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This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other "texts,"' and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change. The book is based on field work done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin's laboratory at the Salk Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of modern sciences and laboratory studies in the history of science.
This work investigates the precise effects on society of the new and much vaunted electronic technologies (ICTs). Are fundamental shifts already taking place in the way in which we behave, organize, and interact as a direct result of their implementation? Providing a comprehensive set of detailed empirical studies of the genesis and use of these new technologies, the book also presents some surprising counterintuitive results.
Edited by expert scholars, this volume explores the 'imposter' through empirical cases, including click farms, bikers, business leaders and fraudulent scientists, providing insights into the social relations and cultural forms from which they emerge.
The book aims to explore how governance and accountability are mediated through material relations involving ordinary everyday objects and technologies. It draws on empirical materials in three main areas: waste management and recycling; the regulation and control of traffic; and security and passenger movement in airports.
The essays in this book provide an excellent introduction to the means by which scientists convey their ideas. While diverse in their subject matter, the essays are unified in asserting that scientists compose and use particular representations in contextually organized and contextually sensitive ways, and that these representations - particularly visual displays such as graphs, diagrams, photographs, and drawings - depend for their meaning on the complex activities in which they are situated.The topics include sociological orientations to representational practice, representation and the realist-constructivist controversy, the fixation of evidence, time and documents in researcher interacti...
A fresh approach to visualization practices in the sciences that considers novel forms of imaging technology and draws on recent theoretical perspectives on representation. Representation in Scientific Practice, published by the MIT Press in 1990, helped coalesce a long-standing interest in scientific visualization among historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science and remains a touchstone for current investigations in science and technology studies. This volume revisits the topic, taking into account both the changing conceptual landscape of STS and the emergence of new imaging technologies in scientific practice. It offers cutting-edge research on a broad array of fields that stud...
Global corporations initiate, join and maintain socio-technological change and hence, alter the ways in which we organize our lives. Demanding significant investment of resources and time, the development and implementation of new technologies on different levels must take into consideration these subtle processes. As such, it is particularly important that we have a greater insight into the practices of hi-tech corporations, in view of the often inflated promises of and concerns about the destiny of technological breakthroughs, especially those promising sizeable economic outcomes and societal transformation. Elena Simakova undertook a lengthy ethnographic study, working alongside marketing...
This unusually innovative book treats reflexivity, not as a philosophical conundrum, but as a practical issue that arises in the course of scholarly research and argument. In order to demonstrate the concrete and consequential nature of reflexivity, Malcolm Ashmore concentrates on an area in which reflexive "problems" are acute: the sociology of scientific knowledge. At the forefront of recent radical changes in our understanding of science, this increasingly influential mode of analysis specializes in rigorous deconstructions of the research practices and textual products of the scientific enterprise. Through a series of detailed examinations of the practices and products of the sociology of scientific knowledge, Ashmore turns its own claims and findings back onto itself and opens up a whole new era of exploration beyond the common fear of reflexive self-destruction.
This book argues that the power of science as the most respected and authoritative world view is based on its superior material and organizational resources, not on its superior rationality. Fuchs approaches science as a social construct, and utilizing a theory of scientific organizations, he analyzes knowledge production in scientific fields--how they differ in their resources and how these differences affect how science is conducted. The book explains why certain fields produce science and facts, while others engage in hermeneutics and conversation; why certain specialities change through cumulation rather than fragmentation; and why some fields are relativistic while others are positivist in their self-understanding. This general theory of knowledge is applicable not only to science, but to all varieties of professional groups engaged in knowledge production.