Knowledge on its travels: Dispersal and divergence in the makeup of communities

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

Volumn 31, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 149-162

  Strathern, Marilyn ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AFTER-THE-FACT; CAMBRIDGE; DIVERSE LOCATIONS; ELECTRONIC CIRCUITRY; KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITIES; KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY; ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURE;

SOCIAL SCIENCES;

EID: 33746092508     PISSN: 03080188     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1179/030801806X103316     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Taken (in each case) from the 2001 'Proposal to the Department of Health and DTP initiated by the Public Health Genetics Unit, with thanks to Dr R. Zimmern. 'Knowledge parks' originate in the need articulated by the UK Department of Health to support research in clinical genetics by bringing together multiple aspects of emerging developments and to ensure their acceptability to the public. Of several bids (of which six were successful), the Cambridge proposal goes furthest in responding to the tender invitation to develop appropriate economic, ethical, legal and social frameworks for the effective delivery of genetic services.
2. Later, an advisory panel, as well as associates, joined them (see www.cgkp.org.uk).
3. 'Knowledge is only useful if others can have access to it. The [GGKP] will concentrate its efforts at dissemination and education on three group: (a) health professionals (b) policy makers (c) scientist/entrepreneurs and commercial partners' (from the 2001 proposal).
4. This was the conference rubric to which I was initially writing (see Acknowledgements). It is answered in one vein by proponents of actor-network theory: the classic travelogue remains for me A. Mol and J. Law: 'Regions, networks and fluids: anaemia and social typology', Social Studies of Science, 1994, 24, 641-671.
5. Not a term I have ever been happy with as an analytic. I use it throughout 'ethnographically', that is, assuming nothing more than its common usage implies.
6. I deliberately leave aside knowledge communities found within formal structures of association generated by companies and business firms, or by departments and faculties or disciplines and arenas of expertise, which presuppose common interests, common 'cultures' of operation. This is not to say that they are not interesting, but arenas self-conscious about 'mixing' expertises sharpen certain salient issues.
7. Borrowings do not have to entail transactions of course, One of the few anthropological accounts of traffic between disciplines is M. Schlecker and E. Hirsch: 'Incomplete knowledge: ethnography and the crisis of context in studies of media, science and technology', History of the Human Sciences, 2001, 14, 69-87, a study of the way the fields of media, cultural studies and science and technology studies took up the concept of 'ethnography'. Anthropology has taken many things back for its own usage. The result is a kind of implicit or embedded interdisciplinarity that requires no tokens of agreement or disagreement.
8. On 'trading zones', see M. Strathern: 'Commons and borderlands', in Commons and Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability and the Flow of Knowledge; 2004, Wantage, Sean Kingston Publishing.
9. J. Goodman and V. Walsh: The Story of Taxol: Nature and Politics in the Pursuit of an Anti-Cancer Drug, 2001, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
10. Bronwyn Parry's work on the transformation of substances into information has several remarkable insights important here (B. Parry: Trading the Genome: Investigating the Commodification of Bio-Information; 2004, New York, NY, Columbia University Press).
11. For a summary of the Taxol case, see M. Strathern: Property, Substance and Effect. Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things, 193; 1999, London, Athlone Press
12. (after J. Goodman and V. Walsh: The Story of Taxol (see Note 8)): at each point at which knowledge about its properties migrated from one product to another (from the bark to the extract to the molecular formula to the chemical compound), different communities of experts (botanists, chemists, pharmaceutical researchers, companies) were involved.
13. Scientific findings build upon one another and 'scientists buttress their new claims by connecting them as much as possible to the body of previous scientific literature' (M. Biagioli: 'Right or rewards? Changing contexts and definitions of scientific authorship', Journal of College and University Law, 2000, 27, 83-108, 88, 104).
14. Biagioli refers to the 'community-specific' nature of scientific authorship. See also M. Biagioli and P. Galison (ed.): Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science; 2003, New York, NY, Routledge.
15. Hugh Gusterson describes scientists despising the academic culture with its focus on publications and citation (H. Gusterson: The death of the authors of death: prestige and creativity among nuclear weapons scientists', in Scientific Authorship, p. 300 (see Note 10)).
16. Thanks to Ludek Broz for emphasising this point. Commissions of enquiry and ethics committees afford other examples.
17. This does not begin to describe the social realities. See for example, on air pollution control in Southwark, A. Barry: Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society; 2001, London, Athlone Press.
18. D. A. Schön: The Reflective Practitioner. How Professionals Think in Action; 1991, Aldershot, Ashgate (first published 1983).
19. Huge US government investment in exploiting the yew bark, over the course of some thirty years, was a 'failure' until events took an unexpected turn with Bristol-Myers Squibb.
20. J. Law: Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience; 2002, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. The programme was scrapped as part of a new policy measure by an incoming government, but among the reasons why it was scrapped were problems with delivery.
21. J. Law: Aircraft Stories, p. 87 (see Note 16). This multiplicity was effaced and the enterprise could be performed as though it encapsulated a common goal.
22. J. Law: Aircraft Stories, pp. 13-15, 33-34, 192, 140 (see Note 16).
23. Law would intend us to understand many operations as exactly so, the aircraft project - deploying tens of thousands of people - being just an example.
24. P. Harvey (ed.): Social Analysis, 1997, 41, (1), Special issue on 'Technology as skilled practice'.
25. S. Hill and T. Turpin: 'Cultures in collision: the emergence of a new localism in academic research', in Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge, (ed. M. Strathern), 131-152; 1995, London, Routledge.
26. See below: a kind of intended community.
27. An exemplary study here is G. Born: Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Bouleic, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde, 1995, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, on the avant-garde experimental music centre IRCAM.
28. S. Helmreich: 'Replicating reproduction in artificial life: or, the essence of life in the age of virtual electronic reproduction', in Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation, (ed. S. Franklin and H. Ragoné), 8; 1998, Philadelphia, PA, University of Pennsylvania Press;
29. Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World; 1998, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press.
30. S. Helmreich: 'Replicating reproduction', p. 208 (see Note 24).
31. S. Helmreich: 'Kinship in hypertext: transubstantiating fatherhood and informational flow in artificial life', in Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, (ed. S. Franklin and S. McKinnon), 129; 2001, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. I quote the deliberate use of analogy here because of its clear role in knowledge-making (not all metaphors or analogies work this way).
32. S. Helmreich: 'Replicating reproduction', p. 215 (see Note 24).
33. These are 'Micrographic relations', my model for the way in which anything that comes into focus is also part of something else (M. Strathern: After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century, 1992, Cambridge, Cambridge Univeristy Press).
34. I thank Mark Henare for this prompt.
35. A well known move from the implicit to explicit (M. Strathern: After Nature (see Note 28)), and long establised proclivity (e.g. newcomers to a village wanting to see it activated as 'a village' (Elmdon) or the QAA that wants a university to be seen to be 'a university'.
36. See D. Miller: The virtual moment', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2003, 9, 57-75.)
37. As though Luhmann's model for sociality (society as a network of communication) were being animated (N. Luhmann: Essays on Self-Reference, 1990, New York, NY, Columbia University Press).
38. On the self-defining virtues of connections, see S. Green and P. Harvey: 'Scaling places and networks: an ethnography of ICT "innovation" in Manchester', presented at Internet and Ethnography Conference, Hull, UK, 1999;
39. also A. Wittel, C. Lury and S. Lash: 'Real and virtual connectivity: new media in London', in Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, 2002, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
40. On interactivity and technological citizenship, see A, Barry: Political Machines, Chap. 6 (see Note 13).
41. And was never in the end fully realised. See B. deal: 'Capturing community: innovation and technology within a European framework', PhD thesis, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK, 2001.
42. From L. N. Andersen: 'Magic Lounge in Saarbrücken', i3 Magazine, 1998, (2), 10-11. I am grateful to Bryan Cleal for the copy of the Eniii in-house magazine (13 Magazine), for all other information included in this section, and for permission to quote from his unpublished dissertation (see Note 33).
43. People will already have social interests, drawn from their own circumstances; these do not have to be integrated because each person can instead be integrated into a wider circuit which makes available what he or she wants.
44. From A. Agostini, G. De Michelis and M. Susani: 'A methodology for the design of innovative user oriented systems', i3 Magazine, 1998, (2), 4-7; while it drew from another part of the i3 programme, the ethos would have been recognisable to the Magic Lounge project.
45. A. Agostini et al.: 'A methodology' (see Note 36); my emphasis. The authors begin their piece saying: The design of computer based systems willing to support social interaction among users is not a technological problem' (i.e. it is a social one).
46. At one point it would seem the ML designers imagined they would be creating a community of locals who would enhance their own community initiatives through being in easier contact with one another than they had been. However the potential users saw little point in further developing local contacts: they saw the facility as giving them access to those not on the islands, to the world outside. (One might see this as another version of the Santa Fe incorporation of 'extraneous' reference points.)
47. In the Danish case, for example, distance learning for children, more effective advertising to tourists, and in general practical work tools rather than recreational opportunities.
48. Where, among other things, people have to learn how to communicate with themselves. See I. Putkonen: The global subject: a study of a family planning NGO, globalisation and the shaping of subjectivity', PhD thesis, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK, 2001.
49. It built on an earlier venture, regarded as 'revolutionary' at the time, a publicly owned file server involving several organisations in the city. The original G-MING network was funded by the EU's 4th Framework. Infocities, a further European initiative, seven of them across the continent, were a subgroup of over fifty Telecities (of which Manchester was one), with an agenda based on the idea of harnessing telematics not only to make cities more attractive places to live but to get people to use cities in 'more flexible ways' (J. Agar, S. Green and P. Harvey: 'Cotton to computers: from industrial to information revolutions', in Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, (ed. S. Woolgar), 272; 2002, Oxford, Oxford University Press).
50. The longstanding aim of the MCIN was to bring together 'community information" from diverse places and make it widely available.
51. Being well established also meant these operations had their own agendas. I have of course abbreviated the account here, and this is not the point at which to go into the complicated relations between the two - they led at one stage to 'serious rupture' (J. Agar et al.: 'Cotton to computers', p. 283 (see Note 41)).
52. J. Agar et al.: 'Cotton to computers', p. 280 (see Note 41).
53. The Canadian Royal Commisson on New Reproductive Technologies and its advocacy of evidence-based policy equipped the public it was consulting with the information it needed to make opinions.
54. Or we may find communities in alliance with one another. Responsibilities of the researcher extend into the design and delivery of products (see The Ethics of Research Related to Healthcare in Developing Countries; 2002, London, Nuffield Council on Bioethics). What this means is that how knowledge gets carried beyond the producers and authors feeds back into the institutional underpinnings of the original process.
55. M. Gibbons et al.: The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies; 1994, London, Sage;
56. H. Nowotny, P. Scott and M. Gibbons: Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty, 2001, Oxford, Polity;
57. M. Gibbons: 'Science's new social contract with society', Nature, 1999, 402, Suppl., C81-84.
58. 'Quinquennial review of the grant-awarding research councils. Stage two report', DTI/Office of Science and Technology, London, UK, 2001, 1-2, 11. The following admonition to address the science and society agenda through 'consultation, engagement and dialogue' carries the warning that this must not be a passive matter of dissemination: 'the views of the concerned public should be actively sought' (p. 61).