Social Studies of Science - An Encyclopedia Entry

SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE In Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia. Edited by R. John McGee and Richard L. Warms. Sage Reference. pg. 788-791 The Social Studies of Science names a multidisciplinary approach to analyzing scientific and technological practice. The field is also referred to as Science, Technology, and Society and Science and Technology Studies. As the differences between approaches are slight, the abbreviation STS will serve here. The flagship journal for the field is Social Studies of Science, first appearing in 1971. In 1976, the Society for the Social Study of Science held its first annual meeting and released the first issue of its journal, Science, Technology and Human Values. STS is an international concern, represented by professional societies that include the European Association of Science and Technology, the Japanese Society for Science and Technology Studies, and the Latin American Society for the Social Study of Science and Technology. There are a growing number of STS programs at both the undergraduate and graduate level, either run independently or in conjunction with history, sociology, anthropology, and policy programs. This article opens by presenting the early and mid 20th century foundation upon which STS built. Four themes are then detailed that represent major areas of study: Laboratories and Fields, Networks, Hybrids and Bodies, and Controversies. Though not covered here, it is important to note that STS has been engaged with postcolonial, racial, and queer theory as well as scholarship on visualization in science, public understanding of science, human-animal relations, and the study of social sciences including economics.

Foundations Science and technology became ever more central to social, economic, and political life in the 20th century. Scholars saw a need to understand these changing dynamics. Philosophy, history and sociology had already begun to study science as a system of knowledge. Several European intellectual communities, most notably the logical positivists of the 1920s Vienna circle, debated whether and how scientific thinking was unique. Karl Popper’s 1935 Logic of Scientific Discovery argued that a scientific fact must be “falsifiable,” ideally through experiment. In the same year, the Polish doctor Ludwik Fleck published The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Like Popper, Fleck was concerned about the epistemological character of scientific facts. Using biological and medical case studies, he refuted the positivists’ conception of facts as objective, free-floating entities. Instead, facts emerged from the cultural worlds of the people who assert them, or “thought collectives.” In the United States, historians and sociologists were also turning their attention to the study of science. Thomas Kuhn drew from perspectives in history and philosophy of science to write The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962. In representing scientific practice as radical shifts in “paradigms” as opposed to the stepwise accumulation of data that putatively describes “nature” with greater and greater precision, Kuhn offered an anti-positivist account. At Columbia University, Robert K. Merton did pioneering work in the sociology of science, beginning with his 1938 doctoral dissertation, “Science, Technology and Society in 17th century England.” He directed attention away from foundations of scientific knowledge towards the institutional features of modern science. In 1942, he

codified his program around the “norms” of science to characterize an ethos of science, whose co-existence and interdependencies lead to the production of a scientific workforce and its consequent knowledge. Scholars in the Science Studies unit, an interdisciplinary center established in Edinburgh in 1964 by David Edge, criticized such normative approaches. The critique evolved into what David Bloor called the Strong Program of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK). SSK applied a constructivist and relativist approach to analyzing the content of science. In Knowledge and Social Imagery, Bloor drew on Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life to build an analogy between religion and science that would suggest why one might undertake a social study of science as part of the promise of social science to demystify the making of all human knowledge. By the end of the 1970s, scholars were engaged in a cross-disciplinary dialog that coalesced under the umbrella of STS.

Laboratories and Fields One focus of STS has been to study science as it is practiced. As STS expanded from the sociological focus of SSK, early laboratory studies explicitly drew on anthropological theory and methods, including ethnomethodological practices. The first of these, published in 1979, was Bruno Latour’s and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Latour commented on the surprise that no “anthropological excursions” had been made to study the “tribes of scientists.” Situating scientists as tribes with attending cultures opened the door for questions of kinship and life cycles in science. In 1988, Sharon Traweek modeled her analysis of the Stanford Linear Accelerator in Beamtimes and Lifetimes on Evans-Pritchard’s study of the Nuer.

Just as making sense of the Nuer required the anthropologist to understand how the Nuer made sense of cattle, Traweek argued that understanding physicists meant understanding how they made sense of detectors. Additionally, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Michael Lynch, and others argued that facts, as Fleck had earlier observed, were not lying around waiting to be discovered but were actively created through social and material processes. These accounts examined how politics and cultures were ever present in the lab. In studying how facts become stable and accepted, analysts focused on the artifacts necessary for their production and circulation. They argued that no step in lab work is self-evident; each requires a social decision. Accordingly, since lab work is social, the facts that are produced from lab work are as much social as natural. Scientific work occurs in the field as well as the laboratory. Charles Goodwin, Cori Hayden, Stefan Helmreich, and Christopher Henke have all used ethnography – from anthropological, linguistic, and sociological starting points – to follow knowledge and techniques as they move into the field and the wider public culture. Studying how science happens in different places raises the question of the epistemological importance of place in scientific practice. Robert Kohler, in his 2002 Landscapes and Labscapes, historicized the “lab-field” border and the way practices moved across this border. On the one hand, a laboratory strives to be placeless. Far from being a mirror of nature, lab work strips a phenomenon of certain attributes so as to focus on those scientists deem important. Facts are authoritative because they emerge from a carefully controlled lab setting. Aware of the intimate connection between authority and the laboratory, scientific

fieldworkers often emulate lab procedures in the field to lend a similar legitimacy to their work.

Networks Following science beyond the laboratory required a reconceptualization of the relationship between science and society. Dissatisfied with an assumed distinction between these two spheres, Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law developed Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) in the 1980s. ANT used the imagery of a network to place science, technology, and society on the same plane, arguing that they were simultaneously constructed. This symmetry also applied to the actors; human and nonhuman actors potentially share equal agency within the network. ANT required a new definition of “social” in which any tie between two actors is social, even if not part of what commonly would be called the social sphere. In a famous example, Callon framed scallops, fishermen, and scientists as actors, each with fluid identities and relationships, while writing about controversial fishing practices. With the social destabilized, the goal of an ANT analyst is, as Latour coined, to “reassemble the social.” Though technologies are lively actors within ANT, the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) focuses explicitly on technological systems. This field is more influenced by SSK and history of technology, and deviates from ANT in that social and technical domains remain distinct and stable. However, SCOT, like ANT, embraces a networked world-view. Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch’s 1987 book, The Social Construction of Technological Systems, shifts technology studies from how technology influences society to how social forces influence technological development. Emblematic of this work is Donald MacKenzie’s Inventing Accuracy, which addresses

how nuclear missile guidance both shapes and is shaped by its social context. MacKenzie illustrates a network populated by technicians, politicians, and the military, arguing that it is this web of interactions, not a natural technological trajectory, which explains the historical increase in the accuracy of ballistic missiles.

Hybrids and Bodies While network approaches detail how humans are enrolled in complex techno-scientific systems, another stream of STS focuses on how the human body is itself already a hybrid of science and technology. David Mindell’s work examines humans as they live in machines (warships, spacecrafts) and the simultaneous embrace and rejection of being part of a mechanical system. Sherry Turkle’s study of an early Internet program sorts through the psychological impact of the newly emerging networked self. Donna Haraway, drawing both from STS and feminist scholarship, presents the cyborg to argue that we are all human-technological hybrids. This requires a rethinking and possible rejection of the nature/culture binary. Haraway thus suggests the erasure of other binaries, specifically those stemming from gender, race, and class. Marilyn Strathern, in Partial Connections, found traction with the image of the cyborg when considering the analytic difficulty in switching scales that necessarily accompany anthropology’s move to cross-cultural comparison. Haraway’s cyborg captures the positioning of the ethnographer as simultaneously embedded and looking beyond a situation, and thus caught between being one person and something more than one person. Strathern’s work flows back into STS through works such as Annemarie Mol’s 2002 Body Multiple. In detailing the experience of patients with atherosclerosis,

Mol innovatively presents two narratives simultaneously. The ethnographic and analytic text both appear on the same page but without explicit connections. Her book visually reflects Strathern’s characterization of being more than one but less than many. Haraway, joined by Evelyn Fox Keller, Emily Martin, Rayna Rapp, and Sarah Franklin, brought feminist theory into STS. As the body is a fruitful place to explore questions of sex and gender, STS feminist studies focused on the biological sciences, signifying a shift away from the physical sciences that early theorists found exemplary when thinking through facts and experiments.

Controversies An early approach to controversy studies played with Kuhn’s theory of shifting paradigms, when the “normal” science of work within a paradigm shifted to “revolutionary” science. The heterodox of revolutionary science can lead to controversy. With this model, there must be a mechanism by which a new paradigm is shored up. Harry Collins’s notion of the “experimenters’ regress,” the inability to know whether a replicated experiment supports a truth claim or reinforces false premises, suggested that it is not simply a competently performed experiment that ends a controversy, because what is or is not “competent” is under debate. Latour noted that controversies are not ended because of the emergence of indisputable facts. Rather, what in retrospect looks like indisputable facts are the result of a resolved controversy.

Peter Galison argued against

such clear shifts from one paradigm to another. Instead, his “trading zones,” modeled on anthropological understandings of how cultures exchange goods despite speaking different languages, account for how scientists who might appear to be working in

different paradigms develop a discourse that allow seemingly incommensurable theories to be simultaneously developed.

Conclusion STS scholars have begun to ask what their role is in scientific controversies. Should STS be an activist discipline, more intimately engaged with scientists and the policy questions they raise? Sheila Jasanoff re-framed the language of “controversy,” suggesting instead a model of “co-production” in which knowledge and social order are simultaneously produced. Jasanoff advocated for the scholar to offer critical reflection while still being actively engaged. Debating whether and how STS should be socially or politically active has encouraged the examination of topics that illustrate how scientific work impacts people beyond the laboratory. Kim Fortun’s Advocacy after Bhopal situated her role as activist and offered a study of an industrial disaster and the role of advocacy networks, while Steven Epstein has examined the role of lay and expert knowledge in the area of biomedical activism. STS is still concerned with questions raised early on about lab-, field-work, and scientific facts. Though the complex network of science, technology, and society defies description in any single work, STS continues to attend to micro and macro processes, following them wherever they lead. Lisa R. Messeri

CROSS-REFERENCES

Ethnomethodology; Latour, Bruno; Medical Anthropology; Popper, Sir Karl; Social Construction; Strathern, Marilyn

FURTHER READING Dumit, J. (2004). Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Forsythe, D. (2001). Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Latour, B. (1988). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. MacKenzie, Donald. (1993). Inventing Accuracy. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pickering, A. (1999). Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rabinow, P. (1996). Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shapin, S., & Schaffer, S. (1985). Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420.