On the occasion of the publication of: ‘A Vital Rationalist. Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem’, edited by François Delaporte, with an introduction by Paul Rabinow and a critical bibliography by Camille Limoges. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. MIT Press, 1994.
*The worst bit is the self assuredness. Canguilhem’s writing is severe and calm. Sharp and authoritative. He’s a doctor. One story follows the next. A case is unravelled, then another. Get into the details. And then there’s his diagnosis, each of his words a final word. The sentences sound as if they seek to incorporate history. And to transcend it. This is a breathtaking rationality - but, and this is exceptional, not one that denies pain. Even pain is included.
*An essay review? I am to write an essay review of A Vital Rationalist. Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem, a volume with translations of fifteen of Canguilhem’s texts from French into English. But I can’t. I do not want to. How ever to judge this work - which is about the very act of judging, about handling norms. It tells that pointing out error in what went before, is what finding truth is all about. But escaping from that place can hardly be done by calling it error, can it?
*Canguilhem knows what a science is. “If medicine has attained the status of a science, it did so in the era of bacteriology. A practice is scientific if it provides a model for the solution of problems and if that model gives rise to effective therapies. Such was the case with the development of serums and vaccines. A second creation of scientificity is the ability of one theory to give rise to another capable of explaining why its predecessor possessed only limited validity.” (p.146) So. That’s how it is. And he knows so much more.
*Is writing down questions a sin? Must writing be affirmative, ordering a chaos that will retreat to the fringes of what is articulated?
*The attractive side is that there’s so much about objects. The big guys of the Vienna-Cambridge philosophy of science tradition were obsessed with method. They wanted guarantees for the trustworthiness of science. And therefore transformed the characteristics of a nineteenth century gentleman into something that had to be as impersonal as possible. Method. The obsession was so strong that even their enemies got caught up in it. The enemies denied that method can ever distinguish real science, because (1) all methods can be productive in their time - which implies we do not need to hold on to a single method (2) that methods do not guarantee or demarcate anything at all since they leak and (3) that methods are not used anyway but reconstructed afterwards.
Method doesn’t keep the social world out of the scientific domain - science is social. Good. All right. Take your constructivism and run. But then. What about the world that’s made? What about the quarks and the genes and the pain? It is at this point that a moderate dose of Canguilhem may help.
*Be careful. Especially those in crisis (and who isn’t after having lost so many of the certainties they were raised with?) might be in danger of succumbing to his voice. A father? A schoolteacher? Philosopher, doctor. Man.
*About objects. The Comptian pyramid holds the promise that knowledge of the smallest particles at its base may - once - help to explain events in the higher, more complicated layers. (Some in STS turn this around. They dream that the most complicated layer, which they call society, helps to explain small particles - or at least the non-methodological production of scientific knowledge about them.)
Canguilhem shows that there are cleavages in the pyramid. And loops.
Cleavages: biochemistry may talk about macro-molecules, but it cannot understand disease. Some mutations are adaptive, others lethal. Since survival, illness and death happen to a living organism in its surroundings, biochemistry can never understand that. Loops: the physicist may dream of explaining life. But at some point, inevitably, he, the physicist, as a person, a body, will suffer illness. Death.
*Canguilhem writes history. With judgements. He hands out credit, takes it away. Meanwhile concentrating on the way objects are framed. On the concepts delineating them. No, Descartes didn’t come up with the concept ‘reflex’. For in the body Descartes described, the sense that ascends from senses to brain was different in nature to the instructions that descend from brain to muscles. This makes the analogy with a mirror that reflects a light beam inconceivable. It only became conceivable at the moment Willis described anima spiritualis that do ascend, reflect and descend again. Willis: a vitalist, who talked about anima spiritualis. Thus, Canguilhem writes, an ideology, vitalism, may produce science. But the theory of the reflex only became scientific a long time after Willis, when the spirits were chased away while the reflex remained.
*That’s his desire. To be subtle in his judgements. To redistribute credits. To look for the good in the bad and vice versa. But then there’s the verdict. And that’s the end of it.
*Social scientists talk endlessly about the boundaries between ‘machines’ and ‘people’. They forget about bodies. They forget they have bodies. And if they mention the body, it is usually in some psychoanalytic erotic version. No beating hearts, bleeding wounds, coding genes.
*Canguilhem puts bodies in the center. He writes about life. About life and the life sciences. Their specificity. “At all levels, biologists have identified ordering structures that, while generally reliable, sometimes fail. The concept of normality is intended to refer to these ordering structures. No such concept is needed in the epistemology of physics.” (p. 215)
Canguilhem doesn’t believe that after Kant a philosopher could ever hope to write about objects directly. He makes the detour into the sciences. It isn’t Canguilhem who knows what life is. The life sciences do. Canguilhem writes their history as a history of the shifting delineations of their objects.
*And Canguilhem writes the history of the norms by which to judge the sciences, too. Even norms don’t fall under the jurisdiction of philosophers. A science creates its own normativity. Objects, methods and norms are intertwined. (They can be pointed out. By Canguilhem, the historian, the epistemologist. This is the object, not that. This the method to study it and the norm that distinguishes good from bad science at that time. No doubt about it.) Writing the history of science is, according to Canguilhem, different from writing other histories precisely because of the normativity of the scientific project. Because science is about breaking with error, and establishing norms, its history cannot be neutral.
But Canguilhem doesn’t write Whiggish history - the present wasn’t what the past was aiming at from its very beginning. History could have taken a different course. And yet for Canguilhem writing history begins in the present. It is not just anything in the past that is of interest to the epistemological historian, but only those things that are steps - errors, findings - towards the present.
*Not Whiggish but starting from the present all the same. Canguilhem’s writing is bereft of many of the dichotomies familiar to those whose education largely consisted of reading books in English.
As a Dutch student of philosophy at the end of the seventies, I was taught Popper-Lakatos-Kuhn. But being Dutch (and a student of medicine, too) allowed me to read Canguilhem in French. What a relief it was. How subtle. How many words that opened up the body of medicine and made it analysable.
Disillusion came in the early eighties when I went to study in France. There this rebellious author appeared to be severe. He wasn’t undermining the foundations of science, but laying foundations. They were merely different ones. What will be the reading experience of others (Scandinavian, Japanese, American) whose language skills only allow them to read Canguilhem in this English translation, now, years later, after so much iconoclastic work has been done? I cannot tell. Try, if you want to.
*Canguilhem even attends to materialities, to the very experimental set ups of the life sciences he studies. And he relates these to the societal content of the questions they must solve. “Did the technique of in vitro culture of explanted cells (…) offer experimental proof that the structure of the organism is an analogue of liberal society?” (p. 300) The answer is negative. For while Canguilhem carefully explains how analogy was used as a method in the life sciences of the nineteenth century, he also shows the limits of this method. Society and bodies are different objects.
In vitro cultures do not tell us what organisms have been all along, they create something new. They make ‘organic elements’ that didn’t exist before. “An organic element can be called an element only in its undissociated sate.” (p.300) In its associated state, an organism isn’t a set of separate elements, linked up. It’s an organised whole.
*The body and society are different. “For an organism, organization is a fact; for a society, organization is a goal.” (p. 302)
It comes back again and again. A body isn’t a physico-chemical assemblage of elements because it is organised. And the organisation of a body isn’t like the organisation of a society. Both organisations are characterised by norms. But the body lives its own normality. Each organism may deviate from all others, but as long as it maintains some norm or other, there is organisation, and the organism lives. When no norms are maintained there is chaos and chaos is death. In a society norms aren’t given, they are actively set. They may be altered, too.
Normalisation: making order by setting norms. Everyone and everything that doesn’t live up to the norms, ends up at the fringes. The chaotic unconcious that is constantly created and respressed. Norms are concomitant with order.
*You’ve read Foucault? Then you knew this story.
*Canguilhem, as a philosopher of medicine, defends the lived suffering of patients against objective data. He defends clinical medicine against the outcomes of laboratory measurement. It is not because a number is deviant, that the patient suffers. It is because there are patients who suffer, that we built laboratories. And call them in.
“The abnormal, being the a-normal, logically follows the definition of the normal. It is a logical negation. But it is the priority of the abnormal that attracts the attention of the normative, that calls forth a normative decision and provides an opportunity to establish normality through the application of a norm. A norm that has nothing to regulate is nothing because it regulates nothing. The essence of a norm is its role. Thus practically and functionally the normal is the operational negation of a state which thereby becomes the logical negation of that state; the abnormal, though logically posterior to the normal, is functionally first.” (p. 383)
*The question is this. Reader. Canguilhem follows biology and medicine judgementally. Finding errors makes him come up with norms. But if one leaves the judgements out, what happens? We might try. For after so many years that we, in STS, have anthropologised method, have looked into the way facts are produced, we might try this. To anthropologise objects. Life. Bodies. To look at what’s produced in practive. What is sustained, what altered. To look not into mechanisms (associations, translations) but into products. What is made. Objects.
Canguilhem defends the clinical assesment of disease against that of the lab. Anthropologising disease, would imply suspending judgements about clinic and lab in order to study how they work and relate in practice. In detail. When and where do doctors currently take complaints as their lead? What precise role do they give to laboratory numbers? Where do pain and numbers clash? That is: where does the way pain and numbers are handled clash? And what is the interdependence between them? Links, gaps, resonances, analogies, shifts, struggles.
*To judge is not an error. It is no mistake. It can be done, and in current medicine a defence of the clinic against the lab isn’t such a bad move, either. But what does postponing judgement yield? What is there to learn? The reality, not of the body as it should be known, but that of the body as it is practiced.
What are bodies made to be in the hospital around the corner? Go and take a look. Beating hearts make graphs and graphs make heartbeats. Wounds bleed, are closed, covered with cloth. Genetic codes are read from long printouts. Diseases attributed to the codes. Patients scream. They tell a story. Series of blood sugar values are scribled down in files. Doses of insulin are increased, decreased, adapted. Vessels opened up, stripped clean. All this. And a lot more.
*All criticism is partial: “theoretical themes survive even after critics are pleased to think that the theories associated with them have been refuted.” (p. 177) No doubt some of Canguilhem’s theoretical themes are still alive. In different guises. They might even go through a revival in the work of those who do not know what science is. Non-doctors. Non-philosophers. Non-teachers. Non-fathers. Non-men.
(Thanks to Marianne de Laet for the immediacy of her reactions. Thanks to John Law for his help with the language.)
With this contribution we want to join the theoretical discussion about shifting contents and new perspectives in the social studies of science. Despite all its differences, the social studies of science once shared a coherent perspective, namely to relate the knowledge content of science to social factors.
From the very beginning, a strong emphasis had been put on the social construction of science. Meanwhile, however, “constructivism” as a methodological and theoretical device is slowly disappearing. Michael Lynch, in his recent book states a “crisis in relativist and constructivist studies” (1993: 103), and for Karin Knorr-Cetina “constructivism … is not … a world view or a life-time occupation.” Therefore she presumes that “there will be a time when it is more useful to take the questions and run from constructivism” (1993: 561-562). Others, like Andrew Pickering (1992) and Bruno Latour (1987), simply do not mention the term “constructivism” any longer in their book indices.
The term “social” is even more contested. Especially in empirical studies on scientific practice and in the actor-network approach a sharp criticism of social biases in previous science studies is put forward. Our argument with regard to this heated debate is threefold:
First, we will give a brief introduction to basic assumptions and common features of those science studies, which claim to have overcome what Andrew Pickering, Bruno Latour and others call “sociological reductionism”.
Second, we will draw attention to the inherent limitations of the post-sociological alternatives presented. Apart from the problem that the constitution of single phenomena has to be taken for granted, the question remains open, how all the observed phenomena and their outputs are related to each other if not by cognitive and social factors. Third, we will show that the shift towards practice and the actor- network approach are, despite their claimed newness, a direct consequence of the limited and rather metaphorical use of social theory, which characterize the social studies of science in general.
Basic assumptions and common features of recent science studies One main objective of the present studies is to focus on all dimensions of scientific research. Therefore the traditional limitation to social dimensions seems to be too narrow. Entities which previously were neglected are included in the analysis. See, e.g., Ian Hacking: “I am not to argue for idealism but for a rather down-to-earth materialism. Mine is a thesis about the relationships between thoughts, acts, and manufactures” (1992: 30).
The so-called shift towards scientific practice focuses on the amount of equipment and technology, which is relevant in a laboratory setting and which is taken as an actively shaping part of scientific research. As a consequence, equipment and technology are regarded as a cause for the production of scientific knowledge in the same way as the scientists` cognitive contributions. Karin Knorr- Cetina, for example, has even emphasized in a case study on particle physics: “The production, measurement and description of the relevant particles takes place in an integrated way in the inside of the apparatus. The surrounding “laboratory” (in quotation marks) is the service station for the machine, which is the true laboratory” (1988: 328-329). In a similar vein, Andrew Pickering tries to attribute a constitutive role to the material world in science. Scientific results are then seen as inherently shaped by what he calls “maneuvers in the field of material agency” (1993: 581).
A second emerging trend can be identified in the actor-network approach of the Paris School. Bruno Latour, its most prominent representative, aims at blurring the boundaries of the distinction between the social, on the one side, and technology and nature on the other side. These a priori distinctions have to be substituted, since a network is composed of different actors and their interactions, all of which contribute to its strength or weakness. As a consequence, microbes are introduced as new social actors (1988a: 35 ff.), scallops are understood as beings with ends (1988a: 167), and even “reflexion” is transfered to nonhuman living beings and technical artefacts (1988b: 173).
To sum up, both developments have a common objective. Namely, the complete representation of the interactions of single components. However, this ambitious modification causes two conceptual problems: First, the constitution of each of these components usually is taken for granted. It remains implicit why microbes are not treated as a result of molecular processes, and why technical artefacts are not broken into single subcomponents like nuts and bolts. The second problem refers to the question how the components relate to each other. This is grounded in the claim that the approach avoids to consider technology and nature only as a function of human activities.
This stands in sharp contrast to the former social constructivist dogma, where causal priority was assigned to the social. As a consequence, these older science studies focused on the social shaping of nature and technology. No matter whether society as a whole or local thought collectives of single research groups were considered to be relevant, in each case social contexts were assumed to be the location where not only the negotiation of scientific results takes place, but also the production of technology and the definition of nature. Hence, social reality served as a key to open up all other phenomena and their relationship to each other. This perspective has been abandoned.
Limitations of the shift towards practice and the actor-network approach
Recent science studies document directly visible phenomena. Each component is taken as an independent factor. Single components are interesting only as far as they produce material outcomes. Internal characteristics of single components are left out of consideration in the same way as those relations between them which lie beneath the surface.
Such a material and outcome-oriented perspective could have been integrated by a physical theory of science, focussing exclusively on movements, emissions and noise of scientists and other components. Instead key terms of the social sciences, like agency, actor and interaction, reappear and are employed for the description of single components and their relation to each other. Cognitive dimensions like intention and reflection are ascribed in the same way. These concepts are no longer limited to the analysis of scientists and the relations between them, but transferred to all visible phenomena - computers, detectors, and microbes. Unfortunately, they are employed in an ad hoc and arbitrary manner, without careful consideration of the rules and obstacles of such transformation, or of the repercussions on the content of the concept involved.
Two examples illustrate this point: First, in a completely desocialized definition of action, the relevant dimensions of intention and meaning as well as normative and cultural aspects, are sacrificed in order to treat all observable entities in the same manner. As a consequence, scientists do research in the same way as the sun shines, planes fly, taps drip water and test-tubes break. Second, also the underlying concept of interaction is an extremely reductionist one. Aspects which lie beneath the surface and which can be reconstructed only from an internal point of view, like the process-character of interaction and the mutual structures of meaning and expectation within the interaction, are sacrificed. As a consequence, not only can scientists interact with computers but a toaster can interact with a piece of toast.
The symmetrical consideration of all kinds of phenomena is common ground for the post-sociology of science. Beyond that, there are differences. While those who advocate the shift towards scientific practice pursue an empiricist ideal, Latour`s actor- network approach is characterized by theoretical and ethical aspirations. In a brutishly anticonstructivist manner networks are treated as an objective structure, and Latour can present himself as its legitimate and independent speaker. His language contains both: an excessive use of terms borrowed from social theory and, correspondingly, a devaluation of the content of these terms. The implications have been shown above.
Social reductionisms in the Social Studies of Science
The shortcomings of post-sociological science studies have also been discussed by others. Some critics even have argued for a return to the more traditional paths of the social studies of science (Collins/Yearley 1992 a,b). Our point is that this will not suffice, since the problems experienced now - namely the lack of a theory which allows for an understanding of how things are structured and processed - can be traced back to the core assumptions of the social studies of science. Therefore, continuation, not revolution should be the right term to characterize the development. Though less obvious and hidden by an excessive use of social metaphors, the former approaches were already characterized by a very narrow understanding of the social dimensions in science.
Shortcomings with regard to the social dimensions are characteristic of the two perhaps most influential, but entirely different schools in the social studies of science, namely the strong programme and the ethnomethodological approach. The strong program started with the social environment, which was supposed to determine science (Bloor 1976, Barnes 1977). Here, social dimensions were reduced to broader societal interests without specifying the mechanisms which transform these external forces into the social structures and processes of science. In contrast, the ethnomethodological approach by Knorr-Cetina (1981) and Lynch (1985) started with individual scientists. Here, social dimensions in science were reduced to scientists’ negotiations. Science now appeared to be like an unstructered vacuum, without a past and without a future.
While the ethnomethodological approach by Knorr-Cetina (1981) and Lynch (1985) had at least an idea of the dynamics of social interaction, Latour and Woolgar (1979) in their book on “Laboratory Life” employed an entirely desocialized concept of human action and interaction. The main unit of analysis, individual actors, was conceptualized as nothing but strategically operating and manipulating entities. Though the study is subtitled “The social construction of scientific facts”, common features of social constructivism like routines and habits, collective belief systems, and processes of integration and identity formation (Berger/ Luckmann 1967) seem to be of minor importance. Likewise, all kinds of symbolic dimensions (Douglas 1982, Goffman 1967) were neglected. Instead, their oversimplified and reductionist model of man allowed for the observation of the scientists’ actions and interactions as if they were automata, programmed to pursue their individual interest. From this point of view, the social character of knowledge production is reduced to aggregate outcomes - of human actors. This leads rights back to recent trends in the social studies of science. The purified concept of action as employed by Latour/Woolgar (1979) can be - and apparently has been - transferred plainly to all kinds of entities, regardless of whether they are human. As a consequence, men, machines and microbes likewise appear as acting entitities. All differences disappear, and everything becomes possible in the new, enriched world of science studies.
References
Barnes, B., 1977: Interests and the Growth of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Berger, P.L./ Luckmann, T., 1967: The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday.
Bloor, D., 1976: Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Collins, H.M./Yearley S., 1992a: Epistemological Chicken, in: Pickering, A., ed., Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 301-326.
Collins, H.M./Yearley, S., 1992b: Journey into Space, in: Pickering, A., ed., Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 369-389.
Douglas, M., 1982: Cultural Bias, in: Douglas, M., ed., In the Active Voice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 183-254.
Goffman, E., 1967: Interaction Ritual. Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior. Chicago: Aldine.
Hacking, I., 1992: The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences, in: Pickering, A., ed., Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 29-65.
Knorr-Cetina, K., 1981: The Manufacture of Knowledge. An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford: Pergamon.
Knorr-Cetina, K., 1988: Laboratorien: Instrumente der Weltkonstruktion, in: Hoyningen-Huene, P./Hirsch, G., eds., Wozu Wissenschaftsphilosophie? Positionen und Fragen in gegenwŠrtiger Wissenschaftsphilosophie. Berlin: de Gruyter, 315-344.
Knorr-Cetina, K., 1993: Strong Constructivism - from a Sociologist’s Point of View: A Personal Addendum to Sismondo’s Paper, Social Studies of Science 23: 555-563.
Latour, B., 1987: Science in Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B., 1988a: The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B., 1988b: The Politics of Explanation: an Alternative, in: Woolgar, S., ed., Knowledge and Reflexivity. London: Sage, 155-177.
Latour, B./Woolgar, S., 1979: Laboratory Life. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Lynch, M., 1985: Art and Artefact in Laboratory Science. A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Lynch, M., 1993: Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action. Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pickering, A., ed., 1992: Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pickering, A., 1993: The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science, American Journal of Sociology 99: 559-589.
Science and technology studies is a curious field of inquiry. While it purports to be integrative, drawing on disciplinary analysis in history, philosophy, sociology, political science, economics, innovation and management studies, psychology, literary and textual analysis, cultural studies, anthropology (and maybe even more), it had better be seen as oriented toward its subject matter, science and technology and their roles in society. Whatever seems relevant to the subject can be taken up, and a certain looseness of method may well go with such an open-ended approach.
The avowed roles of science and technology scholars are linked up with the nature of our field: a mixture of distantiated analysis and a strong engagement with our subject matter, science and technology. This runs from intellectual engagement with the icons of rationality and modernity, and an interest in the broad sweep of history with science and technology as integral factors, to a sense of mission, defending or criticizing progress as it is predicated on the continuing role of science and technology. In both cases, we are modernists, and partake in the modernism of science and technology, as well as the complementary modernism of social science. Sometimes, the sense of mission is put up front, and contrasted with distantiated analysis. One of my aims in this paper is to replace such a sense of mission with a reflective or ironic engagement with our subject matter, science and technology and their role in society.
I will start with diagnosing our field as being better at micro- and meso-analysis than at macro-analysis and tracing long-term transformations. This can be seen as a strength: we are better at something; but also as a weakness, when we limit ourselves to it, or fragment ourselves in endless case studies. In any case, it is certain that we have achieved something that we can build upon, if we want to. With the benefit of the micro-studies of the last 15 years, we are in a position to see and understand how patterns and structures emerge and stabilize. It is not necessary anymore to just posit structures.
This detour through the micro is what constructivism is all about, I would argue. True, constructivism (and especially social constructivism, as it was called for some time) has been pre- occupied with demolishing naive views about science and technology, and has been distracted into polemics about relativism, machiavellism, and “epistemological chicken.” While one may have to destroy before one can build, I prefer to put my efforts into what I call, for emphasis, constructive constructivism.
Still, one can be hesitant about the turn to the micro, as it swept our field. Isn’t there a contrast with the interest in the broad sweep of history and the integral role of science and technology in it, that engages us? Does the focus on the micro indicate a loss of engagement? The recent debates about the loss of the normative in science and technology studies revolve around this question, but it is too easy to just call for more engagement. The real question is what kind of engagement is in order, intellectual and otherwise.
To address this question, I will offer a further diagnosis of our field, as well as use my own and others’ work in the area of constructive technology assessment (CTA) as an occasion to explore varieties of engagement.
The move towards the meso- and micro-level of analysis is not a matter of intellectual fashion among an inward-looking community of science and technology scholars. It reflects the evolving nature of their subject matter (immediately or with some time lag). Science, definitely, and technology to some extent, have become differentiated and somewhat separated subsystems of society.
Especially after the second world war, science, as the “Endless Frontier,” became a quasi-autonomous activity, and its disciplines and specialties proliferated, and became subject of attention of science managers and science scholars alike. Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms and their related scientific communities opened up a field of specialty studies in the 1970s, which continues until today. There is a continuity between the 1950s interest in scientific creativity as one aspect of scientific practice, and the laboratory ethnographies of the late 1970s onwards. All are predicated on the existence of a quasi-autonomous scientific community. The shift is very clear in the contrast between the work of Merton in the 1930s and 1940s, where scientific values and norms were linked with emerging or threatened contracts between science and society, and his work in the 1960s, where the same norms were used to explain the inner workings of the scientific community.
Technology is a much more heterogeneous domain, but one can see a similar movement in the treatment of technology by economists, from a ‘residual’ in the analysis of productivity growth, to its partial un-blackboxing in Nelson and Winter’s and Pavitt’s sectoral analyses, and in the rise of detailed contextual histories of technologies in the same period (1970s and 1980s). In my perspective, this is related to a growing interest in technology as such, as reflected in innovation competition and the emergence of explicit technology policies in the same period.
In the 1980s and 1990s, re-integration of science and technology occurs. Science is scrutinized for its relevance, scientists become active in society, disciplines interact and fuse into new combinations; science and technology become integrated in ‘strategic’ science and technology, and link up with expectations in policy and in society. In addition, scientific and technological development is becoming reflexive: scientists and technologists, as well as science and technology policy makers (note that the concepts of science policy and technology policy, themselves an indicator of a reflexive attitude, are recent: in the case of science, of the 1960s, and in the case of technology, of the 1980s), have become interested in and knowledgeable about the nature of science and technology and the dynamics of their development. The concept of ‘paradigm’ is now regularly used in scientific conversation and in discussions about awarding grants and shaping science policy. Insights in the dynamics of technological developments are taken up in policy documents. Nelson and Winter’s evolutionary model of variations and selection environment, for example, has shaped the text as well as the thinking of the 1989 innovation policy memorandum in the Netherlands.
Neither scientists and technologists, nor science and technology policy makers are naive any more. At least, they need not be naive, if they reflect on what is happening. Of course, as actors, they will be focussed on their situation, their problems, and their interests, and not necessarily be interested in the more general insights from science and technology studies. They may even be right in neglecting these insights, if these have been developed for internal purposes of the community, and/or focus on aspects of science and technology that are no longer important.
If we want to follow our subject matter, science and technology, we should turn to the macro and the long-term again, but with the benefit of the detour through the micro. This allows us a better perspective on the vicissitudes of what is happening with science and technology. In addition, we should have more respect for the insights that reflexive practitioners of science and technology come up with. The contributions from such practitioners, with a lot of experience in science and technology, have always been important in our field, especially if they seriously turn to science and technology studies. John Ziman is a good example here. By now, almost all scientists and technologists have lost their naivet. They may still be biased, according to our cosmopolitan standards, but we might sometimes learn from them, instead of assuming that they should learn from us.
My two diagnoses of the field of science and technology studies have led me to indicate an agenda for further work. I also noted that the role of the science and technology scholar could be changing: the nature of the engagement with the subject matter can be further articulated. Specifically, I would argue that we need not depend on the sympathetic understanding of scientists, technologists, and policy makers only to insert science and technology studies in the real world of science and technology. Recent experiences with constructive technology assessment allow me to develop this point.
Constructive technology assessment (CTA), born of the renewed interest in TA in the 1980s, is not a mature area yet by any means. In a recent book, we speak of a paradigm, but only in the sense that exemplary achievements are recognized and are being articulated. The basic idea is to shift the focus of TA away from assessing fully articulated technologies, and introduce anticipation of technology impacts at an early stage in the development. Actors within the world of technology become an important target group then, but the insight of recent technology studies - that impacts are co-produced in the implementation and diffusion stages - implies that technology actors are not the only ones to be involved. Within the world of technology, the preferred strategy for CTA is to broaden the aspects and the actors that are taken into account. More generally, one should work towards societal learning in handling, and sometimes managing, technology in society.
Interestingly, within the world of technology de facto CTA, in the sense of broadening of aspects and actors, is increasing. The attempts at concurrent (or simultaneous) engineering, where product development, production, implementation and marketing are worked on in parallel, instead of sequentially, are sometimes extended to include work on social acceptance and adoption. This happens emphatically in the biotechnological firms, which have encountered legitimation and acceptance problems that they could not solve by traditional means. It is also in biotechnology (and in telematics and for environmental aspects) that consumers have become interested in a CTA which is consumer-oriented.
From the beginning, CTA emphasized the necessity of insight in, and analysis of, the dynamics of technological development and how technology gets embedded in society. It drew on science and technology studies, and was able to paint a persuasive picture, in spite of the fragmented nature of the field. By now, one can also see the benefits of the detour through the micro: the emphasis on contingency, on seamless webs has led to various theories about how patterns, technologies, and socio-technical orders are constructed. The key point for CTA is that a collusion of actors and factors is needed to have a reliable and otherways “good” technology. And here technology should be recognized as working at more than one level: from the ‘immutable mobiles’ (to use Bruno Latour’s felicitous phrase) to sociotechnical orders and the ‘landscape’ of our society.
Science and technology studies are important for CTA, and in two ways. First, to critically articulate and strengthen the analytic and intellectual basis of CTA; this fits our role as science and technology scholars. Second, to do the specific analysis and often also articulate some advice necessary for concrete CTA projects; here, we must assume a professional role, which we are less used to. The experience of CTA is an example, and in my view, an inspiration for a broader role of science and technology scholars.
When the world of science and technology itself is becoming broader, integrative, and more reflexive, the role of science and technology scholars must change as well. In any case, the opportunities for interaction increase, and collaborative efforts with actors in the world of science and technology become a real possibility. Let me give you an example from an ongoing CTA study (on product development in biotechnology firms).
A recurrent phenomenon is the asymmetric alignment that one associates with technology push, and often corrective action at a later stage (or just luck) is necessary to create the collusion of actors and factors necessary for a “good” technology. How is this possible in a world where planning, management and market orientation are keywords? Let me make a little detour. Michel Callon introduced the notion of an ‘actor world’, a scenario of a new world around a proposed technology (say, the electric vehicle in France). Actors proposing a new technology or development of a new product present a diffuse scenario of the benefits and some of the barriers that have to be overcome. It is an actor world in which the co-production of impacts is not specified yet, even if some of the positive effects are already claimed. When the proposal is accepted and development work starts, very little attention is given to the diffuse scenario. It remains unarticulated, unless something happens that obstructs progress or is otherwise seen as a barrier to be overcome. The point of CTA is that one should articulate the diffuse scenario in parallel to the internal development work, and gradually fill in the actor world. The processes of co-production of impacts is envisaged, and partially implemented at the same time. Here, in this extension of concurrent engineering, the science and technology scholar has an important contribution to make, mobilizing general understanding, doing specific studies, and involving himself in the development over time.
Here, we have a clear example of what I would call the professional service role: there is identification with the problem of the client, but critical contributions based on the professional competence (here, of science and technology scholars) remain in order. This is even necessary, if the science and technology scholar is to provide added value to what actors themselves can do already.
The example is specifically relevant for work on CTA, but other examples of professional service that I have encountered can be phrased in more general terms. That science and technology studies have something to offer that the actors in the world of science and technology cannot produce themselves, can be shown in at least two ways. One is because science and technology studies, when offering concepts like path dependency, or co-production, or paradigm, helps practitioners in ‘naming’, i.e. using a name (a concept, a label) to mobilise one’s own and others’ experience and items from the literature to understand one’s own situation better and derive action strategies. The other value-added benefit is that of ‘circulation’: science and technology scholars can move about as observers and aggregators of data, while actors cannot, because their movement will be as a player, and encounter strategic reactions.
In offering these examples of professional service drawn from my work in CTA, I am arguing that the role of the science and technology scholar can and should be broadened. In addition to intellectual engagement, and the sense of mission, a third component turns out to be viable: professional service.
In conclusion, I would argue that my diagnosis of the field of science and technology studies should lead to action, and that my articulation of the role of the science and technology scholar should be seen as generally applicable, not just to CTA.
Macro and long-term studies are necessary, not just because we should cover all aspects of our domain, but also because the increasing importance of these aspects in the present world in which science and technology play an integral role. It is, in addition, the only way to overcome our helpless feeling with respect to big issues like the situation of less developed countries and their increasingly dependent situation; now, we address the issues out of sympathy rather than analytically.
The small scale of most academic work, however, and especially so in institutionally marginal areas like science and technology studies, is not conducive to concerted attempts to broach bigger questions. One or more consortia, like the political scientists in Europe created more than ten years ago, might be the way to go. In addition, I know that interesting work in our field is already being done in non-university contexts, and I suspect that this will expand. If productive alliances can be formed, and if the intellectual goals can be maintained, a major move forward could be made.
The sense of mission, which is such a pervasive feature in our field and structures our questions and approaches, would profit from the more detailed underpinning that macro and long-term studies would provide. Too often, the mission is put up front, and derives from a position (critical or otherwise) which is not articulated in interaction with concrete studies — exactly similar to the modernist push of scientists and technologists which makes them neglect the articulation of their diffuse scenario about the wonderful world they will help create. I am not arguing for a quasi- neutral approach. The sense of mission should be retained, but it should not be separated from intellectual and scholarly engagement, and be part of a more interactive, sometimes collaborative effort which I discussed under the label ‘professional service.’ So let us remain modernist, by all means, but it must be a reflexive modernism.
I am not arguing that every individual scholar in science and technology studies should be a reflexive modernist. One may very well concentrate on one of the three components that make up the reflexive modernist stance. But it should be a positive choice, in full recognition of the need for all three of them, rather than a dismissal of the other components as irrelevant, or bad. Ideally, the three components should inform and improve each other. Individual scholars like Helga Nowotny and Brian Wynne have done so in their work, and could be taken as role models.
While I have argued my case with the help of examples from technology studies and technology assessment, it would be equally possible to take the study of scientific and engineering practices, or the study of science policy, or the study of controversies, and come up with the same points: the need to add macro and long-term studies (and seeing the first signs of such a movement), and the possibility of a productive combination of three ways to engage with our subject matter, as an intellectual, missionary, and professional, especially now that the world of science and technology is becoming more reflexive. So science and technology studies can and should move with their subject matter, following its evolution, and be engaged with it.
Notes
The existence of the Society for Social Studies of Science in the USA, in parallel to various disciplinary societies for the study of science and/or technology, and the nature of its activities, can prove my point. While the field of science and technology studies has come into its own since the late 1960s, its history is usually taken to start in the 1920s, and I will follow this usage. Thus, the critical movement of the 1960s has helped shape the field, but is not its source.
A similar point was made by Aant Elzinga in EASST Newsletter 13(1) (March 1994), at p. 10. Note that I (much more than Aant Elzinga) here concentrate on the core of science and technology studies, as it becomes visible in the scholarly journals, conferences, and scholarly societies. Things are different elsewhere, in what we consider as periphery (but are cores in their own right). It is for the core of science and technology studies that my diagnosis of the focus on micro, and my later points about constructivism and the detour through the micro, holds.
See Hans Radder, ‘Normative Reflexions on Constructivist Approaches to Science and Technology,’ Social Studies of Science 22 (1992) 141-173, and Richard Rogers’s report on a lecture series on `The Normative Quandary in Science and Technology Studies’ in EASST Newsletter 13 (2) (1994) 17-22.
The so-called Brooks Report, Science, Growth, and Society. A New Perspective (Paris: OECD, 1971), is generally considered to mark the transition. Subsequent developments are discussed and analysed in Susan E. Cossens et al. (eds.), The Research System in Transition (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990).
Arie Rip, Tom Misa, Johan Schot (eds.), Managing Technology In Society. The Approach of Constructive Technology Assessment (London: Pinter Publishers, forthcoming, 1995). The book is based on the third Twente Workshop in Technology Studies, September 1991.
Think of the path-dependency theories, evolutionary and quasi-evolutionary theories, and the “Borodino”-type theories (after H. Rom Harré, ‘Images of the world and societal icons,’ in Karin D. Knorr, Herman Strasser, and Hans-Georg Zilian (eds.), Determinants and Controls of Scientific Development (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975) 257-283) including the recent interest in expectations and stories (Harro Van Lente, Promising Technology (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Twente, 1993), Bryan Pfaffenberger, ‘Technological Dramas,’ Science, Technology & Human Values 17 (3) (1992) 282-312).).
One example is the work of Johan Schot, who combines contextual history of technology, socio-economic theory of technological development, management- and policy-oriented studies, with an attempt to position CTA intellectually (in his view, as a present-day Luddism).
Michel Callon, ‘The Sociology of an Actor-Network: The Case of the Electric Vehicle,’ in Michel Callon, John Law, Arie Rip, Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology. Sociology of Science in the Real World (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), 19-34.
So I am not talking about the “jobbing” that is sometimes required by policy makers and other actors commissioning science and technology studies. This can run from simplistic data collection jobs, to “appeals to social scientists to help lubricate the public acceptability of science and technological change.” I quote Howard Newby, ‘One society, one Wissenschaft: a 21st century vision,’ Science and Public Policy 19 (1) (Feb. 1992) 7-14, at p. 11, because his overall theme is very relevant to my discussion: “.. social science is an integral, not merely a marginal, activity in understanding the process whereby scientific excellence and technological innovation may lead to economic and social well being. There remain formidable obstacles to achieving this integration.” (summary, p. 7).
The notion of `naming’ is drawn from Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner. How professionals think in action (Basic Books, 1983). Here, I am not interested in the cognitive aspect, but in the way ‘naming’ locates situations, problems, options in the landscape of our society as reconstructed by science and technology studies. There is an intriguing link with Paul Carter’s ideas: “To name [places] is to bring them into cultural circulation.” “…names … are rhetorical lighthouses for getting on” (The Road To Botany Bay. An Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), at p. 28 and p. 9). David Edge pointed out to me the Biblical echoes, including God, being jealous of his power, refusing to be named.
See further my paper Following the actors, moving about … and then? A social theory of social research, extended version of a paper presented to the 4S meeting at Purdue University, 19-21 November 1993.
Ron Giere’s notion of an ‘enlightened postmodern synthesis’ is similar. He starts from the intellectual perspectives in the field (and focusses on the ‘destructive’ version of constructivism), and then calls for a modernist relation between knowledge and policy, the “enlightenment gamble” that knowledge and understanding help, even while we know that things may go wrong. See Ronald N. Giere, ‘Science and Technology Studies: Prospects for an Enlightened Postmodern Synthesis,’ Science, Technology & Human Values 18(1) (Winter 1993) 102-112.
In my own work, I combine intellectual engagement and professional service, and I see myself as an ironist, rather than a modernist.
An ironic reflection by John Ziman
Arie has fitted the key in the lock and tumed it boldly; but the gate needs to be opened wide. We should indeed make a conscious effort to unblock the pathways between science and technology studies and the obscure objects of our attentions. He is right in suggesting that the S&T are being re-integrated and linked more closely with society at large, but that has not made scientists and technologists significantly more knowledgeable about the nature of their work. Oh yes, they have learnt to parry Popperian falsifications with Kuhnian paradigms, but remain as naive as ever in their self analyses. I am a very bad ‘example’ of a reflexive practitioner. Who else was he thinking of? I gave up `practising’ natural science 25 years ago to devote myself fully to STS. The irony here is that I would count myself now with Arie, David Edge, and many other prominent members of our Association, who moved out of science and found their true intellectual home in this field.
Yet I have deep sympathy with the S&T worthies trying desperately to cope with the immoderate demands of society. With only the anecdotal tradition of the academic ethos to guide them, they are improvising erratically at every level of policy. Unfortunately, as Arie points out, the microsociological bias of STS has provided the policy-makers with no new insights about the social structures that they are expected to reform. They know that major changes are inevitable, but they naturally reject advice from scholars who seem intent only on debunking their cherished institutions, practices, and norms. This may be a misreading of the motives of STS experts. Yet even the established social sciences can find little policy guidance in research that mainly demonstrates the logical contradictions and human fallibilities embodied in all S&T - as they are in all forms of social action. Such findings are not only shallow and trite: they are as misguided and offensive as the fabled ethnographer’s report: “Manners none: customs beastly”.
Casting an empathic sociological eye on the manners and customs of S&T folk does not mean going native. Research commissioned by bemused policymakers to answer their own questions throws no light forward into a new era. What is now needed is detailed but independent study of S&T as a peculiar social institution in its own right, with particular attention to the features that differentiate it from other institutions of a similar kind. Those features are not uniquely purposeful, or uniquely successful in achieving these purposes, but they are seen as distinctive by those who are involved with them - including STS scholars themselves when they don their own academic robes.
There is a genuine intellectuel challenge in trying to understand a number of complex practices, such as the peer review of project proposais, that have evolved in and around S&T. These practices are shaped by purposes that are larger than the competing personal interests of those who are caught up in them. The actors themselves are often quite aware of these purposes, but lack the sociological insight required to articulate and explicate them. These could be ‘meso’ and ‘middle range’ rather than ‘macro’ or ‘long-term’ studies, and do not necessarily involve research on a heroic scale. What is important is that their findings should indeed be `named’ - that is, translated into concepts that ordinary scientists and technologists can grasp for themselves and incorporate into their reflexive and constructive practices.
Twenty-five years ago, S&T were carrying all before them. A critical modem mission for STS was appropriate. Nowadays, the whole scientific enterprise is at risk of being taken over by much grosser powers. Ironically, we should now be re-orienting STS towards a postmodem mission of helping S&T to reinvent themselves.
STS: Constructing the Client by Les Levidow
‘He who pays the piper, calls the tune.’
It is right to ask the question, ‘What kind of engagement should STS have?’, rather than assume that it could be neutral. Better yet, we could ask, `What kind of commitment is implied by a particular conceptual framework and terminology?’ In this regard, Arie Rip’s article begs crucial questions or even forecloses them. Here I briefly pose three such questions:
1)Where and what is the ‘constructive’? Often technological innovations encounter political disputes over how society should define the problem which is to be solved. This is because the supposed solution pre-empts the problem-definition, by imposing an implicit model of social relations, human needs, nature, etc. Some CTA approaches have left open these issues for democratic debate among diverse social forces. In Arie Rip’s article, however, such antagonisms disappear; they become flattened into mere dysfunctions, to be avoided through better planning. The task of ‘good’ technology becomes a matter of how to optimize the engineering design for intended users, and how to avoid negative external `impacts’.
2)Whose problems shall STS adopt? Yes, for example, biotechnology faces legitimation problems, which in turn lead innovators to anticipate and shape public attitudes. STS could respond in various ways: we could treat the legitimation problem as a dysfunctional obstacle for policymakers to overcome, or as an opportunity for critics to exploit, or as a topic for supposedly neutral study, etc. When Arie Rip advocates that we identify with ‘the problem of the client’, the implicit clients are high-level policymakers (who were the explicit clients in his Budapest talk). Who shall be the clients for our ‘professional services’? Can a particular STS framework serve all actors equally? Indeed, how shall STS construct `the client?
3) Who will define ‘value added’? Further to the biotechnology example above, industrialists have been developing ‘value-added genetics’, whereby they anticipate the market value of genetic ‘properties’ in order to set their R&D priorites. By analogy, if we are to promote STS as ‘value-added knowledge’, or even to use such terminology, then who decides what kind of analysis is valuable? Who calls the tune? Shall the pipers compose their tune in advance as a commodity?
Anticipating and Intervening by Andrew Barry Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London
The topic of time used to preoccupy historians and philosophers of science. When did modern science begin? What stages did it progress through? When and how did a ‘scientific revolution’ occur? Did science progress steadily through time or was it transformed in a series of radical epistemological breaks? And will scientific progress ever end?
As Arie Rip reminds us a concern with time and, in particular, the ‘long term’ has not marked recent work in science and technology studies. Studies in the sociology of science have, as he notes, been much better at micro-analysis than in tracing long-term transformations. Sociologists of science have sought to situate knowledge production, but the situations that they have analysed have not been temporal but spatial. On the one hand, the sociology of scientific knowledge has been preoccupied with the peculiar spatial locale of the laboratory: its instruments, skills, visual displays, architecture and so on. On the other hand, both economists and sociologists of innovation have emphasised how difficult it is to translate the ‘results’ of laboratory work into the rather different spaces of the outside world. The full implications of this spatial shift in the history and sociology of science have probably yet to be realised.
But if the ‘new’ science and technology studies has led us to recognise the importance of the spatiality of science, what about its temporality? Arie Rip’s paper suggests that we need to rethink the relation between science and time as well or as, he puts it “we should turn to the macro and the long-term again, but with the benefit of the detour through the micro”. In brief, science and technology studies has lost a sense of history.
There is a contemporary political context to this need to consider the question of time. As the paper argues, ‘science and technology’ are no longer granted the autonomy they once were. Instead they are surrounded by an array of institutional and technological mediations: technology assessment and foresight, industry-academic links, research evaluation studies, framework programmes and ethics committees. Rip himself makes the importance of time clear in discussing the notion of Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA). The development of CTA, he notes, involves a significant shift away from the assessment of the past - “fully articulated technologies” to the anticipation of future possibilities and dangers. In my own study of recent European science policy, I observed how the relation between the temporality of technological innovation and the temporality of politics had become an important focus for political and intellectual debate within the European commission. Was it desirable, commission officials asked, to carry out an evaluation study before the start of a research programme? Could the European Commission have a particular role to play in developing a long term strategy for European science and technology policy? What role could prospective studies of science and technology play in informing or in intervening in the political process? And even if it were no langer possible to forecast the future was it nonetheless possible to anticipate what might happen?
In investigating the ‘long term’ we can no longer return to the old models of the history and philosophy of science, just as we cannot return to a Hegelian model of historical change. As Bruno Latour has argued, the traditional categories of the long term in the history of science (such as ‘revolution’, and ‘progress’) need to be understood not as analytical concepts but as tools with which actors have intervened in the historical process.1 Today ideas of revolution may have gone out of fashion but, as Rip points out, concepts such as `path dependency’, ‘co-production’ and ‘paradigm’ are used increasingly by practitioners including, I would add, European Commission officials. His paper suggests that there is a complex route between the way notions of time are employed in science policy and the changing articulation of time in economic and social studies of science. This does not mean that ‘long term’ studies are impossible, but it does mean that analysts need to recognise the significance of intellectual work in defining and intervening in the process of historical change.
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