Science and the World/Science in the World

When I turned to the study of science, technology, and society in the mid-1980s, Bruno Latour and other “social constructivists” defined the research agenda for the field, having displaced the institutional and sometimes functionalist scholarship of Robert K. Merton and his students and followers. Much of the work being published at the time was provocative and in many ways compelling, attending to the craft character of laboratory research, the centrality of everyday negotiation in knowledge production, and the fundamentally local nature of science. However, most of this new wave of research either ignored or rejected the importance of social structures, organizations, and institutions in explaining the character of “technoscience” and the scientific field. The work offered little or very limited attention to the relationship between states and science and science and industry, and much of this scholarship rejected the possibility of causal argument and explanation. Often macro- and meso-level investigation was dismissed and little connection was made between what we might think of as micro- and macro-levels of the social world.

In my own work, from the 1990s forward, I sought to bring concepts and tools from political and organizational sociology to bear on understanding science policy (Kleinman 1995) and scientific practice (Kleinman 2003), attending to state structures and the effect of the larger social world and business culture and history on local research-related practices. Over the last decade, the array of scholars taking kindred approaches has grown tremendously. There has been an outpouring of creative scholarship in the sociology of science, and science and technology studies more broadly, building on concepts and methods from economic, political, and organizational sociology and from classical social theory.

While this work does not have a monopoly on compelling and innovative research in the field, constraints of space have led me to focus on a set of provocative and engaging books that shares an interest in the historically specific ways in which organizations, institutions, and social structures affect the scientific field. Some of this work seeks self-consciously to align with the emerging tradition Frickel and Moore have termed “the new political sociology of science” (Frickel and Moore 2005). Other volumes do not. While varied, much of this scholarship is especially attentive to the social organization of power and how this organization shapes and is shaped by technoscience. As well, in one way or another, much of this research is attentive to questions of inequality and resources distributions. Finally, virtually all of it is alert to change over time, and much of the work deploys some form of systematic comparative method. In all, this scholarship is well equipped to move beyond description to explanation, an approach especially valuable as scholars, politicians, and the public are increasingly interested in understanding the place of technoscience in the contemporary world.

In Chemical Consequences: Environmental Mutagens, Scientist Activism, and the Rise of Genetic Toxicology (2004), Scott Frickel offers an historically sensitive and analytically sharp study of the rise of an interdiscipline: genetic toxicology. Frickel suggests that that genetic toxicology was the creation of a scientists' social movement. That is, argues Frickel, “collective action among scientists involved in genetic toxicology’s creation was organized, strategic, and infused with environmental values; it elaborated a social critique of the disciplinary organization of science and sought to create a new way of ordering environmental knowledge” (p. 12). Like several of the books I consider below, this volume stresses how the boundary between science and politics becomes blurred. Significantly, in this context, key scientist organizations that built genetic toxicology “simultaneously functioned as social movement organizations that helped raise public awareness about the dangers of chemical mutagens and to advance problem-solving strategies to understand and minimize genetic hazards” (p. 12). But beyond the policy and civic orientation of genetic toxicology, Frickel argues that building genetic toxicology was a political act, since its creation involved promoting a new field of applied biology at a time when biology’s growing legitimacy rested on its claim to do hard experimental work.

Before the late 1960s, chemical mutagens were used by scientists as research tools, but not seen as an environmental problem. Frickel suggests that the heterogeneity among chemical elements created a highly fragmented field in which chemical mutagenesis figured and this in turn slowed the development of a field in which the environmental effects of chemical mutagens became a systemic matter of concern. Late in the 1960s, a small group of geneticists began to voice fears that mutagenic chemical agents in food, cosmetics, drugs, and other industrial products could potentially threaten human health and the well-being of the broader environment. According to Frickel, the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 provided a decisive boost to the development of genetic toxicology as federal government science programs became increasingly receptive to environmentally-oriented research. During this period, for example, the Biology Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory began to focus on problems of environmental health, and the federal National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) was established. In 1969, the same year the NIEHS was created, the Environmental Mutagen Society was founded, providing a focus for building the genetic toxicology field. In the absence of dedicated academic departments, the EMS served as a central vehicle for recruiting and training scientists. It also coordinated research, facilitated the standardization of research tools, and engaged in public education.

Chemical Consequences does not offer a simple descriptive history, but conceptualizes discipline and interdiscipline formation as political processes that involve alliance building, role definition, and resource struggles. Furthermore, Frickel highlights the ways in which the successes of the scientist social movement that struggled to create genetic toxicology redistributed (inter)disciplinary power. The field shifted attention to the study of genes and the way they are harmed by toxic exposure, and from the exposure of workers to chemical mutagens to dangers to consumers, communities, and the natural environment.

In framing the effort to create genetic toxicology as a scientist social movement, Frickel draws on the work, among others, of social movement theorist David Snow, and he uses the notion of “frame amplification” and “frame extension” to think about how scientist-activists recast chemical mutagens into an environmental health problem. In this context, Frickel suggests that “Scientist-activists amplified the genetic hazards frame in an attempt to convince biologists already familiar with chemical mutagenesis as a research tool that mutagenic chemicals also constituted a serious environmental problem” (p. 91). They also worked to frame chemical mutagenesis in a way that would attract the concerns of citizens and policymakers.

If Frickel’s book is concerned with the activist role of scientists in the service of interdiscipline formation, Kelly Moore’s Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945–1975 focuses on scientists as activists in civil society conflicts more broadly. She examines the development of scientists’ activism against the financial and political relationship between sciences and the military between 1945 and 1975. Era is crucial here. The mid-twentieth century marked a moment when the authority of science was unusually fragile and the boundary between science and politics was increasingly seen as blurry. In this context, Moore is concerned to understand the role that scientists’ actions played in “unbounding” scientific authority from scientists.

As Moore shows, the movements she studies were specific responses to material changes in scientists’ work lives and intellectual and political debates about the role of science in public life. Moore investigates three cases in which scientists created organizations to address their concerns about the relationship between science and the military. The first, the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, was created in the late 1940s by pacifists and aimed to convince scientists to decline involvement in all research that could contribute to war. The second, the Committee for Nuclear Information, was a product of the late 1950s and also aimed to persuade scientists to decline involvement in all research that could contribute to war. Finally, Scientists for Social and Political Action emerged in the late 1960s and was the most radical of the groups. Later called Science for the People, this organization engaged in direct action as well as education to highlight the relationship between science and the military and science and sexism and racism, and sought to discourage scientists from engaging in practices that would advance the military or reinforce sexism and racism. In later years, this group also sought to empower citizens by giving science “to the people.”

In her investigation of these three organizations, Moore attends to the role of orientation defining political discourses of these three groups—liberalism, moral individualism, and the New Left’s neo-Marxism—in shaping scientists’ commitments to particular political practices and ideas about the relationships between politics and science. Moore also highlights the role of the state shaping the formation and practices of the three scientist political organizations she studies. Specifically, Moore suggests that several characteristics of the state shaped scientists’ political action: (1) the role of state in knowledge production, (2) state surveillance and repression, and (3) the decentralized system of scientific work and training. Importantly, from a methodological and explanatory perspective, Disrupting Science is not just a comparison across three groups that were motivated by different worldviews. Instead, in temporal sequence, the orientation and practices of each organization influenced the shape of the next. As Moore puts it: “Each subsequent group responded to the earlier forms of action and tried to supplant them. Rather than an evolution of forms, however, the story I have told suggests that there were ever more ways of joining political and narrowly professional interests during the mid-twentieth century” (p. 191).

At a conceptual level, Disrupting Science makes several valuable interventions. Like Frickel, this book brings the notion of contentious politics into discussions of the politics of science. Here, Moore treats social movements not just as efforts to redistribute resources or reorient policy, but also as “attempts to deconstruct and reconstruct an organized moral order” as much as efforts to redistribute resources (p. 15). The book promotes an appropriately complicated characterization of social movements that draws on symbolic interactionism and takes seriously the interpretive activities of social movement organizations. Beyond bringing a powerful approach to social movements into the sociological study of science, Disrupting Science advances a nuanced view of the state as a “differentiated system, whose power is exercised in material, bureaucratic, and cultural forms” (p. 12). Perhaps most importantly for the sociology of science, Moore challenges the standard view that scientists’ actions are motivated solely or even primarily by their desire to monopolize expertise and authority. Scientists have a range of preferences and motivations. Not all are professionally strategic or interest driven. Like much of social life, scientists in Moore’s stories acted in a world constituted by “sense-making.”

While Frickel and Moore look at science and scientists from a social movement perspective, in Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Healthcare, Shobita Parthasarathy investigates the role of national level “context” in shaping government regulation, medical diagnostic delivery and the character of actual technologies for genetic testing for breast and ovarian cancer in the United States and Great Britain. By national context, Parthasarathy refers to the social organization of policymaking, political culture (including the unwritten codes and practices that shape policymaking in often overlooked ways), the place of political actors outside the state, and the nature of healthcare systems. Parthasarathy shows how these factors influenced the divergent policies and practice in Britain and the United States.

Parthasarathy’s story focuses specifically on policies and practices surrounding the testing of women for mutations in BRCA genes associated with some cases of breast and ovarian cancer. Parthasarathy begins by outlining the very different systems of healthcare found in the United States and Britain. As is widely known, the United States has a virtually completely privatized healthcare system, and Britain is known for its National Health Service, which promises quality healthcare services to all citizens. At the outset, government officials and scientists in the United States expressed skepticism about the benefits of the BRCA test in a private for-profit environment. Here, four U.S. companies initially offered BRCA testing as “an experimental technique, clinical research, reproductive services, and a commercial product” (p. 23). Market competition ultimately left one testing firm—Myriad Genetics—standing in the United States. In Britain, by contrast, the government “eagerly developed genetic services as a potentially cost-effective form of preventative care” (p. 22). In the United States, Myriad took a marketing approach to their testing tool, promoting its uniqueness and linking the value of the test to a newly marketed breast cancer preventative drug, tamoxifen. And the company framed the benefits of the test in fundamentally individualistic terms: it allowed women to take control of decisions about their health. In Britain, the test was seen as an additional tool to help identify breast and ovarian cancer risk among women in general. The NHS avoided defining novel risks and categories of disease for which newly marketed treatments would be appropriate.

Beyond offering a systematic and rigorous comparison of the empirical differences between the United States and Britain in the domain of medical science and healthcare, Parthasarathy adds a valuable concept to the tools we have for analyzing science and technology. Sociotechnical architectures point to the simultaneously social and technical components of technologies and how they combine to produce the artifact and the practices around it. Parthasarathy looks at how distinct genetic testing systems—architectures—in Britain and the United States served to define ovarian and breast cancer and their associated risks as well as how they differently affected the distribution of patent rights, rights, and responsibilities in each nation.

Finally, it is worth noting that Parthasarathy’s work has echoed beyond the academy. Based on the research for her book, she collaborated with the American Civil Liberties Union in the federal case about who controlled testing for the mutation in a gene associated with breast cancer. Indeed, in its 2010 decision, the Federal Court in the case explicitly cited Parthasarathy, ruling that genes are products of nature and therefore unpatentable.

Libby Schweber takes the comparative analysis of states and science in a different direction in her Disciplining Statistics: Demography and Vital Statistics in France and England, 1830–1885. Where Frickel’s book focuses on the role of a scientist social movement in creating genetic toxicology, Schweber explores the roles of states and related institutions in shaping “disciplinary activity” around the development and use of statistics to inform policy decisions in France and England in the middle of the nineteenth century. She is interested in understanding the relative successes in establishing “vital statistics” in England and the ultimately failed efforts to establish demography in France. Schweber contends, following Ronald Jepperson, that England was an anti-statist form of liberal society, while France was a statist liberal society. In England, political authority was decentralized and rooted in civil society, while in France the state was understood as the single institution that embodied the interests of the entire population. According to Schweber, a more decentralized polity provided space for organizations like the Social Science Association to create statistical knowledge of use to the government. In France, the centralized state, along with a relatively centralized structure for the professional organization of science, constituted a substantial barrier to the acceptance of statistical approaches to policy-relevant social matters. Culture, as funneled through states and other organizations, matters here too. In France, the notion of a homogeneous population and thus aggregate statistics was subject to question, whereas in England the notion of a single population made sense to elites.

Influenced by sociologists like Theda Skocpol, Schweber introduces systematic historical comparison and explanatory causal logics where states are important independent variables into the study of social studies of science. She is attentive to how the structure of states (and civil society) shape the fates of efforts to establish research agendas, scholarly fields, and the use of (social) science in policymaking. Beyond this, Disciplining Statistics pushes us to think differently about discipline formation. This is a central subject among historians of science and, to a degree, sociologists too. In this context, Schweber introduces the notion of “disciplinary activity.” With this concept, Schweber highlights the fact that not all collective action by scientists is directed at the establishment of autonomous fields.

Marion Fourcade’s Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s, shares much in common with Parthasarathy’s and Schweber’s scholarship. It offers a cross-national comparison. In addition, the character of national states plays an important explanatory role in Fourcade’s argument. Finally, like Schweber, Fourcade is interested in the ways national level factors shape the differential character and successes of scholarly fields. Significantly, both Schweber’s and Fourcade’s work focuses on social science, and this is a relatively recent move for the sociology of science and science and technology studies.

The essence of Fourcade’s argument is that distinctive institutional logics explain the varied character of the discipline and profession of economics as they developed during most of the twentieth century in the United States, Britain, and France. More specifically, Fourcade contends that the structure and character of national states and systems of higher education (plus the realm of the economy) play crucial roles in shaping professional identities, collective disciplinary practices and projects, and the relative value granted to different methods and substantive foci. In the United States, Fourcade shows how a decentralized and competitive system of higher education and the lack of a well-developed professional civil service prompted a focus on “scientific professionalism” by university-based economists. This group successfully pursued an approach deeply dependent on mathematics and focused on the function and value of markets. In Britain, by contrast, the university system was dominated by Oxford and Cambridge and the social and political elites who travelled through those institutions. Students at Cambridge and Oxford entered and departed with a commitment to noblesse oblige. These publicly-minded elites did not receive a professional economics education, but a humanistic one. They brought this background with them when they entered the civil service and aimed to address questions of poverty and welfare in the policies they created. French economics, finally, was shaped by a highly centralized and professionalized civil service made up of elite university graduates. Engineers in the civil service were the state’s economists, separated from academic economists, and focused their thinking on the modernization of France’s Fifth Republic. Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly in an age often dubbed one of globalization, Fourcade documents a convergence in economics across her countries as the field became internationalized, and the approach taken in the United States became the international model.

Of all the books reviewed here, Fourcade is perhaps the most “magisterial.” She shows us that big, ambitious, cross-national comparisons in the study of science have substantial explanatory payoffs and offers a rigorous approach to explaining difference and ultimately convergence.

The books I have discussed so far all draw from various schools of sociological institutionalism and political economy. But exciting work that is macro or meso in focus and attends to broad matters of social organization in the study of technoscience does not begin and end with work drawing on these related traditions. Among other well-crafted and compellingly argued studies of technoscience is Patrick Carroll’s Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation. In this expansive text, one sees the influence of scholars like Charles Tilly, but also of theorists like Michel Foucault. Carroll’s is an investigation of Ireland from the seventeenth century to the dawn of the twentieth. He shows how the practices of government and what he terms “engine science,” an integration of natural philosophy, mathematics, and engineering, built a nation, transforming the land and, in a Foucauldian sense, controlled the population. Carroll illustrates how a set of technologies—scopes, meters, graphs, and chambers—made possible the control of land and people. Censuses and various systems for monitoring and controlling the spread of disease that were developed and refined during Carroll’s period were population defining and thereby constraining.

The scope of this work—like all of the works I review above—distinguishes it from much early “social constructivist” scholarship on science; but beyond that Carroll is interested in clearly disentangling causal mechanisms. He rejects, in a wide array of work, the idea in the sociology of science “that everything co-constructs everything else” (p. 7). And Carroll does not take the lessons of Foucault to lead him to a world where everything is discourse. Instead, throughout this book, Carroll deploys a helpful distinction between discourse, practice and materiality.

I turn finally to David J. Hess’ Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry. ¹ While several of the other books I have discussed seek to make broad observations about technoscience and its relationship to social movements and states, each volume seeks to illuminate specific historical cases. Hess’ project is different. While he is historically attentive and does explore specific cases, here Hess offers a big theory of the contemporary social order in which an array of movements oriented toward science and technology offer possibilities for remaking the world in a more just and sustainable fashion. This is not only a piece of social analysis, but of engaged scholarship. While Hess develops a theory that is very much his own, his substantial debts to the social movement scholarship are clear and one can see the significant imprint of Pierre Bourdieu in how he characterizes the role of power and resources in shaping what science gets done (and what does not) and what technologies get developed (and which do not).

Hess describes the contemporary world as one in which elites from various sectors, through possession of power and resources, largely determine what kinds of science gets done and what technologies are developed. But according to Hess, in the current era of globalization, a countervailing process is emerging. He dubs the trend “epistemic modernization” and defines it as “the process by which the agendas, concepts, and methods of scientific research are opened up to the scrutiny, influence, and participation of users, patients, non-governmental organizations, social movements, ethnic minority groups, women and other social groups that represent perspectives on knowledge that may be different from those of economic and political elites and those of mainstream scientists” (p. 47). Epistemic modernization reflects an environment in which the status of science and scientists is subject to challenge and where the barriers to entry into science for diverse social groups, while still substantial, are considerably less formidable than they were in previous years.

Central to epistemic modernization is the growth of direct citizen engagement in questions of science and technology and the presence of dissident scientists, willing to challenge dominant trends in their fields. While conflict over research and development priorities may grow in this environment, it also makes possible the development of alternative research fields, such as green chemistry, and the possibility that undone science will be undertaken. “Object conflicts” also emerge over product development. Social movements may straightforwardly oppose new technologies, such as the movement against genetically modified crops, but movements of various sorts may pursue more affirmatively generative strategies. Thus, technology and product-oriented movements pursue the development of the organic agriculture sector and the development of specific crops as well as alternative and renewable energy technologies.

While all of the books I discuss above move beyond a “narrow focus on knowledge claims and microsociological processes” (Hess: 19) and seek to understand how larger organizational and structural factors shape the character of the scientific field broadly understood, Alternative Pathways differs from the other texts in its overtly political agenda. Several of the other volumes are surely normatively motivated—that is, the authors seek to understand an aspect of the world to provide a foundation for changing it—but Hess very explicitly seeks to understand how and to what extent alternative pathways pursued by assorted movements move us along a trajectory of increased social justice and sustainability and, thus, which ones are helpful models for future incorporation and transformation.

The last decade or so has seen a substantial broadening in the array of work being done under the rubric of the social studies of science. ² While there is exciting work going on beyond that has moved the field to attend more seriously and systematically to questions of organizations, institutions, and power, this variety of scholarship seems especially well-suited to the current period of substantial social, economic, and political instability and uncertainty. The tools deployed and developed in the work I have reviewed here and other related scholarship will provide us with a cogent basis for understanding the place and possibilities of technoscience in the rapidly changing world (dis)order. ³ In new ways that earlier scholarship in the area could not, this work also offers crucially important tools for real world interventions, as Parthasarathy’s work and Hess’ suggests. Better understanding the social organization of technoscience (from the character of states and markets to social movements and healthcare cultures) will position those who are so inclined to engage intelligently in contemporary debates about the intersection between science and society. As criticism of the insular nature of much scholarship by citizens and elected officials mounts, this kind of scholarship offers the foundation for a responsible public sociology of science. ⁴