It was a good place to hang around. Very European. Multicultural. Witty people. A community of friends. It was always Sunday.
All of this seems to have ended by now. Hostility rages. Heard the latest news? ‘They are no longer on speaking terms.’ ‘There is a war going on.’
The first shots were fired during a small meeting in Bath, one Saturday, in February 1990. The meeting ended with dinner in a Lebanese restaurant. Soon after, email messages started to circulate, making it clear that deep differences had come to the surface. No Sundays any more, after this Saturday. Read the ravaging/outrageous review of Latour’s book Collins did for Isis. Listen to Latour. Watch Woolgar. Lebanese dinners are not good omens.
Let’s not dramatise. We’re talking about science and technology studies, not about the Balkans. This is a conflict of the size of one of former Yougoslavia’s stamps.
No one with a taste for intellectual matters should be scared by a few rounds of polemics. Pfeffer for the mind. There is nothing exceptional in a discipline splitting up after some time. Young Turks stand up against the old guard and start shouting. But nothing like that has happened here. The main combatants are scholars with long-standing careers. Old hands. A former President of 4S. A recipient of the Bernal Award.
Is the dispute between Harry Collins and Bruno Latour perhaps just a matter of egos in overdrive? The terms in which the debate is conducted and the issues that are at stake suggest that, at least, also more serious matters are involved. It is, among other things, a debate about the scope and ambitions of our business and about the way we should evaluate the achievements of the past decades. Is science studies one of many branches of sociology, a sub-discipline that studies the social process of knowledge production? Or does science and technology studies open a window to the modern world at large? Are we talking about the core of a future anthropology that will completely replace traditional sociology?
True, but the heat of the debate is on a different level. Observe the highly abstract and philosophical issues that are discussed: Humans and Non-Humans, Man and Nature, the Social and the Technical. Deep down, there are Weltanschauungen operating in this debate, which translate into differences in methods, ambitions and styles of writing.
Put shortly, the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) is heir to the English and German enlightenment, to a tradition that takes epistemology to be the core of philosophy. Collins is a Kantian dressed up as a sociologist, a rationalist who uses empiricist rhetoric. Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) does not start from this tradition. Its interest lies in the nature of the modern world and it comes with the claim that to analyse this world, one has to bypass epistemology. Latour is doing pan-semiotic ontology. Pardon me?
Let me try to describe the philosophical landscape and let’s see how it turned into a battlefield.
SSK
Harry Collins’s Changing Order brilliantly sums up the core of SSK. The point of departure is a simple observation: although the world comes to us in what William James once described as ‘blooming, buzzing confusion,’ there is concerted perception and understanding in science. Collins conceives the task of SSK as to analyse how such concerted perception and action come about, i.e., how scientists actually come to be certain about regularities in practice, how they organise the chaotic world of experience into structured knowledge. As such, Collins’s problem is a well-known, traditional philosophical one, viz. the problem of induction, the problem of how knowing subjects acquire knowledge about the world.
The particular version Collins works upon is drawn from the work of Nelson Goodman. It brings the problem of induction on the level of language rather than knowledge. Epistemological scepticism is translated into the problem of how we know the meaning of words and phrases. Enter Wittgenstein. In Philosophische Untersuchungen, the concept of rule-governed behaviour is introduced to explicate the meaning of words: meaning is rule-governed use. But rules do not contain the rules for their application. So, ‘something more’ is needed to guarantee our continuous correct use of language. According to Collins, ‘social conventions’ fill in this gap. Even in the case that we ourselves have forgotten what the correct application of a rule is, others will be able to identify a mistake. Ergo, the criterion for correct use rests with a community of rule-followers.
Meaning is thus constituted by a community providing agreement. This agreement is not an agreement of opinion but one of being socialised in a ‘form of life’, an agreement in doing things, i.e., to follow certain rules. For example, the physicists Collins is talking about agree on what counts as a good experiment, what counts as a valid argument, what counts as a good scientific paper, etcetera. This agreement is shown in the actual practice of physics as a discipline, in institutionalised beliefs.
At this point, all the essential connections for SSK have been made. The traditional epistemological problem of induction has been transformed into scepticism with respect to meaning. This scepticism cannot be answered as long as we hold a view on language that explicates meaning in terms of truth conditions, because that would bring us back to epistemological problems. Therefore we need another semantics, another philosophy of language: one that concentrates on assertibility conditions. These assertibility conditions are provided by a community that shares a form of life. Enter sociology. Sociologists are the experts on community life. They know everything about institutionalisation. So they can answer the problem of induction. There follows Collins’s solution to this problem: ‘It is not the regularity of the world that imposes itself on our senses, but the regularity of our institutionalised beliefs that imposes itself on our world.’
How much progress has been made? In philosophical respect, not much. Kant pointed to ‘transcendental categories’ where Collins thinks that the ‘regularity of institutionalised beliefs’ operates. What Collins has provided is in fact a sociologicised and dynamic version of rationalism: what marks out humans in nature is not - as Kant thought - the mind (rationality, consciousness), but socialisation. Kant’s formulation, however, has the advantage of not being circular, while Collins’s solution is: the phrase ‘the regularity of institutionalised beliefs’ introduces the induction-problem on a new level. This circularity can be neutralised by embracing epistemological relativism. (Philosophers generally don’t like that: relativism is a poor man’s philosophy. If we accept relativism, why bother about epistemology at all).
But in other respects, Collins’s approach has decisive advantages. It opens scientific knowledge to sociological investigation: to do what epistemologists used to do - i.e., to speak about the nature of knowledge, to account for concerted perception - we may study empirically, by describing the interactions in scientific communities, how beliefs become institutionalised and controversies closed. This is Changing Order’s main asset: detailed analyses of the ways beliefs become institutionalised in science. Philosophical epistemology is replaced by detailed sociological study of the development of scientific knowledge. The content of scientific knowledge is explained by its social context, SSK claims.
So, Collins is a present-day rationalist of sorts. However, the rhetoric in his work, the style of his writing and arguing, is definitively empiricist: the sociologist reveals ‘what everyone should know about science’. In this respect the spirit of David Hume’s famous peroration in the first Enquiry reigns over British SSK: Pick up any book about scientific knowledge. Does it contain detailed (sociological or historical) observation? If not, commit it to the flames.
This is SSK’s Weltanschauung and like any Weltanschauung, it splits the world up into good and bad guys. Who are SSK’s enemies? We can predict the answer. First, of course, all who fail to contribute to the solution of the basic epistemological problem: they do not seem to have any interest in science at all. In the second place, everyone who defends a non-rationalist epistemology: realists, mainly, whatever their further convictions may be. Thirdly, all rationalist philosophers whose insights are not based on detailed - sociological, or historical - observation. Popperians, for example, who dare to argue about science in logical terms, rather than base their ideas on such solid grounds as interviews conducted over lunch. Fourthly, all ‘reflexive’ sociologists and philosophers. They have to be kept at arm’s length. People who think that there might be something puzzling and even paradoxical in using empiricist rhetoric to answer rationalist questions, spoil the game. Last, but certainly not least, everybody who blurs the distinction between the human and the non-human world should arouse deep suspicion. This includes adepts of Artificial Intelligence, the chattering classes who have discovered that they are cyborgs, and also ANT. Rationalists are committed to the view that man has a special place in the world. Their epistemology is based on an inherent asymmetry: what can be said about the ‘non-human world’ is what is perceived by humans. We only have epistemic access to the phenomenal world, not to the noumenal world. The stuff we focus on and interact with are interpretations of the world, never ‘things-in-themselves’. To turn blooming, buzzing confusion into organised knowledge requires human accomplishment.
As we will see, Latour is guilty on all charges, except the fourth one. The problem is that he refuses to stand in this court.
ANT
Latour’s interests are definitively not primarily epistemological, but ontological ones. He does not focus on the nature of knowledge of the world, but tries to figure out the nature of a world in which knowledge plays a role our world, i.e., the world of science and technology.
To get a feel for ANT, think of the world as a staged play. How does an actor become a character in a play? Only by interacting with other actors and with artefacts, and by speaking about himself, artefacts, events, and so on. What character is he? Look for the artefacts and the actors that surround him and the plots he is involved in. Watch how artefacts mediate to define a character: a crown on his head translates an actor into a king, and vice versa. How does a prop become a particular artefact which plays a definite role in the world of the play? Look how it has become involved in interactions. On stage, each thing is only constituted solely through its interrelations with, and differences from, everything else. Nothing has any intrinsic features of its own. ‘The properties of a thing are effects on other “things”. If I remove all the relationships, all the “properties”, all the “activities” of a thing, the thing does not remain.’ (Is that a Latour quotation? No, but it could have been. In fact, this is Nietzsche). So, to answer any question about what anything is, and to answer any question about meaning, we have to study how the world in which it plays a role is built up as an effect of interactions, i.e., interactions in which both humans and non-humans are involved. We have to deconstruct the ‘scripts’ that brought actors and artefacts into existence, study their genealogy, and see how in that process they became bestowed with essences.
What is the philosophy behind this? First, call to mind the Saussurian idea (commonplace in semiotics) that there are only differences in language: nothing inherently suits a phoneme for its role in words, the only thing that matters is that it differs from other phonemes. (For example, the phoneme b enters in bat and bed, not in rat and red - that makes b into a distinguished phoneme, but nothing inherently affords b this particular role.) ANT follows up on this. It radicalises this idea, by applying the Saussurean principle to the whole world. Interestingly, ANT is not the first to have done this. In fact, Nietzsche already took - twenty years before Saussure - this step (from which Saussure explicitly refrained) to apply the intuition that language is a system of differences to the whole world. So, what we are talking about is a pan-semiotic ontology, a Nietzschean conception of the world as a text, or - as I would prefer - as a staged play.
No intrinsic features, but differences and interactions constituting a world - thatÕs the main idea. Even the ontological categories are subject to change. There is no a priori distinction between Man and Nature, Subject and Object. You want to know what the world consists of? Want to know the essence of what has come to exist through the actions of humans and non-humans? Join the audience, watch the play and see how the world evolves as a sequence of events, as an effect of interrelations. See how the world develops as a network of interlocking characters and artefacts. Just follow the play. Now, sit back and reflect on this for a while. Notice first that it is sheerly impossible to imagine a play without props. Even in En Attendant Godot, there is a rope. Artefacts are crucial elements of almost any situation in which humans interact. If we want to analyse the world, we should take human actors and non-human artefacts on a par. Perhaps we better use one term for both: actant. It will help us see how humans and non-humans may change places, how delegation of human action to a machine may occur. Secondly, observe that on stage, there is only local action. If a faraway, out of sight, event is supposed to affect the course of action we are looking at, the playwright has to introduce a messenger who or which mediates that faraway event for the actors on stage, and for us, the audience. Therefore, if you want to study the modern world, a world in which science and technology play a dominant role, study how texts and artefacts and scientific instruments circulate, how laboratories are built and statistics are collected. For these are the actants that mediate, that make up the extended, often global, networks that characterise our modern world.
This is what Latour is extremely good at: staging an episode in the history of science or technology, picking out the relevant actors and props, showing the work they do, reflecting on what’s going on, and thus turning thick description into philosophy. As an anthropologist of science and technology, Latour is playwright and literary critic in one. But aren’t we, as audience, interpreting the events on stage? Yes, of course, in a certain sense we are, but that is not the point. On stage, in normal cases, there is no ‘interpretative flexibility’. Props speak in a clear voice: ‘I’m a crown.’ The actors on stage take this for granted, as does the audience captured by the play. Of course, someone may begin to question whether this thing is the real crown or a forgery, but then the action of the play has already turned into a different phase.
Likewise in science. Instruments - and more generally: natural phenomena and things - speak in a clear voice. Outcomes of measurements are taken for granted as unproblematic units; they are ‘black boxed’. However, scientists can question outcomes, ‘open the black box’, by using interpretative flexibility as a rhetorical tool. When a scientist doesn’t believe an opponent’s claim, but has not yet found a conclusive countermove, he may weaken the opponent’s stand by pointing out that his claim is ‘(just) an interpretation’, suggesting that other views are possible as well.
For Collins and the rationalist philosophical tradition, knowledge consists of interpretations of natural phenomena. For Latour, ‘interpretations’ are the exception, not the rule. ANT focuses on the ways in which arguments (produced by humans) and data (produced by machines) become lined up into black-boxed ‘facts’ that can speak as one: measuring devices, field experiments, graphs summarising data, even the title of a paper - they all can be instrumental to this effect. Whereas the rationalist tradition perceives human scientists interpreting non-human phenomena, i.e., organising chaotic experiences through the filter of institutionalised beliefs into certified knowledge, ANT focuses on the mediation that is involved in enrolling and controlling both human actors and non-human props into a tight network. In this outlook, interpretation and hence the problem of induction are borderline phenomena.
ANT stresses that networks always involve two-way interaction: everything and everybody that acts, will also be acted upon. For ANT, there is no a priori distinction between something organising (scientists, transcendental categories, institutionalised beliefs, or social context, all being directly linked up with humans) and something being organised (nature, data, experience, etcetera). The difference between organising and being organised is only a matter of time. We have to watch how the play evolves, to see the work that goes into organising (human and non-human) actants into (temporarily) stable networks.
This Weltanschauung is more catholic (in both senses of the term) than the one we discussed before. But this one too, picks out its good and bad guys. Who are ANT’s enemies? First and foremost: the epistemologists. They commit complicated sins. They ignore ontological questions and as a result, they become victim of the rigid modernist worldview with its timeless ontological categories: subject and object, Man and Nature, Humans and Non-Humans. The outcome of the long process of the genealogy of the world is mistaken for an unproblematic starting point of analysis. As a result, epistemologists are seduced to think that they should answer the question as to how scientists organise blooming, buzzing and confusing experience into concerted perception. However, someone who experiences the world as blooming buzzing confusion is certainly not a scientist; he probably needs psychiatric help. SSK fails to see that the content and context of scientific knowledge are both outcomes of the work that goes into building networks of humans and artefacts, and that in this network scientists and the world they investigate mutually assume form.
The second class of enemies of ANT is made up by philosophers who take ontology seriously, but who lack the ability to feed this interest with detailed, empirical analyses: Heidegger, for instance. There are certainly similarities between Latour’s interests and those of this philosopher. But there is a crucial difference in style of writing that one should not skip over light-heartedly. For Heidegger, the modern world has lost something; its genealogy is a story of decline. No need, therefore, to bother with detailed examples. Heidegger has no interest in the modern world itself. Enough. Get rid of him.
The third group are the reflexivists. In criticising SSK, they accept too much of the epistemologist’s framework and problematic. What’s more, their approach often turns into unreadable writing. For somebody with a dramaturg’s eye, this is a deadly sin.
The dispute
From the point of view of SSK, Latour’s philosophy is metaphysical nonsense. For SSK, ANT just fails to take advantage of the critical attitude that came with the epistemological scepticism of Hume and Kant. As a result, as soon as Latour starts to discuss science and technology, he is either naive or wrong. He seems to think that scientists have unproblematic access to the world of facts, and that bacteria, Coquilles Saint Jacques or whatever object may draw his attention, speak in a clear voice. Naively, he falls back into the out-of-date realism of the philosophically and sociologically illiterate. As a result, Latour’s practice is reactionary. Uncritically, he embraces the winners in the social power games of science and technology. Admittedly, it took some time before all of this became clear. LatourÕs style of writing, which emulates the style of serious empirical work, misled SSK. But in Latour’s recent work, there is little left of the ‘empirical fulcrum that gave his earlier work its leverage’. The verdict is therefore clear: ‘[Latour’s] We Have Never Been Modern has nothing to offer on the question of the primacy of human society in the making of knowledge, nor on a host of other topics with which SSK still struggles.’ In fact, with hindsight, one may wonder whether Latour has ever been part of the great enterprise that SSK is.
Now that SSK has finished its plea, let us turn to the opposite party.
Of course things look different from ANT’s perspective. Latour is happy to admit that SSK has been very useful in the past, but only ‘for a split second’. SSK helped to transform sterile philosophical studies of science and technology into a discipline where an eye for empirical detail really matters. But Collins is wrong in thinking that the real work has already been done and that we can be proud of the achievements of ‘social studies of science’ in the past. It is true: ANT ‘has nothing to offer on the question of the primacy of human society in the making of knowledge’. But this is not due to a sudden weakness of the mind of ANT’s practitioners. The reason ANT has nothing to offer on this issue is that, on second analysis, the question is completely ill-framed. It takes for granted what has to be analysed: what is ‘society’?; what role humans and non-humans play in the making of knowledge?; etc. The topics with which SSK still struggles are hardly worthy of attention. Not ANT is the problem, but the other side. Because he fails to move beyond the epistemological problematique, Collins’s ‘social constructivist’ epistemology is by now brain-dead.
It is hard to imagine how this deadlock can ever be unravelled. In this dispute, SSK and ANT not only embody different philosophies, but, as a result of this, they also fundamentally differ on what the dispute is about. However, as in any war, the fronts in this conflict have in fact been less static than the rhetoric of the generals suggests.
Consider first ANT’s development. (Hey, I’m trying to be fair, so it’s time to reverse the order of presentation used so far.) There has been an interesting shift in Latour’s style of writing. Laboratory Life was written in the style of an anthropological site visit, with a few theoretical models and a couple of jokes to sum up the results. This was a style familiar to empirically oriented sociologists and for that reason they can be excused for failing to see that LatourÕs aims differed radically from both traditional sociology of science and SSK. In Latour’s later work, the double role of the (ANT) anthropologist as playwright and literary critic has become much more explicit. Latour’s Aramis is a good example. In this book, the history of Aramis, a French high-tech public transportation system, is cleverly and elegantly staged in a kind of Bildungsroman. A young student becomes a detective of sorts, and in the course of his attempts to answer the question ‘who killed Aramis?’, he learns what technology and society are made off. What mediates the past? Documents with technical details, evaluation reports, interviews with engineers and policy-makers, his professorÕs commentary. Out of these fragments, the student reconstructs the world of Aramis. From scattered splinters of the past, like an archeologist, he constructs how content (‘technology’) and context (‘society’) co-developed. He comes to understand that Aramis is not a thing ‘out there’ that is killed by a character (Capitalism, the Communist Party, Engineering Problems) waiting in the background to be discovered. He comes to know a network, and discovers why it disintegrated in the end. How do we, as readers, learn about all of this? In the same way: by constructing a plot out of the fragments in this book. The literary form of the book supports the (ANT) content. By emphasising mediation and by selecting a clever format of writing, the problems the epistemological tradition used to frame as ‘problems of method’ are tackled.
Now consider SSK. By the end of the 1980s, Collins became engaged in a shoot-out with Artificial Intelligence. The reason was obvious. AI’s claim that intelligent machines exist (or are at least at the point of becoming reality) is - if true - a clear refutation of SSK’s basic idea that there is a fundamental and unbridgeable difference between socialised human beings and the non-human world of machines and nature. In this debate, Collins used an argument that did wonderfully well. He claimed that whereas humans can (intentionally) mimic machine behaviour, the reverse is not true: machines cannot mimic normal human action. However, because of the former, we are tempted to think that there is overlap between human action and machine behaviour and that there are in fact certain types of human action that can be better performed by a machine. But this is false. Machines are generally better in performing machine behaviour than men are in mimicking this (machine) behaviour. But from this, it doesn’t follow at all that machines will ever have the capacity to mimic typically human, socialised, and rule-governed action. Machines are good in the area where machines are good: machine behaviour (humans are not so good in this domain); humans are good in the area where humans are good: socialised action (in this domain machines fail). The argument is a little tricky (because it begs the question that is at stake in the AI debate), but it worked. Collins then moved on to apply the same argument to tackle problems that are closer to ANT’s interests: the question as to which part - if any - of human skills can be delegated to machines and, more generally, the problem ‘how men and machines mix’. Observe that this is no longer an epistemological problem, but an ontological one, and that it comes very close to ANT’s interests. But as we will see, Collins’s views remained informed by the same (epistemology-based) philosophy that informed SSK.
The problem ‘how men and machines mix’ turned out to be much more difficult to answer than AI’s outrageous claims. A long sequence of papers (and a forthcoming book with Martin Kush) shows Collins’s adding new distinctions again and again to account for the supposed basic difference between socialised human beings and non-human artefacts. For some time, like the Ptolemaic astronomers, Collins made the impression of needing to add ever new epicycles to save a system that was about to collapse. Moreover, his style of reasoning changed: no more interviews with scientists and engineers over lunch, but elementary examples discussed in the style of good old analytical philosophy - a style that had been discarded in the early days of SSK as pedantic and useless. However, in the end, Collins’s answer came down to an interesting claim that - I think - can be summarised in a simple formula: Yes, men and machines mix, but men mix differently with machines than machines mix with men. With this claim, Collins sticks to SSKÕs point of view laid down in the 1970s (the asymmetry between socialised humans and non-humans), but he also allows some room for a role for un-socialised machines in our concepts of human society and human action. It took Collins a long detour to arrive at a point that is obvious to Latour: that it takes more than just ‘interpretation’ to account for the ways in which humans and non-humans (machines, nature) mix. But along the way, Collins has qualified Latour’s point. His claim points to the possibility that Latour has been too rash in using one category (actant) for both human actors and non-human artefacts. Even if we accept the idea of hybrid (human plus non-human) networks as the basic stuff the world is made of, it may be the case that human actors and non-human artefacts lock into these networks in ways that differ systematically in an interesting way. It is an hypothesis (it is an hypothesis) worthy to be discussed and tested.
Let’s set out two simple constraints for this debate. First, any future contribution to this matter will have to turn philosophy into thick description and back. Let us in that respect grant the ‘split second’ of SSK to last forever. Second, one has to cook up a clever format of writing. A straightforward empiricist phrase regimen (‘this is how I found the world to be’) will not do for the obvious reason that it presupposes the distinction between humans and the world that is at stake. It also entails too simplistic ideas about time and our relation to history. If the texture of the world is made up by a mix of humans and non-humans, we should expect the traces of that to come out in our texts.
No doubt, it will take the parties involved some effort to move, to imagine the opponent’s point of view, to shift style and leave behind philosophical (and national and egotistical) bases. Perhaps EASST can organise a conference. The airbase in Dayton, Ohio, seems to have excellent facilities that are vacant by now.
Notes
See the papers by Collins, Yearley, Woolgar, Callon and Latour in A. Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992
Isis, 85 (1994), 672 - 674.
There are more people involved in the debate than Harry Collins and Bruno Latour, including Steven Yearley and Michel Callon and Steve Woolgar. To reduce complexity, I will stick to Collins and Latour.
I use ANT because it is an established name by now, although “Actor Network Approach” seems to me to be more appropriate.
H.M. Collins, Changing Order, London: SAGE, 1985
Collins follows Winch’s “hermeneutic” reading of Wittgenstein. This reading is by now contested by Wittgenstein-exegetists. See e.g. G. de Vries, “Consequences of Wittgenstein’s Farewell to Epistemology.” In: L’étude sociale des sciences - Bilan des annŽes 1970 et 1980 et consequences pour le travail historique, ed. D. Pestre. Paris: Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques, Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, 1992.
F. Nietzsche, Aus dem Nachlass der achtziger Jahre, Werke III, Muenchen: Hanser Verlag, 1966, p. 502.
Cf. A. Nehemas, Nietzsche - Life as Literature, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1985, esp. Chapter 3.
A better view on the Nietzsche connection may help to save ANT from the often aired accusation that it embodies a voluntaristic ideology. This accusation (which in CollinsÕs review in ISIS takes the form of a wild association of LatourÕs work with Margaret Thatcher’s idea that there are only ÔindividualsÕ, and no such thing as ‘society’) is based on a simplistic interpretation of the concept of the ‘will to power’. Cf. Nehamas op.cit. for a more interesting reading of this concept.
B. Latour, La Clef de Berlin, Paris: Ed. la Decouverte, 1993
Collins, Isis, cf. fn. 2
B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life, London: Sage, 1979
B. Latour, Aramis ou lÕamour des techniques, Paris: Ed. la Decouverte, 1992. An English translation is forthcoming.
H.M. Collins, Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines. Boston: MIT Press, 1990
This paper grew out of a ridiculously long email message to, among others, Collins and Latour, sent in 1990 shortly after the Bath conference where the papers for the Pickering volume (cf. note 1) had been discussed. I refrained from publishing the argument because I was very pleased to see references to my email message in the printed press. The recent new outbreak of the dispute made me rethink my position. Several people have contributed to the argument, including the two main protagonists of SSK and ANT, and my colleagues Rob Hagendijk, Werner Callebaut, Ruud Hendriks and Annemarie Mol.
Review of: Angel Kowlek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women In the Corporate Office, 1870-1930, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994.
Angel Kwolek-Folland’s Engendering Business is an important exploration of the changing nature of gender relations in the United States between 1870 and 1930. It builds upon, contributes to and goes beyond the rich secondary literature in business history (Chandler, Wiebe), labor history (Braverman, Baron), material culture (Ames & Martinez, Upton & Vlauch) studies and women’s studies (Aron, Davies, DeVault, Rotundo, Scott). Part of a new series on gender relations in the American experience published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Kwolek-Folland’s book takes the transformation of the corporate office as the analytical focus. In industries of banking and insurance, the corporate office represented the bureaucracy par excellence: the industry’s office work did not merely support the business operation but occupied the center of the production. Bookkeepers, secretaries, stenographers, cashiers, file clerks, telephone operators, office machine operators, payroll clerks, receptionists, stock clerks, typists, sale clerks and managers ‘produced’ the intangible goods of the service industries. In the sixty years under discussion, the corporate office had become a site where middle-class men and women mingled, but did so through careful negotiations over time, space and job descriptions. By the 1930s clerks had become an icon of womanhood, while managers and salesmen represented the “central male figures of the new gender relations of the business world” (p. 70).
At first, the study seems to be an historical narrative, analyzing the growth of the financial industry’s office as a site of production. Kwolek-Folland closely examines the historical records of U.S. life insurance companies such as Metropolitan Life and other important corporate offices. Upon closer examination, however, the author has organized her book not in chronological order but in a topical manner to tell her almost anthropological story of gender. Instead of chronicling the history of office work from the small family run organization to the corporations, Kwolek-Folland shows how gender constituted the very fabric of the corporate office.
The increased numbers of young women — both ethnically white and African-American — found new employment opportunities in the emerging corporate bureaucracies. As many other scholars have shown before her, these structural changes altered working relations on the office floor in profound manners. Equally important, gender rhetoric smoothed the entry of women into office work and also created new male-defined job categories such as managers, executives and salesmen. Thus, the dynamics of gender did not merely involve women, but also was the business of men.
If the ideal office worker (as someone who could be subservient and selfless) operated as a middle-class male ideal in the precorporate office so long as men could hope for promotion, that ideal would become at once more appropriate for middle-class women and more threatening to men when possibilities for promotion became less a viable option by the early twentieth century.
More profoundly, perhaps, the author argues that gender had an impact far beyond the socialization of men and women and the structure of their work. For example, she shows how corporate America literally incorporated the idea of the family and womanhood in order to domesticate as well as mask the underlying hard-nosed competitiveness of their businesses and the subordination of their workers. The corporations, emphasis on feminine ideals of service and corporate domesticity was both metaphorical and material since “blood ties were present at every level of corporate experience, from executives to the clerical staff”. In particular, the corporate domesticity and kinship were created, expressed and integrated by corporate sponsored leisure activities such as soccer games, wedding showers, outings, and gift giving. Corporate domesticity went beyond the employment of gendered language, however. It took on concrete material forms in the architectural shape of the skyscraper. Within its concrete walls, office spaces echoed nineteenth- century female-coded parlors shaped as a new public domain.
Kwolek-Folland’s very important conclusion is that gendered language and practices shaped the corporate production process by suggesting that corporate work was based on the “natural hierarchies of gender rather than economic imperatives or class status”. It masked class tensions through the rich and elaborate employment of gender images and practices. “Corporate domesticity, with its symbolic images of womanhood and manhood, masked the hierarchical realities and paternalism of corporate organization” (p. 186).
The book marks an important synthesis of previous and emerging scholarship, not the least because its research lives up to and elaborates on the years of theorizing in gender studies. Through painstaking historical scholarship, it demonstrates that the employment of gender is more than a code word for women’s studies to include men, shows the changing varieties of male and female gender scripts in relation to each other, and employs gender a useful category for historical analysis (Scott). If that is not enough, it is through its critical use of footnotes that we learn the true import of the book. In many places, Kwolek-Folland provides alternative interpretations and elaborations of current scholarship. For example, she shows how the ideas of Scientific Management had been practiced within corporations decades before it became articulated as a system of belief in the 1910s; in another place, she takes issue with Chandler and Wiebe’s neglect of the theories of salesmanship in the development of professional management theory; and in a chapter on spatial arrangements of corporate offices, she has different readings of architectural historiography in her interpretation of the commercial buildings such as hotels, apartment buildings and the skyscrapers that insurance companies built for themselves. Insurance buildings built after 1870 did not move away from domestic imagery, but rather negotiated the increasingly fragile boundaries between domestic and commercial spaces by creating public spaces that incorporated the intimacy of the home into its design.
Anyone interested in the rise of the corporations, the history of gender relations and cultural history should include this significant book on the reading list.
Cited Works:
Ames, Kenneth L.; Martinez, Katharine (eds.), The Material Culture of Gender/Gender of Material Culture, New York, W.W. Norton, 1994.
Aron, Cindy S., Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1987.
Baron, Ava (ed.) , Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990.
Braverman, Harry, Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1974.
Chandler Jr., Alfred D., The Visible Hand: the Managerial Revolution in American Business, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1977.
Davies, Margery W., Woman’s Place is at the Typewriter, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1982.
DeVault, Ileen, Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and Clerical Work in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh, 1990.
Rotundo, E. Anthony, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era, New York, Basic Books, 1993.
Scott, Joan W., “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”, Journal of American History, 1053-1075, 1986.
Upton, Dell and John Michael Vlach (eds.) Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1986.
Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877-1920, New York, Hill & Wang, 1976.
Review of: Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science, Faber & Faber, London, 1992.
In the 1960s, E.P. Snow suggested the need to bridge the two cultures between the arts and humanities on the one hand and the natural sciences on the other. In recent times Steve Fuller suggests that Snow’s two cultures still exist and seem to be played out between science and sociology - the debate continuing more between practising scientists and those engaged in the social study of science rather than between literary intellectuals and scientists.
The new critics think those engaged in science studies have put science in the dock despite the fact that the latter as a group has not elaborated a shared and well-defined theoretical position with respect to science. In spite of the variety of approaches within science studies, these scientists claim that science studies has managed to achieve a shared tone which is unambiguously hostile to science. These natural scientists can be said to constitute a distinct culture owing to their mission to rescue science from this hostility and by the alternative social, moral, philosophical statements they often pronounce themselves in the process. These scientists can be distinguished from other scientists who are interested in positively engaging within the debates of science studies. The Unnatural Nature of Science by Lewis Wolpert has the distinction of being one of the earliest statements which triggered the new debate in the 1990s.
Wolpert defended scientific knowledge by constructing science as a unitary kind of thinking with distinctive virtues distinguishable from mere common sense. The five cases identified as having tainted science and from which science must purify itself and separate its identity are: a) the notion that every human being is a potential scientist, b) the lack of distinction between technology and science, c) the confusing of the Greek origin of science, d) the conflating of artistic creativity with scientific creativity, and e) the claim by anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers of science to regard scientific knowledge on a par with other knowledge.
Everyone a Potential Scientist
Wolpert asserts that the view that man is innately curious and thereby capable of critical and self-conscious reflection about knowledge about nature is a myth. Left to his own resources, he opines, man is only capable of curiosity up to matters that affect his conduct. He limits attainable knowledge to common sense and ordinary man’s curiosity to intuition. Both are thought unreliable for scientific thought. In fact Wolpert declares “if something fits in with common sense it almost certainly is not science” (p11). This is because the way the universe works is different from the way our common sense works in understanding the immediate world around us. Science is not a result of a simple interrogation of nature by intuitive thinking and every day experience. It is both counter-intuitive and outside everyday experience (pxii). Scientists are admonished to be aware of the errors of applying natural/intuitive thinking and theories in scientific knowledge production, and to recognise that it is precisely “the unnatural nature of science that historically made it so rare” (p11).
Wolpert employs the rhetorical distinction between thinking and common sense to divide humanity between a vast lay public and a few elite scientists. There are difficulties with this stance. First, the idea that thinking in science is “meta-unitarian” fails to recognise that there is not one kind of thinking which runs through different disciplines of science or within a discipline of science, and in different organisations or within an organisation of science. In physics, for example, there is theoretical and experimental aspects often evolving differing thinking methods depending on the historical development of the science. The Newtonian mechanistic thinking with the universe as a clockwork metaphor is not the same as relativistic-quantum physical thinking or the contemporary Santa Fe’s complexity theoretical thought. Cartesian mechanistic thinking from the seventeenth century has been replaced by the crude holism of late twentieth century contemporary complexity theory. Field theory in physics is different from geometrical kinematics and celestial mechanics. Wolpert constructs a meta-attribute to thinking whilst still recognising that science and scientific method are differentiated. He himself tells us that science does not fit a “simple minded description in terms of Kuhn’s paradigm or Popper’s falsification” (p108-109), adding that there is no such thing as the scientific method. Why is his attribution to scientific thinking a defining, distinctive and singular generality of “counter-intuition” less simple-minded than Kuhn’s paradigms or Popper’s falsification? How can Wolpert square his position of science and scientific methods as differentiated and plural with a single meta-unitarian thinking running through all of them?
Second, Wolpert uses the term common sense in a static and an undifferentiated manner. All kinds of common sense is described as “unconscious”. The self-aware thinking of science is compared to a common sense defined or lumped together in a single category as “unconscious”. Common sense in one culture could just as well be “counter-intuitive” thinking in other cultures.
The conflation of “common sense” with the term “unconscious” is also problematic because examples showing common sense as conscious are legion. Every day existence is full of such examples from crossing roads to making decisions on all kinds of problems. Wolpert seems to be “unconscious” of the contradictions of his own thinking here. The use of the comparison between a unitarian thinking of science and unconscious common sense helps him to build science as an elitist project which only special human beings from the western world with “self-aware” virtues can engage in. With it he classifies scientists as a special breed of men from the west by distinguishing them from the rest of humanity. Only some 15 per cent of the human race are said to be capable of doing science.
Third, ordinary people who carry out ordinary existences partake in conscious thinking. Modern complex societies demand self-aware living. The reduction of common sense only to unconscious reasoning radically simplifies the complexity of common sense experience. It is endlessly problematic to rank one as superior and another inferior - just as it would be to rank one kind of experience or knowledge as superior and another inferior.
Clarifying the Confusion between Science and Technology
His next move is to try to validate this distinction between common sense and science by classifying much of technology as requiring “no understanding or theory of the kinds provided by science” (p26).
The ancient cultures, especially the Chinese, have made significant achievements technologically, but their inventions were not based on science. They never managed, claims Wolpert, to theorise the process or give reasons why the technology worked. Science is said to have played no role even in such inventions like the compass, the telescope and steam engine. Chinese exports to Europe - gun powder, printing, the magnetic compass - “owed nothing to science” (p28). For technology neither learning nor literacy was relevant. The motivations of technology and science are different. The final product of science is an idea whilst that of technology is an artefact. Creators of technology want money, whilst scientists seek esteem. Technology succeeds if it correspond to wants and needs, whilst science’s success is measured when its results correspond with reality. The epistemological status of technology and science are radically different. Wolpert claims that “[t]he very nature of scientific and technological thinking is dissimilar. Many aspects of technology are visual and non-verbal, which is quite unlike scientific thinking” (p33-34). Much of the belief that ordinary intuition can understand science comes from a thinking which adulterates science with technology. There was no relationship between science and technology until the nineteenth century. “Engineering, even today, should not just be construed as merely applied science” (p34).
This position radically simplifies the ontological interpenetration of science and technology in present-day circumstances. The way science is done has changed from the Scientific Revolution to the present. Wolpert does not recognise that much of scientific research has become industrial activity. Much of science is done within corporations, research institutes and universities by specialists based on a division of labour using the latest technologies. The consequence of the industrialisation of science is the development of the “scientification” of technology and the “technologisation” of science.
The Greek Origin of Science
The next move focuses on Greece/West/Christianity and the rest. The author continues the epistemological purification by literally writing the non-West out of the history of science, and definitely science. Wolpert simply asserts that historians who mix science with technology have made two cardinal mistakes: first they deny the peculiarity of science and its radical difference with technology, and, secondly, they admit others and not Greece as the origin of science. Wolpert asserts that the unique Greek “origin is important for understanding the nature of science, since it makes science quite different from so many other human activities, for no other society independently developed scientific thought, and all later developments can be traced back to the Greeks” (p35).
Even the Chinese who are recognised to have developed a sophisticated culture, are merely described as having attained engineering not scientific knowledge. Though persistent and accurate observers of celestial phenomena before the Renaissance, the Chinese were said to have failed to develop planetary theory and geometry (p46). Wolpert thinks a large part to this failure lay in Chinese philosophy. Buddhism with its eternal returns, Taoism with its intimate link between nature and man, and Confucianism with its core emphasis on human conduct and personal cultivation probably prevented the origin of science in Chinese society. Perhaps this can be easily extrapolated to all other societies having belief systems like that obtaining in China. Paradoxically, Japan has been advised that it may not be able to develop science and technology without taking western values, languages and concepts. It was able to introduce selectively scientific knowledge into its culture without borrowing from the humanities originating from the west.
Wolpert claims that Christianity has had a positive influence on scientific development. Theological disputes on the nature of Christ had the salutary effect of helping those engaged in the debate to undertake logical consistency and reasoned argument. Christianity fostered scientific thinking. It provided “a system in which there was the possibility - even the conviction - that there were laws controlling nature. Such a conviction was unique to Christianity” (p48). Wolpert mentions the methodological difficulty “in looking for elective affinities between Christianity and science” (p48). What he means by this is the association of scientific pursuits with different forms of Christianity raises methodological difficulties; i.e., whether Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity, and both vs. protestantism facilitated science. In spite of this reservation, the importance of Christianity in fostering science is upheld.
Wolpert makes no reference to the historians of science who tried to establish the African and Egyptian connection to Greek science, as Martin Bernal demonstrated in Black Athena. He stresses the Western/Greek influence on Islamic scholars and not the Afro-Arab contribution to Greek science. In one paragraph consisting of less than three lines Wolpert concedes that Islamic scholars have “also continued the Greek tradition”. He failed to point out how Islamic scholars continued the Greek tradition. For someone who makes such play of the distinction between knowledge and scientific knowledge, it is not clear what epistemological status Wolpert assigns the “Islamic scholars’ contribution to knowledge”. On Islam this is what he says: “[i]t may not be irrelevant that Islam offers a unifying perspective of knowledge and considers the pursuit of knowledge to be a virtue” (p51). This could be any knowledge and may not include his epistemologically privileged scientific knowledge.
The Question of Creativity
Art and artistic imagination should not be confused with science and scientific creativity. Creativity in science is unique and has special characteristics different from art. Gifted scientists have “stamina, devotion, psychic courage and character”, and they work very hard at problems (p69). Even some scientists confuse scientific imagination with artistically creative imagination. This notion which equates arts and sciences - both as products of creative human imagination - must be debunked. In science flashes of genius and inspiration are based on painstaking work and perspiration. Scientific research is based not on chance or serendipity, but on highly focused thoughts (p79). It is the best scientists who seem to be the luckiest (p83).
Wolpert acknowledges the difficulty of explaining genius, and claims that in the long run the communal production of science would make genius irrelevant. Art is individual, and artistic genius would remain individualised. A Shakespeare and a Mozart are not replaceable, he suggests. The problem with his account is that he has not provided the criteria for distinguishing creativity in art as opposed to science. Both artists and scientists do hard work. Both do not depend on chance. The characteristics he describes for science apply to the arts.
Criticism of SSK’s Critical Scrutiny of Science
The most vehement opposition was reserved for SSK’s thesis which denies that science is epistemologically privileged or even a separate domain of activity or enquiry. Wolpert dismisses with an uncompromising tone all relativist and social constructivist accounts of the creation of scientific knowledge. Social thinkers of science, like Bloor and Barnes, suggest that scientific knowledge is not discovered but constructed/manufactured. It is not a passive mediated product of nature, but an actively negotiated social construct of the processes of research and enquiry. Constructivism suggests that the expectations, prejudices and interests of the various actors are embodied in scientific knowledge. It describes the social process in which actors involved in a variety of ways in scientific knowledge production manage to attribute the status of objectivity to the resulting knowledge. SSK’s Strong Programme regards science as one of the many belief systems. Its knowledge claims have to be empirically tested and validated. Wolpert selectively took empirical studies done by SSK from biology and physics and pronounced them unsatisfactory.
Wolpert recognises that social factors influence science. Nevertheless, his view of science as a “social process” is radically different from that of the sociologists of scientific knowledge. He complains that SSK studies have ignored the “core of the scientific enterprise”, by “ignoring the achievements of science, by ignoring whether a theory is right or wrong” and “by denying progress” (p122). He suggests that sociologists study the unnatural nature of science by generating research programmes on the external dimensions of science (e.g., funding, institutions, career structures and so on), rather than the intrinsic validity of its knowledge claims and theories (e.g., theorems, laws, methodologies and so on). SSK thinkers would react to this agenda as limiting the scope of social research to external social factors, and would argue that science’s claim to objectivity in discovery as well as the resulting knowledge validation is a proper domain for social research. In many ways they claim that the latter is in fact the more interesting problem to investigate.
So the dispute here is not because Wolpert does not recognise science as a social process (however limited that may be), whilst SSK recognises science as a social process. It is rather between the narrow and wider scope of the definition of science as a social process. By emphasising both the inclusion of context in the process of discovery and knowledge justification, SSK thinkers suggest that they do not disparage the object of their study; i.e., science and scientists. Perhaps the main result they seek is to encourage scientists to become self-reflexive about the work they do. There is room for a healthy debate in how to describe and understand the factors that shape scientific thought if there is restraint from purple polemic and labelling on both sides.
Social Responsibility of Scientists
Having carried out the epistemological purification of science, Wolpert can confidently pronounce it exceptional and unique to western culture. What is left as an issue is to describe the social responsibility of the scientist consistent with his story. Are scientists implicated in the ethical dilemmas which their creations generate? His view on it is consistent with his overall approach. Scientists are obliged to inform the public “about the possible implications of their work” and “must be clear about the reliability of their studies” (p152). Scientists should not be held accountable for the application of their sciences. His truncated view of science as a “social process” translates into a truncated view of the social responsibility of the scientist. Once again the social responsibility of the scientist is not denied, but it is merely qualified and strictly limited. Scientists have more of a social responsibility than that suggested by Wolpert. They are involved increasingly as experts and advisors to government. The position that scientists are free from being implicated in the application of their science exaggerates their neutrality, diminishing their growing and lucrative connection with politics.
From 30 November to 2 December politicians and academics convened at the Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin (WZB) for a major international conference on the public understanding of science, chaired by Meinolf Dierkes. Sponsored in part by the European Commission (DG XII), the conference aimed to evaluate the EUROBAROMETER, the European-wide public surveys on scientific literacy and attitudes towards science and technology conducted in 1989 and 1992, and to outline a research (and, in some respects, funding) agenda for the scholarly field. The presence of leading scholars and high-ranking European politicians lent an air of import to the proceedings, which was at its weightiest during the political speech-making on the final day. While they’re seemed to be vast divides between the proverbial qualitative and quantitative methodologists as well as a rather profound lack of understanding of the express purposes of surveys as the EUROBAROMETER, there promises to emerge a degree of consensus in the results of the conference, which will be reported by the WZB in the form of a book, a web site and the final memorandum to be drafted for the Commission. Public understanding researchers of all stripes eagerly await their appearance.
The EUROBAROMETER, inspired by similar scientific literacy and attitudinal studies conducted over the past couple of decades in the United States, has become practically synonymous with its most notorious question: “Does the earth go around the sun or the sun around the earth?” This and a battery of true or false questions, as “all radioactivity is man-made” and “the oxygen we breathe comes from plants”, are meant to measure national EU citizens’ knowledge of scientific fact. A basic knowledge of scientific fact and conventional scientific method, which is also measured, are supposedly essential for a community citizen’s ability to understand science and technology. Such an understanding, it was argued in Berlin, helps people to read newspaper articles on scientific controversies as well as to participate as democratic citizens in debate and decision-making on the subjects. The notion that Europeans, generally, or certain national citizenries, as the Portugese or Greeks, have lesser understandings of scientific fact and method than other nationals, a result arguably designed into and certainly confirmed by the surveys, has come to be known as the ‘deficit model’, which most everyone agreed is not semantically correct. In any case, the literacy surveys, as was noted in the presentations, measure educational uptake — a sort of level of high school book-learning — and do not measure, among other things, when or the extent to which this knowledge is relevant in various social settings and situations. There was some agreement, expressed in the call for “methodological pluralism”, that the analyses should be augmented by contextual research, more regional, open-ended and finely grained in character.
The surveys, which gather basic demographic information and pose questions about people’s interest in and sources of knowledge and information about science and technology (i.e., traditionally, through activities as media consumption and library and museum visitation), also guage the respondents’ attitudes towards science and technology in general and practical terms, their sense of the status of European research as compared to that of the U.S. and Japan, and their awareness of EU-sponsored research and research policy. The relationship between knowledge and attitude constituted the key finding, which has been known or surmised for some time. Contrary to the expectations of the surveyers and perhaps many others besides, a higher level of knowledge of science, as construed by the survey, does not lead to fewer reservations about science. Put differently, the more you know, the worse your attitude, which, as was also mentioned, has much in common with Ulrich Beck’s notion of the self-refutation of modernity. But there were abberations, as in the comparison between Danes and Germans, and much is being made of the fact that in certain cases the Danes, again in aggregate terms, are both knowledgable and optimistic, while the Germans are knowledgable and pessimistic.
This relates to what the surveyers call the “industrialisation paradox”. While, as the researchers maintained in the presentations, the EUROBAROMETER instrument is not meant to rank nations, it nevertheless does indicate an hierarchic disparity in national citizenries’ attitudes towards the promise of science and technology, depending on their country’s “level of industrialisation”. Thus the citizenries of “developing EU countries” (defined as Greece and Portugal) view science and technology as the way forward but are pessimistic about their ability to solve social problems, the “established industrialised countries” (Belgium, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands) generally do not believe in science as progress but readily assimilate the fruits into everyday life, while, finally, the “advanced industrialised countries” (Denmark and Germany), as mentioned above, both share a belief in progress but are split on the costs of assimilation. On an even more general plane, further presentations compared interest, knowledge and attitudes at work in Europe, Canada, Japan and the USA, where the most notable finding concerned a relative lack of interest on the part of the Japanese in new scientific, technological and medical inventions and discoveries.
Many of these European survey findings have been reported before, as at the ‘94 EASST conference in Budapest, and the approach and the findings have been subject to critical examination. The meeting, as discussed especially in the informal encounters, was more about whether room would be made in the Commission funding schemes for different approaches to the study of public understanding. While the final day seemed to witness the attrition of alternate approaches to the EUROBAROMETER, other agendas were drawn up in working groups and duly reported earlier. Here mention is made only of the results of the group dedicated to ‘mapping the knowledge on public understanding’, with special reference to ‘forgotten aspects’.
Addressing the social and policy-making purposes of the research, members of the group made a plea for attention to be paid to the contexts of use of the research. Instead of merely evaluating survey barometers methodologically or “internally”, enquires should be made into how the survey findings are interpreted, by whom and to which ends. So in contrast to running after the actors, the idea is to follow the results in national and European policy arenas, especially in educational policy. The same demand should be made of qualitative research findings. The key question, affirmative answers to which were provided in some of the presentations, is whether the research construction of the bearers of scientific knowledge reproduces painful stereotypes and merely legitimates science policy. More fundamentally, “understanding” may refer not only to the ability to demonstrate “cognitive performance”, i.e., to get the test questions right, but also to the capacity to use and interpret scientific knowledge in situations closer to home or, as it was put, in one’s “world of relevance”. The recommendation related to further social epistemological research, where, if need be, definitions of knowledge as well as understandings of science and technology emerge at the outset of the study from the users. There remains a need, however, for symmetrical treatment of the value of the experts’ and the publics’ knowledges, which, as a participant remarked, means not (normatively) granting the public some superior capacity to generate truth.
Trust was a much-discussed topic, given the survey finding that trust in public institutions continues to wane, while that in consumer organisations and other NGOs waxes. Turning the arrow from knowledge to trust around, research should concentrate on the extent to which mistrust could just as logically be a product of scientific capability, unrelated to formal learning.
Finally, the idea was put forward that exposing people to the sorts of qualitative public understanding research advocated could be a way of promoting personal engagement in scientific deconstruction and reflexivity. As is freely admitted, science and technology studies is hardly the only arena in which wide-spread deconstruction of science and regulation occurs. It may even be described as a normal feature of public scientific controversy, where vested interests are regularly exposed, especially in the USA. Perhaps the point of such research engagement is to improve the style of public debate and reconciliation of scientific controversy, and certain models, as Danish, Dutch and British “consensus conferences”, are under consideration.
In conclusion, it seems that the old “noble” aims of raising the public awareness in science have gone the way of modernity, leaving some researchers with the tools and the findings but not the rationale. Nevertheless it appears the surveys will continue to be conducted, their social value debated and their purposes reinvented. One might even be tempted to call them fun, but at whose expense no one’s quite sure yet.
NOTES
Italians scored highest on this question, while the British were at the bottom of the heap.
European Commission, Europeans, Science and Technology - Public Understandings and Attitudes, DG XII, EUR 15461, June, 1993, p. 19. The standard Eurobarometer 38.1 field questionnaire is found on pages 123-133. A conference paper on the subject was presented by John Durant and Martin Bauer.
These and other comparative results were presented by Rafael Pardo and Jon Miller.
Cf. Wynne, B., “Public Understanding of Science”, in S. Jasanoff, G.E. Markle, J.C. Petersen, and T. Pinch (eds.), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Sage, London, 1995, pp. 365-370.
The group, chaired by Brian Wynne, heard contributions by Sheila Jasanoff, Steven Yearley, Boudouin Jurdant, Knut Sorensen, Ulrike Felt, Aren Mortensen and Alexandros Kyrtsis.
See Joss, S. and J. Durant (eds.), Public Participation in Science: The Role of Consensus Conferences in Europe, Science Museum, London, 1995.
While in a wistful mood this Fall, I imagined that organising a lecture series resembled the quiltmaking work of my foremothers; a seasonal occupation meant to fulfill household needs but also significant as a community activity. A general motif must be chosen — and such a preference, any crafts historian will tell you, is highly determined by the maker’s geographical and historical setting. In the Fall of 1995 in Amsterdam, we wanted to reflect on the role of the researcher as insider/outsider, observer and actor in one’s field of study. We sought to work this motif into a recognizable pattern from our speakers’ contributions, keeping in mind that the pieces of material collected must provide some contrast if the motif is to appear, but the weights and textures must be compatible. Advice is given and the voice of experience is heeded in this endeavour, since artisans may wish to innovate but rarely to break with tradition. In the final steps, a quilting rack is set out in an appropriate location, friends and neighbours are expected to gather and lend a hand with the overall needlework in the form of the quilting bee, the locus for discussion of community affairs, transmission of news, gossip and of course, arguments over the best way to proceed.
The diamond pattern emerged from our four meetings, a pattern where background and motif (here to stand as objectivity and involvement) are forever competing for attention, since the areas granted to each are nearly equal. Speakers were sought who had experienced and reflected on the way to stich together their contributions to both academia and to the domain they research, asking them to give accounts of how they struggled with the distinctions between their status as activists and as scholars, between their political commitments and their methodological choices.
From Scholar to Activist and Back Again
The symmetry of the first two contributions to the series established a satisfying balance. Sharon Beder (Science and Technology Studies, University of Wollongong, Australia) spoke of her experience as a scholar mobilised by activists, and Anita Hardon, (Medical Anthropology Unit, University of Amsterdam) of the opposite route from activism to a more distanced position. For Beder, difficult choices arose in the course of her study of the sewage problems off the beaches of Sydney. She struggled against both her personal preference and mounting pressure from friends and activists close to her, to maintain neutrality in order not to compromise her access to institutional sources. Upon (near) completion of her Ph.D. work, she shared her findings, sometimes by collaborating directly with the media. Most significantly, she felt was able to bring into public debate issues of power and knowledge, and to support the attempts by lay (non-STS) activists to deconstruct official science. Yet, while Beder ackowledged her relief at being able to embrace a political position and forego neutrality, this neutrality of the social scientist also served to enable involvement in a subsequent environmental controversy, where Greenpeace activists were considered too radical to stand in opposition to the governmental representatives. In this second instance, neutrality was not opposed to involvement, but rather it enabled entering debate in a public forum.
Anita Hardon also contrasted her shifting role in two controversies. Trained in both STS and anthropology, she presented the possibilities open to the researcher using the anthropological trope of participant-observer. The researcher can place herself along this axis of involvement and neutrality, and its related range of discourses, from extreme, reflexive accounts to the ethnography as dialogue. Hardon told of her participation as a women’s health advocate in the first instance and of her subsequent move to a role closer to that of observer, distancing herself from the women’s health movement, while retaining privileged relations with this group of actors. From this second position, spurred on by (but also confirming) her awareness that advocacy work implies representation, Hardon has since attempted to involve both developers of contraceptives (corporate and governmental) and women’s health advocates to broaden their understanding of the life conditions, values and aspirations of the people for whom they claim to be working. The accounts of these researchers highlighted not only the fact that the boundaries set by academics and activists are in turn constraining and enabling, but also that these boundaries must be carefully negotiated to maintain one’s credibility on either side.
Annemarie Mol’s rejection of long seams in favour of multiple short stiches caused our motif to be exploded into fragmented harlequins. If our theme of involvement is to be taken as the political component of STS work, then the empirical is political and the political is empirical for this scholar. Rather than try to play at big politics and embrace schools of analysis that postulate specific modalities of politics (alienation, conflict between lay versus expert versions, issues of choice), Mol proposes that researchers rely on a set of units of analysis: topics, parties, sites, styles and relations. In discussion, it became apparent that there was significant resistance to Mol’s insistence on the local, and on foregoing aspirations to contributing to larger political agendas. Yet, Mol’s provocative combination of the highly theoretical and determinedly local may open up new avenues in STS.
Politics was also the starting point for Dick Pels (Sociology, University of Amsterdam and Groningen), for whom the political project in which we engage as academics is one of representation. This work, he argued is risky, and involves the gap between the intellectual and those in whose name she speaks. Pels pointed not to the mechanism of boundary-making, but rather to the strategies used to cover-up this work: the use of labels of strangeness and nomadism. Posturing as stranger and nomad thus serves as a cloaking device for the distinction-making that is at the heart of academic (and political) work, by positioning those who embrace such labels of otherness in a grey zone, beyond social codes. Furthermore, this discourse too often involves a claim to a better view of the state of things, because of this marginal standpoint. Nothing more than a healthy dose of reflexivity is needed to distinguish between the flaneur and the vagrant, between the uprooted refugee and the academic suffering from too-frequent jetlag. Yet, bemoaned Pels, this stance is accepted uncritically all too often, with the possible consequences of trivilisation of the state of those who are displaced and beset with exclusion, rather than willed (upward) mobility.
These discussions of the strategies for boundary-making, of the risks and perils of standing inside and/or outside have focused on the local and temporary nature of positions; a scholarly past does not preclude an activist future, and vice-versa. But certainly each of these decisions creates new tensions even as it resolves others. A quilt is not stretched out on a woodden frame for nothing: only through preventing one corner from being pulled more than the others is a proper pique achieved. While parallels may be drawn between the aesthetics of such a series and the activity of quilt-making, the nature of academic discussion precludes claims of completion, though, hopefully, not of usefulness.