What makes us modern? This is a classic question in philosophy as well as in political science. However it is often raised without including science and technology in its definition. The argument of this book is that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology. This division allows the formidable expansion of the Western empires. However it has become more and more difficult to maintain this distance between science and politics. Hence the postmodern predicament - the feeling that the modern stance is no longer acceptable but that there is no alternative. The solution, advances one of France's leading sociologists of science, is to realize that we have never been modern to begin with. The comparative anthropology this text provides reintroduces science to the fabric of daily life and aims to make us compatible both with our past and with other cultures wrongly called pre-modern.

We Have Never Been Modern

Scientific work is heterogeneous, requiring many different actors and viewpoints. It also requires cooperation. The two create tension between divergent viewpoints and the need for generalizable findings. We present a model of how one group of actors managed this tension. It draws on the work of amateurs, professionals, administrators and others connected to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, during its early years. Extending the Latour-Callon model of interessement, two major activities are central for translating between viewpoints: standardization of methods, and the development of 'boundary objects'. Boundary objects are both adaptable to different viewpoints and robust enough to maintain identity across them. We distinguish four types of boundary objects: repositories, ideal types, coincident boundaries and standardized forms.

and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39

Scientific work is heterogeneous, requiring many different actors and viewpoints. It also requires cooperation. The two create tension between divergent viewpoints and the need for generalizable findings. We present a model of how one group of actors managed this tension. It draws on the work of amateurs, professionals, administrators and others connected to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, during its early years. Extending the Latour-Callon model of interessement, two major activities are central for translating between viewpoints: standardization of methods, and the development of `boundary objects'. Boundary objects are both adaptable to different viewpoints and robust enough to maintain identity across them. We distinguish four types of boundary objects: repositories, ideal types, coincident boundaries and standardized forms.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/285080.pdf

Institutional Ecology, `Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39:

How to Do Things With Words

This paper outlines a new approach to the study of power, that of the sociology of translation. Starting from three principles, those of agnosticism (impartiality between actors engaged in controversy), generalised symmetry (the commitment to explain conflicting viewpoints in the same terms) and free association (the abandonment of all a priori distinctions between the natural and the social), the paper describes a scientific and economic controversy about the causes for the decline in the population of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay and the attempts by three marine biologists to develop a conservation strategy for that population. Four ‘moments’ of translation are discerned in the attempts by these researchers to impose themselves and their definition of the situation on others: (a) problematisation: the researchers sought to become indispensable to other actors in the drama by denning the nature and the problems of the latter and then suggesting that these would be resolved if the actors negotiated the ‘obl...

Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay

This article asks how contexts are made in science as well as in social science, and how the making of contexts relates to political agency and intervention. To explore these issues, it traces contexting for foot-and-mouth disease and the strategies used to control the epidemic in the United Kingdom in 2001. It argues that to depict the world is to assemble contexts and to hold them together in a mode that may be descriptive, explanatory, or predictive. In developing this argument, it explores how contexts are assembled in a series of different descriptive and explanatory narratives in epidemiology, policy, critical social science, and (feminist) social studies of science.

Contexts and Culling

This paper explores a colonial controversy: the imposition of state rules to limit salmon fishing in a Scandinavian subarctic river. These rules reflect biological fish population models intended t...

/pdf/indigeneity-science-and-difference-notes-on-the-politics-of-1qpee5ol4r.pdf

Indigeneity, Science, and Difference: Notes on the Politics of How:

Normative and Interpretive Sociologies of Science

For the last four years I have been collecting material about a major British aircraft project, the TSR.2 tactical strike and reconnaissance aircraft. This project, which was first conceived in about 1956 and was canceled amid much acrimony in 1965, employed at least 20,000 people at its height. As a part of my study I have read all the secondary material I can find, I have seen a great deal of primary source material of one kind or another, and I have interviewed more than thirty of the major participants. During the last eighteen months I have been writing this material up. This has, I confess, been a particularly difficult exercise. One of the reasons for this has been that it is possible to write it up in different ways. Let me simplify and say that I could write it up as critical narrative history. Alternatively, I could use parts of that narrative to explore more theoretically oriented questions that have to do with technology and the way in which it interacts with social relations.

Theory and Narrative in the History of Technology: Response

In this book we have mounted an argument about science and technology and offered a method for its study. The implications of the argument, which were developed in detail in early chapters, are reviewed for science studies and science policy studies in the first section of this chapter. The method, that of co-word analysis, which we see as being the pursuit of the qualitative argument by quantitative methodological means, is assessed in the second section.

John Law

Papers

Contexts and Culling

Indigeneity, Science, and Difference: Notes on the Politics of How:

Normative and Interpretive Sociologies of Science

Theory and Narrative in the History of Technology: Response

Putting Texts in Their Place