Review of: Jens Lachmund, Der abgehorte Koerper, Zur historischen Soziologie der medizinischen Untersuchung, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997; and Marc Berg, Rationalizing Medical Work, Decision-Support Techniques and Medical Practices, MIT Press, 1997.
The medicine of western cultures is technomedicine. Both practitioners and advocates of technomedicine, as well as its adversaries and critics stress the pre-eminent role of technology in medicine. The use of instruments and technical devices is probably the distinctive characteristic of this form of medicine. From microscopic needles and scissors to large-scale scanners and visualisation devices, from operating robots to computerised filing systems, hardly any encounter with medicine nowadays occurs in a technology-free space.
Techniques and instruments do not only expand medicine into new dimensions of the human body, providing ever more diagnostic and therapeutic options, but they are at the heart of medicine. Modern medicine is enmeshed with technology. Nevertheless, the roles of technology in medicine and the modes of its functioning have only recently become an object of investigation. Particularly, visualisation techniques have been studied as representational techniques. The books under review here pursue another strategy. They observe tools in action.
How exactly does technology interfere with medicine? How do technical devices come to be nested in medical practice? To answer these and similar questions, both authors follow particular devices on their way from the construction site through initial attempts of use, back into the hands of designers, to the hospitals, through several countries and into further translations. On the way back and forth, the tool or instrument is constantly being reconstructed, reshaped, and re-conceptualised, but the practice of medicine to which it becomes increasingly essential is also moulded during this process. Furthermore, scientific theories and concepts have to be adjusted to the output produced by the new devices. The stepwise unfolding and emergence of the applicability and usability of a tool, the consequent adjustment of the sciences and practices of medicine result from ongoing negotiation and networking, with, in turn, re-entry effects within medicine as a social institution. So there is an awful lot to see when you follow an instrument around; even more might remain invisible, and become approachable only through even more thorough investigative strategies.
The first book investigates one of the starting points of technomedicine: the introduction of the stethoscope into medical practice. Because it founded a completely new version of physical examination, it led to a revolution of the science and practice of medicine. The second looks at the relative failure of the latest advance in technomedicine, the attempts to delegate the organisation of technomedicine in a recursive loop to second order technologies which were to organise and select the use of diagnostics and therapeutics. These so-called decision-support techniques range from simple protocols to sophisticated computer programmes and expert systems dealing with the immense amount of data and complexity in medical decision making. Techniques of this sort are widespread, but the selection and control of medical actions still remains by and large in the hands of the doctors.
Medicine has always been a technology of knowledge, not just in Foucault’s reading, but also in Plato’s analysis. However, in his The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault has shown how this technology of knowledge took a turn around 1800, preparing the ground for new principles, typical of medicine still today. Although the predominant role of instruments and machines in modern medicine can be traced back to exactly this break in the history of medicine, Foucault has written surprisingly little about the role of instruments and techniques in medicine before and after.
Modern medicine is in a sense a technology-based technology of knowledge, as Jens Lachmund now has convincingly shown. From this point of view, he has written the sequel to The Birth of the Clinic, not only delivering the missing bits of the story and addressing questions open since 1972, but also demonstrating how the introduction of an instrument reorganised the practice of medicine and thereby medicine itself as a form of scientific knowledge. The new instrument of the stethoscope, the focus of his study, and the new ways of diagnosing diseases it made possible, cannot simply be understood as an intrinsic development of medicine, gradually emerging as a science towards more objectivity and higher precision. Lachmund’s aim is to show how the cultural understanding of diseases, the concepts of objectivity and medical expertise were reconstructed along the way, and how the new form of physical examination together with the new pathological anatomy formed the interior space of the body into an object of medical knowledge, accessible only through the instrument by the expert-physician.
Such a historical investigation of the sociology of scientific knowledge and its cultural reconstruction depends on the richness of the source material at one’s disposal, since it requires much more than simply tracing out the spreading of this technique. Whereas Marc Berg, himself trained in medicine, could literally follow his tools around in participant observations, Jens Lachmund had to reconstruct a delicate network from the past, tracking down the debates surrounding the introduction of this instrument instead of the published successes with it. To gain access to these topics, Lachmund concentrates on textbook and handbook material from the 19th century, in a sense documenting the ‘state of the art’.
However, he combines and contrasts this with unpublished material, such as letters and autobiographies from the same period, reflecting encounters with the medicine of those days in private conversation. It is this well chosen material that allows him to reconstruct the cultural shifts in which this epistemological break in the history of medicine was embedded and in which it participated.
Lachmund begins by reconstructing the traditional medicine as a discursive practice, located around the bed of the ill. The physician came into the house of his patient, talked with the patient and his family, and developed in this discourse his statement, qualifying the disease, giving a prognosis and recommending a treatment. Diseases were the hybrids of the medical literature end terminology on the one hand and the cultural product of the discourse at the bedside on the other hand but there was hardly any direct physical contact between the physician and the patient, and no physical examination proper. Comparatively few members of the society could afford such medical treatment, hence the physician and the patient were on a social par, if indeed the physician was not inferior.
The situation had changed dramatically, when Laennec published his first paper in 1819 on the form and use of the stethoscope - a small device connecting the ear of the physician with the body of the patient. Since Ackerknecht’s seminal study from 1968 on the Paris hospital, the emerging form of medicine has been labelled after its location, the medicine of the hospital. But it was more then just a change of the site of medical practice. First and foremost, the social setting of this new form of medicine differed radically from its predecessor. The new hospitals mainly served patients from the lower classes, giving the physicians an unforeseen advantage of social prestige, subordinating patients to their command and leaving the medical discourse to the physician-experts. The counterpart to this shift in social organisation was a reorganisation of the science of medicine, a new topography of diseases as produced in the morgue by way of post-mortems. Foucault has shown how the opening of the body related to a new organisation of medical knowledge, dominated by spatial relations and visual representations.
It is here that Lachmund takes over. According to his analysis, it was the local setting of medical practice at the hospital in Paris that enabled Laennec to employ his instrument successfully. The contingent constellation was the precondition for the acceptance of Laennec’s new form of physical examination. Only here could the culturally fixed rules for the interactions between physician and patient be violated by the use of the stethoscope. And only here, in the context of a topography of diseases in the body, did the production of new signs, by way of a physical examination, make sense. Here these signs could be related to the location of a disease as revealed by the autopsy. With the stethoscope, the sound could be related to a seen alteration of the body, and united to a new classification of diseases. In the situation of the Paris hospital, the stethoscope linked pathological anatomy with the clinic.
Thereby it mediated the production of the new type of hospital medicine. Nobody believes in technological determinism any more, and neither does Lachmund, but he shows how the technical side of an artefact structures the possibilities of its employment. In the case of the stethoscope, the required silence, for example, and the repetition of certain commands, shifted the control of the interaction from the patient to the physician. Yet it also forced the physicians into a specific training and to an extension of their sensibility. The invention of the instrument had to be implemented via the construction of a medical sense of hearing. With this new sense of hearing, ever more clinical signs poured out, following Laennec’s initial observations, which were highly debated among the experts and discounted by the adversaries of the whole new technique. The very productivity of the technique made strategies of stabilisation and standardisation necessary, i.e., a reduction to reproducible signs.
But reproducibility was as much a question of objectivity as of ability and skill. Dependent on local experience, the negotiations on the use of the instruments, on the criteria for the interpretation of the data and on the classification of the signs developed in different directions, producing different systems of medical practice, different worlds of medical objectivity, different realities of medical practice. Nature, by way of the sounds produced in the body, had scant influence on the use of such sounds as data for medical purposes, one can conclude Lachmund’s narrative.
When a case study puts so much weight upon local contingencies in explaining long term developments, this must be validated in a comparative analysis. Lachmund finds his contrasting examples along the route his instrument travelled through Europe. In the attempts to transfer the new technology of hearing and the physical examination to Vienna and Germany, again, we find the local settings constraining its use and thereby shaping a new form of medicine. But against these remaining local styles and national differences, we also see a form of medicine emerging which is still part of medical practice today. The local cultural constructions of medical practice become justified as scientifically valid in this very process.
And it is here, where, in my view, his study pays off most. Lachmund sketches the trajectory of the stethoscope, thereby revealing the history of medicine as scientific practice. Unfortunately, the very instrument of this process, the stethoscope, is treated more like a black box most of the time. I was somewhat disappointed by the brief chapter on its design and technical development which seems largely disconnected from the rest of Lachmund’s narrative.
Lachmund develops his story with little regard to mine fields in the historiography of medicine. He does not touch the tricky question of the relations between medicine and Romanticism, for example, or the rise of the physiological laboratory. Since his aim is particularly the reconstruction of the cultural production of the scientific knowledge of medicine, his arguments, without a more detailed picture of the theories in the medicine of the time, remain somewhat vague, but overall, it is a fresh and stimulating approach to the history of medicine which also proves that ethnographic methods can be profitably employed in a historical analysis.
Marc Berg takes up the thread almost a hundred years later, analysing the roles and functioning, of what he calls ‘decision support techniques’, tools that promise to guide medical personnel scientifically through their work. He looks at three different sorts of tools: decision-support systems, which analyse statistically data from a single case with regard to disease classifications; protocols, which steer the caretaker stepwise through a specific procedure; and finally expert systems, which deliver statistically the best management to an individual case. In some ways, these tools can be arranged in a temporal order, with the decision-analysis coming first, being replaced by expert systems, and the protocols coming in from another side, but abounding today. All these tools have been introduced into medicine at a certain stage to improve its rationality. Therefore, what is at stake is the rationality of medical practice and thereby of medicine itself. The exponential growth of medical knowledge after World War II, which increased enormously the complexity of nearly all medical procedures, but also the increasing pressure to justify medical practice rationally in the new scientific world-view of those days, pushed the medical system to overcome the traditional setting of medical practice under the framework of medicine as an art and applied science. In the historical part, Berg’s analysis offers a fine periodisation of post-war medicine in terms of fashionable concepts of rationality, which gradually supersede earlier conceptualisations of medicine as based upon art and individual expertise.
He looks at this permanent reshaping of medicine, propagated under the banner of its promised rationalisation, from three different perspectives: by reviewing the medical literature, by giving voice to the system builders, and, finally, by participating in medical practice and focusing on medical personnel. In all three perspectives, Berg reveals perplexing ambiguities in the ‘process of rationalisation’. The rationalisation of medicine as a ‘science’ meant standardising medical practice in both its style and degree of complexity to make it digestible by computer techniques. Designing a tool meant permanent compromising between the details of the data and the logic of its processing. Setting a tool to work meant disciplining a practice to the abilities of a machine. Furthermore, the disciplining of a local practice becomes entangled in the localisation of the tool, where tool and practice finally converge. The interaction with these tools was simultaneously an interaction with the medical data and the criteria for their interpretation. There was no true representation of a condition through the tool, but instead an endless tinkering with its functioning. The decision-support technologies did not become the central decision-maker. Instead they participated as an additional active element in the network. For Berg, the via regia to the underlying dynamics is obviously prepared by the work of Latour and Law, from whom he also adopts their jargon.
Instead of a ‘rationalisation’ of medical practice (which one may or may not wish), Berg sees divergent rationalities at all levels and places of this process:
Instead of the transparent, optimal, unified, Clinical Rationality hoped for, we end up with opaque, impure, additional rationalities. Instead of imposing order where there was disorder, an order is achieved that incorporates the very messiness it started out to curtail. (p. 116)
Only by the detailed reconstruction of the local effects of a tool at work, by the unfolding of its specific trajectory in its local setting, does one get to an understanding of the dynamics of ‘rationalising medicine’. Localisation occurs in Berg’s study on the methodological level as well as on the systematic. One of the characteristics of his ‘diverging rationalities’ is their localisation in space, scope, and rationale, all of which serve to get a system to work by setting its limits. Berg also shows how ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ data differ mainly in the amount of discipline imposed upon the practice producing them, rather than reflecting any qualities of objectivity.
The book displays many fascinating facets and details, especially from the rich material of his interviews and participant observations. For example, we learn that there is no other way to evaluate an expert system in medicine than the good old Turing Test. Experts ultimately could not decide whether a treatment was suggested by the system or a colleague. But although the system passed the test, it nonetheless was never properly employed, because the doctors disliked the way they had to feed in the data. In another situation, the decision-analysis only ‘worked’ when it was instructed in an obviously false way, since it behaved as a trouble-maker. The implicit logic of medical practice on a ward was frequently in conflict with the procedure suggested by the decision-support systems. Situations of this type were solved by foreseeing the outcome of the machine and guiding it in a different direction through the alteration of data. These are not simply entertaining stories from everyday life; they tell us of the very complexity of daily life. Just before the final, summarising chapter, Berg develops an idea I would like to know more about: the disappearance of the notion of a cognitive decision in medical practice. Decisions were always enmeshed in the treatment of a patient, crystallising as decisive points only in post hoc attributions. Decisions exist as points to be referred to in the accounts of these processes, but cannot be anticipated, planned or organised.
I was nonetheless disturbed upon finishing the book by the blunt and general conclusions Berg draws from his own work. As one can see in the quotation above, his argument works only on the condition that one accept in the first place the simple dichotomies by means of which Berg organises his field of study, and between which he finally wants to situate himself. I find it strange that someone who constantly argues for heterogeneity, varieties and complexity applies such a straightforward strategy in his own argument, thereby ignoring and pushing aside the very details he so carefully harvested along the way. ‘Clinical Rationality’ with capitals simply does and did not exist, even before Berg’s study. Once being irritated about such a generalisation constraint in Berg’s work, one wonders whether the three examples of decision-support techniques should really be studied as examples of a common type. Especially protocols probably share at least as many characteristics with typical documentation and examination sheets as with expert systems. So why does Berg level those differences?
author’s address:
borck@mailmac.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
Review of Steven Yearley, Sociology, Environmentalism, Globalization, Sage, London, 1996. 161 pages, ISBN 08039 7517-1 (pbk); 0 8039 7516-3 (hardback)
Environmental discourse has given us the awareness of the global, all encompassing nature of some of the processes of environmental change. The “climate catastrophy”, the diminishing ozone layer or the reduced forest cover of the earthþs surface are seen as problems facing “mankind” thus strongly invoking the idea that, when it comes to the ecological crisis, “we are all in a same boat”. The emphasis on the global dimension of the ecological crisis stems from the early 1970s. This was the era of “saving the planet” and brought about the globalization of the terms of environmental discourse, at least in the circles of policy makers. The concept of globalization has other meanings and other connotations. It primarily refers to political-economic changes and is employed to give a label to the increasing power international financial networks and the growing interdependency in the political-economic sphere. Globalization is then seen as the product of an interplay of the new communication technologies that allow for rapid movement of data and thus of funds, a new political-ideological turn to free market policies that have materialized in GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), WTO (World Trade Organization), and geo-political shifts (new emerging markets, increased inpact of new industrialized countries, and the political responses to these developments as in NAFTA or the creation of a European monetary union). The second meaning of the concept of globalization is that not only suggest do the interdependencies occur on a larger scale than before, it also suggests that the world has become smaller. This is the idea of a “shrinking” of the globe both in a physical and a cultural sense. It refers to the diminishing importance of distance, the “annihilation of space by time”, the alleged þdeath of distanceþ and the proliferation of Western life styles that came with. It are the cultural icons and narratives of Coca Cola, Disney and McDonalds that represent the most prominent forces of this new globalized cultural discourse. The emphasis on a growing interdependency and the strong forces of a cultural colonization (also known as “cocacolonazation”) suggest that we are becoming aware that, when it comes to globalization, we are in the same boat too. Interestingly, the term “globalization” is almost never related to the global turn in environmental discourse as described above.
Stephen Yearley’s Sociology, Environmentalism, Globalization examines the ways in which the coupling of the quasi-independent knowledges underpinning global environmental discourse on the one hand and globalization on the other, can produce new insights. He assumes that these two processes interrelate: the world is being compressed and people are becoming more aware that there is “only one planet” as the classical statement had it. Yearley pits the two against oneanother and wonders what environmental phenomena and environmentalism can tell us about the nature of globalization and what the sociology of environmentalism can learn from theories of globalization. This is a highly relevant and courageous endeavour. It is highly relevant too, since sociological enquiry has traditionally been weak both on non-national issues such as globalization as well as on the issue of environment and nature. Despite the fact that it often aims to produce knowledge with a universal validity, there is a very clear national bias in sociological theory. Whoever has been in the position to teach the same subject in different national contexts will appreciate that sociology has, in this sense, thus far produced several versions of universal knowledge. The environment is also relatively new territory for sociologists. Ever since Durkheimþs dictum that sociology should come up with social explanations for social facts, nature has been blended out. With a few exceptions sociology has indeed used this exclusively social orientation as a strategy to carve out its own territory on the academic map. In light of recent events, both these biases of sociology become problematic. The planet, the earth, our common future, global warming: all pose new questions to the sociological curriculum, as do global financial networks, global cities, and new patterns in international migration.
It is obvious that an endeavour of this sort is extremely demanding. Without a clear focus one would easily drown in the array of approaches to both subjects. The fact that the study of environmentalism and globalization are indeed of separate intellectual origin only enhances this problem. Yearley’s book is better seen as an exploration. It is not a firm and robust, theoretically grounded argument on the various dimensions of globalization of the relationships between man and nature. He first discusses the existing sociology of globalization more in particular the work of Wallerstein on the world system and Sklair on transnational capitalism. He criticizes their work for its alleged mono-causality. In his critique he draws heavily on the work of Roland Robertson, Mike Featherstone and Anthony Giddens. Somewhat surprisingly, Yearley does not systematically discuss the work of these authors even though they come out to be the main source of inspiration for Yearley’s thinking on globalization. There was good reason to do so. After all, the work of Robertson and Featherstone comes from a school of thought related to the journal Theory, Culture & Society that have not only produced very insightful work on globalization but have made substantial progress in cracking the meaning of the contemporary ecological crisis as well. Instead of taking this more or less overseeable path, Yearley steps back and carves out a route of his own. The book continues with a discussion of various forms of universal or universalising languages - arguing that the latter ones are often drawn upon to come to grips (or frame) global phenomena. He points out that “Systematic analysis of the ‘universal’ can easily be traced back to the philosophers of classical Greece” and embarks on a discussion of the analysis of the intellectual traditions of geometry, arithmatic, logic, science, and, somewhat surprisingly, contemporary theories of justice. These discussions are too brief to be of real help or it would have to be for the general appreciation of the idea that universalist ideas about knowledge have a cultural bias and come with exclusionary effects.
Another step in the exploration is a lengthy discussion of the world’s environmental problems. It is written in the somewhat naive language that some geographers use when writing about environmental politics: strongly realist with a very basic idea of the power games that occur. Yearley concludes that the various environmental problems actually compress the world (as the globalization thesis suggests) since the extent to which countries depend on oneanother increases. “The diminution of resources and the loss of species are making people aware that there are global limits to the things and the creatures which they count on. To some extent at least, these considerations are giving citizens, governments and corporations a sense that there are real global ties and, perhaps, in principle at least a global identity for the occupants of spaceship Earth.” (59). Here the analysts seems to fall prey to the language he is supposed to analyse. The uncritical usage of “resources” and “species” as key to the idea that there are global ties, the idea that knowledge of these ties actually will result in new identities, and that these identities would allow us to finally undersand our þtrueþ identity as “occupants of spaceship Earth”: it is as if Yearley is unaware of the fact that these concepts, assumptions and metaphors are all related to the dominant discourse of eco-management which is not at all an unproblematic approach. Indeed, it is mostly seen as part of the problem. This is the more surprising since Yearley subsequently succesfully deconstructs the very idea of a global turn in environmental politics. Yearley concludes that some problems are more global than others (61) and that one should be appreciative of the fact that the very definition of environmental problems as global problems could, in some cases, be part of a “politics-of-interest”. As Yearley’s puts it, “To put it crudely, there may be other reasons than pure environmental concern for wishing to see certain environmental issues handled as matters of international, global priority.” (61) Indeed, Yearley shows that some of the key issues on global environmental discourse, such as the abatement of carbon dioxide emissions, are, on closer examination, tied up in power struggles over who should have what right to develop economically.
Arguably the best section in the book is Yearley’s discussion of the concrete attempts to employ particular knowledge systems to create a universal basis for environmental politics. Here many well known references for people working in the SSK tradition can be found. Scientists have a had a key role in defining what counts as an environmental problem. Yet it was not as if science just functioned to put issues on the agenda. Science was important as provider of the particular discourse that facilitated global consensus. Science is here seen as a practice that allows to produce universally valid truth, thus opening the possibility to negotiate agreements on the remedial strategies required. Yet since science is explicitly silent on cultural matters, it cannot make differences between what some authors have called “survival emissions” and “luxury emissions”. In other cases the very methods with which data were generated implied a cultural bias. Yearley concludes that scientific discourse is not very effective as basis for political agreements. Environmental economics, the idea that nature could be brought into the economic equations, cannot pre-structure the political decision making on environmental issues either. Here it is required to put values on nature and that implies an essentially cultural discussion. It is hardly conceivable that one would find a universal system of valuation for this problem. Sustainable development, then, is in itself not a basis, but at best a general outlook. The role of NGOs is not unproblematic either. Yearley rightly notes that in their commitment to act upon the troublesome state of nature environmental NGOs are often unaware of their own cultural biases and can become rather expert oriented and technocratic. In the end, it seems hard to include nature in a trade-off with - dare we say - other social goals. Towards the conclusion Yearley admits that “The difficulties encountered in the practical application of the universalizing discourse of science lead one to a sceptical view of any idea that the recognition of global ‘oneness’ prepares the way for authoritative ‘master’ discourses.” (149)
At this point one wonders whether insights such as the above, should not lead to a rather different account of the challenges facing environmental politics. Yearley’s book seems ridden by a discrepancy in this regard. Between the lines one senses that Yearley wants to explore how environmentalism can help bring about a global identity. Yearley opens his book using Robertson’s distinction between þobjectiveþ aspects of globalization (global marketing, world-wide financial markest) and “subjective” aspects that refer to the fact that we see ourselves increasingly as þparticipants in a globalized world”. This subjective element is then conflated with a growing consciousness of global “citizenship”, although citizenship is usually reserved for a much more active acting upon a particular consciousness. If one reads the book with this political ideal in mind, Yearley’s book is depressing. The number of mechanisms that seem to work against an effective green politics are countless. Yearley has to give up the idea that science can help, realizes that global environmental NGOs are not always to be trusted, so what is left? Well, globalization. Key in his book seems to be the assumption that diffusion of knowledge or awareness of global interconnections and global eco-catatrophies will produce a political change. Yearley postulates that the force of globalization actually potentially helps to produce the awareness needed to face global environmental problems. Quite against a common sense position, he argues that “the more that products and popular culture become the same wherever people go, the stronger the grounds for people perceiving themselves as members of a global community, the more likely they appear to be to support Amnesty International or Greenpeace International.” (p.9) MacDonalds, Coca Cola and Disney pave the way for a chance in cultural values. If this is true, perhaps there is still hope.
A less naive and probably more promising line of thought would break with the global discourse altogether. Indeed, this seems to be what is happening in environment politics today. As the institutional arrangements of global environmental politics falter, new, more regional approaches seem to point the way forward. Perhaps the globalization of environmental discourse was just a station on the way. Suddenly, Rio is no longer seen as the “apex” of all political developments, just as it becomes obvious that it was a mistake to think that environmental politics was all about raising consciousness, after which action would, quasi automatically, follow (if people could only be made aware!). The next phase in environmental politics seems to be about the repositioning of environmental issues in a broader cultural critique. Science and mainstream policy making institutions cannot be relied on to start produce solutions after having been implicated in co-producing the problem for decades as sociologists have pointed out. Environmental politics, then, is not about the implementation of the optimal solutions but about a conscious political development of society, taking nature and other cultural concerns into account.
It seems that Les Levidow doesn’t much like the Science Museum’s recent temporary exhibition on genetically modified (GM) food. While acknowledging that we “sought to accommodate both promoters and critics of biotechnology”, he finds that the exhibition “presents a one-sided account of biotechnology as environmentally-friendly, despite a long-standing public debate over what this means” (EASST Review, 17, 1, March, 1998, pp. 3-6). He has reprinted his critique as an Editorial in the Ecologist (Ecologist, 28, June, 1998, pp. 143-5), so clearly he must feel deeply about the issues he raises.
First, I should declare an interest. I am responsible for the Science Museum’s Future Foods? exhibition. I raised the money for it, and I led the team that produced it. As a result, I think I’m in a reasonably good position to say what we were trying to do in this exhibition. From the outset, we had two aims: to explain the use of gene technology in food production; and to explore some of the key issues relating to this technology in order that our visitors could make up their own minds about it. It was no part of our aim merely to promote GM foods. Indeed, we went to enormous pains to try to represent clearly and fairly the views of both supporters and critics of the technology.
In doing this, however, I never expected to satisfy everyone. The handling of controversial issues within an exhibition is a complex issue; indeed, I completely agree with Levidow that there is no entirely neutral way to represent controversy in this (or, I might add, any other!) medium. The reason for this is simple enough: every representation is an interpretation; and every interpretation embodies explicit and implicit value judgments. In a situation where there is significant disagreement, individual judgments differ. As a result, any single representation of a controversy is bound to please some actors witin the controversy more than others.
Just as the act of exhibiting is inevitably interpretive and evaluative, so too is the act of exhibition reviewing. Levidow’s review of Future Foods? is studded with statements that appear at first sight to be straightforwardly descriptive but turn out on closer inspection to be deeply evaluative - and, I would add, deeply tendentious. Here are just a few of the more obvious examples. First, the review misquotes the title of the exhibition. It is not called Future Foods but rather Future Foods? The question mark matters; it is intended to convey the thought that whether we all end up eating GM foods is an open rather a closed question, which depends not least upon the choices that people - including our visitors - make. In short, the question mark is intended to be empowering.
The opening description of the exhibition tells us of “a playful, reassuring atmosphere which associates biotechnology with familiar images and devices”. There is, we are told, a generally “friendly ambience”. Well, yes, to be sure the exhibition does go out of its way to be visitor friendly; but, no, this is not, as the review suggests, part of a strategy to “domesticate” biotechnology. Rather, it is part of a strategy to encourage visitors to engage with the issues by actually stopping at the exhibition! There’s not much point in producing exhibitions that people don’t visit; and believe me, there are plenty of worthy exhibitions about science and technology that people don’t visit. It is tendentious in the extreme (and, ultimately, deeply patronising to visitors) to suggest that a visitor-friendly medium is likely to induce a biotechnology-friendly attitude. In my opinion, visitors just aren’t that dumb.
In several parts of his review, Levidow skillfully marginalises the way in which Future Foods? actually engages with critical perspectives. Thus, an exhibit entitled Technological Fix? (get it?), designed to inform visitors about potential environmental problems associated with the use of gene technology to produce weedkiller resistant crops, is condemned because it supposedly dumps these problems on farmers’ laps by asserting that “vigilance is needed in crop management”. Similarly, an interactive exhibit included to convey the (environmentalist) message that agricultural biotechnologies can have unpredictable ecological effects is dismissed on the absurd grounds that the device used to convey the point is mechanical: “Thus the ecological uncertainties are symbolically converted into a mechanical model; the “unpredictable” is made to appear reassuringly familiar”. Oh please, give us a break!
“Finally, near the end”, writes Levidow, “the exhibition acknowledges safety concerns about biotechnology”. As a matter of fact, the exhibition has no end, any more than it has a beginning. The exhibition isn’t linear at all; it is designed to be approached from several different directions and to be “read” in any order the visitor chooses! (In its travelling form, the exhibition will be arranged on the ground in several different configurations to suit local circumstances.) I suggest that it is only because Levidow is predisposed to find evidence of pro-industry bias that he sees this particular section of the exhibition as something akin to an afterthought.
I could go on, but what would be the point? In the end, the issue is not whether Future Foods? succeeds in getting the balance between competing views precisely right at every point; rather, the issue is whether the exhibition succeeeds in its twin aims of informing visitors about GM foods and helping them to come to their own views about the issues. Here, I am happy to say that the evidence is clear. Our visitor research suggeststhat Future Foods? is one of the most popular of our current series of contemporary science exhibitions; and the visitor comment book, which invites people viewing Future Foods? to say what they think about the issues, reveals that many visitors are stimulated by what they see into expressing some pretty strong views. Les Levidow may perhaps draw some comfort from the fact that - notwithstanding our alleged skill in “domesticating biotechnology” - many of these views are either sceptical or downright hostile towards GM foods.
In the past, science museums have tended to “play safe” by celebrating widely acknowledged achievements and avoiding difficult and controversial subjects. For some time, the Science Museum London has been moving away from this sort of position and towards a closer engagement with the issues of the day. We shall continue to do this - most notably in our new Wellcome Wing, which is due to open in 2000 and which will feature a rolling programme of exhibitions on topical ideas and issues. We know that by engaging with controversial subjects we risk displeasing representatives of particular points of view in the wider society. We are willing to take such risks, not least because we are committed to the facilitation of a broader and better-informed public debate about science and technology. I hope that all who share this commitment will continue to support us in this work, even if they don’t always agree with the treatments we give to topics in which they have special interests.
author’s address: j.durant@nmsi.ac.uk
Review of Barry Barnes, David Bloor and John Henry, Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996.
Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis is an introductory book into the sociology of scientific knowledge. Barnes et al do not pretend to provide a balanced overview of the field. It is a biased introduction that largely ignores alternative approaches to SSK (the sociology of scientific knowledge), such as those provided by Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar and Andrew Pickering, to name a few. Barnes et al make no apologies for this bias. They believe their version of SSK to be “particularly well-suited” for an introduction to SSK (p. 200). Part of this ‘well-suitedness’, for them, is their allegiance to materialism. They believe too many versions of SSK have been idealist and have sought to deny the existence of an extra-mental reality. Here they exclusively cite Harry Collins, though Woolgar would have been a more poignant example. At any rate, materialism they claim puts them “in touch with other fields that study human beliefs and dispositions — psychology and biology for example” (p. 210).
Overall, the approach they take to introducing their version of SSK is foundationalist. They start in chapter one with an examination of empirical, perceptual psychology. The ground they cover here is familiar to philosophers. Their focus is the debate between Jerry Fodor and Paul Churchland concerning whether perceptual processes are theory-laden to the extent that what one perceives is a product of what theory one believes. Here they side on empirical grounds with Fodor’s modularity theory according to which the phenomenal character of perceptions is, to a degree, impervious to cognition. This is clearly the more difficult path for defenders of SSK, since the social constructedness of knowledge would be assured if theoretical beliefs informed our perceptions in the way Churchland suggests. On this psychological basis, they next examine the socio-cognitive processes involved in interpreting perceptual experience (chapter two). Their discussion of this topic is unclear and unsystematic since they focus entirely on Robert Millikan’s discovery of the quantization of electric charge (the famous oil-drop experiment). Apparently, Millikan’s work is paradigmatic of how perceptions are interpreted. It is true that Millikan’s work is considered a ‘classic’ in the history of science, as Barnes et al point out (p. 18). And let us grant for the sake of argument that the methods Millikan used to support his beliefs about the quantization of energy were both epistemically suspect (Millikan presumably discarded legitimate data) and socially motivated — Barnes et al comment, “it is the experiment qua institution that is at issue here” (p. 40). It follows that as evidence for the social constructedness of knowledge, the Millikan case is quite compelling. Nonetheless, if one wants to defend generalizations concerning the social mechanisms of perceptual interpretation, then one should proceed generally, as they did in chapter one. By examining exclusively the interpretive strategies use by Millikan and citing their social character, one does not demonstrate, in a general way, the social character of interpreted perceptions.
From a discussion of how perceptions are interpreted, they next consider how language evolves from a foundation of interpreted perceptions (chapter three). The content of this chapter is central to their book, and central to their SSK. For it introduces their favoured view concerning the nature of linguistic classification — the ‘finitist’ view. Finitism can be simply stated as follows: the application of any classificatory term is logically imprecise; thus, to render its application more precise, one has to supply extra-logical considerations, which for Barnes et al involve psychological or sociological considerations. In other words, finitism entails the legitimacy of SSK: the precise application of any classificatory term must involve social negotiation. Obviously, the key to their finitism is their defense of the logical imprecision of classificatory terms, which proceeds as follows. They start with the assumption that terms are connected to the physical world through (i) acts of ostension, and (ii) feelings of similarity between objects which compel speakers to extend the use of ostended terms to further non- identical objects (see pp. 49-53). They then suggest that any two objects, however dissimilar, could be linked by a feeling of similarity and so grouped under one term — that is, logically they could be so linked, although perhaps not psychologically nor sociologically. Thus, classificatory terms are inherently logically imprecise and need supplementation by psycho-social forces to be given a consistent usage. It is here that Barnes et al’s defense of SSK becomes extreme. The logical possibility of alternative classificatory schemes is too weak a foundation on which to ground the necessity for sociological contrivance. For there is another question to answer before making this leap — i.e., is the grouping of two objects under the same term not only logically possible but epistemically possible as well? This question Barnes et al ignore to the detriment of their program. For it is logically possible to group red and blue under the same colour term, despite the psychological and sociological discomfort in doing this. But don’t we agree that, psychological and sociological factors to one side, it just doesn’t seem reasonable to group red and blue under the same colour term?
Let me pause to consider this important question. What I’m suggesting is that one’s grounds for distinguishing red from blue is a separate issue from the question of whether one is psychologically or sociologically compelled to separate these colours. One can have (non-logical) grounds for separating these colours, despite a psycho-social compulsion not to do so, and vice versa. Barnes et al wish to ignore this fact. Perhaps this is fair enough, since their topic isn’t epistemology but SSK. Nevertheless, a distinction needs to be drawn between having reasons for drawing a classification and being psychologically or sociologically compelled to do so, for whether a belief constitutes knowledge is often taken to depend on whether one has reasons for one’s belief. And, after all, Barnes et al are doing the sociology of scientific knowledge!
Barnes et al have a response to this criticism. Their response is a reiteration of Collins’ notion of the experimenter’s regress. In short, one cannot non-circularly assert the accuracy of one’s classifications, for to assert the accuracy of one’s classifications one must assert beforehand the reliability of one’s classificatory procedure, and one cannot assert the reliability of one’s classificatory procedure without asserting its accuracy. Thus, they believe, one must abandon the epistemic study of experimental (and more generally observational) practice for a more psychological or sociological approach. However, the experimenter’s regress flounders because of its dependence on a dubious epistemic principle: that to be justified in asserting a claim, one must be justified in asserting its justification. For example, they don’t believe that to be justified in asserting a claim, it is enough that one is a reliable producer of true claims (and that one believes this). One must further prove one’s reliability and prove it in the strongest way possible, by demonstrating the accuracy of one’s beliefs. Call the principle at work here the JJ- thesis; it is akin to the KK-thesis, that to know, one must know that one knows. Both the KK-thesis and the JJ-thesis lead to skepticism since both lead to a justificatory regress. Hence, in the absence of strong arguments in their defense — and Barnes et al provide no such arguments — they should be discarded as epistemic constraints. Once we discard the JJ-thesis (along with the KK-thesis), we remove Barnes et al’s objection to the possibility of epistemically grounded classificatory distinctions, where this objection is motivated by the experimenter’s regress. In turn, we re-establish the sense in which the classification of terms can be epistemically grounded. Classificatory precision would then no longer demand the introduction of psychological or social factors.
At this point, Barnes et al have a further response. The basis of their finitist view of classification is the claim that determining the referent of a term is inexorably indefinite — that one really doesn’t know if the use of a term should be extended to a certain object or not. Logically, it could, or it couldn’t; logically, for example, I could call my pen a ‘pencil’, if I wished to stretch my use of terms in this way. Psychologically and sociologically, of course, such an extension won’t succeed, so at this stage the sociology of scientific knowledge takes hold. Thus, Barnes et all arrive at the following tenet of finitism as applied to beliefs: if what terms refer to is open-ended, then what beliefs are about must also be open-ended. Just as there is a sense in which we do not know what our terms mean, in that same sense, we do not know what to believe (p. 71) Again, we have a form of skepticism that is underwriting Barnes et al’s SSK. Given that we lack knowledge about the meanings of terms or what we believe, social and psychological factors are needed to supply definiteness to the meanings of words and our beliefs. However, such skepticism is unwarranted in the usual case. Given that the application of a term is unclear in certain areas, it doesn’t follow that it’s unclear in all areas. For example, I may be unsure about whether to call a particular shade of colour orange or red. But my lack of certainty here doesn’t affect my certainty about calling some colours ‘red’ and some colours ‘orange’. Because I don’t know how to apply a term in some case, that doesn’t mean that “I don’t know what the term means” or that “I don’t know what to believe” in all or even the usual cases. Such an inference is far too strong. Thus, the social and psychological factors introduced above, needed to render meanings and beliefs more precise, are not needed in all cases or even the usual cases.
In chapter four, Barnes et al extend their SSK to theoretical entities. It is here that Barnes et al’s SSK shows its real value as a scientific enterprise. Let me first remark that empiricism is a viable and compelling philosophic position, where by empiricism I mean: the view that claims about the world should always be put to empirical test. True empiricists don’t ‘a priorize’. Thus, true empiricists when examining the nature of scientific knowledge allow empirical results to guide their inquiry. And so when investigating the nature of scientific knowledge, the following sorts of facts become relevant: that people generally believe in the existence of an external reality whose nature may be completely different from how we think or talk about it (p. 88), that what has counted as science has changed dramatically over the centuries with the appellation ‘science’ often being motivated by non-epistemic concerns, e.g., political interests (chapter 6), that the ‘self-evidence’ of geometrical first principles is historically variable (p. 190), that science often evolves in a Kuhnian manner (chapter 4). The bulk of Scientific Knowledge is devoted to examining in this sort of empirical manner the character of scientific knowledge. In essence, Barnes et al are doing empirical history of science (and math) and allowing it to inform their sociology of science. Some of the historical episodes they consider to this end include Henk van den Belt’s recent work on the 19th century legal battle in France concerning the classification of aniline red dyes (pp. 121- 127; van den Belt’s work illustrates the dependence of classificatory schemes on social interests), Robert Kohler’s 1972 study on 19th century enzyme theory (pp. 129-139; this episode exhibits the limitations in social explanations of institutional explananda), and the controversy surrounding Robert Chamber’s 1845, best-selling, proto-evolutionist book Vestiges (pp. 154-168; it is a controversy that demonstrates the political motivations underlying the way scientists draw disciplinary boundaries). Without a doubt, an empirical methodology such as this is an excellent way to examine science given the pride of place science holds for empirical data. It renders their work, like any scientific work, testable, revisable and defeasible. In fact, it has been put to recent test by Andrew Pickering in his book The Mangle of Practice (Chicago, 1995). Pickering provides convincing historical, empirical evidence against the sort of interests approach Barnes et al advocate in chapter 5. I believe Barnes et al would recognize whole- heartedly the value of this sort of empirically-based criticism, though, of course, they might disagree with Pickering’s conclusions. For this reason, because of its pro-empiricist standpoint, the version of SSK Barnes et al present in Scientific Knowledge is highly commendable.
author’s address: hudsonr@alcor.concordia.ca
A Report from the international STS conference in Japan (March 1998)
As in most social sciences, qualitative and quantitative approaches in STS are developing along differing trajectories. In the interdisciplinary field of STS, there is a large gap between these two approaches. How can we develop a theory to link the the qualitative and quantitative? Can scientometrics mediate between more fundamental research in STS and science policy issues? What are the underlying mechanisms when qualitative theory is operationalized into empirical data through simplification or abstraction? Analyzing the gap between quantitative and qualitative approaches in STS is also related to the question of what are the underlying mechanisms in scientific activity itself, in the operationalization into quantitative data, reflexively.
At the recent STS Conference in Japan (16-22 March 1998), the issue of how to bridge the gap between the qualitative traditions of STS and scientometrics was made central to two sessions. One of these sessions focused on the further development of STS and scientometrics in Japan, the other brought a number of leading figures from the two relevant arenas together for a discussion on future perspectives at the international level. A number of scholars in STS accepted our invitation to contribute to above discussions. Arie Rip chaired the international session which had contributions by Michel Callon, Steve Fuller, Loet Leydesdorff, Shin-ichi Kobayashi (one of the organizers of the conference and, among other things, the Japanese translator of the Gibbons et al. 1994 book), and myself.
Michel Callon formulated the challenge that confronts scientometrics as follows: “Scientometrics will face a crisis if it restricts itself to its concerns of further developing as a discipline per se. In order to be able to understand ‘Mode 2’ research, scientometrics itself needs to develop some characteristics of Mode 2 research” (Callon, 1998). He argued that the performative functions in relations to users have to be understood and internalized in the construction of the discipline. “We have encountered problems in making explicit the conceptual linkages between qualitative STS and scientometrics in courses at my university. Our students are not interested in scientometrics, because they do not see how this approach to studying scientific development can be made more reflexive and more consistent with qualitative methods in STS,” Sheila Jasanoff noted in the discussion. Indeed, in Japan we have also noted difficulties in linking these two different kinds of educational traditions. Both in relation to the policy processes and in relation to their educational roles, scientometricians have to engage in new discussions with STS scholars and others, providing their methodological expertise as a service to the relevant audiences.
The following is a report on the symposium on future perspectives of STS and scientometrics at the international level. As noted, Michel Callon first summarized the problems in disciplinary oriented scientometrics. He indicated a thin layer of exchange with other STS traditions and a lack of goals in the use of mathematics as internal problems of scientometrics. Furthermore, difficulties in the usage of scientometric tools in STS research and policy processes were signaled as external problems. However, Callon envisaged an application context for scientometrics in relation to so-called techno-economic networks. He discerned a future role for scientometrics in providing STS insights a point of entry to the discussions of the new economics of science because of the specialty’s affinity with econometrics. As a future perspective, he further recommended that scientometricians in the academic context should exchange more intensively with other traditions in STS, and that scientometrics in practice should reflect more qualitatively on its performative dimensions.
Following Callon’s recommendation for a Mode 2 like scientometrics, Shin-ichi Kobayashi showed the difference of the application contexts of scientometrics in Mode 1 R&D from scientometrics in Mode 2. For example, he raised the following questions: “Can measurements for Mode 1 research indicate effectively and sufficiently the activities in Mode 2?” and “Can scientometrics measure impacts towards policy goals rather than output in terms of disciplinary contributions?” These questions related to Callon’s insistence on a reflection on the application context: how can one analyze the impact of S&T indicators in different socio-political configurations (cf. Van der Meulen, 1997)?
Steve Fuller pointed out that “measurement” itself has a risk to produce a tendency that “bigger is better”, that is, appreciation only of large numbers like economic products (Fuller, 1998). For example, there is a tendency that the papers which were cited many times are considered as the good ones. Based on this tendency, Fuller insisted that “citation” can be considered as “voting” towards the papers. He claimed that although it is said that now is a “post-industrial” phase, whereby the endless production of material goods are no longer the driving forces of human condition, we are not free from the old industrial mindset towards our intellectual outputs. We are likely to deal our papers or books as “products”, using analogy of manufacture of product, and there is a tendency towards the more, the faster, the better. “Citation” is also utilized based on the implicit premise relates to this manufacturing mindset. The analogy between citing and voting can make this point clear, and this analogy is also useful to reveal the strategic characteristics of citation, explicitly.
I, Yuko Fujigaki, claimed that citation is not a voting process, but a focusing process on differences from previous papers. Citation itself is an orientation of the paper, in a map of the previous papers. Therefore, the papers which are cited frequently, can be considered as utilized in this mapping process through repetition and exaggeration of the underlying differences (Fujigaki, forthcoming). Applying autopoiesis system theory to scientific knowledge, she analyzed the process that subsequent bodies of papers exaggerate and re- evaluate the previous papers selectively. These processes can be considered as self-referential processes of the “journal system”. The study of the aggregated citation process thus potentially bridges a gap between measurement and epistemology. These aggregated citations built a disciplinary “validation boundary” (Fujigaki 1998), which reflect an embedded cognitive boundary of scientists, as well as a social one that restricts the behavior of scientists. Furthermore, these boundaries also can become empirical ones, based on journal system theory.
In a final contribution, Loet Leydesdorff showed results of citation networks from reflexive analysis among STS journals, indicating communication networks in the field of STS. His results suggest that since the later half of the 1980’s, various core journals of STS (Social Studies of Science, Scientometrics, and Research Policy) have grown apart, with less mutual citation relations between each other. He also induced the dimensions of communication in this interdisciplinary field, such as, “utilization” (Research Policy), “codification” (Social Studies of Science) and “formalization” (Scientometrics), and he explained exchange in different traditions in STS in terms of citation behaviour.
Arie Rip, who chaired this symposium and also played a role as the discussant, summarized by focusing on two points. One is how to construct a theory for linking science studies and measurement, and the other is the usage of scientometrics in politics. With reference to the former point, he elaborated on concepts like “citing as voting” introduced by Fuller and “validation boundaries” as mentioned by Fujigaki, since these concepts link the citation (quantitative) and cognitive (social) aspects. With reference to the policy use of scientometrics, he argued that there is an “eternal triangle,” constructed between scientists, science (policy) analysts, and science politicians (Rip, 1997). Following his summary, there was a discussion of these two points.
Different opinions were expressed on the present state of exchange between different kinds of research/educational traditions in STS, as illustrated by reflexive citation analysis in this area (Leydesdorff & Van den Besselaar 1997). That science studies is eventually a single field was a feeling shared strongly by the audience. For enhancement of exchange of different traditions, self-consciousness on each validation boundary in each tradition can be helpful. It can be said that “translation” between different traditions as integration method is considered as replacement of meanings of issues that across the different validation boundaries. It was also pointed out that researchers show the adaptation process towards validation boundaries of each journal which construct the tradition. The validation boundary affects the action of scientists, however, this boundary does not exist at the beginning, it is also constructed based on the action of scientists. Therefore, the validation boundary, which plays as a cognitive and social restriction, can be changed based on continuous next operation (scientists futures behaviour). We do not need to consider that boundary is fixed. It is possible that we can construct new boundaries which include exchanging between different kind of research/educational traditions, based on our future’s next behaviour.
In the discussion of the use of scientometrics in politics, several participants pointed to the risk of fixing one interpretation of quantitative data among the many possible by policy makers as well as by other scientists. The “rationality” in the interpretation process of the output data of scientometrics was discussed. In considering “rationality”, two points of entry for qualitative theorizing can be distinguished: operationalization process and interpretation process. First, qualitative theorizing can help direct quantitative measurement through operationalization process from qualitative theory to quantitative measurement. We should consider methodologically what it means when qualitative characteristics are operationalized into empirical data through simplification and abstraction. Secondly, in interpretation process, there is a feedback from the quantitative results to the qualitative questions. Here, the quantitative data operationalized in the first direction should be interpreted given the insights about the mentioned abstraction process. Otherwise, the data itself can be miss-interpreted without a context of producing these data and there emerge the risk of fixing one interpretation mentioned above. Therefore, we can say that there is a need to enhance the interaction between these operationalization process and interpretation process. The “rationality” in interpretation process of the output data of scientometrics can be re-considered in these interaction process. Furthermore, through these integration between operationalization process and interpretation process, qualitative theorizing itself will have an insight for further improving. In these interaction, quantitative approach can be made more reflexive and more consistent with qualitative methods in STS. Then we can overcome the problem that Sheila Jasanoff indicated above concerning educational traditions.
Additionally, a focus on the role of scientometrics in STS allows me and my colleagues in Japan to consider different research traditions in STS. Which are the methodological issues involved? How are conclusions from STS research warranted? These questions are important for the construction of STS in the Japanese context because of the functions of STS at the interface between the policy context (indicators) and because of the potential relations of scientometrics as a discipline with systems theory and metrics in the other sciences, like econometrics, psychometrics, and sociometrics.
Hence, we organized another session with a focus on the development of scientometrics in Japan. It included the application of co-words analysis towards policy documents (Fujigaki and Nagata, forthcoming), analysis on the operationalization process in making science indicator using the concept of meso data (Tomizawa and Niwa, 1996), publication analysis and citation analysis in astro physics (Makino, et al, 1997) and in psychiatry, application of interindustry relations analysis towards citing cited matrix (Shirabe, forthcoming), and a study on the possibility of using scientometrics method for cultural studies. The classification of methodology in scientometrics (publication, citation, words/co words analysis, institutional, co authors, etc.) and application fields was also discussed in a three dimensional space with three axis; texts, scientists, and cognitive (cf. Leydesdorff, 1995).
The two sessions were rich in terms of suggestions for the future perspectives in STS and scientometrics, indicating the ways and possibilities of exchange between the different research traditions in STS. The necessity of constructing a theory linking science dynamics and measurements accords with the possibility of integrating these traditions, that is, integration of qualitative studies and quantitative studies. Perhaps, STS has itself experienced a conflict between two cultures (natural science versus humanities and social sciences), reflected as a conflict between methodologies. Then, the analysis of dis communication among different traditions in STS and the efforts of integration among them can be utilized reflexively in analyzing the conflict between two cultures, as well as for studying communication difficulties among inter disciplinary and trans- disciplinary research.
Acknowledgment: The International Conference on STS (March 16-22, 1998, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Kyoto, Japan) was organized by Yoichiro Murakami (chair of organizing committee), Hideto Nakajima (chair of program committee) and Shin-ichi Kobayashi (chair of steering committee). I would like to show my gratitude towards these chairs for giving me the opportunity to organize above sessions with fruitful discussion. In total, about 380 people attended the conference. The conference information is available on: http://hostcinf.shinshu-u.ac.jp/stsconfjp.html. Those who wish to obtain the book of abstract, please contact: nakajima@sv.hss.titech.ac.jp.
References:
Callon, M. (1998) Is It Any Future for Scientometrics? And If Yes, Which One? Book of Abstracts of International Conference on STS, p26.
Fujigaki, Y. (1998) Filling the Gap Between the Discussion on Science and Scientist’s Everyday’s Activity: Applying the Autopoiesis System Theory to Scientific Knowledge, Social Science Information, Vol. 37, No. 1, 5-22.
Fujigaki,Y. (forthcoming, 1998) The Citation System : Citation Networks as repeatedly focusing on difference, continuous re-evaluation, and as persistent knowledge accumulation. Scientometrics.
Fujigaki, Y. and Nagata, A. (forthcoming, 1998) A Concept Evolution in Science and Technology Policy: The Process of Change in Relationship among University, Industry and Government, (forthcoming) Science and Public Policy.
Fuller, S. (1998) Science as a Vocation Circa 2000, in Brown, R.H. (ed.), Academic Knowledge and Political Practice, New York: Teachers College Press.
Gibbons, M., et al. (1994). The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Kobayashi, S., Wen J.(forthcoming, 1998) A New Configuration of R&D Collaboration both in Public and Private Sectors: Applying Audition System in Performing Art, Triple Helix Conference Book.
Leydesdorff, L.(1995) The Challenge of Scientometrics: The development, measurement, and self organization of scientific communications, Leiden: DSWO Press, Leiden University.
Leydesdorff, L and Van den Besselaar,P. (1997) Scientometrics and Communication Theory: Towards Theoretical Informed Indicators, Scientometrics, 38(1), 155-174.
Makino, J. Fujigaki, Y. and Imai, (1997) Productivity of Research Groups: Relation between citation analysis and reputation within research community, Japan Journal for Science, Technology & Society, 6,85-100.
Van der Muelen, B.J.R. (1997) The use of S&T Indicators in Science Policy, Scientometrics, 38(1), 87-102.
Rip, A. (1997) Qualitative Conditions of Scientometrics: The New Challenge, Scientometrics, 38(1), 7-26.
Shirabe, M (forthcoming, 1998) Introduction of Economic Methods to Scientometrics: Centering around the citing cited table and the autopoietic system of citations.
Tomizawa, H. and Niwa, F.(1996) “Evaluating overall national science and technology activity: General Indicator of Science and Technology (GIST) and its implications for S&T policy”, Research Evaluation, 6(August), 83-92.
author’s address: fujigaki@nistep.go.jp
As Sarah Franklin rightly points out, science studies now exists as a wide and diverse research initiative that is rightly characterized by its critics as comprising an established scholarly field within the academy (Franklin, 1995, p. 166). Those working within it question directly the positivism and universalism of western science, and seek to describe its discourses as cultural practices imbricated in the social and historical conditions of the society in which they are produced. This general task has produced various factions and epistemological positions, from science and technology studies, to science policy, to the history, philosophy, and sociology of science and scientific knowledge, around which new courses and departments have been generated in both Europe and the US. Beyond these more explicit areas of research, there are many other engagements with the sciences in the wider academic community, from philosophy, anthropology, to linguistics, and literature departments that subject scientific texts to the kind of analysis once reserved for literary texts. However, despite being fundamentally interdisciplinary, the more formal boundaries in many universities, particularly in the UK, still remain a barrier between these different approaches, methods, and levels of analysis. This situation has made it difficult for postgraduates, entering this more nebulous field of science studies, to communicate with their peers (other than at formal conferences) and to discuss common points of interest. For this new generation of researchers, we wanted to overcome these intellectual and practical obstacles, to create a forum for the exchange of ideas, resources, and approaches, to create a space, an informal and supportive environment, to present our work in progress.
Therefore, on 17 April 1998, the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University hosted a one-day postgraduate colloquium on the sociological, anthropological, and philosophical implications of developments in the field of human genetics.1 The focus of this colloquium moved away from standard bioethics research that is often more concerned with establishing protocols or identifying concerns of potential users of new techniques or treatments. Whereas our aim was to initiate more critical and interdisciplinary engagements and to create a distinct postgraduate research identity. The papers that were delivered featured the ongoing work of six researchers all wishing to address broader points of interest.2 These included the media representation and public perception of biotechnologies, the far-reaching issue of the geneticization of medical and social discourse, access to reproductive technologies, the philosophical discourse of molecular biology, the lived experience of genetic disorders, and the Human Genome Diversity Project. In this article, we would like to highlight each of these papers and discuss their specific areas of research.
The way that newspapers, television, and radio present new scientific developments, address ethical, philosophical and social questions, and interrogate individual scientists on these issues is crucial. Jimmy Endicott (Nottingham Trent University) in his paper Dollymania: an examination of media portrayals of cloning, describes the hysteria and moral-panic generated by the announcement of a cloned sheep in February 1997 mainly, but not exclusively, in the UK media. Endicott highlights how the media used the familiar frameworks of science fiction and religion to describe a complex scientific process and its equally complex ethical issues. He argues that the responses by the media to innovations such as transgenic cloning shape public perceptions about other possible biotechnologies that could be developed. The UK Human Genetics Advisory Commission has now begun its public consultation on nuclear transfer and Endicott expresses the fear, no doubt shared by many scientists, that the public at large will not be able to make an informed decision on this due to the bias in news management and reporting. The public representation of science has long been an important issue for both science and its critics. For example, in the UK, the Royal Society report (1985) on the public understanding of science brought about a whole new area of investigation. Working from a deficit model in which an undifferentiated public is regarded as generally ignorant of the sciences, the level of its understanding has been measured and assessed. There has also been a concerted effort to promote a particular vision of science in the media through engaging and accessible programmes that show science being done in certain ways. No doubt, in light of the Dolly incident, the scientific community shall become more cautious when dealing with parts of the media. However, this incident has to balanced against the representation of science in specialist television programmes in the UK, such as those produced for the Horizon (BBC2) or Equinox (Channel Four) strands. The recent controversy over the Against Nature programme on Channel Four in which those critical of certain scientific developments, such as David King the editor of GenEthics News, were claimed to have been treated unfairly, is only one example of where a pro-science bias is clearly evident. Another programme, Gene for Genius, featuring the work of Robert Plomin on the identification of the heredity of intelligence which also featured King, failed to disclose how he and the Campaign for Real Intelligence (CRIT) had lobbied the MRC to end funding for this kind of research. The programme did not address the very specific issues of concern raised by the CRIT (King, 1997) and presented, on the whole, the views of those who supported Plomins work.
Media representation also features in one of the most significant and difficult questions facing researchers in science studies. Has Western contemporary culture undergone a process of geneticization by which individuals and their characteristics are increasingly seen as a consequence and in terns of their DNA? Adam Hedgecoe (University College London) in his paper Geneticization, Medicalisation and polemics sets out to critically examine this question. He looks at Abby Lippmans term geneticization and its analogue genetic essentialism, used most notably by Dorothy Nelkin and Susan M. Lindee (1995). These are often the main starting points for discussion of genetics in medicine, health care, and the heredity of behaviour. For example, we often hear the expression that someone has a gene for a certain trait, such as intelligence, aggression, addiction, or shyness and popular magazine articles are asking whether Were you born that way? (Colt, 1998).
Moreover, since the description of the structure of DNA and its pronouncement as the secret of life, images of the double helix have proliferated in popular culture, with genetics and genetic engineering featuring more in film, from Twins (1988), Alien3 (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997), to Gattaca (1997). And those who have been watching British television could not have failed to notice Professor Steve Jones sharing his vision of a genetically engineered future for the Equitable Life commercial or his lecture on evolution for Renault. With their focus clearly on the last decade, Nelkin and Lindee argue it is not surprising that this popular appropriation of genetics should begin just as the Human Genome Project (HGP) is underway with scientists actively promoting it in the popular media and in popular science texts. However, Hedgecoe asks, is there actually a qualitative shift in explanations that privilege genetic factors over the environmental, which would justify the claim that western society has become geneticized? Or it is only a new figuration of a long tradition of hereditarian discourse? Indeed, the term genetic essentialism seems reminiscent of biological determinism used by writers such as Steven Rose, Richard Lewontin and Leon Kamin (1990), even if now the level of determinism has shifted from the physiological to the molecular. And they argue that this biologism has existed for centuries in a variety of discourses in the West. Hedgecoe also looks to more recent work by Celeste Condit who has used quantitative data as a way of approaching the question of geneticization. Condits research reveals a decrease in the number of articles in popular magazines in the US attributing influence to genetics only. However, the evidence to support or refute the geneticization/genetic essentialism thesis remains ambiguous, so Hedgecoe argues for a certain caution when using such encompassing terms and calls for further empirical research. Two papers delivered at the colloquium outline the different kinds of philosophical engagements with genetics that are possible. In his paper, Access to assisted reproduction in the UK: morality, law and practice, Shaun Pattinson (University of Sheffield) also acknowledges the role of the media — through sensationalising certain examples, such as Diane Blood or Mandy Allwood — in determining the public perception of who should have legitimate access to assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). For Pattinson these technologies are a paradigm of moral conflict. By applying a model developed by the philosopher Alan Gewirth, called the argument to the Principle of Generic Consistency, he argues that all individuals have certain rights, which includes the right to eproduce. This right can be expressed either as a positive, meaning that assistance should be given to allow that individual to reproduce, and a negative, meaning that the individual has the right to reproduce without interference if so wished. If any of these rights are denied then that individual is harmed, s/he might feel personal grief, or a lack of personal fulfilment. Once Pattinson establishes the philosophical argument for the universal right to reproduce, and with certain qualifications, the right to be assisted if so desired, he turns to the requirements and practices surrounding the access to ARTs. He notes how certain individuals are denied access to these technologies that reflects the power structures around sexuality and reproduction in UK society. According to the 1985 Warnock committee, it is morally wrong to allow lesbian or single women access to such technologies because, it is claimed, the interests of the child are best served in a two-parent heterosexual environment. Pattinson argues that this is an indefensible position to maintain in terms of the philosophical model with which he is working. Then, in a strong and provocative argument, he questions the very decision making mechanism that regulates the access to and operations of ARTs in the UK, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). He critically examines how the membership of the HFEA is decided and suggests how its decisions could be more democratically accountable. The latest development to increase the success rate of ARTs is pre-implantation diagnosis, which will again complicate the moral position Pattinson and other researchers will adopt. In a recent front page article in the newspaper, The Independent, it was disclosed that 50 children had been born after being screened for genetic defects (Laurence, 1998). These included the single gene disorders Cystic Fibrosis, Duchennes muscular dystrophy, and Taysachs disease. More troubling, BrCaI, which gives women a 80 per cent chance of developing breast cancer, usually around middle age, is likely to be the next test.
The other engagement, with more metaphysical implications of genetics, comes from Niall Scott (Lancaster University) in his paper `Necessity, contingency, and identity in evolutionary theories.’ Scott is prompted in part by the writings of eminent scientists such as Steven Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, Richard Dawkins, and Jacques Monod from whose book Chance and Necessity, he derives the twin foci of his research — the random and the contingent vis a vis invariance and determinism in evolutionary accounts. As the two poles around which such theories turn, this is a very interesting area of research that shows the difficulty in striking a balance between them when explaining the emergence and continuation of biological organisms. Monod, a molecular biologist, writing just at the end of the golden age of his science in 1970, discusses how the randomness at the molecular level is governed by certain structural laws. There is, for example, a universal genetic code even if there are an almost infinite number of possible combinations that could create new and different proteins.
However, what Monod is keen to stress is that things new and different don’t happen all that often, but when they do, they are faithfully copied to future generations. Gould, on the other hand, looking at the matter from the level of the organism, sees the evolution of humans, as with any other species, as a purely random and unlikely event. Rose and Lewontin argue along similar lines to Gould here, not accepting fully the adaptationist explanation for the evolution of species that seeks to account for all mutations in terms of giving selection advantage. They point instead to other random forces that might give rise to neutral mutations with no obvious advantage. There is also a question of level and perspective, since a random mutation at the molecular level does not necessarily produce one at the level of the phenotype. And mutations between many different organisms do not necessarily affect the identity of the population in which it is situated. This whole tension between chance and necessity comes from trying to account for the reproduction of relatively unchanging and highly complex organisms while trying to move away from narratives of design and teleology which are part of that quagmire marked with the warning sign eugenics. The most recently heralded example of how the science of genetics will bring about a change in the philosophical understanding of what it means to be human is the Human Genome Project (Bodmer and McKie, 1994). Again the relationship between chance and necessity still seems to be a central issue in the context of some of the claims made by the many supporters and participants of the HGP. They argue that the whole nature vs. nurture debate will be successfully brought to a close with the realisation that it is the former that dominates the way people develop and behave. As the writer of an article in Life remarked, far from a piece of putty, say biologists, my daughter is more like a computers motherboard, her basic personality hardwired into the infinitesimal squiggles of DNA (Colt, p. 40).
Anthropological research in the field of science studies has linked the kind of discourses with which many of the papers are concerned with here, to the lived experiences of individuals and groups. For example, Andrea Stockl (University of Cambridge) in her paper Embodying genetic disorder the case of SLE [Systematic Lupus Erythematosus] examines the social and cultural construction of biomedical knowledge of SLE. Its aetiology is currently unknown although genetics, sex hormones, viruses and stress are seen to play a crucial role. Stockl wishes to combine the observation of laboratory practice and the life-world of SLE, particularly howpeople make sense of the diagnosis and the disease in their everyday life, in relation to the body of biomedical knowledge through what she called illness narratives. SLE is now viewed as an example of an autoimmune disease, where the immune system turns against its own body, therefore Stockl is interested in the recent revival in exploring concepts of the self, especially in the work of Donna Haraway. Individuals with SLE, like many others, have set up user groups on the Internet where aetiology, current research, and new techniques is shared and discussed. Stockl suspects that they might be beginning to form their own discourse and identity, which is also happening with other groups of people with certain genetic disorders. These groups, currently the subject of research, are sites where forms of knowledge are generated outside the boundaries of academic or corporate science. The distinction and relationship between expert and lay knowledge, which has often been the focus of science studies research, is brought to the foreground, and the implications for future research is of great interest.
Probably the greatest area of controversy in the 1990s has been the conduct of genetics research in developing countries. This has mainly involved the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) whose proponents wish to sample and preserve genes from the worlds populations, especially those on the verge of extinction. It has been consistently opposed by Indigenous Peoples Councils and non- governmental organisations. The term that often features now in their declarations and press releases is biocolonialism — the practice whereby the dominant culture in the world maintains and extends control over the biological resources of others (Whitt, 1998). It describes the growing commercial interest in these resources by universities, governments and industry often in partnership, leading, it is feared, to the continued exploitation of isolated communities with high incidences of particular diseases. The most notable example is probably Tristan da Cunha whose small population experiences a very high rate of asthma (Biggin, 1997). The other component of this biocolonialism might be seen as the way in which the proponents of the HGDP dont acknowledge the specific originary and historical inscriptions held by many of the populations whose genes they would like to sample.
Richard Tutton (Lancaster University), in his paper `Writing the human’, locates the HGDP in the broader context of western biology and the emergence of the textual and informational metaphor so fundamental to the discourses of the human genome. He shifts the argument from documenting the sequence of events in the controversy of the HGDP, to an analysis of its conceptual foundations, especially to the effect of its chosen sampling strategy on the discursive claims of its proponents. He argues that their desire is to create a universal humanity based on molecular genetics and Neo-Darwinian theory, in which physical differences (the basis for the old category of race) are supplanted by a common genetic heritage to unite all the worlds populations. However, he suggests that this universal humanity, which is bound up with the attempt to scientifically answer the origins of other cultures, is highly offensive to many indigenous peoples, and highlights the difficulties of a universal science dealing with situations of cultural relativism.
At the end of the meeting in April, it was decided to hold a second colloquium hosted by the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London in December, under the title of Postgraduate Forum for Genetics and Society (PFGS). The intention is to make this a biannual event so as to follow closely the work of participants as it progresses, and to make the forum open to as many postgraduates, on both MA and PhD programmes, as possible. The organisers would therefore like to hear from those involved in the public understanding of science, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, philosophy, literary studies, and science and technology studies who will find this new forum to be very useful. We are especially interested in fostering pan-European links, and would like to attract researchers from different national traditions.
To join the PFGS electronic mailing list for details of our future meetings, please send a message to Richard Tutton at the email address below.
Notes
We would like to thank the Department of Sociology for funding this event. We would also thank Justine Brooks, Dr Sarah Franklin, Dr Maureen McNeil, and Denise Wright for their valuable assistance.
Other participants included Wan Ching Yee (University of the West of England), David Cumner, Katy Harkavy, and Annie James (all at Lancaster University).
References
Biggin, S. (1997) “Whose DNA is it, anyway?” Science, 278: 564-67.
Bodmer, W. and McKie, R. (1994) The Book of Man: The Quest to Discover our Genetic Heritage, Abacus, London.
Colt, G. H. (1998) “Were you born that way?” Life, April 1998: 38-51.
Franklin, S. (1995) “Science as culture, cultures of science,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 163-84.
King, D. (1997) “How to control science: a case study,” GenEthics News, 19: 6-8.
Laurence, J. (1998) “Designer baby fears after 50 screened births,” The Independent, 7 May: 1.
Nelkin, D. and Lindee, S. M. (1995) The DNA Mystique: The Gene as Cultural Icon, W. H. Freeman, New York.
Rose, S. Lewontin, R. C. and Kamin, L. J. (1990) Not in our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.
The Royal Society (1985) The Public Understanding of Science, Report of an Ad Hoc Group, The Royal Society, London.
Whitt, L. A. (1998) “Biocolonialism and the commodification of knowledge,” Science as Culture, 7 (1): 33-67.
authors’ addresses: a.hedgecoe@ucl.ac.uk, r.tutton@lancaster.ac.uk