences of Co-operation Between Scientists and Non-Scientific Groups, eds. S. Blume et al. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1987), pp. 135-160; Rolf Zaal and Loet Leydesdorff, “Amsterdam Science Shop and Its Influence on University Research: The Effects of Ten Years of Dealing with Non-Academic Questions,” Science and Public Policy, 14, no. 6 (Dec. 1987), pp. 310-316.
E.g., Orlando Fals-Borda and Muhammad Anisur Rahman, Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action-Research (New York: Apex Press, 1991); Peter Park, et al., eds., Voices of Change: Participatory Research in the United States and Canada (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1993).
E.g., Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka, eds., Participatory Design: Principles and Practices (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993); Randall Trigg, et al., eds., PDC ‘94: Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference (Palo Alto: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, 1994).
Richard E. Sclove, Democracy and Technology (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1995), esp. chap. 11; and ke Sandberg, et al., Technological Change and Co-Determination in Sweden (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1992).
Richard E. Sclove, “Soul-Searching: What About STS Activism?,” Technoscience, 6, No. 2 (Spring 1993), pp. 12-13.
Ibid.; and Christine Meisner Rosen, Book review of “The City and Technology,” edited by Mark H. Rose and Joel A. Tarr, Technology and Culture, 30, no. 4 (Oct. 1989), pp. 1070-1072; Claude S. Fischer, “Understanding Technology: An Agenda,” Book review of “The Social Construction of Technological Systems,” edited by Wiebe Bijker, et al., Science, 238 (20 Nov. 1987), pp. 1152-1153; Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (3rd ed., New York: Free Press, 1983), pp. 371-379.
E.g., Robert D. Putnam, “The Strange Disappearance of Civic America,” The American Prospect, no. 24 (Winter 1996), pp. 34-50.
See, for example, three 1993 articles in Science, Technology & Human Values: Brian Martin, “The Critique of Science Becomes Academic,” vol. 18, no. 2 (Spring), pp. 247-259; Susan E. Cozzens, “Whose Movement? STS and Social Justice,” vol. 18, no. 3 (Summer), pp. 275-277; Langdon Winner, “Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology,” vol. 18, no. 3 (Summer), pp. 362-78; and also Carl Mitcham’s review of “The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies” in the Lehigh University newsletter Science, Technology & Society, no. 106 (Winter 1995), pp. 2-4.
Richard E. Sclove is the author of Democracy and Technology (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1995). He directs the Loka Institute, a nonprofit organization commited to making science and technology responsive to democratically decided social and environmental concerns. The Loka Institute manages several action-oriented Internet discussion lists, including FASTnet (the Federation of Activists on Science & Technology Network). Another current Loka project is working to establish a National Community Research Network in the U.S., modeled partly on the Dutch science shop system; the Institute’s “scishops” Internet listserv is dedicated to advancing this endeavor. The Loka Institute, P.O. Box 355, Amherst, MA 01004, USA; Tel. +(413) 253-2828; Fax +(413) 253-4942; E-mail Loka@amherst.edu; World Wide Web http://www.amherst.edu/~loka.
This piece contains no handy tips for website development as we know it. Here I provide no information on how, effectively, to panhandle for internet wisdom amongst your colleagues, schmooze with the network guy, beg the department for more computing power, negotiate content, locate model websites, download the right guide to the web, work with an HTML editor, hack code, create links, make forms, use ftp, beta test, write an ü, or keep the access and referral log files in order to angle for advertising down the line. I will not talk about work reduction strategies after a site is ‘finished’ for the first time, as ‘if you’d like your announcement to be on the site right this minute, no problem; just give it to me in HTML’. There is nothing in here about my internet behavior (or yours), and the word netiquette will not appear again.
This piece, contrary to the endless how-we-do-it guides, is about what websites are not - up till now. As far as I’ve seen, there is plenty of social science and STS on the web, to which the modest EASST site and the contents of the links attest. There’s also some social scientific analysis of the web, as in the field of internet studies advertised in the Sage mailings. There is, however, very little social scientific thinking embedded in website design.
It’s as if every webmaster-social scientist stows his methodological baggage and takes on the mantles of an eclectic librarian and specimen collector, this ‘creator’ included. Despite tremendous growth, the world wide web remains an elaborate show-and-tell session, with connections to other one room schoolhouses doing the same, but with different acorns. Webmasters are currently locked into the ‘promotional flyer’, ‘merchanise catalogue’, ‘resource guide’ or ‘spatial metaphor’ design paradigms, all of which (technology studies anyhow predict) have