BRUNO LATOUR, The pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. 273, £23.95. GEORGES CANGUILHEM, Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, The MIT Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. xi, 160, £17.95. Bruno Latour has written a wonderfully funny book about himself. It is difficult, however, to summarize a text committed to the view that \"Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else\", (p. 158). In Latour's opinion, the common view that sociologists of knowledge and scientists are opposed is incorrect. Both groups, according to Latour, are the authors of identical mistakes: reductionism and, relatedly, attempting to conjoin (in the instance of the sociologist) science and society, or (in the instance of the scientist) keeping them apart. For Latour, there are only forces or resistances which different groups encounter and attempt to conquer by forming alliances. These groups, however, are not simply the actors of conventional sociology. They include, for example, microbes, the discovery of the Pasteurians, with which they have populated our world and which we must now take notice of in any encounter or war in which we engage. War is a fundamental metaphor for Latour, since in a war or a battle clashes of armies are later called the \"victory\" of a Napoleon or a Kutuzov. Likewise, he argues, the Pasteurization of France can be viewed as a battle, with its field and its myriad contestants, in which opposing sides attempted to mould and coerce various forces of resistance. Strangely, he points out, the outcome of this huge battle, the labour and struggle of these masses, we attribute to the scientific genius of Pasteur. Pasteur's genius, however, says Latour, lay not in science (for this could be yet another way of making science and society distinct) but as strategist. Pasteur was able to cross disciplinary lines, recruiting allies to laboratory science by persuading them that they were recruiting him. This was possible because, like the armies in battle, they had already done the work of the general. Thus Pasteur's microbiology, which might conventionally be seen as a whole new science, can also be construed as a brilliant reformulation of all that preceded it and made it possible. Hygienists seized on the work of the Pasteurians and the two rapidly became powerful allies because \"The time that they [the hygienists] had made was now working for them\" (p. 52). French physicians, on the other hand, resisted recruitment, since for them it meant enslavement. Finally, however, they recruited the Pasteurians to their enterprise. Pasteurian public health was turned into a triumph of medicine. It is impossible to read this book and not substitute Latour for Pasteur. At the head of his own army, increasingly enlarged by the recruitment of allies, Latour now presents us, in his own language, with something we have made, or at least made possible. The cynic might say, using the old jibe against sociologists, that Latour has explained to us in his own language everything we knew anyway. Retorting thus, however, would be to unselfconsciously make an ally of Latour and miss the point by a narrow margin that might as well be a million miles. Latour says all this much more clearly (and certainly more wittily) than any review. Read it, but beware; in spite of Latour's strictures about irreducibility, the text is not what it seems. This is a recruitment brochure: Bruno needs you. Among the many historians whom Latour convicts by quotation of mistaking the general for the army, Pasteur for all the forces at work in French society, is Georges Canguilhem. Latour uses two quotes from Canguilhem, both taken from the original French version of Ideology and rationality in the life sciences, first published in 1977. Reading Canguilhem after Latour induces a feeling akin to culture shock. Astonishingly, Canguilhem seems almost Anglo-American. Anyone familiar with Canguilhem's epistemological universe would hardly be surprised to discover that Latour finds in it perspectives different from his own. After all, Canguilhem remains committed to the epistemologically distinct entity science or, better still, sciences. Likewise he employs distinctions between science and ideology, as in Spencerian ideology and Darwinian science, which will seem familiar, possibly jaded to English-reading eyes. His text is liberally seeded with unLatourian expressions, including injunctions to distinguish \"between ideology and science\" (p. 39), lamentations that eighteenth-century medicine \"squandered its energy in the erection of systems\" (p. 53), rejoicing that physiology \"liberated itself' from classical anatomy (p. 54), and regret that \"Stahl's influence ... seriously impeded experimental

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Bruno Latour, The pasteurization of France , trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. 273, £23.95. - Georges Canguilhem, Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences , trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, The MIT Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. xi, 160, £17.95.

A vast and continually expanding literature on economic globalization continues to generate a miasma of conflicting viewpoints and alternative discourses. This article argues that any understanding of the global economy must be sensitive to four considerations: (a) conceptual categories and labels carry with them the dis- cursive power to shape material processes; (b) multiple scales of analysis must be incorporated in recognition of the contemporary 'relativization of scale'; (c) no single institutional or organizational locus of analysis should be privileged; and (d) extrapolations from specific case studies and instances must be treated with caution, but this should not preclude the option of discussing the global economy, and power relations within it, as a structural whole. This paper advocates a network method- ology as a potential framework to incorporate these concerns. Such a methodology requires us to identify actors in networks, their ongoing relations and the structural outcomes of these relations. Networks thus become the foundational unit of analysis for our understanding of the global economy, rather than individuals, firms or nation states. In presenting this argument we critically examine two examples of network methodology that have been used to provide frameworks for analysing the global economy: global commodity chains and actor-network theory. We suggest that while they fall short of fulfilling the promise of a network methodology in some respects, they do provide indications of the utility of such a methodology as a basis for under- standing the global economy.

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Chains and networks, territories and scales: towards a relational framework for analysing the global economy

When reviewing the conditions required for the existence of markets, no concept is more useful or appropriate than that of 'externality'. The concept of externality is effectively central both to economies and to economics. So an attempt to clarify its significance and scope represents a suitable point of departure for renewed efforts at co-operation between sociologists and economists. Rather than highlighting the limitations and weaknesses of the concept with a view to attacking the limitations and weaknesses of economic theory, I intend to show just how useful it is as a tool for understanding the dynamics of markets, drawing upon sociology as an additional resource. I shall approach this task from the perspective of the sociologist of science and techniques. This will allow me not only to highlight the role of investment-in particular technological-in the emergence of economic agents that are capable of strategies and calculation; it will also serve as an incentive to take the 'performative' role of the sciences-and hence also of economics and sociology-more seriously. I shall start by putting my economist's hat on in order briefly to remind my fellow sociologists of the various ways in which the concept of externality can be defined, together with its practical and theoretical implications. This will lead on to a discussion of the various mechanisms upon which the concept is predicated. I shall then touch first upon what I shall here refer to as 'framing/overflowing' and upon the various issues associated with the identification, measuring and containment of such overflows. I shall subsequently focus my attention on the role played by the technosciences in the proliferation of overflows, highlighting the active role of the social sciences-alongside the natural sciences-in the identification and management of externalities. Finally, I shall draw one of the most

An essay on framing and overflowing: economic externalities revisited by sociology

This article reviews research in Strategy-as-Practice (SAP) and suggests directions for its development. The power of this perspective lies in its ability to explain how strategy-making is enabled and constrained by prevailing organizational and societal practices. Our review shows how SAP research has helped to advance social theories in strategic management, offered alternatives to performance-dominated analyzes, broadened the scope in terms of organizations studied and promoted new methodologies. In particular, it has provided important insights into the tools and methods of strategy-making (practices), how strategy work takes place (praxis), and the role and identity of the actors involved (practitioners). However, we argue that there is a need to go further in the analysis of social practices to unleash the full potential of this perspective. Hence, we outline five directions for the further development of the practice perspective: placing agency in a web of practices, recognizing the macro-institutional nature of practices, focusing attention on emergence in strategy-making, exploring how the material matters, and promoting critical analysis.

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Strategy-as-Practice: Taking Social Practices Seriously

The spaces of actor-network theory

. Les sciences sociales ont invente toute une serie de concepts pour surmonter l'opposition entre action individuelle et collective. Un des apports de l'anthropologie des sciences et des techniques (AST) est de montrer que cette opposition ne constitue qu'une des configurations construites par l'action et sa distribution. Pour restituer la diversite de ces configurations l'AST a elabore quatre principes. Le premier affirme le caractere heterogene du social. Le deuxieme conduit a considerer que toute entite est une realite assimilable au reseau des elements heterogenes. Le troisieme affirme que les entites sont a geometrie variable et qu'elles reorientent l'action dans des directions imprevisibles. Le quatrieme propose que tout arrangement social stabilise est a la fois un point (un individu) et un reseau (un collectif). L'analyse sociologique, si elle veut surmonter l'opposition entre individualisme et holisme, doit donc se donner pour objet l'etude de ces differentes configurations hybrides. Resume. The social sciences have devised a series of strategies in order to overcome the division between individual and collective action. However, science, technology and society (STS) has shown that this distinction is only one possible configuration for action and its distribution. In order to investigate other possible configurations, STS proposes four principles: that the social is heterogeneous in character; that all entities are networks of heterogeneous elements; that these networks are both variable in geometry and in principle unpredictable; and that every stable social arrangement is simultaneously a point (an individual) and a network (a collective). If sociological analysis is to overcome the individualism/holism division it should attend to the range of hybrid configurations. "For at the intersection of all these fields we sense that the same basic message is being conveyed -- a message that seems indeed over the course of the centuries to have almost attained the status of an accepted truth. This is the assertion that reality -- all reality -- can be conceived of as a construction that one should be able to lean on, and as something that must be manipulated. Arts and wisdom, as the Chinese conceived of them, should be devoted to the strategic exploitation of the propensity inherent in reality; they should be designed so as to cause a maximal effect." (Francois Jullien, La Propension des Choses, Paris: Seuil, 1992, page 15) Introduction Many cultures manage perfectly well without it. For instance, those of the Papua New Guinea Highlands (Strathern 1991) -- or, perhaps less exotically, that of the Japanese. Indeed, the very translation of Euro-American social thought into Japanese is extraordinarily difficult. For the whole idea of the "individual" and "society" is foreign to Japanese culture. There is a fascinating story to be retold about the conversion of these terms into Japanese neologisms -- the ugly neologisms needed to import Euro-American social science and its problems into Japan. And another equally interesting story to be told of teaching about the distinction between the individual and society to eighteen-year olds in Japanese universities -- students who tend to come from places which perform continuities between the collective and the personal, rather than divisions or dualisms. (2) Are the Japanese disadvantaged? Perhaps. But perhaps not. For maybe what appears to be a Japanese problem is really one of Euro-American making. And one that should be treated as a burden, indeed an unnecessary burden. Such, at any rate, is the thesis that we explore in this paper. That the Euro-American distinction between the individual and the collective--current since at least the Enlightenment, though no doubt preceding this by many centuries -- is unsatisfactory. And that the space created by the division and the intellectual games it generates are unnecessary, perhaps even sterile. …

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Michael Callon

Papers

After the individual in society : Lessons on collectivity from science, technology and society