The Broken Boundaries between Science and Technology Studies and Cultural Sociology: Introduction to an Interview with Trevor Pinch

Introduction

The interview presented in the following pages constitutes another attempt – following the dialogue published in this journal with Richard A. Peterson (Santoro 2008) – to review and extend the landscape of research approaches in cultural sociology. In this case, the aim of the dialogue with Trevor Pinch is to describe, through the means of interviewing one of its main protagonists, the development and evolution of the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), showing how it created an original and to some degree coherent approach to ‘culture’. A related aim is to demonstrate the convergences and differences between this field and both cultural sociology and cultural studies.

While the recognition of relationships between STS and culturalist forms of analysis is not completely new (see Rouse 1992; Hess 1997; De Laet 2001), nevertheless these connections remain largely unexplored, reflecting the uncertain disciplinary definition of both STS and the social study of cultural phenomena. To give some examples, the authoritative introduction to cultural theory by Philip Smith and Alexander Riley (2009) does not cover any aspect of STS, while the introduction to cultural studies by David Oswell (2006: 131–9) devotes just a few pages to actor-network-theory and Bruno Latour. Moreover, if we exclude rare figures like Antoine Hennion (1993), almost no scholar has crossed with confidence these two sectors through their research work.

In order to fill this gap and to trace some of the coordinates of the interrelationships between STS and cultural matters, consideration of the figure of Trevor Pinch is particularly interesting and useful. After gaining a degree in physics at the beginning of the 1970s, Pinch then participated in the initial development of British ‘science studies’. At the beginning of the 1980s he was a major figure in the development of the field of the social study of technologies, promoting the ‘social construction of technology’ (SCOT) approach in this area. Over the last ten years Pinch has contributed majorly to the development of a more specific field of research, ‘sound studies’, which established an interdisciplinary perspective on the connections between sound, technology and culture. Therefore the dialogue that follows presents at least three topics particularly relevant for the readers of Cultural Sociology.

The first stage of Pinch’s career was immersed in the process that marked the rise of new forms of science studies against the older sociology of science in the Mertonian tradition (Merton 1973). This move went in the direction of a more explicit consideration of socio-cultural factors involved in scientists’ material practices. The evolution of Pinch’s research interests developed together with the formation – between the second half of the 1980s and the early 1990s – of the broader field of science and technology studies. In this interdisciplinary field, a peculiar convergence took shape, transforming the restricted group of sociologists of science into a ‘broad church’ (Williams and Edge 1996), under whose roof scholars from various disciplines have found their own space, including sociologists, anthropologists, humanists, historians, geographers, and so on. The interview also engages with the more recent phase of Pinch’s career, which involves the study of musical technologies, a particularly interesting area for cultural sociologists in the present day that during the last few years has also been addressed in the pages of Cultural Sociology (e.g. Beer 2008; Prior 2008). In the new constellation of sound studies (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012), different disciplines converge in novel ways, in order to examine the relations between musical artefacts and socio-cultural processes. Sound studies shows how the theoretical frames of STS can contribute to a domain – in this case, musical production and consumption – which has previously been a privileged field of inquiry for both the sociology of culture (Peterson and Berger 1975; Becker 1982; DeNora 2000) and cultural studies (Hebdige 1979; Chambers 1985; Hall and Jefferson 1976; Dugay et al. 1997). But let us return back in time, to the mid-1970s, when culturalist approaches made their appearance in the social study of science.

Social Studies of Science and Culture Issues

During the 1970s, British social studies of science started to develop a different approach to the consideration of scientific knowledge. Until that decade, the study of science was dominated in the UK both by rationalist philosophy of science, exemplified by the work of Karl Popper, and by the institutional approach to science founded on the basis of the work of Robert K. Merton. At this time, at the University of Edinburgh, a small group of scholars initially led by the astronomer David Edge started a dense intellectual activity that was extremely critical toward these two dominant traditions. Those scholars wished to overcome both Popperian ¹ and Mertonian approaches, believing that the main way to carry out this task was to focus their work on the actual social processes at the basis of the production of scientific knowledge. These efforts were collectively known as the ‘strong programme of relativism’ (Bloor 1976), as put forward by the Edinburgh School, and the emergent field they were pioneering was labelled the ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’ (SSK).

It was at this time that Trevor Pinch started to collaborate with Harry Collins at the University of Bath on matters related to the production of scientific facts (Pinch 1977; Pinch and Collins, 1979). They pushed the new ideas pioneered at Edinburgh University further with their formulation of the ‘empirical programme of relativism’ (EPOR) (Collins 1981, 1983). The main advance beyond the Edinburgh approach involved paying closer attention to the material work of scientists through careful collection of data about their work. While the Edinburgh ‘strong programme’ was mainly oriented around a historical approach based on the analysis of documents, Collins and Pinch introduced into social studies of science new methodologies associated with qualitative sociology, such as interviews and ethnography.

At around the same time, other scholars were also approaching the production of science in a similar manner, such as we can see in the cases of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, who together published in 1979 the very influential study Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar 1979), based on an ethnography carried out at the Salk Institute in San Diego. We can also mention here the well-known works of Karin Knorr-Cetina (1981), Gilbert and Mulkay (1984) and various ethnomethodologists such as the father of the field, Harold Garfinkel (Garfinkel et al. 1981; Lynch 1985).

In a clear convergence with the symbolic interactionism tradition (Clarke and Gerson 1990), the main concern of ‘laboratory studies’ was the notion that science is an embodied work that cannot be analysed as static knowledge or through the analysis of institutions alone. Scholars involved in laboratory studies refused to consider the production of knowledge outside the context of mundane interactions, for it was in the dynamic negotiation of meanings that scientific facts were formed. Thus laboratory studies evidently represented an attempt to build a more culturalist approach to the world of science (Knorr-Cetina 1995; see also Martin 1998). In this light, science started to be considered as equal to other kinds of cultures and activities in society, rather than as something removed from social life, and this focus helps to explain why concepts and approaches first developed inside STS came to flourish some years later in many different spheres of social science concerned with other domains of social life.

After some years working on issues related to scientific controversies, in the 1980s Pinch, then about 30, began to work with the Dutch scholar Wiebe Bijker on the relations between technological development and society. In so doing, he helped take the agenda of social studies of science in a new direction, laying the groundwork for significant progress in that emergent field, toward the social study of technological artefacts in society (Pinch and Bijker 1984; Bijker et al. 1987). Pinch and Bijker took up some of the main epistemological and empirical aspects of the EPOR approach and applied them to the study of technological artefacts such as the bicycle and the lamp-bulb. In 1984 they presented an influential paper in which they traced out the ‘social construction of technology’ (SCOT) approach, pioneering what Steve Woolgar (1991) later defined as the ‘technological turn’ in the field of sociology of science.

The SCOT approach had the aim of understanding the relevance, in the process of social shaping of technologies, of the meanings and interpretations created by social actors around technologies, thus connecting their work directly with the classical phenomenological tradition of the sociology of knowledge associated with Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966). Studying technologies as objects that are ‘socially constructed’ involves recognizing how their forms and functions come out of a process of interpretative negotiation among producers, users, sellers and other relevant social groups. Indeed, in Pinch and Bijker’s model, a role is played by how different people build conflicting interpretations around technologies, which are structurally characterized by different degrees of ‘interpretative flexibility’. The social shaping of technology is seen to involve the ability of social actors to imagine different uses and functions of particular technological artefacts. As Pinch recalls in the interview, this approach was strongly rooted in the traditions of symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, discovering one of the main common roots and intellectual convergences between STS and cultural sociology (see Becker and McCall 1990).

Evolution and Institutionalization of STS

Laboratory studies and the SCOT approach represent the main points of departure for the expansion in the 1990s of the broader field of STS. While during the 1970s and 1980s the field of science studies remained very small and confined to relatively few scholars, during the following decade STS became a more popular endeavour (Hackett et al. 2007). The small number of pioneers – whom Pinch describes as ‘missionaries’ – ended up creating a field that subsequently developed into a fully institutionalized academic area. In 1995 the second edition of the Handbook of Science and Technology (Jasanoff et al. 1995) categorized the whole set of themes, methodologies and approaches which had come to characterize the field. In the same period, many universities on both sides of the Atlantic opened departments in science and technologies studies, and courses and textbooks in this area began to multiply. STS can now boast of many well-established departments, such as those at Virginia Tech, Twente (Netherlands), York University and Cornell University – where Pinch moved in the early 1990s – and programs in prestigious universities such as those at Harvard and Stanford.

This process of consolidation and institutionalization of the field took shape in part thanks to the emergence of scholars originally trained in STS, who then became leading figures in social theory and in broader social science contexts. The clearest example here is Bruno Latour, who previously was one of the key figures in the development of laboratory studies, and who later became one of the most influential reference-points in contemporary social theory. Latour’s propounding of actor-network-theory (ANT) – which he formulated together with Michel Callon and John Law (Latour 1987, 2005; Law and Hassard 1999) – meant that ANT became widely referred to and discussed in many different areas of social science, from media to organization studies.

Another trend in the evolution of science studies into the broader field of STS involved the extreme permeability of the latter field as regards new inputs and different ideas. This permeability mainly consisted in the fact that new streams of research and concepts relatively easily entered into and colonized STS, with scholars in the field often explicitly avoiding the strict demarcations of this sector. The heterogeneity of the first generations of science studies scholars (coming from fields like astronomy, physics, history and sociology) was mirrored in the variety of researchers who have in more recent years embraced and developed STS concepts to deal with a plethora of different research questions. This permeability of the field is reflected both in the multiplicity of different backgrounds of scholars who have brought their concerns into STS, and in the dissemination from STS into other fields of those ideas originally generated by the first-generation science studies scholars.

This permeability became the condition for unexpected intellectual convergences, as in the case of the philosopher Donna Haraway, who was able to connect her work on humans and animals (Haraway 1989) with the STS universe. Moreover, many of the first-wave STS scholars shifted their own interests in the 1990s, establishing innovative connections with other disciplines, such as in the work of Sheila Jasanoff, who connected science and technology with law and regulation (Jasanoff 1995), or in the case of the strong link that connected STS and the sociology and anthropology of medicine (Berg and Mol 1998; Bowker and Star 1999; Collins and Pinch 2005). STS concepts and perspectives did not remain confined to the study of laboratories but became useful tools to research the widespread technological dimension present in every aspect of contemporary social life. The usefulness of STS for scholars involved in studying ‘cultural’ matters concerns the way this field can offer tools, connections and sensibilities that can deepen the understanding of those social processes in which technological artefacts and socio-technical innovations play a significant role in shaping people’s actions, practices and cultural universes.

It is commonly recognized that is not an easy task to define the boundaries of STS. This difficulty is, for example, reported by the editors of the third and most recent STS handbook, who identified the great ‘ambivalence about conceptual categories and dichotomies’ (Hackett et al. 2007: 1) as one of the main characteristics of the field. Indeed, in STS debates scholars often prefer to use words such as ‘insights’, ‘sensibilities’ and ‘approaches’, rather than terms like ‘models’, ‘paradigms’ and ‘theories’. ² As these editors also pointed out, in STS ‘rather than defending pure positions, authors risked strategic crossovers and melded ideas from different intellectual domains’ (2007: 1). The balance between permeability on the one side, and a recurrent coherent identification with the STS ‘tradition’ by many scholars on the other, is possible only on the basis of some common and shared understandings of what the field ‘is’. If we try to delineate some of the most characteristic aspects of STS, we can point out at least one element that in fact indicates a close link to cultural sociology and cultural matters in general: this is the marked attention paid to ‘practices’ and ‘things’. This disposition involves recognition of the key role played by material culture and by technical objects in the shaping of social processes. This attention – or sensibility – goes together with a focus on analysing the social practices that develop around and about these technologies and objects.

The emphasis accorded to the non-human dimension of society is theoretical and empirical at the same time. Latour has particularly emphasized the centrality of material culture and ‘things’ in the understanding of social processes. In his typically colourful language, Latour wrote in 1992 that objects ‘knock at the door of sociology, requesting a place in the accounts of society as stubbornly as the human masses did in the 19th century’ (Latour 1992: 227). In one of his most influential books, We Have Never Been Modern (Latour 1991a), he identifies the heterogeneity of elements around which the complexity of the social world revolves. He outlines how modernity has been built on a fictional split between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’, scientific ‘hard facts’ and mere symbolic representations. It is the recognition of the centrality to social life of the mutually informing relations between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ that is perhaps the clearest link between STS and contemporary cultural sociology.

One of the most controversial formulations within actor-network-theory is the ‘principle of generalized symmetry’ (Callon 1986). This principle states that non-human entities (things, animals, concepts, etc.) have to be treated at the same analytical level as human actors. The theoretical consequence is that agency is accorded also to non-human actors. The idea of theoretically conceding to ‘things’ a dimension of agency and a new role in social explanations has generated a large amount of criticism. One of the most eminent critics is the British science studies scholar Harry Collins, who in 1990 engaged with Latour in the now-famous ‘epistemological chicken’ debate (Pickering 1992), about which Pinch in the interview gives some interesting insights.

The prominence accorded to objects and materiality emerges clearly in classical STS empirical studies. STS scholars often devote to material culture and ‘mundane objects’ a very marked attention, finding in these a lever to discover new connections within, and to discern the complexity of, the social world. Various non-human entities are used as the point of departure to explain broader ideas and processes, such as in the case of the St. Brieuc scallops (Callon 1986), a hotel key (Latour 1991b) and the samples to be found at the Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (Star and Griesemer 1989).

As indicated in the interview, one of the main connections between STS and with cultural sociology concerns the work of Howard S. Becker, who during his long career has laid strong emphasis on the material dimensions of social interaction and on the relevance of the web of relations in the emergence of social (or artistic) facts (Becker 1982), and whose orientations to these issues has been complemented by a deep commitment to empirical research (Becker 1998). On several occasions Becker has made explicit his high regard for the STS field and in particular for the classic work of Latour and Woolgar (1979), while also discussing methodological issues concerning social sciences and qualitative research (e.g. Becker 2003, 2009).

If several aspects indicate the proximity of STS to Becker’s work, they also illustrate the gap between STS and the ‘grand theories’ of figures like Anthony Giddens. There are also divergences between STS on the one hand and – in Pinch’s view – much contemporary American sociology on the other. For example, Pinch distances his own work from the neo-institutional approach put forward by such authors as Paul DiMaggio (DiMaggio and Powell, 1992) which is perceived as more oriented to the structural dimension of institutions rather than to the materiality of interactions between social actors. At the same time Pinch also contributes to bridging the gap between STS and economic sociology, editing together with Richard Swedberg a collection of essays on the materiality of economics (Pinch and Swedberg 2009).

A further consideration concerns STS scholars’ political commitments and their orientations towards the political dimensions of science and technology. As Pinch indicates, he shared with many other first-generation STS scholars some form of political engagement, which was oriented towards the possibility of developing actors’ conscious choices about socio-technical forms of development. This politics was rather different from the Marxist heritage that inspired and underpinned much British cultural studies. STS-style ‘politics of technology’ was very much connected with the strong constructivist attitude that characterized the field. In pointing out that scientific facts as well as technological systems are the result of contingent and not previously-determined processes, STS stresses the possibility of bringing into question the relationships that pertain between scientific expertise, power, politics and political decision-makers. It is exactly around this aspect – the relations between techno-science and decision-making processes – that some of the recent STS interventions have clustered in recent years (see Bauer and Bucchi 2007; Bucchi and Neresini 2007; Nowotny et al. 2005).

In Pinch’s own work, the relationship between science, technology and politics emerges in at least two ways. During the first half of his career, his work with Harry Collins on scientific controversies involved discerning the dynamics though which science and technology are concretely shaped through social negotiations, processes which can have notable effects on social reality (as, for example, in the dramatic case of the space shuttle accident in 1986 – see Collins and Pinch 1998). In more recent years, he has looked at groups of science and technology users and the possibilities they have to contribute to shaping scientific and technological innovations (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003). In this kind of research, STS intersects with other fields such as feminist studies (Wajcman 2000, 2004), with the empirical research tradition in media studies that is focused on how people actually use media technologies (Silverstone and Hirsch 1992; Silverstone 1994), and with the sociology and anthropology of consumption, the latter fusion indicating a convergence on issues to do with material culture and objects (Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Kopytoff 1986; Miller 1987; McCracken 1988). In some respects this research appears to involve a technology-oriented update of the classic questions – central in British cultural studies – as to how dominant and hegemonic cultures take the form of constraint in the contexts of everyday life, and how ordinary people can take the initiative and produce alternative interpretations of the world, starting from the material cultural conditions of everyday experience.

STS and Musical Technologies: Towards Sound Studies

As with many other first-wave STS scholars, Pinch has shifted his research interests over the years. His most recent shift is towards the analysis of musical technologies. The STS framework has again been opened up towards new objects, this time with the aim of focusing on music to deepen the understanding of the relations between culture, materiality and social and artistic conventions.

The first connection between music and science studies happened in the 1980s and involved the work of Latour’s colleague, the sociologist of culture Antoine Hennion, who was among the first to transgress the boundaries between laboratory studies on the one hand and the study of the recording studio in popular music on the other, researching the recording studio in the same fashion as science labs (Hennion 1989). Despite Hennion’s inventive contribution, the relation between technology and music was not developed further in STS during the 1990s by other scholars, even though in this period it gained some attention in cultural studies (Jones 1992), popular music studies (Frith 1986) and the new musicology (Born 1995; Taylor 2001).

The work of Pinch in this field has been two-fold. He has produced some relevant research works on musical technologies and has contributed to the bringing together of scholars with different backgrounds around the emerging field of sound studies. In understanding musical artefacts, he was moved by the idea that studying specific music technologies could improve the STS understanding of some keys aspect of the relations between technology and society more generally. More specifically, he was interested in seeing how actors’ reactions to new musical technologies could provide a fertile research site for investigating the ways in which technologies in general are embedded within conventional normative frameworks.

His major work in this area is a very detailed history of the social construction of the analogue synthesizer in the 1960s and 1970s, the Moog. It is interesting to note that as a young man Pinch was an amateur synthesizer player and also a do-it-yourself synthesizer assembler; in recent years, he has begun once again playing his synthesizer with Ithaca’s punk and electronic bands. But it was only in the ’90s that he began to research the history of the music synthesizer, applying some of the key concepts of the SCOT approach to this instrument (Pinch and Trocco 2002). For a cultural sociologist, it is interesting to consider how his analysis of the social shaping of this technology is characterized by an even more marked attention paid to the cultural aspects of its construction. Indeed, Pinch and Trocco explain the way in which the form of this new musical instrument emerged from a process of negotiation between the imagination and desire of its creator, Bob Moog, and the normative framework constituted by the musical practices and cultures shared among both keyboard amateurs and rock music players of the time. While this new electronic instrument was initially conceived as a complex device, which could be manipulated only with knobs and cables, the process of its development was characterized by the arbitrary (i.e. non-essential) introduction of a traditional music keyboard in order for the device to became appealing not only to highbrow experimental musicians but also to rock musicians. In STS terms, the traditional keyboard, which was added to the instrument, represented a ‘boundary object’ (Star and Griesemer 1989) able to connect the weird new sound of the synthesizer with the already established rock music culture. Thus the case of the synthesizer allows an interrogation of the relationships between cultural practices and their crystallizations into technological artefacts. The authors demonstrated that cultural innovations always represent the result of processes of negotiation between cultural practices already stabilized around the uses of specific objects that mediate social action. The synthesizer study also shows how cultural practices can be deeply embedded into the material tools social actors have at their disposal, tools that in turn facilitate modes of social action.

As previously indicated, Pinch has also played the role of an entrepreneur for the field of ‘sound studies’ (Sterne 2012). As argued by Pinch and Bijsterveld (2004), those in the sound studies field recognize their research object as the relations pertaining between musical technology and culture. They start with the idea that the social dimension of sound and music cannot be addressed without paying specific attention to their technical and material dimensions, and to the practices and cultural meanings actors build around them. The work of Pinch, together with Karin Bijsterveld (2008), set out the theoretical relevance of musical technologies for STS (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2002 and 2012) and brought together different scholars around this issue. In 2002 they organized the conference ‘Sound Matters: New Technology in Music’, held at the University of Maastricht, which was followed in 2004 by the editing of a special issue of the journal Social Studies of Science on sound studies. As they pointed out in the introduction, what STS ‘can contribute is a focus on the materiality of sound, its embeddedness not only in history, society, and culture, but also in science and technology and its machines and ways of knowing and interacting’ (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2004: 636).

In presenting the development of studies of musical technologies, Pinch and Bijsterveld also recognized that none of the standard disciplinary approaches existing at that time were adequate on their own. A strategy was proposed for sound studies scholars to set aside their own inherited disciplinary perspectives and to integrate them with the work of other research traditions. A clear example of the interdisciplinarity that characterizes the field can be outlined by considering some of the main books published about sound and technologies in this last decade. Among the most relevant contributions is the book Soundscape of Modernity by the historian of technologies Emily Thompson (2002), who focused on the relation between architecture and sound in the first 30 years of the 19th century in the USA. Thompson describes many different issues to do with the changing nature of acoustics in public environments, such as the development and introduction of sound-absorbing materials and the efforts to control sound and noise in modern cities. She also develops these various issues within a broader framework that tries to account for the shaping of modernity. Increasing forms of efficiency in architectural acoustics reveals in a novel way how modernity constructed ‘sound’ as a cultural and material entity, as the result of increasing technical control over the environment, creating an ever more uniform aural entity in the social world.

Another crucial book in this context is Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past (2003), which deals with the social history of sound and of the technical devices involved in its development, involving what the author calls the very ‘cultural origin of sound reproduction’ in modernity. Sterne reconstructs the historical development of the possibilities of sound reproducibility, starting his work with 17th-century innovations in the medical field. The book recontextualizes what sound ‘is’ by considering how it can be used for various functional purposes, such as for medical applications as well as for communicative aims, as in the case of the telegraph. Such developments contributed to the establishing of the basic cultural – or socio-technical – frames that permitted subsequent social changes concerning sound transmission and reproduction. Moreover, the analysis of how musical technologies were received by their audiences, as in the case of first phonographs and recorders, is revealing both of what sound was thought to be in pre-Edison societies and thus also of the relativity of the ways we conceive of sound and music today.

While these two books deal with historical examples, other works in the field directly deal with contemporary uses of sound and music. Thus the ethnomusicologist Michael Bull analyses ‘mobile listening’ and the uses of the Walkman (Bull 2000, 2007). With his first book Bull produced one of the most intriguing pieces of research done on the concrete practices of music consumption, stressing how the use of portable musical devices is closely connected both with the construction of a specific experience of the urban environment and with the definition of a personal aural dimension which is actively defined by people through the use of headphones in public spaces. Again we can see how consideration of the relationship between sound, machines and sociality represents an intriguing entrance point into more complex and more general socio-cultural questions. These questions are often connected with the way modernity took its distinctive shape, highlighting the emergence of new forms of social experience and the centrality of technical and commercial developments for the institutionalization and stabilization of everyday practices and cultures. In this sense, for example, the recent transition to the immateriality of digital music has been used to investigate the relationship between cultural goods and the material dimension of their consumption, helping to make sense of the broad process of dematerialization of cultural goods in contemporary society (Magaudda 2011, 2012)

As clearly emerges from the interview that follows, the consideration of the development of Pinch’s career trajectory in social studies of science and technology enables us to discern a series of broken boundaries on the terrain of cultural processes in society. These involve the breach between science and culture, which was overcome with the emergence in the 1970s of the cultural analysis of scientists’ practices. Then, at a later date, the boundaries between technologies and cultures was broken down, with Pinch helping to develop a deeper cultural analysis of how objects and technologies are embedded in producers’ and users’ cultural frames. Finally, Pinch contributed to the mapping out of existing boundaries between music, technology and culture, and helped to create the new and exciting field of sound studies, a domain which is still open to further development, not least by the future contributions of cultural sociology scholars.