Comparing Notes, Review of Wissenschaftsforschung by Felt, Nowotny and Taschner
A review of Ulrike Felt, Helga Nowotny, Klaus Taschner, Wissenschaftsforschung. Eine Einfhrung. Reine Campus Studium. Frankfurt/aM band 1085, 1995, 322 seiten, 26DM
by Aant Elzinga
As the subtitle says, this is an introductory text on science and technology studies. As such it has the virtue of defining and locating the field historically and intellectually in a much broader terrain than what we usually find. Apart from the topics that figure prominently in similar books stemming from Anglo-American academic speech comunities, this one tries to do justice also to a number of additional entries. Chief among these are institutional studies, issues of science and technology policy in a critical perspective, and a discussion of the place and conditons of research in the humanities. The latter is a topic put on par with and treated as part of “science studies”. This is natural considering the continental European definition of science as Wissenschaft, whereunder is also included Geisteswissenschaft. This broadening of the scope of the science studies field is welcome and corresponds with recent trends in the policy domain where the humanities are being played up as important dialogue partners with the natural sciences, medicine and engineering (without, for that matter, being able to expect more funding - on the contrary).
In keeping with their broader perspective the authors, who are affiliated with the Department of Theory and Social Studies of Science, also betray their humanistic ambitions and training by bringing to the subject a politically informed, critical and historiographically reflective approach. Touching upon macro- as well as micro-levels of analysis found in the literature, history and philosophy of science, social studies, gender studies and policy studies of science are all brought together under the common umbrella of Wissenschaftsforschung.
This is a term that is difficult to translate. The nearest English-language equivalent might be “Research on research” (which is comparable to the Scandinavian forskning om forskning), or perhaps “science of science”, or even “Science research”. The trouble with the first two is that they are too loaded with technocratic associations of managerial contexts, especially in the former Soviet Union, but also in the West. The third translation is too awkward. The ambition of the authors of this book is moreover anything but technocratic. First and foremost it is one of socially responsible scholarship. Their delimitation of the field is consciously informed by the dual heritage of STS, on the one hand that of the radical or critical science movement, on the other hand that of the more moderate “internalist” and “professionalizing” post-Kuhnian mode of sociology of scientific knowledge and actor network theory with their various conceptual shifts, branches, terminologies and methodologies.
In the very first chapter some of these historical roots and intellectual background features are highlighted, indicating how STS should be understood as part of a progressive, i.e., democratic politico-cultural trend of more than fifty years vintage, especially in Europe but also in the U.S. The historical trajectory charted out goes from Saint Simon, over Marx, Weber, Scheler and Mannheim to a concentration of a number of important events in the 1930s. Included are precursors to scientometrics, Boris Hessen’s delivery at the 2nd History of Science Congress, the emergence of an early notion of science of science in Poland 1936, the work of the Bernalists, and the debate on the steerability of science sparked off by their theses on the social responsibility of and need to plan science. The accent all the way through is on science, not so much on technology. Merton’s identification of a system of norms is taken to reflect a liberal democratic tendency in opposition to totalitarian attacks on science qua institution and enlightenment culture. This history is brought forward through the thick of the Cold War and the McCarthy era up to the advent of 4S and EASST in the mid-1970s. Some readers might want to see something on the German finalization debate included, compared for example to the Bernal-Polanyi debate, contrasting the situation and contexts.
The foregoing account, which is much more detailed and multifarious than what has been sketched here, is in keeping with the authors’ conviction that the function of STS is to contribute to critical historical self-reflection over and in the sciences. This, it is suggested, may be done through three parallel analytical lenses. One is with a focus on the (among other institutional) interplay of science, technology and society broadly speaking, but also yielding specifics amenable to case studies. A second is with focus on societal and cultural conditions (and conditioning) that facilitate and are constitutive of science and research, all the way from the level of its differentiation(s) and institutional fabrics to the realms of imagery, norms and cultural goods that play into the self-definition and upholding of boundaries or relationships vis-…-vis other domains of societal endeavour, like religion, which historically speaking is seen to have had a heavy bearing on the shaping of science and its multiple discourses, its dynamics, and the posing of questions concerning its authority and/or legitimation at various points in time. A third focal point is the one that has been most prominent of late, i.e., a concern with the nitty gritty of scientific practices, the interplay of materialities and the cultural in the lab, and how scientific knowledge is (socially) constructed at its sites of production.
Thus emerge three broad, partially overlapping domains of STS. These are defined on the basis of a common denominator - the quest for (self-) understanding of (and in) what has become a major cultural force in our time: science/wissenschaft. From this vantage point the so- called “science wars” debate is seen as yet another instance of Kulturkampf, the latest in a series of such if one looks back into the past, at least in the continental schools where one has had scrimages around hermeneutics and Methodenstreit, where Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften were pitched against each other, with compromises like the emergence of Kulturwissenschaft (Cassirer). The delimitation of the field in terms of Wissenschaftsforschung as proposed in the present volume also seems to invite closer participation from scholars in places with stronger disciplinary identities, like political science, history and sociology which also deal with knowledge society, risk and reflexive modernity from critical points of view. Moreover the authors’ approach clearly privileges the humanities and cultural sciences, as distinct from more instrumentalist (unthinking?) modes of analysis found at business schools. This does not mean that scientometrics, science policy studies, or other “harder” tools of the trade need to be excluded. In the present text they are certainly included, but in a way that does not let us forget the broader flux of contingencies, be it of institutions, corporate frameworks for industrial growth, state and power politics, or social and epistemic differentiation processes at work in disciplines and the articulation of disciplinary identities and claims. All of these, it appears the authors are saying, are significant at one or another level in the negotiational and truth claiming practices that take place at (and around) the sites of scientific knowledge production.
When it comes to making sense of life at these sites the authors want to enrich Bourdieu’s scheme of reproduction of symbolic capital(s) with Latour’s and Woolgar’s account of credibility cycles. This in turn is overlayered with David Edge’s analysis of various types of regulatives and conditions involved in maintaining competition within bounds of the non-antagonistic as distinct from the antagonism that gives rise to and is part of the substance of science and technology based controversies in our contemporary societies. This seems to be a fruitful framework for controversy studies, a subject the authors are well equipped to elaborate on but have refrained from doing so here. Perhaps in the next edition one might see a specific chapter that takes this (controversy studies as a genre) further, with exemplifications from the many case studies that now exist in the literature.
Gender studies is a genre that is not forgotten. It has a chapter of its own. Among others it is seen as a field where scholarship has been able to show historical and political contingency, not as external contextual determinants but as constitutives right into the heart of cognitive structuration. Considerable space is given to the “first wave” of the women’s movement in science studies and the efforts to make visible and reconstruct women’s contributions in science, as well as explanations of the economic, social, cultural and academic mechanisms whereby women were excluded or made invisible at various points in historical time.
A second section reviews findings that deal with gender as a determinant in the hierarchisation of social location and the distribution of rank and rewards in (and between) sciences and the humanities. Two further sections take up the question of the social construction of gender difference in science and other issues related to feminist science criticism: standpoint theory, essentialism, and identity politics subsuming “new forms of representation”. Similarities and differences of approach and analysis among Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway and others are briefly explored. One of the strengths of this chapter again is its broad reflective historiographical mode of presentation, which tends to add a social epistemological dimension to the trends under discussion.
Another chapter gives an insightful review of concepts and perspectives of the “newer” STS, building on Callon’s identification of four models (in the Handbook). The tension between philosophy of science and the cognitive (anti-rationalist) turn in Social Studies and with it the discussion centered around the Duhem-Quine thesis and paradgim theories is reviewed as a backdrop to a presentation of essential tenets, topics, shifts of “program” and a few influential case studies within or associated with SSK. (Some of the earlier ones on reciprocity between natural and social order - e.g. phrenology - are unfortunately left out.) This is followed by an outline of laboratory studies and actor network theory, with reference made to several genres in this domain - Knorr-Cetina, Latour and Woolgar, Callon and advocates of the rhetorical or semiotic turn of analysis. Today there are many books and articles that cover this episode; despite the brevity of the treatment in the present book this digest is hard to beat in terms of independence and pointedness of succinct presentation.
Chapter six is something of a novelty in that here the social sciences and Geisteswissenschaft are added to the science studies map. We are given an interesting recapitulation of some of the current discussions on the role of the humanities that has emerged in several countries in connection with evaluation exercises. Are the humanities compensation potential to balance technocracy and alienation in science-permeated high tech society? Or do they have some other utility and function? Breakthroughs in the neurosciences (with prospects of neuropharmocometics), genetic biology, nanotechnologies, AI and computerized visualisation techniques prompt questions of identity - what is it to be “human”? - therewith challenging the humanities with some of its age old questions in new and urgent forms. At the same time the conditions of doing research in the humanities are also changing rapidly. To be sure, all of this is a signficant part of making the case for considering “science studies” as having a broader scope both in its objects of research and approaches. Research ethics and bioetchics as topics might have been played up more in this context too.
The final three chapters deal with topics that show how science and technology policy studies, when framed in a self-reflective historiographical perspective, are really integral to STS. For this reader at least the book provides a rationale for paying much more attention to policy relevant issues, science communication (conceived more broadly and critically than PUS - public understanding of science), and interplay between institutions; we are shown how these can be tackled without giving up our science criticist agenda. This applies equally to technology assessment, risk analysis and the role of social movements in the shaping of technologies. In relationship to the triangle drama of macro “actors” - university-state-industry I miss a fourth one, civil society.
All of these topics have become the basis of more limited specialist discourses; here they come together with the topics of the previous chapters in a natural way, without for that matter stranding in some species of Low Church eclecticism. The quality of analysis, the selection and up-to-dateness of the literature, and the synthetic achievement are all commendable. The readability of the book is enhanced by the inclusion of lists of literature with comments after each chapter, as well as a 12-page glossary of frequent STS terms and concepts (we might quible about ones missing too), plus a 4-page list of journals in the field, again with comments. The bibliography is useful, even if I would have liked to see something of the German finalization theorists, controversy study texts like Engelhardt and Kaplan, as well as some bio- and research ethicists included. In sum, what we have here is “the introductory textbook we have all been waiting for”. My only regret is that it only exists in German. Hopefully EASST’s Publication Committee can do something about this, so that it will become available in English too, so we can start using it more extensively in our classes.
Also recommended is another publication from Vienna: Ulrike Felt and Helga Nowotny (eds.), Social Studies of Science in International Perspective (University of Vienna, Institute for Theory and Social Studies of Science, 1994), 142 pp. It contains the proceedings of a workshop at which several well-known scholars address a few thematic questions (e.g., the new production of knowledge) and gives brief reviews of the state-of-the- art in their respective countries, mostly pointing to who (what groups) are doing what. This report is also useful for those who need introductory materials to provide orientations into STS for their curricula, or to argue for the field in front of their faculty boards, research councils and central university authorities.
Entries refer to Britain, France, the Netherlands and Austria. German, Portugese, Spanish and Scandinavian country studies do not appear here. It is always stimulating to compare notes between countries. Apart from an orientation on the various “turns” in the discourses at hand, one of the things that emerges from this little volume is that STS is still beset with many difficulties when it comes to gaining a recognized institutional space in university landscapes in Europe. Discussion and comparison of strategies for institutional capacity building and interchange tend to be exhausting but are certainly not exhausted.