Social Studies of Science

Events that led to the successful identification by the US of the 1949 test of a Russian atomic bomb are analyzed in terms of three decisions that involved, respectively, the management, development and deployment of the monitoring system that detected the Russian test. Analysis of these decisions focuses on the way public and `insider' beliefs about atomic bombs influenced the decision-making process, and on how technical and organizational factors modulated the pace of system development and deployment.

This paper advances the concept of `cultural identity' to account for the nexus between structure and practice in technological negotiations. It describes how the formation of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and that group's subsequent discourse and nonverbal actions, both reproduced the established identities of group members and contributed to negotiations that reconstituted those identities. In particular, UCS claims about emergency core-cooling systems in nuclear plants were congruent with the combination of a shared ideology, the social interests of MIT faculty, and established principles of engineering design. The cultural analysis of identity reproduction shows the opposition between cognitive and social phenomena to be a significant distinction framing action in Western culture. The analysis also suggests that new attention be given to the relationship between the constitutive and reproductive functions of discourse and nonverbal action.

The term `sacrifice' is used by experimental biologists to describe methods for killing laboratory specimens. In Western societies, `sacrifice' usually connotes a process of `making sacred', a process Durkheim and his followers interpreted as a ritual transformation between `profane' and `sacred' realms. This paper examines whether `sacrifice' in the experimental context bears any relation to such traditional usage, or whether, as animal rights advocates argue, the term is no more than a euphemism for brutal and unnecessary slaughter. Drawing on ethnographic observations of laboratory practice, the paper argues that `sacrifice' means much more than simply killing a specimen, and that the violence done to the animal victim is part of a systematic `consecration' of its body to transform it into a bearer of transcendental significances. While scientists do not treat their practices as ceremonial rituals endowed with religious meaning, laboratory `sacrifice' is a part of a sequence of procedures through which the naturalistic animal body is transformed into an abstracted analytic object with generalized significance for members of the research community.

The object of this paper is to uncover the changing relationships between scientific culture and social class in one British industrial town during the nineteenth century. Rather than concentrating upon one or two `significant' figures, the paper attempts to identify the social status and political affiliations of cultural institutions through detailed analysis of their membership. It is argued that until the 1840s the urban scientific culture was supported by a fairly ad hoc mixture of competing social groupings. During and after the 1840s, it becomes possible to interpret the further development of the local scientific enterprise in terms of class conflicts. Increasingly, institutions within which scientific and technical matters were researched, discussed or taught became exclusive to particular social classes, and did not exhibit that variety of occupations, incomes and educational backgrounds found in the well-known provincial and metropolitan forums of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is suggested that the social generation of a scientific culture may have had important economic effects. Where relevant, comparative data are drawn from Sheffield, Liverpool and Manchester.

The fluoridation issue provides a test of some of the usual approaches to the analysis of scientific controversies. One of the important features of the fluoridation debate has been the use of professional power to promote fluoridation and to attack the credibility and activities of anti-fluoridation scientists. To incorporate this feature, the `resources' perspective must be broadened to include resources besides discourse. Even so, the resources perspective cannot touch certain key questions, such as why fluoridation was so heavily promoted originally. For this, a structural analysis is useful, though it needs to be extended to include more scope for human agency.