Review of Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1995.
In many ways the sociology of technology is a sociology of obduracy. Much of the literature in this diverse field asks in one way or another, ‘Just how is it that artifacts reach and maintain their shape?’ Others ask a similar question, but - preferring to engage in a politics of obduracy - ask why such arrangements have occurred. In his new book, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs, Wiebe Bijker offers us a thesis that sits most comfortably in the latter camp. A detailed constructivist history of three important technologies, this book beautifully reviews and sets out the framework of the approach known as the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT). It gives us, as Bijker would argue, a political constructivist theory of technology.
Split into five chapters - an introduction, a conclusion, and three empirical chapters between - the book brings together the various threads of Bijker’s programme over the last decade. The empirical chapters are enlarged and heavily reworked revisions of three earlier papers on bicycles, celluloid and Bakelite, and high intensity fluorescent lighting respectively (Pinch & Bijker 1984, Bijker 1987, Bijker 1992) - all important in the so-called new sociology of technology. The conclusion revises a later paper in which Bijker calls upon scholars of science and technology studies to revisit the political relevance of their early endeavours (Bijker 1993). The first empirical chapter stems from the most influential of the earlier papers - Pinch & Bijker’s (1984) account of the social construction of the bicycle. In the book he sets out in much more detail the relevant social groups (RSGs) that were involved in fixing the dominant meaning of the bicycle. In the example of the stabilization of the Ordinary (or Penny Farthing), he shows how one of the RSGs - young adventurous men - saw the Ordinary as a sporting machine “that was rather hazardous to ride”. (p47) That the Ordinary was seen as risky to ride was however one of its attractive features, so that:
Young and often upper-class men could display their athletic skills and daring by showing off in the London parks. To impress the riders’ lady friends, the risky nature of the Ordinary was essential. Thus the meanings attributed to the machine by the group of Ordinary users made it a Macho Bicycle. (p75)
For another RSG, one that Bijker calls the ‘Ordinary nonusers’, this riskiness was an important reason to avoid riding the perilous machine: “… the machine was difficult to mount, risky to ride, and not easy to dismount. It was, in short, an Unsafe Bicycle.” (p74) Bijker thus deconstructs the Ordinary into two different artifacts: one with the meaning attributed to it by the young daring riders - a Macho Bicycle; the other, an Unsafe Bicycle:
This Macho Bicycle was … radically different from the Unsafe Bicycle - it was designed to meet different criteria; it was sold, bought, and used for different purposes; it was evaluated to different standards, it was considered a machine that worked whereas the Unsafe Bicycle was a nonworking machine. (p75)
Bijker shows here how the ‘working’ and ‘nonworking’ of an artifact are socially constructed rather than intrinsic properties of the object itself. This demonstrates one of the most important notions in the new sociology of technology - that of the interpretative flexibility of artifacts. In other words, in Bijker’s argument, there are as many artifacts as there are RSGs, and there is no artifact not constituted by a RSG. That we can demonstrate the interpretative flexibility of an artifact in this way allows for a sociological explanation of the development of artifacts. If no interpretative flexibility could be demonstrated
all properties of an artifact could be argued to be immanent after all. Then there would be no social dimension to design: only application and diffusion - or context, for short - would form the social dimension of technical development. (p76)
Once the delicate work of deconstruction and interpretative flexibility has been shown, argues Bijker, what then remains to be shown is the closure and stabilization processes of particular artifacts - whether particular technologies become dominant or are lost for ever in a technological scrapyard.
Closure and stabilization are then key concepts in Bijker’s theoretical framework. Aimed at answering the continuity-change requirement, they too first came to light in Pinch and Bijker’s (1984) paper on bicycles. However, Bijker now endows the terms, formerly used interchangeably, with different meanings. Closure is what is in progress when the interpretative flexibility of an artifact is diminishing. It can lead to convergence on a single dominant meaning. It is a social-interactionist process that goes on between RSGs. It is moreover virtually irreversible. In the case of bicycles, closure occurred around the Unsafe and not the Macho interpretation of the Ordinary. Thus the Ordinary became extinct and has next to no chance of being revived. Stabilization, on the other hand, goes on primarily within RSGs and is semiotic, as Bijker would have it. It can be detected when the names used to refer to an artifact become in time simplified. Thus an exhibition report from 1888 refers to “rear-driven safety bicycles” which can have diamond or cross frames. Stabilization in the ensuing years meant that by 1889 “safety bicycle” was enough and by 1895 “bicycle” all by itself would do to label essentially the same artifact, a low-wheeled machine with rear-driving chains and a diamond frame.
The technological frame (TF) appears to be the theoretical improvisation of which Bijker is most proud and its exposition comes appropriately in the longest chapter, which looks at the “invention” by Leo Baekeland of Bakelite. A TF is an arena in which the meaning attributed to an artifact by the members of a RSG is negotiated. It is where the problems of the artifact are identified, and where solutions are proposed and essayed through problem-solving strategies characteristic of that frame. It is the site also of goals, technological and scientific theories, tacit knowledge, testing procedures, as well as design methods and criteria. Is it a catch-all concept? No, says Bijker, because “it is possible to give a quite unambiguous characterization of the technological frame for a relevant social group” (p124). And “describing the technological frame of a relevant social group does indeed explain a particular course of events”.
The TF is to sociotechnical change what Kuhn’s paradigm is to scientific revolutions, though it differs in important respects. For one, it is not narrowly cognitive but materially and socially heterogeneous. Also it is a concept to be applied not only to scientists and engineers but to all RSGs. With the TF the analyst is able, according to Bijker, to breathe life into the sequence of snapshots that alone is possible with only the theoretical concepts of the RSG, interpretative flexibility, closure and stabilization. So it is much more than a symptom, or indeed cause, of artifactual stability. For Bijker it will be helpful in transcending the distinction between hitherto irreconcilable opposites: the social shaping of technology and the technological impact on society, social determinism and technical determinism, society and technology (p196-7).
Once he’s entered it into the drama, Bijker feels able to claim that he has met the four requirements for his theory of sociotechnical change that he laid out in his introductory chapter. Along with closure and stabilization as well as inclusion, it accommodates both technical change and continuity. It combines elements of agency and structure. It transcends the need to use a priori distinctions between the social and technical. And, finally, it allows for the question of whether an artifact “works” to be treated as explanandum rather than explanans.
Technological frames abound in Bijker’s Bakelite history. One develops around celluloid which prominently includes practices and problems associated with the solvents used in its manufacturing process. Another has synthetic-dye chemistry as its focus. The purification and chemical analysis of reaction products is central to this TF’s modus operandi. Other TFs, in which Baekeland becomes strongly included before his Bakelite days, are those of photochemistry and electrochemistry. Early in his career Baekeland, a keen amateur photographer in the early days of photography, worked on innovations in photographic paper and its development. So successful was he that he sold his photographic paper affairs (and an undertaking to stay out of the photographic business!) to Eastman Kodak in 1899 for the then enormous price of $750,000. He became involved in the then burgeoning electro-chemistry TF later, when he worked as a consultant to a firm intent on producing caustic soda from brine. Both frames notably favoured meticulousness and systematic investigation.
His low degree of inclusion in the TF of the synthetic-dye chemists and his high degree of inclusion in the electrochemistry TF meant that Baekeland worked unusually when he eventually turned to experimenting with the phenol-formaldehyde reaction. It had already attracted synthetic-dye chemists but they had dismissed it because its products proved impossible to purify and analyse. Baekeland however paid little attention to analysis. Instead he went about varying the reaction variables systematically. He managed thus to produce several promising chemicals. Some were soluble and interested him and his assistant as potential varnishes; others were insoluble and came to interest him as potenial moldable materials. It was some of the latter which later he and the interactions of multiple RSGs through their TFs stabilized as “Bakelite”.
It is ironic that Baekeland’s retrospective account of his “invention” portrays it in a very different way, as a more or less single-minded journey towards the goal of creating a moldable plastic. Bijker’s tells us why. Refusing psychologism, his is an explanation once more in terms of the versatile TFs. By the time Baekeland came to write his story, long after the “invention”, his inclusion in various TFs had changed:
His degree of inclusion in the celluloid technological frame increased, and the history of the invention of Bakelite was cast in terms that were in accordance with that frame: building on Kleeberg’s work [which had demonstrated an insoluble solid product of the phenol-formaldehyde reaction], aiming at a molding plastic, focus [sic] on the solvent (p150).
By the time we get to the fluorescent-lighting case study, we have seen all of the theoretical concepts that make up Bijker’s analytical framework. So at last we see his approach in its fullness as he explains why even today we use high-intensity and not high-efficiency fluorescent lamps. It is a story that tells of several relevant social groups. On the production side there were the Mazda companies, which dominated the market for electric lighting; the electricity utilities, which feared that high-efficiency fluorescent lamps would slash electricity consumption; the independent lighting manufacturers, burdened with prohibitive patent licences from the Mazda companies; and, later in the story, lighting-fixture manufacturers producing standard fixtures for Mazda lamps. Last but not least of the RSGs was the ‘general public’, which included a subgroup that bulked large in the calculations of some technologists - women. According to a 1940 article in Electrical Engineering green and yellow “mercury lines in the spectrum of fluorescent lamps” meant that “overemphasis of these colors in the wall finishes, the draperies, upholstery, and the complexion often results in unattractive effects very disturbing to the lady of the house” (p246).
We use those high-intensity lamps for a host of reasons, naturally. But one of the more salient ones is, for Bijker, the Nela Park Conference. Here representatives of the Mazda companies and the electricity utilities met to sort out their differences. They did this in an extraordinary way. They designed the now familiar lamp around the conference table. It was a design not yet built and not one whose feasibilty they could be certain of. But the new design satisfied their various interests. It went some way to settling the ‘load issue’, which had the utilities fearing that electricity consumption would plummet because of the high efficiency of recently developed fluorescent lamps. The increased efficiency was compensated for by a much greater brightness (and electricity consumption). It allowed for power-factor correction in the lamp fixtures. This had been another worry for the utilities, who did not want to provide extra generating capacity unnecessarily. And for the Mazda companies it meant they could get on with selling fluorescent lamps without continually worrying about how the utilities might react to their every move. This “amalgamation of vested interests” was a doubly conventional resolution, lodged as it was within both TFs.
Before he turns to his concluding chapter, Bijker explains how power fits into his framework. He takes as his starting point Giddens’s definition, “the transformative capacity to harness the agency of others to comply with one’s ends” (p262), which avoids the pitfall of seeing power as “stuff”. There are two sides to Bijker’s power coin. Semiotic power is a fixedness of meanings, which is apparent in the ways facts, artifacts, agents, practices and relations are articulated in TFs. It is the “apparent order of taken-for-granted categories of existence” (p263). Micropolitics of power, the other side of the coin, describes “how a variety of practices transforms and structures the actions of actors” (p263), and results in a specific semiotic structure, which, naturally, acts back on the micropolitics. The two aspects are related to closure and stabilization. Closure, the reduction of interpretative flexibility, comes about as an outcome of heterogeneous micropolitical actions to fix meanings and is a first step in making semiotic power. The remaining steps are made by the continuing stabilization process. In closure, the TF as a cage confining its members, exerts semiotic power; as a resource (problem-solving strategies, etc.) for its members, it lends micropolitical power to them.
Actually, power does not so much fit into the theoretical framework as overlay it. Semiotic power and the micropolitics of power do not work alongside the theoretical entities already introduced - the RSGs, interpretative flexibility, closure, stabilization, the TFs and inclusion. “Rather, a description in terms of power strategies functions as a neat summary of processes that were otherwise described in terms of “those entities (p266).
In an autobiographical vein early in the book, Bijker tells how he came to the academic study of technology and society. For him it was a detour. He had been in the science-technology-society movement popular among engineering students in the Netherlands in the seventies. They managed to introduce into school and university curricula critical ways of looking at the relationships between science, technology and society. Then they started to look for empirical and theoretical ‘ammunition’ to help in their struggles with technoscientific authority. Bijker thought he might find some in academia.
He may have been there ever since but he has not forgotten his old political motivations. He takes up the political strand again in the final chapter. For him, though, the obvious route into politics is not the one that leads to science and technology policy studies. That would be to ally oneself with the interests of a specific social group. Instead he advocates a “politics of technology”. It should be “emancipationist rather than instrumental”; it should “politicize technological choices rather than pacify them”, and “problematize rather than absolve” (p280). Bijker, it appears, is as radical as ever.
“Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs” is a river fed by two tributaries, Wiebe Bijker’s theory of sociotechnical change and the detailed historical case study. It alternately runs in twisting gullies - impatiently following unexpected courses - and coasts along in grand deep flows. It could serve as an excellent route for a first foray into the territory of science and technology studies. It will also repay renavigation by experienced hands, particularly in its fine reworking of the histories of the bicycle, Bakelite and the fluorescent lamp.
Perhaps it should be said however that while the book collects between two covers the theoretical framework adumbrated in his earlier papers, it does not greatly elaborate that framework. True, closure and stabilization are now distinguished from one another; the relationships between technological frame, relevant social group and artifact are fleshed out a little; and we get the mapping of semiotic and micropolitical power onto the framework. Bijker has lubricated his theory. But there is little else new here.
Moreover, Bijker deflects only some of the criticisms that can be made of this theory. In particular there is the argument that the RSGs used by an analyst are themselves the constructions of that analyst. Drawing boundaries around certain groups is always problematic. Given Bijker’s political intentions it is perhaps not surprising that he barely reflects on this. As we have seen he attempts to empirically justify the use of the RSG by adopting as analyst the categories used by the actors themselves. The world as it exists for the RSG “is a good place for the analyst to begin his or her research. Thus the analyst would be content to use “cyclists” as a relevant social group, but introduce separate “bicyclists” and “tricyclists” only when the actors themselves do so (p48). While we accept that Bijker provides such a strategy as a heuristic rather than in the form of some hard-and-fast rule - and we concur with him in his method - we feel it is valuable not to lose sight of the questions that can be raised while studying the fuzziness of boundaries between groups.
Bijker does this himself in many ways. Indeed central to his work is his explicit aim to fracture the traditional diffusionist image of technical innovation, with its black-boxed technologies passed linearly from engineer to user. He argues, “I have taken an additional step beyond this interpretation by suggesting that it is not only engineers … but all relevant social groups who contribute to the social construction of technology” (p273). Recall his interest in the Nela Park Conference. “At that meeting a third fluorescent lamp was designed - not on the drawing board or the laboratory bench, but at the conference table” (p238). In one move he rubs out the distinction between those who produce and those who use technology - casting the managers as designers. In a futher move he is happy to retain other distinctions, to maintain other boundaries - General Electric as a RSG with specific interests - and with it, the stability of the RSG. Bijker seems to shift between purity and heterogeneity to further his story.
Throughout his case studies he leaves vague his distinction between the social and the technical, but in the conclusion argues for other differentiations which are less reductionist. He argues, “Instead of technical artifacts, our unit of analysis is now the ‘sociotechnical ensemble’” (p274). Every time “artifact” is written, it is shorthand for “sociotechnical ensemble” and we should be able to trace the “[social] construction” of the artifact. Likewise, each time we write “social institution” we really mean “sociotechnical ensemble”, and we should be able to trace the “technical relations” that go into stabilizing that institution. Introducing such complexity (or irreduction) is seemingly at odds with Bijker’s political programme, but he argues for a need to produce “other differentiations between explanandum and explanans, between dependent and independent variable, between foreground and background - differentiations that are not based on the distinction between the social and the technical” (p274). Thus Bijker is arguing for other types of reduction (that which is not social and technical), of the sort where we stabilize enough of this sociotechnical ensemble, so that we can explain the Other against this background. Rather than talk of the social or technical we can talk of the particular configurations of TFs. If we know of the particular configuration (one in which there is for example a single dominant RSG that insists upon its definition of the artifact’s problems and solutions) we are then able to specify what process of sociotechnical change is likely to occur.
In telling his story, Bijker is willing to iron some new creases into the seamless web while ironing others out. For us what is interesting is why he is content to make firm the boundaries around the interests of RSGs such as General Electric - and at the same time unpick the boundaries around others, such as those around design engineers on the one hand and the managers at the Nela Park Conference.
At the very end of the book, Bijker leaves us with an unsettling double paradox. The first he acknowledges directly. Existence is a seamless web in which no individual or collective sociotechnical ensemble is privileged. What then can a theory of sociotechnical change do, he asks, “to help establish institutional and structural ways of guaranteeing the democratic nature of technological culture”? The answer he invites us to accept is to recognize that “there is [and, we presume, can be] no Leviathan” and simultaneously to propose “some form of institutional regulatory system”, even if that is paradoxical. The form of such a system is left entirely to the readers’ imagination. Before the pages ran out as we progressed through the concluding chapter - with its plea for political relevance in academic studies of technology and its advocacy of a politics of technology - we had begun to hope for a more explicit political programme. We were disappointed.
A very mild dose of reflexivity reveals the other paradox. Bijker tells us that his theory of sociotechnical change and stability is tantamount to neutral:
One might attempt to argue that the sorts of STS studies I have discussed, by highlighting the constructed nature of facts, artifacts, social orders, and sociotechnical ensembles, will allow those who are kept hostage by the semiotic power structrues involved … to sever these bonds and free themselves…. Although this may happen, there is no guarantee that it will always work out this way. First science and technology may also be fruitfully employed by the less privileged…. And second there is no reason why the powerful may not draw on the insights of the STS community (p289).
The social construction of technology in that case seems to mirror the technology so often pushed by technologists: something that can be used equally for good or ill. So it is the exception among sociotechnical ensembles. Unlike the technology told of by Bijker, it has no politics.
References
Pinch, T. J. and Bijker, W. E. 1984. “The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other”, Social Studies of Science 14, 399-441.
Bijker, W. E. 1987. “The Social Construction of Bakelite: Toward a Theory of Invention” in Bijker, W. E., T.P Hughes, and T.J, Pinch (eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 159-187.
Bijker, W. E. 1992. “The Social Construction of Fluorescent Lighting, Or How an Artifact was Invented in its Diffusion Stage” in Bijker, W. E. and J. Law (eds), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 75-102.
Bijker, W. E. 1993. “Do Not Despair: There Is Life After Constructivism”, Science, Technology, and Human Values, Vol. 18, No. 1, 113-138
Authors’ addresses: c.stokes@lancaster.ac.uk n.pollock@lancaster.ac.uk
Woody Allen has this joke. It’s about a man who tells his friend that his brother thinks he is a chicken. So this friend says: “Why don’t you turn him in? Bring him to an asylum?” But then this man replies: “No, I won’t do that because I want his eggs.”
Seeing oneself as a chicken and being chicken amounts to a minor difference of usage, but the practical difference is substantial. In the first case, you take the person to an asylum, while in the second you stop taking him seriously. It is very possible that privately the first option has crossed the minds of the combatants in the ‘Epistemological Chicken’ debate.1 Are they out of their minds? The written statements resemble the second option. SSK-adherents, Collins and Yearley, and ANT-adherents, Callon and Latour, seem to have stopped taking each other seriously, which is even more devastating for intellectual debate. We find this unfortunate, because, as Gerard de Vries has shown in the last issue of the EASST Review,2 important issues are at stake. But contrary to de Vries we will suggest to look for the eggs of this debate in a different place, beyond epistemology and ontology. More specificly, we will discuss two related issues featuring implicitly in the Chicken debate. The first is the problem of order. How seamless is the web between science, technology and society? The second concerns the problem of (science) politics. Using the insights of twenty years of STS, how are we to ‘re-center’ political and normative questions, raised in the sixties about science and society?
The common house of STS
The ‘Chicken papers’ should not be read in isolation - as a one-time debate between Bath and Paris, between British SSK and French semiotics of science and technology. There is more at stake here. The Chicken papers are part of an ongoing evaluation of about 20 years of productive science studies. What have we reached? Where do we stand now? And where do we go from here? This is how we read Pickering’s Science as Culture and Practice.3 Comparing this volume with its predecessor of a decade ago, Science Observed,4 we have to acknowledge what Lakatos would have called both theoretical and empirical progress in the field. The 1983 volume chiefly contains programmatic papers, or main lines of research. Moreover, these research programmes are presented side by side - as equivalents. Possible conflicts, contradictions and mutual competition are rarely discussed, apart from in a few footnotes and appendices. The various approaches are presented as belonging to one Wittgensteinian family. In the volume’s introduction Mulkay and Knorr-Cetina spell out the family resemblances. Since all of them were already around in Science Observed, ten years ago the Chickens papers’ discussants still lived together in a common house - although in different rooms: Collins on the SSK-floor in the central EPOR-room; Yearley, together with other Discourse Analysts, in the cellar space immediately beneath this floor, critically reexamining the empirical foundations of SSK; Latour and Actor Network Theorists in the entrance hall, near the front door where insiders go out and outsiders come in; and Woolgar in the garden, in the little summerhouse where everything that matters in the big house is ruminated upon, reflexively. In the Pickering volume not resemblances, but differences are emphasized. Take the discussion between Lynch and Bloor about rule-governed behaviour.5 Here Wittgenstein is no longer a shared resource, but a divisive element. Pickering’s volume is not about the common house but about the differences between the rooms. There is even a skirmish about which room is most important. Who will inhabit this room? There is much envy in the Chicken debate - the British king dethroned by a French emperor.
The metaphor of a common house points to two things. First, the participants in the Chicken debate still live in the same house. Not only in terms of organization (common societies, journals, conferences, etc.), but also according to their intellectual self-image. Just as in political or in religious circles, the most rigorous denunciations are pronounced between kindred spirits. In this respect the title, and, even more so, the closing sentences of Callon and Latour’s paper are illustrative. “We want to change the water, but to keep the Bath baby in, since it is also our baby.”6 Second, the metaphor raises an interesting question. In all these years, did the house remain more or less the same, or, due to all the internal turmoil, has it been completely reconstructed? Pickering, in his introduction, observes not only a sharpening of internal contrasts and discussions, but also a general shift in STS, empirically and analytically, from science-as-knowledge to science-as- practice, from language to action, from ‘linguism’ to embodiment and ‘materialism’.7 Here the authors of the Chicken papers disagree. Broadly speaking, Collins and Yearley, we would guess, want to keep the house as it stands in Science Observed. They are quite satisfied with the SSK-project. Their motto is: further refinement and extension to new fields of research. Callon and Latour, on the contrary, are only this close to leaving the house. And Woolgar? He still lives in the garden’s summerhouse, parasitizing, however interestingly (or irritatingly if you like) on what is going on in the ‘real’ house.
The heterogeneity of the Chicken debate
Why is this debate referred to as the ‘epistemological chicken’ debate? The chicken part of this title is clear. Apparently, intellectuals are accused of being chicken in theoretical matters. Collins and Yearley point to this phenomenon within STS, but after bringing it up they refuse to play the game of chicken at all. But why do they call this game epistemological chicken? Why not ontological, methodological, sociological, or even political chicken? Because all the participants, we would claim, make it an epistemological game most of the time. Even when other sociological or political problems are at stake, the debate is recast in epistemological terms. Subject and object, word and world, relativism and realism, the problem of representation - these are the central issues to which all other items are reduced. In the Chicken debate, epistemology still functions as the traffic island in the middle of the road - as an escape route to safety. In Woolgar’s case this is obvious. His reflexive project, and, in his view, even the whole business of STS is primarily concerned with epistemological issues: “The central significance of social studies of science”, he says, “is that it adresses fundamental questions about the nature of knowing.”8 His trade is the splitting and inversion of the relation of representation between subject and object. But he is not the only one with an epistemological bias. Discussing Callon’s paper on the domestication of the scallops and fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay, Collins and Yearley, for example, contest the way Callon puts the scallops on the stage, as actants, just as active as fishermen or marine biologists. This way Callon questions sociological and political common sense. But this is not how Collins and Yearley treat Callon’s paper. They immediately return to epistemology. In Callon’s story the things-in-themselves (the scallops) can speak once again for themselves. So Callon is an old-fashioned realist setting the clock back to the days before SSK. Collins and Yearley accuse Callon and Latour of epistemological conservatism! Who is playing the game of chicken here? Even Callon and Latour are not fully recovered from this epistemological disease. However much in a negative, critical sense, their ontology still uses Kant’s yardstick to structure the discussion; it’s a yardstick which is primarily epistemologically calibrated. In order to avoid epistemological reductionism, paradoxically enough, Callon and Latour reduce all interesting questions about science, technology and society to this Kantian yardstick. Nature versus Culture, Object versus Subject, Science versus Society, Facts versus Values, Knowledge versus Politics, Non-humans versus Humans, Behaviour versus Action, Natural versus Social Sciences - all these dichotomies are pinned down to that sole yardstick. No wonder it gets overloaded to the point of breaking down. There is no reason to read the Chicken debate in such a single-minded fashion. Not every problem raised in this debate can be reduced to epistemology, or to the battle against epistemology. There is more at stake than epistemology and ontology. The chicken debate, we would like to claim, can also be read from a political and sociological perspective. In the remainder of this paper we will concentrate on the political consequences of the different solutions of Collins/Yearley and Callon/Latour to the problem of (social) order.
The problem of order
Both Collins/Yearley and Callon/Latour acknowledge the heterogeneous character of order, consisting of humans, non-humans, social relations and natural ‘things’. They disagree about the mechanism that constitutes order, and, in particular, about the role of non-humans in this respect. Aside from humans, social relations, interests, etc., Collins/Yearley also acknowledge the existence of non-humans, but only through the accounts of humans. Their order is a social order. For Callon/Latour, order is quintessentially a hybrid order of humans and non-humans. For the former, there is no order without social mechanisms. In the wider network they perceive, social entities, like group interests, ultimately hold society together. For the latter there is no order without mixtures of humans and non-humans. In the Collins/Yearley perspective, order is constituted by commuting between science and the world outside science. It is the core set which ‘funnels in’ social interests.9 Their ‘social rea- lism’ works like a camera with a zoom lens. First, they zoom in on science. At this point their social realism is Winchian. The cognitive and social order of science is created simultaneously; the stabilization of scientists’ accounts of the natural world and the stabilization of social order within the scientific community is a single process. Subsequently, they zoom out from the inner scientific circle to the world outside. Now their social realism is more Durkheimian or Bloorian.10 This time the focus is on interests and other social ‘things’. This zooming device enables them to bridge the gap between science and society, between the internal, produced order of science, and the external, pre-given order of society, which is a Durkheimian social fact of its own. This is how they bring science ‘home’ to society by stressing common features and levelling out epistemological differences between scientific and cultural practices. They want to make science ‘smaller’ than it may seem from the perspective of its users or laymen. This is accomplished by detailed description, whereby epistemological mystery and wonder is dissolved. By commuting between these two kinds of order, scientists dealing with truth and nature in an authorative way become ‘ordinary’ experts dealing in competence and skills in society. Callon and Latour want to break away from this commuting between inside and outside altogether. If you stick to the scientists, you will see how they enroll others, and make them insiders as well. There simply are no outsiders in their network. Hence their motto: follow the scientists! See how they change the world, not just the social world, but the world of humans and non-humans. The scientists are not confronted with either society or nature, but with both of them at the same time, with tangles of humans and non-humans. From the perspective of the scientists there are nothings-in-themselves or humans-among- themselves. If anything, the natural and the social are the product of the activities of scientists after tangles have stabilized, so after scientists have already moved on to more ‘fluid’ boundaries of the social and the natural.
Reading their work one cannot escape the impression that society is almost completely swallowed by science. It is not science but society they want to make ‘smaller’. This is accomplished by elaborating on the dramatic impact of science and technology on society and by more or less implying that, apart from science and technology, there really isn’t much of interest that holds society together.
Now returning to the practical problems STS wants to confront, one might ask how far we get with Collins/Yearley’s strategy. Will debunking scientific authority be sufficient for understanding the role of (scientific) experts in society? Can we understand the social basis of their power any better? If we become social realists and try to understand the social world (including science), we may find out that scientific work looks just like any other kind of practical work. But does this also give us insights into the politics of science and into the power of experts, which is obviously not entirely based on the epistemological sacredness of science? In the old days of Science and Society the problem with experts was more complicated than just their scientific nimbus, which placed them effectively outside the political realm. So, after we have made science look like any other kind of practical work, we still have to figure out the differences between what experts do and other kinds of practical work.
It reminds us of the replacement of Latin by the vernacular in the Catholic Mass some decades ago. Although this might be considered as a sign of the waning power of the Church, abolishing spoken Latin certainly did not by itself break the power of the church. Epistemology may have been one of the ways to depoliticize science, but after destroying the epistemologically legitimized aura of scientists, we are still faced with the problem of understanding their power and bringing science back into the political realm. Just like Merton reduced the sociology of science to the sociology of scientists and the social structure of science, so Collins and Yearley reduce STS to the sociology of experts with specific skills. It is true that traditional sociology (to which Collins and Yearley turn for advice) has collected ample knowledge about professionals and experts. But traditional sociology also has been weak in understanding what it is that makes these experts special (let alone powerful). Even after they have lost their scientific nimbus, they mobilize non-humans. Just think of the difference between social workers and heart specialists. Both are experts with specific skills. But while social workers can only mobilize (some) other people (usually with very little power), heart specialists can mobilize not just various other, far more powerful, professional groups, but also, and more importantly, powerful machinery. So debunking the scientists’ epistemological hegemony and making ‘normal’, skilled experts out of them results in a sociology of experts which underestimates the basis of the power of at least some of them. Within the class of experts it makes quite a difference (also financially) whether you are a social worker, a pediatrician, or a heart specialist. Callon and Latour acknowledge this difference, based on the power-generating capacity of the non-humans. Our vocabulary has been too anthropomorphic, and in particular very inarticulate about the strong positions of (some) non-humans in our society. This deficient vocabulary made us utter incoherent curses on technology and science as a whole. It made us complain about the ‘scientization’ or ‘technologization’ of society in a way that left only two choices: embrace or reject science. Accordingly, Callon and Latour reject the time-honoured humanism that saw nothing but differences between humans and non-humans.
The problem of differentiation
But once this is granted, we are left with problems related to how Callon and Latour want us to take notice of non-humans, and to their implicit claim that, apart from science and technology, there really isn’t much of interest that holds society together. Starting with the last point, while Collins and Yearley have a dual notion of order, with scientists producing order ‘inside’ and a ‘given’ order out there in society, Callon and Latour reject this duality (actually, any duality). Their notion of order is ‘productivistic’ through and through. Scientists and the non-humans they represent produce order. All the dualisms they fight against (internal - external; science - society; social - natural, etc.) are the product of this activity, i.e., the product of a second-order process of purification in the hybrid networks of nature-cultures, as Latour calls it.11 Their translation model makes it clear that it is silly to assume that one can discuss the stabilization of science without the stabilization of society.
But the converse does not hold. The stabilization of society, even our scientific-technological society cannot be completely explained by the stabilization of science. This is what we mean when we say that they seem to imply that society is completely swallowed by science. We don’t suggest to look for regions which are ‘untouched’ by science and technology, but that scientists and technologists (and the non-humans they represent) are not the only producers of order. One doesn’t have to embrace a simple dichotomy between science and technology ‘here’, and society ‘there’, to acknowledge that modern society - again, not in the least as a result of the stabilizing power of science, but also of other forces - is internally differentiated in various relatively autonomous domains like economy, politics, culture, etc. Of course, these domains and their boundaries are contested permanently - especially in late-modern, reflexive societies.12 Nevertheless, we should not too quickly toss into one basket the humans and the non-humans, subject and object, society and nature, social science and natural science, science and politics. Even Latour’s Machiavellian scientist-in-the-making does better to acknowledge this differentiation. For example, the way a biotechnologist tries to convince his colleagues in the laboratory to accept his knowledge claims differs from the way he tries to get his biotechnological project financed in his negotiations with representatives of the Ministries of Economic Affairs and Public Health Care. Of course, both activities can be labelled as ‘enrolling allies’, but this common label should not conceal the difference between these activities. Both may be called ‘politics’, but our biotechnologist has to acknowledge the difference between the two policies. Stressing the importance of social differentiation is not to defend traditional social science, and in particular sociology against all too radical realignments such as Callon and Latour seem to have in mind.
There is another reason for acknowledging differentiations in the network of science, technology and society. From the perspective of the active, network-building scientists, the natural and the social may be fluid as long as they are in the business of producing order. But from the perspective of other parties involved - policy-makers, environmental activists, consumers, etc. - science just doesn’t look the same. For them science, or segments of it, has turned into a black-box; for them it is ready-made science. Opening this black box requires a different set of strategies than closing it. Let us stick to the example of biotechnology. The starting point of the biotechnological scientist (building up a biotechnological network completely) differs from the starting point of the environmental activist (criticising that very same network). Moreover, just as the biotechnologist uses different strategies to enroll allies on different levels of his network, the environmental activist will use different strategies to open up this network. Depending on his political goals he will start at different levels to break into the network. Sometimes he will be satisfied with a minor change in the social side-effects of biotechnology; sometimes he may want to go much deeper into the network, maybe even into the (for him) ‘hard core’ of biotechnological knowledge production, becoming a colleague-scientist (that is, becoming the dissident Latour describes in Science in Action).13 Surely, all these operations can be labelled ‘political’, but we think that Callon and Latour do not sufficiently differentiate between the different operations.
The problem of politics
Indeed, the whole concept of politics is under discussion here. One of the most striking differences between the two positions under review relates to their interpretation of politics. To understand Callon and Latour’s perception of politics, it might be useful to make a little detour into the history of political ideas. We will concentrate on Latour here. Latour places socialism along with naturalism at the centre of the modernism he rejects.14 Thus he can hardly be called a Marxist in whatever meaning of this word. But in spite of this, his conception of politics (and also his ‘productivistic’ notion of producing order we mentioned earlier) bears a strong resemblance to classical Marxist interpretations of politics. First of all, according to Latour, politics is about changing society, and not (as Collins and Yearley would probably assume) about balancing interests in the political realm. What happens in the laboratory is ‘political’, because the laboratory has the ability to change the world dramatically, or, to use his vernacular, to ‘displace society’ in a way that reminds one of the imputed revolutionary power of the working class. And just as the power of the working class established a ‘fresh’ and ‘pure’ kind of politics, so the power of things constitutes a ‘fresh’ kind of politics, directly associated with science, and utterly different from traditional (bourgeois) political powers. This ‘fresh’ kind of politics has nothing to do with the traditional politics of power and counter-power, of profit, predictable goods and evils, etc. If you want to understand how science and society are interrelated, you have to take the position of (the representatives of) this new politics. If you rely on traditional politics (which is what Collins and Yearley seem te be doing) you cannot even see the tangles of science and society, let alone understand them.
With classical Marxism Latour also shares the notion of spokespersons.15 Just like the workers needed spokespersons in their efforts to conquer the political realm, so the non-humans need spokespersons to conquer society. Scientists like Pasteur speak for the microbes and other non-humans.16 They constitute the avant-garde in our scientific- technological culture. We should not, in terms of traditional politics, attribute interests or even intentions to these scientists, because their political activities become clear and obvious if and only if we follow them around. So follow the scientists (and of course Latour himself - who positions himself in turn as their spokesman) and you will be “on top of the world”. As far as Collins and Yearley are concerned, it seems safe to assume that they adhere to what Latour calls a traditional notion of politics, with interests, ideologies, profits, etc. Their view of politics includes making an effort to enhance the public understanding of science (without embracing some simple notion of popularization) and in particular a more adequate understanding of scientific expertise on the part of the general public.17 Scientists are neither prophets, nor gods, but experts with specific skills. As prophets or gods they are rightly despised, but as experts they can and should be used (and certainly not despised). They can be used in the same way other experts or professionals can be used. Latour’s interpretation of politics is, like the activist Marxist interpretation, particularly suited for breaking open the traditional political domain, for emancipating the non-humans - to grant these a voice in politics, to conceive of a parliament of things. Here lies the attractiveness of Latour’s model, because we stuffed our political domain with nothing but social ‘things’ - people, groups, professionals, social structures, votes, etc. Since non-humans play an important role in our society and politics, not just as separate entities, but increasingly mixed up with humans, we should at least let our sociological and political vocabulary reflect this state of affairs. However, from a political point of view this emancipation model is too simple (and possibly even dangerous) in a society as scientifically and technologically advanced as ours (just as the Marxist model of emancipation was too simple and dangerous).
First of all, non-humans do not need to be emancipated in general. Just like the working class, non-humans do not constitute a single class, so to speak, but a mixture of all sorts of things and animals - some powerful, like the machines of heart specialists, some powerless, like trees or animals. Technological devices in our hospitals and factories have been used for a long time. They occupy strong positions of power in our society, even though our humanistic vocabulary has not been very perceptive about this situation. But our inability to have the actions of these non-humans properly reflected in our political debates should not lead us to believe that these non-humans need to be emancipated in the same way as some other non-humans as animals, or some humans as refugees need protection. Latour’s politics of emancipation is just not subtle enough to differentiate between the various positions non-humans hold, nor can it measure their positions against those of humans. The non-humans which play a role in science and technology debates usually don’t have to be emancipated. They (or better, their spokespersons, the scientists) have to be called to account for there actions. The politics of emancipation is not very useful in our technological culture in which mixtures of humans and non-humans hold powerful positions. This political model doesn’t solve what seems to us the real problem. How can we integrate both humans and non-humans, and in particular their mixtures, into a both normatively sensible and politically effective vocabulary that is not just suited for giving these various ‘actants’ a voice, but that enables us to include the non-humans in our deliberations about justice and distribution? Like classical Marxism,18 Latour’s politics of emancipation is insensitive to normative and political problems of choice, justice and distribution. Since both humans and non-humans have to be called to account for their actions, we have to enrich our political vocabulary with ways to discuss problems that are specific for our scientific-technological society.
NOTES
See Harry Collins and Steven Yearley, ‘Epistemological Chicken’; Steve Woolgar, ‘Some Remarks about Positionism: A Reply to Collins and Yearley’; Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, ‘Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley’; Harry Collins and Steven Yearley, ‘Journey into Space’, all in Andrew Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 301-326, 327-342, 343-368, and 369-398, respectively.
Gerard de Vries, ‘Should We Send Collins and Latour to Dayton, Ohio?, EASST Review 14 (1995) Number 4, 3-10.
Pickering, note 1.
Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (eds.), Science Observed. Perspectives on the Social Studies of Science, London: Sage, 1983.
See Michael Lynch, ‘Extending Wittgenstein: The Pivotal Move from Epistemology to the Sociology of Science’, David Bloor, ‘Left and Right Wittgensteinians’, and Michael Lynch, ‘From the “Will to Theory” to the Discursive Collage: A Reply to Bloor’s “Left and Right Wittgensteinians”’, all in Pickering, note 1, 215-265, 266-282, and 283-300, respectively.
Callon and Latour, note 1, 366 (emphasis in original).
Andrew Pickering, ‘From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice’, in Pickering, note 1, 1
Steve Woolgar, note 1, 329.
Harry Collins, Changing Order. Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice, London: Sage, 1985, 144.
Compare David Bloor, ‘Durkheim and Mauss Revisited: Classification and the Sociology of Knowledge’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 13 (1982), 267-297.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.
See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990; and Ulrich Beck, Risk Society; Towards a New Modernity, London: SAGE, 1992, or idem, Die Erfindung des Politischen, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1993.
Bruno Latour, Science in Action, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987.
See Bruno Latour, ‘The Impact of Science Studies on Political Philosopy’, Science, Technology, and Human Values, vol. 16 (1991), 3-19; and Latour, note 11.
It is because of this notion of spokesperson that we prefer the parallel with Marxism above a liberalist reading of actor network theory - as in Nick Lee and Steve Brown, ‘Otherness and the Actor Network: The Undiscoverd Continent’, American Behavioral Scientist, vol.37 (1994), 772-790.
See Latour, The Pasteurization of France, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
See Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Steven Yearley, The Green Case: A Sociology of Environmental Issues, Politics, and Arguments, London: Harper-Collins, 1991.
See Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Find fifteen natural scientists researching and regulating hazardous chemicals. Lock them up in a seminar room with a comparable number of social scientists working on chemical risks. Make sure they talk to each other for about two days. Here is why and how we did it, what happened, and what we learned. An account of a social experiment.
Why and how we did it
The workshop ‘The Politics of Chemical Risk’ was organized with a double agenda in mind. One set of goals was to investigate and construct possible futures of chemical hazard evaluation in Europe. The other set of goals was to attempt to create communication between natural and social scientists working on or in risk regulation.
First goal: devise possible futures
In order to conceive possible futures for the evaluation of chemical hazards and its organization, a first objective was to clarify some of the tensions in the evaluation of chemical hazards in both the workplace and the environment. Consequently, these tensions would then be used as anchors in the development of different scenarios for future chemical regulation.
One of the obvious and unavoidable tensions concerns the problematic internationalization of risk regulation. All industrial countries have developed regulatory systems to assess and manage the risk of chemical substances. International organizations such as the OECD or the EU are becoming more important actors in this field of policy, taking international harmonization ever more forward, often supported by internationally operating industries. These projects run counter to important and persistent differences in national regulatory systems. Such differences are not only due to political structures and styles, but also to different styles and approaches in regulatory science and assessment. Moreover, there are national differences in the way the boundaries between ‘science’ and ‘politics’ are drawn and organized. Some countries tend to rely mainly on expert advice in their regulations, usually in the form of highly discreet expert committees. Others have set up extensive negotiation procedures, in which a wide range of groups participate, even in rather technical discussions (Brickman et al. 1985). International initiatives, such as the North Sea Conference or the EU’s setting of Occupational Exposure Limits, continue to put these national mechanisms of science/policy coordination under pressure. As international initiatives intensify, they increasingly raise important questions of how these tensions will work out and about new alternatives for accommodating local differences with translocal integration. How will national consultation procedures relate to international decision-making on chemical risks? What are the possibilities for democratic participation in risk regulation on an international level? How will differences in national risk assessment procedures be accommodated? How will the international regulatory system be integrated with different national styles of regulation and government?
Second goal: cross the social/natural science boundary
The second goal was to stimulate the communication between natural and social scientists, in order to mobilize a broader scope of interdisciplinary experiences for devising regulatory futures. The regulation of chemical risk is a domain of policy that involves a wide range of actors. People in regulatory agencies - scientists such as toxicologists, epidemiologists, or ecologists, industrial researchers, and environmental organizations - all have a high degree of first- hand experience with the operation of regulatory systems. Especially the natural scientists involved in regulatory research (and policy) form a rather close-knit community that has ample opportunities for meeting and exchanging views. However, policy analysts and social scientists interact relatively little with this ‘regulatory community’. In spite of an impressive body of research on risk regulation, only a relatively small portion of social science research is fed back into the regulatory world. This is unfortunate, since the widely differing forms of integration and distinction of science and policy have been a central topic for the researchers in science studies (cf. Gillespie 1979; Gillespie et al. 1982; Jasanoff 1990, 1992; Wynne 1990; Landy et al. 1990; Limoges et al. 1992; Cambrosio et al. 1992; Rip 1992).
Organizing such feedback is not self-evident, since the tools and insights of social scientists do not enter in a previously empty discursive space. The social science approach to risk differs from the presently dominant one of the natural scientists in some crucial aspects. This can be illustrated sharply by referring to a recent report of the British Royal Society, Risk: Analysis, Perception and Management. The first section of the report is entirely devoted to quantitative approaches that interpret risk analysis as a purely scientific problem; the second section points to the close interconnection between culture, policy and risk and the impossibility of a “purely scientific” approach (Royal Society 1992, Levidow 1994; cf. Health Council of the Netherlands 1995). Our idea was to try and get beyond this gap, and to combine the advantages of practical experience and detailed technical knowledge with the power of social scientists’ reflexive contributions, in order to stimulate both to think about possible regulatory futures. Evidently, nobody expected this to be achievable within the setting of a two-day workshop, but maybe such an experiment could help us along.
We wrote all of this in a long starting document, specifying that we wanted one session on the risk management/risk assessment boundary, one on internationalization, and one on standardization. For each of these, specific questions were defined and topics suggested. We sent out this document for comment and snowballed invitations, contributions, and sponsors. We found it very important to take enough time for this early preparation. Especially by taking seriously the feedback from people familiar with the regulatory world, such as Wim Passchier, secretary of the Health Council of The Netherlands, we could make sure the project kept maximum relevance for all parties involved. Because we foresaw communication difficulties, we decided to send out a reader containing some ten basic texts on the regulation of chemicals, and reflections upon these regulatory systems. We thought it important to keep a close grip on the programme in order to keep the project on its intended track, e.g., by asking speakers to talk on specific subjects. We sent out abstracts of all talks to the participants beforehand, in order to keep presentations as short and discussions as long a possible. We included much time for informal gatherings, plenty of food and drink and even fitted in the obligatory Amsterdam canal tour in order to maximize informal contacts.
In short, we invested extensively in the forging of links between the participants. On 7 and 8 December, we all met in the capital of the Netherlands, delicately chaired by Wiebe Bijker.
What happened
The workshop had a difficult start. The first presentations on the risk assessment/risk management boundary clashed diametrically. On the one hand, regulatory scientists such as toxicologist Victor Feron of the Dutch Expert Committee on Occupational Standards felt the need to defend regulatory assessment procedures as being scientific and therefore independent. Critical accounts from policy analysts, such as former Greenpeace Head of Science Sue Mayer, on the other hand, repeatedly pointed at the politics' in thescience’ of risk management. This was perceived as an outrageous attempt to delegitimize the conscientious and meticulous work of the natural scientists. It took quite a bit of informal debate to overcome the polarizing confrontation of this first phase of the discussions, although the clash was probably a productive, necessary step.
By the next morning, when we turned to more detailed and concrete matters of standardization of chemical evaluation, some cracks seemed to have appeared in the natural scientists’ defensive shield. Peter Calow, professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Sheffield, presented his account of the development of standardized toxicity tests to indicate where exactly he saw the decisions in his practice as a scientific expert as ‘actually’ being political. The main issue he identified was the choice between the environmental ‘endpoints’ chemical regulation should protect. More concretely, he signalled the need for a political choice between the assessment of the environmental impact of chemicals in terms of protection of species or in terms of protection of the ecosystem, i.e., the choice between protecting environmental structures or functions. When the evaluation of such potentially contrasting goals of environmental assessment is left to the experts, they will have to make political choices. The risk assessment processes, normally portrayed as pure science, then, according to Calow, can no longer be portrayed as such. As a regulatory scientist, Calow wanted a clear mandate in terms of the goals of chemical regulation, in order to deploy his own specific skills and expertise to achieve these goals.
The presentation of Peter Calow marked the changed atmosphere of the discussions and the growing appreciation of each other’s position. However, even when one accepts that there may be some issues in regulatory science that are ‘really’ political, the consequences of this point are far from clear. Should one attempt to further `purify’ the scientific and the political? Or should the mix of science and politics be considered unavoidable? During the debates, two crucial and related issues in the organization of risk assessment processes were identified and recognized by most of the participants. First, the tension between the difficulty of dividing ‘science’ from ‘politics’ on the one hand and the need of somehow organizing such a divide for the purposes of policy making on the other. There was general agreement that substantial parts of the decision making process over the hazards of chemicals need to be delegated to the experts, the theme of discussion being how substantial this part should be and how this process should be organized. Some argued that if only the process of risk assessment would be ‘transparent’, that is, observable and controllable, there would be no problem. A particularly clarifying intervention in this debate was made by Sheila Jasanoff, of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell. She argued that the model of a sharp split between ‘risk assessment’ and ‘risk management’ was a very specific product of a very specific (American) political situation of the early eighties, not necessarily a universal solution to all regulatory tensions. Furthermore, Jasanoff contested the corollary notion of ‘transparency’ of the risk assessment, as a transparent mountain of regulatory red tape may not necessarily mean accessible, understandable, and meaningful regulation of chemicals.
The second issue identified concerned the tension between local and translocal knowledge, an issue put on the agenda firmly by Erik Millstone of the Science Policy Research Unit, using very concrete and adequate examples. Even if we could agree on what constitutes ‘science’ and what constitutes ‘politics’ in a specific area, which knowledge should be included in the ‘science’? Especially the attempts to harmonize risk assessment procedures on an international level seem to run the risk of ignoring important local variations that could radically alter levels of risk locally. Local knowledge about specific conditions of exposure or specific forms of natural environment could alter the parameters of the evaluations in such ways that an international assessment may obscure major local hazards. In order to be able to include such local knowledge under pressure of unifying markets, harmonized regulation, and multinational companies, new and creative forms of risk regulation seem to be required.
At this point in the discussion, we thought these two classic points of the Science and Technology Studies work on risk regulation would provide the input for a debate on the four ‘possible future’ scenarios we had prepared. However, proceeding so quickly to this primary goal of the workshop met with some resistance. Most participants insisted upon exploring the differences and resemblances in positions more profoundly. A very useful way to do this was a quick stock- taking of what participants considered to be the most important problems of risk regulation. This indeed showed an extremely wide variety of priorities. Concerns ranged from the difficulty of proceeding with harmonization, a problem especially for international regulators; over how to get rid of the politics in expertise, which mostly concerned regulatory scientists; to how to assure a fair balance of positions in the risk assessment process, especially aired by policy analysts; and how to avoid a gridlock of reflexive loops of analysis, a central problem for some of the science studies people present.
In the end, the tone of the discussions was clearly dominated by the attempts to communicate across interdisciplinary boundaries and between diametrically opposed conceptions of risk. The attempts to discover each other’s frame of thinking, differing problem definitions and especially differing strategies to convince each other were quite fascinating. Unless they were interculturally misunderstood acts of politeness, we registered a clear will to continue the debate. This is now happening in some of the spin-off activities of the workshop, such as the preparation of the Proceedings.
What we learned
As to the goal of the workshop to investigate possible futures of the European regulatory risk arena, the workshop raised a large number of crucial questions. Using the pre-distributed papers and abstracts, we tried to sum these up in the format of a series of scenarios. Our first draft of these scenarios also was sent to the participants beforehand. Put briefly, these scenarios indicate four different - admittedly ‘archetypical’ - models of organizing expert-policy integration on the international level, combined with expectations as to their respective developments.
Possible futures: four scenarios.
A first model is based on the centralization of European chemical risk assessment, performed by a centralized European expert institution. Using examples from case studies, we indicated that such a technocratic model has the tendency to be expansive: more and more issues tend to be drawn in to the sphere of the ‘technical’, as the experts develop calculative tools, such as cost/benefit systems. This in turn tends to lead to increased resistance of interest groups as such a model neglects interest integration. A second model tries to address this problem by prioritizing consultative procedures. Using experiences from the American context as examples, we argued that such a model has a tendency of becoming over- procedural and complex, without necessarily leading to effective policies (cf. Jasanoff 1990, Wynne 1992). In a third scenario, the experts try to harmonize chemical assessment bottom-up, coordinating different regulatory approaches while acknowledging national differences. In this scenario, the contingency of the science/ policy boundary is recognized by the experts, but the results of the negotiations are presented publicly as the results of regulatory expertise rather than the result of a political process. By referring to case studies, again the dynamic of such a model can be sketched: delegitimation of the experts is a constant problem, based on the inconsistency between the rhetoric of confidential scientific inference and equally confidential interest integration (cf. Abraham 1993). The fourth and last scenario starts of with the idea that the differing patterns of science/policy integration and risk regulation in different countries are important and persistent. Rather than to try and harmonize these, international institutions should try to clarify these distinctions and mediate communication. We have dubbed this scenario the ‘reflexive’ one and have based it on Jasanoff’s paper for the workshop. The dynamic of such a scenario may lead to criticism of lack of vigour in the international institutions’ actions and a risk of endless debates.
The scenarios are not yet finalized. The discussion on the scenarios provided valuable new material, but the debate continues in the correspondence and will probably do so even after the conclusions of this workshop will be presented in the proceedings. Within the setting of the workshop, they worked fairly well to focus attention at the very end of the second day, although focusing the attention was not everybody’s desire.
Communication: on organizing this kind of workshops
Especially with respect to the organization of the communication process between the conceptions of risk assessment of regulatory scientists and policy analysts, a few important conclusions can be drawn. Problematizing the boundary between science and politics may be a necessary step to get the discussion going. However, it is also quickly perceived as an accusation of partisanship by regulatory scientists. Since decision-making processes in the regulation of chemicals are so often built on a scientific legitimation, it is difficult to get beyond these two rigid positions. We found it helpful to indicate the problems that a rigid separation between science and politics creates, not only for the analysts, but most importantly for regulatory practices. For these purposes, it is extremely important to come up with very concrete and empirical examples rather than sharp but abstract analyses.
In this workshop, crucial steps were taken by what we called ‘bridge-builders’. Although we presented the participants as two camps, a lot of them brought more than one hat: some natural scientists had experience in policy analysis and some social scientists had experience in regulatory agencies. Not only could our bridge-builders come up with some of the most convincing and concrete examples, they also held intermediate positions that carried weight in ‘the other camp’. The detailed stories of an experienced risk regulator such as Emanuel Somers of WHO, leading to the statement that ‘the science just is not that clear-cut’ simply had much more of an impact on natural science colleagues than a similar statement by a policy analyst. The use of concrete and detailed material in the presentation of an historical and sociological analysis, combined with personal experiences of an occupational hygienist, made Mark Piney into an other key bridge-builder. The importance of these intermediaries can not be sufficiently stressed. Never organize a similar workshop without them.
In spite of the difficult and persistent differences in frames of reference, we found this workshop an extremely useful social experiment. Talking back to the communities we study under the pressure-cooker conditions of a workshop allowed us to appreciate the variety of problems in chemical regulation and to proceed with solutions for the problems we see from the analyst perspective. One could call this action research; we also see it as a way of ‘doing politics’. It is not only a way to learn more about regulation, it is also an attempt to re-formulate STS findings into messages understandable and viable outside our little circles. Call it STS extension work too, if you want. In any case, we would like to see more of such workshops happening and invite you to share experiences with us.
Acknowledgements
The workshop was supported by The Commission of the European Communities (DG V and DG XI), The Ministery of Regional Planning and The Environment of The Netherlands, The Science Foundation of The Netherlands, The Health Council of The Netherlands, The Department of Law and Public Policy of the University of Leyden, The European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, The Netherlands Graduate School for Science and Technology Studies, and The Department of Science and Technology Dynamics of the University of Amsterdam. Thank you Adrienne van den Bogaard, Chunglin Kwa and Richard Rogers for comments.
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If you walk straight into the Tate Gallery, right through to the back, you can still feel the thrill of a queue but without having to devote yourself to its principle (the Cezanne centenary is the Real Thing - out the front, round the corner, and practically over the bridge). Georgina Starr’s exhibition (Brit Pack superstarr) is right next to the ringing tills of the Cezanne exhibition - entrance to her room: no charge.
As the money circulates in exchange for static miniatures of old memories in the large white room, moving images of Georgina Starr circulate through video tape on tv screens, caravan windows, and the walls of a dark room. This young artiste is totally absorbed by screen-images from dreams and scenes of films and plays, mixed with mundane moments in the privacy of a kitchen, the isolation of a caravan.
The constantly looping video machines seem mesmerised by their memories; they don’t seem to care if anyone is watching. They don’t register your entrance and exit with cash transactions; they don’t wait till you’re seated, to start. Like the Man in the Caravan (part of the exhibition), they will use themselves as the audience, playing for their own edification. Like the dancers in the disco scene, they seem focused on a spot beyond anyone else’s gaze. But in fact, they care passionately about their audience. In seeming to look away, they invite you into their intimacy. In a dark room full of strangers, a quiet shift can take place in one’s attachment to the world.
Repetition, identification, rearticulation
If you had been in Milton Keynes last December, you could have come to a Software Symposium. Repetition identificaton rearticulation. ‘Ethnography and Software’ could well have been the third meeting in a series begun at CRICT (Do Users Get What They Want? 1992 and Do Users Get What They Want? 1993). Repetition. Where social scientists tried to explain (to each other, to practitioners, and to their colleagues in the Mathematics Faculty) what they are doing in the computer department. Identification. And computer department people wonder at the difference between their orientation and that of the ethnographer. Both seem to be focused on the same stuff, yet produce such different accounts of it. Rearticulation.
This meeting was organised by the SCoS Group (Social Construction of Software), an informal and dynamic research group within the Faculty of Maths at the Open University. They focused their energy on this symposium to persuade socio(-)logists and software specialists to take to the floor once more and see where their turn-taking took them this time.
Georgina Starr’s art is presented to you entirely through pre-existing familiar objects (kitchen tables, coffee cups, cornflake packets) including videotape on a tv screen. Come and sit on the bed and watch the artist perform a scene from Grease (the play) playing all four different women herself, rendering it real through careful cutting of the video tape. She invites your identification by placing you in the same physical location, and engaging you in the problems of the conversation, but leaves you in the dark to make your own articulation to the scene.
To what extent do ethnographers identify with their software subject, and how does this join in with the re-articulation of that subject? Georgina Starr’s art is expressed entirely through the medium of technical artefacts. She even becomes one herself as she appears on her screens in various guises. Her position in the Tate Gallery maintains her status as An Artist even as her work changes what that means.
Paul Benyon-Davies (Glamorgan University) considered each of the different positions an ethnographer can take as they practice in the field of Information Systems. An ethnography OF IS maintains the allegiance to anthropology and a distanced relationship with software. Ethnography FOR IS surrenders one allegiance to the other. And Ethnography WITHIN IS suggests a more productive relationship from both points of view.
Nevertheless, Symposiums IN Computer Science Departments themselves change the balance once more. And presentations THROUGH computerised machinery magnifies this problematic (Helen Sharp, SoCS group, Open University). Ethnographies that turned into computer software (Tom Rodden, CSCW Centre Lancaster University) through a HyperText tool stood in marked contrast to Ethnographies that devoted themselves to the possibilities of the body (Janet Rachel, University of East London). And finally, ETHNO(-)graphies which focused on the social machinery of software engineers took us back to the beauty of writing, and the skill of turning a phrase (Graham Button, Rank Xerox Research Centre).
The symposium as a whole offered a spectacle of different articulations on a theme. Each turn presented an image to reflect on, offering distinctive possibilities to think in. An attempt to bring two of these together simultaneously (Pat Hall, Open University, and Janet Rachel, UEL) reinforced the value of difference and reminded everyone of the necessity to decide. This point was revisited at the close of the day by Anthony Finkelstein (City University) who drew our attention to the circulation of money, and its place in the decisions to repeat, identify, and articulate.
The constantly renewing queue crawling towards the tills at the Tate Gallery reinforces the importance of the turn of the century - one hundred years of Cezanne, a revolutionary painter in his time. The thrill of the new takes off in his shadow, as Georgina Starr registers her difference in the small dark room next door. Repeating the revolution presents new opportunities for identifications, and invites us to join in differently each time.