Social Studies of Science

The campaign to save the North American whooping crane from extinction began in the early twentieth century with a few individuals seeking legal protection for the bird. It evolved into a programme involving scientists and public interest groups in the United States and Canada, and requiring active strategies to increase reproduction and form new flocks. Programmes and plans have become progressively more complicated; power over policy has shifted from individuals and non-governmental organizations to federal agencies; and academically qualified scientists have displaced naturalists and nature-lovers. The evolution of administrative structures and the increasing importance of federal agencies and experts is seen as a response not only to public demands for action to save species, and the crane in particular, but to the imperatives of bureaucracy and organization required by an industrialized society using all the land.

In this paper, the controversy over sewage pollution on Sydney beaches and how it should be remedied is used to analyze the concept of `closure', and what it means for technological controversies. Various parties to this controversy attempted to resolve it in several ways: by redefining sewage pollution as an aesthetic problem; by negotiating a consensus at the decision-makers' level about water quality standards; by putting forward what appeared to be `sound arguments'; and by the use of rhetoric. The paper explores the difficulties in applying categories of `closure', and its usefulness as a framework for understanding the dynamics of a controversy, and the power relationships between those involved.

The management of health risks in the human environment is usually supported by expert assessment of the risk. We studied two cases of cancer risk in the Netherlands (connected with dioxin and formaldehyde respectively) in which reassessment of the risk was needed shortly after a first assessment. From the change in the assessment in these two cases, we could reach a number of conclusions about the role of expertise in the process of health risk management. First, the experts already include the evaluation of risk in their assessment. Second, they do not seem to be paradigmatically predisposed to adhere to a certain line of argument, but use whatever data are available to enable them to reach conclusions on risk management problems. Experts are seen to act as service engineers, able to use a scientific toolbox to help solve such problems. This `service engineering' model of the role of expertise demonstrates the strong interrelationship and `fine tuning' between experts and policy decisions.

This paper presents an ethnographic account of surgical operations as encounters of two disciplined bodies — a parcelled `patient-body', and an aggregated `surgeon-body'. It describes the practices of making bodies operable, of cooperating and of creating anatomical visibility by means of highly skilled manipulations and optical technology. The discussion relates features of surgical practice to two issues raised in science studies: (1) Ritual aspects of scientific work; how does a medical science deal with the life-world esteem for its object?; and (2) The relation of experience and representation; how do patients' bodies come to embody the properties of anatomical pictures? A constructivist interpretation is offered: the anatomical body is an accomplishment of the sculptural practice of operations.

Freudenthal has proposed that seventeenth-century philosophy depends upon a presumption that the behaviour of a material object is to be accounted for in terms of properties that are localized within its fundamental particles, rather than in the relationships between the object and its environment. He attributes this metaphysical preference to a special emphasis on the priority of the individual in contemporary social developments. I argue the contrary: the localization of causality is not a characteristic of the new philosophy, but is indeed one of the fundamental principles of the scholastic tradition, both in its social philosophy and in its philosophy of nature. By comparison with their opponents, the seventeenth-century mechanists are radical holists, promoting the view that the bulk of an object's properties resides in relationships with the remainder of the universe. Freudenthal's contrast between the matter-theory of `feudal-organic' Europe and that of early capitalism is quite invalid, and with it, his attempt at social explanation of the genesis of modern science.

This paper examines the degree to which measured inequality in scientific output is sensitive to adjustments for attribution and the quality of the journal (as proxied by journal impact) in which the article appears. Data for the study come from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients and the Science Citation Index. Generally, we find that the adjustment for attribution only marginally affects inequality. In all instances, however, the adjustment for journal impact increases inequality by a statistically significant amount. The conclusions persist when the analysis is restricted to only those scientists who publish, and suggest that prolific scientists have not gained their status by `sharing' authorship, as is popularly imagined; neither have they traded quality for quantity by publishing in journals of lower impact. The data also allow for an examination of inequality by sector of employment. The analysis points to substantial differences in inequality between employment sectors, due largely to wide differences in the proportion of scientists publishing in the different sectors.