Social science is also called as the laboratory of life

The Central Place of Anthropology and Ethnography

Building on the work of Bloor and colleagues on SSK, the anthropological input to social studies of science was exemplified in the 1979 publication of Laboratory Life by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar and in Karin Knorr-Cetina's The Manufacture of Knowledge in 1981. In Laboratory Life, scientists are studied in their natural environment in the world-renowned Salk Institute in California in the same manner as Amazonian tribes. They may build exquisite experiments, take detailed readings, annotate results, and even send faxes, but the ethnographer of science records actions and their spatiotemporal location all the same.

Latour and Woolgar also drew on the traditions of semiotics to map out the interactions between scientists and instruments in the laboratory, linking studies of the small to the metafactors of sourcing funding, laboratory management, and career progression. This led to further work by Callon and Latour in their sociology of translations, widely known as Actor–Network Theory. They expounded the conceptual repertoire of social studies of science to include “actors,” “concerns,” and “obligatory passage points” to better delineate the networks of science and technology in practice. An actor represents something that makes a difference, be it a person or a machine, creating new connections and incorporating or replacing existing ones in a network. For instance, a scientist may create a new piece of equipment that strengthens the posited existence of a biological process, which in turn allows her to build a research partnership on a broader-related research topic. Similarly, Latour in Science in Action (1987) would draw on historical examples such as the success of the diesel engine in relation to the broad networks of engineers and series of failed technologies, which contributed to its development.

While originating as “social studies of science,” the field quickly expanded to include technology and other fields as intrinsic to what we understand as science. The broad result of this work is an ontological emphasis on “technoscience” that does not distinguish a priori between humans as intentional agents and other actors in the network that have no such cognitive powers. Instead, a sociology of translations accounts for the politics of science as actors recruit one another into their networks in the pursuit of interests, epistemic, or otherwise. In contrast, the Strong Program retained a distinction between human and nonhuman and dedicated itself to the exploration of how science is socially constructed, spawning a spirited debate between the camps in essays with titles such as “Epistemological Chicken” (Collins and Yearly), “Don”t throw the baby out with the Bath School!” (Callon and Latour), and “Anti-Latour” (David Bloor).

STS' Topical Extensions

It has been a long time since STS was mainly SSK together with ANT (actor network theory); indeed this couple largely ceased to cohabit following the polemics published in Pickering (1992). STS has become extraordinarily diverse, topically, conceptually, institutionally, and nationally. Though the acronym STS seems to specify a single (double) topic, that of science and technology, its topics have now expanded into a whole range of what Lynch (1993) has called ‘epistopics’: law and legal deliberations, politics and policy, engineering and design, medicine and health care, finance and markets; and all the hybridities performed when ‘science’ and/or ‘technology’ (technoscience) meet (these and) other institutions and practices – particularly as heterogeneous assemblages forming around public ‘matters of concern’ as opposed to the private laboratory-based production of ‘matters of fact’ (Latour, 2004; Latour and Weibel, 2005). Where, if anywhere, is the place of reflexivity in this STS?

The varieties of reflexivities (see section Social Science’s Ubiquitous Reflexivities) have made themselves felt in STS, as they have elsewhere. A recent special issue of Science as Culture (Cohen and Galusky, 2010) is dedicated to reflexivity conceived as how personal narrative and experience can lead to STS-relevant insights. A rather different sense of the term is present in Wynne's normative call for greater ‘institutional reflexivity’ (Wynne, 1993); an emphasis that applies the (positive) attribute of reflexivity, not to the STS researcher, but to the researched; that is, to scientific institutions that tend to suffer from a self-awareness deficit. And what of the emphasis of the 1980s reflexivists? It can sometimes seem as if this never existed. Collyer (2011: p. 316) argues that “despite its potential, theorising within the sociology of science and technology is hampered by insufficient attention to … the concept and practice of reflexivity”! An endangered species, evidently (see Section Radical Reflexivity: Is It All Over Now?) but not yet quite dead, though largely confined to a counterintuitive corner of the STS universe – that of business schools and marketing research – courtesy of the Final Reflexivist, Steve Woolgar's elevation to Professor of Marketing at Säid Business School, Oxford University (Neyland and Simakova, 2009).

2.2 Harry Collins: Special Relativism and the Ban on Reflexivity

Not so for, perhaps, the most influential writer through the heyday of SSK (ca. 1975–90), Harry Collins (e.g., 1985). Collins's doctrine of ‘special relativism’ separates the natural world from the social world, and the distinctive tasks and ‘natural attitudes’ of the natural scientist from those of the social scientist. The sociologist of scientific knowledge should treat the natural world as socially constructed, while treating the social world as ‘real’ and a source of sound data. However, this sense of ‘realism’ is taken from a reading of how natural scientists act towards their realm of inquiry, namely, the natural world. In effect, what Collins is doing here is to deny the practical relevance of the purported reflexive similarity between subject and object in SSK for purposes of the conduct of research. The result is the short-circuiting of attempts to apply Collins's conclusions about, for example, the replication of experiments to those conclusions themselves (nevertheless see Mulkay 1985, Chaps. 4 and 5, Ashmore 1989, Chap. 4). In short, Collins's ‘management strategy’ for reflexivity is to ban it altogether. This radical solution to the problem of reflexivity has laid Collins open to charges of inconsistency from both wings of the ‘realist–relativist’ continuum. The recommended moves for repairing this perceived inconsistency differ, however, with the ‘realist’ suggesting he abandon his problematic relativism about nature, and the ‘more-radical-relativist’ proposing the dropping of his social realism (see Technology, Social Construction of).

The Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

In the 1970s, a group calling themselves the “Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge” defended a determinist approach with roots in Durkheim and Marx. David Bloor (1976/1991), a principal spokesperson for the group, laid out four tenets for this program. They are (1) that explanations of belief and knowledge should be causal; (2) that sociology should be impartial with respect to the truth or falsity, or the rationality or irrationality, of the belief to be explained; (3) that explanation should be symmetrical, in the sense that the same kind of causes would explain both true and false beliefs; and (4) that the sociology of knowledge should be reflexive, in the sense that the same principles of explanation should apply to sociology itself. The Strong Programme regarded accounts of the beliefs and practices of scientists in terms of their social interests as satisfying the demand for causal explanation, although, as mentioned earlier, interest accounts are functional rather than causal explanations. Their concept of social interests included not only economic or class interests but political, religious, professional, and other interests as well. Thus, ironically, while criticizing Mannheim for failing to include the natural sciences within the explanatory scope of the sociology of knowledge, they also neglected his warning about expanding the notion of social interests to such an extent as to empty it of meaning.

Philosophers and other social scientists sharply criticized the Strong Programme. Philosophers insisted that scientists held the views that they did on the basis of reason and evidence. They furthermore argued that the tenets of impartiality and symmetry prevent the Strong Programme from arguing for their position on epistemic grounds: that is, these tenets prohibit them from saying that their beliefs are any more well founded than the alternatives. Among the social scientists who criticized them, some felt that in plumping for causal explanations, the Strong Programme was trying too hard to model the social on the natural sciences. Others criticized them for taking the existence of social structure and social classes as given and not recognizing that these are constantly changing social phenomena brought about through complex human interaction. Like Mannheim, these critics recognize that social structure and class exist in and through the beliefs and practices of the members of society and are to be explained in the same way as any other beliefs and practices. To explain a person's scientific beliefs in terms of social interests is thus in effect to privilege one sort of belief over another.

2 The Origin and Development of the Social Construction of Technology

SCOT grew out of the combination of three distinct bodies of work: the STS movement, SSK, and the history of technology. The first started in the 1970s, mainly in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, and the US. Its goal was to enrich the curricula of both universities and secondary schools by studying issues such as scientists' social responsibilities, the risks of nuclear energy, the proliferation of nuclear arms, and environmental pollution. The movement was quite successful, especially in science and engineering faculties, and some of the STS courses were incorporated into degree requirements.

SSK emerged in the late 1970s in the United Kingdom on the basis of work in the sociology of knowledge, the philosophy of science, and the sociology of science (see Scientific Knowledge, Sociology of; Strong Program, in Sociology of Scientific Knowledge). The central methodological tenets of the ‘strong program’ (especially its symmetry principle) seemed equally applicable to technology. The symmetry principle called for a symmetrical analysis of true and false scientific statements, explaining their development with the same conceptual framework. In studying technology, this should mean that working and non-working machines should be analyzed symmetrically and in the same terms.

In the history of technology, especially in the US, an increasing number of scholars began to raise more theoretical and sociologically inspired questions (influential were Constant 1980, Hughes 1983, Cowan 1983). Path-breaking advocacy for this body of work in the history of technology was provided by the reader edited by MacKenzie and Wajcman (1985). Citing the title of this volume, the phrase ‘social shaping of technology’ is used to denote a broader area of research, including work in industrial sociology, technology policy, and the economics of technical change (Williams 1996).

Researchers from these three traditions convened an international workshop in 1984 in the Netherlands. The subsequent volume from that workshop, edited by an STSer, a historian of technology, and a sociologist of scientific knowledge (Bijker et al. 1987), has been heralded as the starting point of SCOT. To understand the role of this workshop and volume, it is helpful to distinguish between a broad and narrow usage of the phrase ‘social construction of technology’ (but to note that both notions fall within the radical meaning of social constructivism).

When broadly used, the ‘social construction of technology’ encompasses all the work represented in the 1987 volume, including the actor-network approach by Callon, Latour, and Law (see Actor Network Theory), and the technological systems approach advocated by Hughes (see History of Technology). Used more narrowly, it refers primarily to the program set out by Pinch and Bijker (1984). For this latter program of the social construction of technology, the acronym ‘SCOT’ was introduced; but this acronym is now increasingly used in the broad sense too, without reference to one specific approach in constructivist studies of technology. The remainder of this article is primarily about SCOT in the narrow sense, although SCOT also broadened its agenda (for reviews of SCOT in the broad sense, see Bijker 1995b).

SCOT developed like any normal scientific program: its agenda, central concepts, and even unit of analysis shifted in response to research findings and discussions among contributing scholars. In that sense, one can distinguish early and late (or recent) versions of SCOT.

An important, though negative, starting point for SCOT was to criticize technological determinism (see Technological Determinism). Technological determinism was taken to comprise two elements: (a) technology develops autonomously, and (b) technology determines societal development to an important degree. This view was seen as intellectually poor and politically debilitating. Technological determinism implies a poor research strategy, it was argued, because it entails a teleological, linear, and one-dimensional view of technological development. In addition, it was considered politically debilitating because technological determinism suggests that social and political interventions in the course of technology are impossible, thus making politicization of technology a futile endeavor. To bolster this critique, it was necessary to show that the working of technology was socially constructed, with the emphasis on ‘social.’ Key concepts in this program, as will be discussed in the next section, were ‘relevant social group,’ ‘interpretive flexibility,’ ‘closure,’ and ‘stabilization.’ The unit of analysis was the single artifact. The choice of the artifact as unit of analysis was a choice of the ‘hardest possible case.’ To show that even the working of a bicycle or a lamp was socially constructed seemed a harder task, and thus—when successful—more convincing, than to argue that technology at a higher level of aggregation was socially shaped.

The agenda of demonstrating the social construction of artifacts by detailed analysis at the micro level resulted in a wealth of case studies. A few years later, the program was broadened in two ways (Bijker and Law 1992). First, questions were raised at a meso and macro level of aggregation as well: for example about the political construction of radioactive waste, clinical budgeting in the British National Health Service, or technically mediated social order. Second, the agenda was broadened to include again the issue of technology's impact on society, which had been bracketed for the sake of fighting technological determinism. Concepts developed for this agenda were ‘technological frame,’ and various conceptualizations of the obduracy of technology. The unit of analysis was broadened from the singular technical artifact to the more comprehensive and heterogeneous sociotechnical ensemble. The emphasis now was on ‘construction’ rather than on ‘social.’ (A similar shift occurred in the social construction of science. Thus, for example, Latour and Woolgar (1986) dropped the word ‘social’ from the subtitle of their book Laboratory Life when it was reprinted in 1986.) The aim became to study the mutual shaping of society and technology, rather than the one being shaped by the other.

Present research in SCOT combines ongoing empirical case studies with more general questions about the modernization of society, the politicization of technological culture, and the management of innovation. It has become increasingly difficult (and unfruitful) to observe the boundaries between the various approaches within the broader social construction of technology. Research collaboration and conceptual combinations have emerged between, for example, the actor-network approach, SCOT in the narrow sense, and gender and technology studies. Connections are developing with studies in the social sciences more generally, including politics, economics, and law.

3 Significance

As the recent so-called ‘science wars’ have revealed, outsiders consider that the importance of SSK and related analyses of science lies in the impact they have on the perception of the meaning of science in the wider world. SSK is widely seen as a radical relativist attack on science. But both the philosophical and political radicalism of the social analysis of science varies from program to program and study to study.

For example, ‘epistemological relativism’ implies that one social group's way of justifying its knowledge is as good as another's and that there is no external vantage point from which to judge between them; all that can be known can be known only from the point of view of one social group or another. Ontological relativism is the view that, in social groups such as those described above, reality itself is different. A combination of epistemological and/or ontological relativism can be referred to as ‘philosophical relativism.’ This attitude is nicely captured by McHugh in the following quotation: ‘We must accept that there are no adequate grounds for establishing criteria of truth except the grounds that are employed to grant or concede it—truth is conceivable only as a socially organized upshot of contingent courses of linguistic, conceptual and social behaviour’ (1980, p. 329). Philosophical relativism is, then, a philosophically radical viewpoint.

A still more philosophically radical position is the ‘actor (or actant) network theory’ (ANT) most closely associated with Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. The approach was first signaled by Latour and Woolgar when, in 1986, they changed the subtitle of Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar 1979) from The Social Construction of Scientific Facts to The Construction of Scientific Facts so as to signify that the ‘social’ in their view no longer deserved special mention in the shaping of scientific knowledge. Subsequently, as Callon and Latour developed their ideas, scientific facts came to be seen as emerging from the interplay of ‘actants’ in the ‘text,’ of life—suggesting that ANT should most properly be included under cultural studies of science rather than SSK. Within Callon and Latour's ‘text,’ terms such as ‘social’ and ‘natural’ are themselves outcomes of the interplay of actants rather than original causes. Therefore, to draw attention to the social as a special factor is to begin the discussion at too low a level of generality. Under this approach ‘constructivism’ has ceased to be social and among the actants nonhumans are given as much reality-forming agency as humans (Callon 1986). The philosophical radicalness of ANT is clear in its refusal to accept even the notion of human and nonhuman as primary.

Methodological relativism, by contrast, says nothing direct about reality or the justification of knowledge. Methodological relativism is an attitude of mind recommended by some of those who practice SSK; it says that the sociologist or historian of science should act as though the beliefs about reality of any competing groups being investigated are not caused by the reality itself. The intention is to limit analysis to the kind of causes of scientific beliefs that are located in the domain of the social. Methodological relativism is meant to push exploration of the social causes of belief to the limit without having it cut off by the argument that a belief was widely accepted because it was rational. Methodological relativism is, then, not at all radical as a philosophy, it is a (social) scientific method.

What is social science also called?

Why is it called social science?

What is social science in life?

What is the short name of social science?