SSK's Identity Parade: Signing-Up, Off-and-On

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 357-391

  Wynne, Brian ^a  

^a LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 84992830365     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631296026002007     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. The exchanges are: P. Scott, E. Richards and B. Martin, ‘Captives of Controversy: The Myth of the Neutral Social Researcher in Contemporary Scientific Controversies’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Autumn 1990), 474–94
2. Collins, ‘In Praise of Futile Gestures: How Scientific is the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge?’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 26, No. 2 (May 1996), 229–44, this issue.
3. The 1970s' ‘political’ debate is indicated in: Hilary Rose and Steven Rose (eds), The Political Economy of Science (London: Macmillan, 1976)
4. H. Rose and S. Rose (eds), The Radicalization of Science (London: Macmillan, 1976)
5. H. Rose, ‘Hyper-Reflexivity: A New Danger for the Countermovements’, in Helga Nowotny and H. Rose (eds), Counter-Movements in the Sciences (Dordrecht, London & Boston: Reidel, 1979), 277–89
6. Steven Lukes, ‘Review of Barnes, Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 5, No. 4 (November 1975), 501–05
7. Lukes, ‘Relativism in its Place’, in Martin Hollis and S. Lukes (eds), Rationality and Relativism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 261–304
8. By the ‘reflexive turn’ I mean the broad shift which began in the early 1980s with the critiques of the ‘social realism’ of the Edinburgh Strong Programme and interests-based SSK, through the seminal influence of Bruno Latour and ANT, but also ethnomethodology and its more phenomenological critique. Some of the key contributions were: Steve Woolgar, ‘Interests and Explanation in the Social Study of Science’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 11, No. 3 (August 1981), 365–94
9. Woolgar (ed.), Knowledge and Reflexivity (London: Sage, 1988)
10. B. Latour, ‘Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World’, in Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (eds), Science Observed (London & Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1983), 141–70
11. G. Nigel Gilbert and Mulkay, Opening Pandora's Box: A Sociological Study of Scientists' Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
12. B. Latour, Science in Action (Milton Keynes,Bucks.: Open University Press; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987)
13. Michael Lynch, Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).
14. The 1990s versions of these variously reflexive stances against the social realism of the Edinburgh and Bath schools can be seen in the exchanges between, respectively, Collins and Steven Yearley, and Michel Callon and Latour (Collins & Yearley, ‘Epistemological Chicken’, in Andrew Pickering [ed.], Science as Practice and Culture [Chicago, IL & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992], 301–26
15. Here I use the term ‘reflexivity’ in a different way from its main use within SSK, where it focuses upon the original SP principle of accepting the same status for one's own explanatory knowledge claims as those being explained. This implies the introduction of the subjective voice into explanatory discourse, a road taken by discourse analysis but declined by others. See Malcolm Ashmore, Greg Myers and Jonathan Potter, ‘Discourse, Rhetoric, Reflexivity: Seven Days in the Library’, in Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald Markle, James Petersen and Trevor Pinch (eds), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA, London & New Delhi: Sage, 1994), 321–42.
16. See B. Latour, Nous n'avons jamais été modernes: Essai d'anthropologic symmétrique (Paris: Decouverte, 1991 English translation, We Have Never Been Modern [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992])
17. for a systematic attempt to set out the relationship between Latour's seminal position in SSK, and the ‘modernity’ debate. A much more fragmentary perspective criticizing leading sociologists of modernity for their simplistic accounts of expert (and lay) knowledge, is B. Wynne, ‘May the Sheep Safely Graze? A Reflexive View of the Expert-Lay Knowledge Divide’, in Bronislaw Szreszynski, Wynne and Scott Lash (eds), Risk, Environment, Modernity: Towards a New Ecology (London: Sage, 1996), Chapter two.
18. David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976).
19. On this see, for example, Zygmunt Baumann, Modernity and Ambivalence (London: Polity, 1991), esp. Chapters 3 and 6.
20. For further discussion in and beyond the ‘Capturing’ debate, see M. Ashmore, ‘Ending Up On the Wrong Side: Must the Two Forms of Radicalism Always Be at War?’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 26, No. 2 (May 1996), 305–22, this issue
21. So far as I know, Jurgen Habermas was the first to coin the term ‘decisionist’ to characterize a model of society based exclusively upon deliberate choices. (This was strongly correspondent with the rise of rational choice models of decisionmaking in public policy which were uncritically derived from individual choice-situations, as in psychological experiments.) Thus Habermas's original critical account of this rationalization process is now germane to a larger field involving much of modern social science and political analysis: see J. Habermas, Towards a Rational Society (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1970).
22. Robin Grove-White has shown how, for example, the substance of controversy about various environmental issues in the UK has been shaped by the institutional cultures in which they have been conducted: R. Grove-White, ‘Land Use Law and the Environment’, in Robin Churchill, John Gibson and Lynda Warren (eds), Law, Policy and the Environment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 32–47.
23. See also Robert Paehlke and Douglas Torgerson (eds), Managing Leviathan: Environmental Politics and the Administrative State (Lewiston, NY & Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1990).
24. Work in SSK over ten years ago (e.g. Brian L. Campbell, ‘Uncertainty and Symbolic Action in Disputes Among Scientists’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 15, No. 3 [August 1985], 429–53), introduced the beginnings of a more multivalent conceptual approach, but this has been rather neglected since.
25. For example: S. Woolgar (ed.), Knowledge and Reflexivity (London: Sage, 1988)
26. M. Ashmore, The Reflexive Thesis: Wrighting Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989)
27. M. Mulkay, The Word and the World (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985)
28. One of the reasons why this shift of mainstream focus can claim value now, is just because it is able to use the enormous advances made by laboratory studies as a springboard. Various key works in SSK (in addition to those of Latour), such as Donald McKenzie, Inventing Accuracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989)
29. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), in any case already systematically dissolve ‘laboratory/external-world’ conceptualizations.
30. See also Wolfgang Krohn and Johannes Weyer, ‘Gesellschaft als Labor’, Soziale Welt, Vol. 3 (1989), 349–73.
31. B. Wynne, ‘Risk and Social Learning: Reification to Engagement’, in Sheldon Krimsky and Dominic Golding (eds), Social Theories of Risk (London & Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 275–300.
32. As Malcolm Ashmore has pointed out to me, the position of one of these authors (Martin) appears to exemplify the difficulty of assuming that ‘sides' can have consistent monovalent identities. In a 1992 paper on repetition strain injury (RSI), Gabriele Bammer and Brian Martin say: ’the sociology of medical knowledge with its symmetrical analysis of negotiations over knowledge claims selectively aids the critics of RSI. This is because, under the circumstances of the debate, deconstructing knowledge claims undermines to a greater extent the position that RSI is a real organic condition’: G. Bammer and B. Martin, ‘Repetition Strain Injury in Australia: Medical Knowledge, Social Movement and De Facto Partisanship’, Social Problems, Vol. 39 (1992), 219–37, quote at 230.
33. This echoes the discussion of ‘active and passive’ rationality by John Kekes, ‘Rationality and the Social Sciences’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 9 (1979), 105–13.
34. H. M. Collins, Changing Order (London & Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985).
35. Collins has also done work on parapsychology, which again largely deals with conflicts not in the public domain: Collins and T. Pinch, Frames of Meaning: The Social Construction of Extraordinary Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).
36. For example, E. Richards, Vitamin C and Cancer: Medicine or Politics? (London: Macmillan, 1991)
37. B. Martin, Scientific Knowledge in Controversy: The Social Dynamics of the Fluoridation Debate (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991)
38. H.M. Collins, ‘Stages in the Empirical Programme of Relativism’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 11, No. 1 (February 1981), 3–10.
39. B. Wynne, ‘Representing Policy Constructions and Interests in SSK’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 22, No. 3 (August 1992), 575–80
40. Riley Dunlap, ‘Struggling with Human Exemptionalism: The Rise, Decline and Revitalisation of Environmental Sociology’, American Sociologist, Vol. 25 (1994), 5–30
41. Margaret Archer, ‘Resisting the Rise of Relativism’, in Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King (eds), Globalization, Knowledge and Society (London & Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991), 19–33.
42. B. Wynne, Rationality and Ritual: The Windscale Inquiry and Nuclear Decisions in Britain (Chalfont St Giles, Bucks.: British Society for the History of Science, 1982).
43. Roger Smith and B. Wynne (eds), Expert Evidence: Interpreting Science in the Law (London: Routledge, 1989).
44. Ted Porter has usefully enlarged our view of the positive role of reductionist discourses, like economistic methods in public policy, by noting that their evident untruthfulness (in realist terms) is beside the point, if they can act as a discursive medium through which different parties can reconcile different values and commitments. This echoes discussion of the functional roles, even the truthfulness in a more complex sense, of myth — what counts as ‘working’, as the ultimate test of truth, and how are nature and culture woven together as point of reference here? The question is what range of multivalent concerns, values and meanings can be tacitly accommodated by such discourses and their ever-present informal surrounds, and what ones may remain unrecognized and excluded? See Theodore M. Porter, Truth in Numbers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)
45. Porter (ed.), Symposium on ‘The Social History of Objectivity’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 22, No. 4 (November 1992), 595–651.
46. For a similar, but less sophisticated, argument, see M. Ashmore, M. Mulkay and T. Pinch, Health and Efficiency: A Sociology of Health Economics (Milton Keynes, Bucks.: Open University Press, 1989).
47. B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)
48. Latour, ‘Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern! Steps Towards an Anthropology of Science’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 21, No. 1 (March 1990), 145–71.
49. An earlier, though basically similar, orientation had already influenced my thinking, namely: Laurence H. Tribe, Technology Assessment and the Fourth Discontinuity’, Southern California Law Review, Vol. 17 (1973), 147–73.
50. Both fail to note the approach which tries to hold at issue the identities and interests of actors engaged in constructing public issues. See, for example: Alberto Cambrosio, Peter Keating and Michael MacKenzie, ‘Scientific Practice in the Courtroom: The Construction of Sociotechnical Identities in a Biotechnology Patent Dispute’, Social Problems, Vol. 37 (1990), 301–19
51. Cambrosio, Camille Limoges and Denyse Pronovost, ‘Representing Biotechnology: An Ethnography of Quebec Science Policy’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May 1990) 195–227
52. John Houghton, Geoff Jenkins and James Ephraums (eds), Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
53. Prevailing international scientific views had converged around the 1.5–4.5°C global warming estimate since the early 1980s: see, for example, World Meteorological Organization, Report of the International Conference on the Assessment of the Role of Carbon Dioxide and Other Greenhouse Gases in Climate Variations and Associated Impacts. Villach. Austria, 1985 (Geneva: WMO, 1986).
54. S. Yearley, ‘Green Ambivalence About Science: Legal-Rational Authority and the Scientific Legitimation of a Social Movement’, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 43 (1992), 511–32.
55. The constructivists he particularly criticized were Fred Buttel and Peter Taylor, ‘Environmental Sociology and Global Environmental Change’, Society and Natural Resources, Vol. 5 (1992), 211–30.
56. See also Buttel and Taylor, ‘How Do We Know We Have Global Environmental Problems?’, in Michael Redclift and Edward Benton (eds), Social Theory and Global Environment (London: Routledge, 1994), 83–99.
57. These actors have been probing the soft spots in GCM science, and funding critical scientific publicity against the IPCC view. Simon Shackley's interviews with industry representatives and critical scientists have directly delineated this. A typical ‘contrarian’ deconstruction of global environmental science is Patrick Michaels, Sound and Fury (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1992).
58. This has been a very sensitive issue for the NGOs especially since the 1992 United Nations ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio: see Wolfgang Sachs (ed.), Global Ecology (London & Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books; Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 1993).
59. Peter Taylor, ‘Reconstructing Socio-Ecologies: Systems Dynamics Modelling of Nomadic Pastoralists in Sub-Saharan Africa’, in Adele Clarke and Joan Fujimura (eds), The Right Tools for the Job (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 113–30
60. Chunglin Kwa, ‘Modelling the Grasslands’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Vol. 24 (1993), 125–55.
61. See for example, Peter Stone and James Riseby, ‘On the Limitations of General Circulation Climate Models’, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 17 (1990), 2173–2176.
62. The literature is vast, but a valuable sympathetic review is Gerald Meehl, ‘Development of Global Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere General Circulation Models’, Climate Dynamics, Vol. 5 (1990), 19–33.
63. See also: Kevin D. Trenberth (ed.), Climate System Modelling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
64. Lawrence Gates et al., ‘An Intercomparison of Selected Features of the Control Climates Simulated by Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models’, World Meteorological Organization, WMO/TD-No. 574 (Geneva: WMO, 1993).
65. Lindzen's critique of the GCMs and the IPCC warming scenarios is based largely on his scepticism about the implications of the parametrization of key processes: see Richard Lindzen, ‘Some Coolness Concerning Global Warming’, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 71 (1990), 288–99.
66. This is not to argue that such chaotic behaviour is real, but is being concealed in the models. The argument is that we might never know if it were. For a ‘chaos theory’ perspective, see Tim Palmer, ‘A Nonlinear Dynamical Perspective on Climate Change’, Weather, Vol. 48 (1993), 314–26.
67. A related argument is given in: Wallace S. Broecker, ‘Unpleasant Surprises in the Greenhouse?’, Nature, Vol. 328 (9 July 1987), 123–26.
68. Richard A. Kerr, ‘Climate Modeling's Fudge Factor Comes Under Fire’, Science, Vol. 265 (9 September 1994), 1528.
69. See Joan H. Fujimura, ‘Constructing “Do-able” Problems in Cancer Research: Articulating Alignment’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 17, No. 2 (May 1987), 257–93.
70. Jasanoff has noted how this bivalency pervades knowledge of risk about chemicals, and how in the US policy culture, formal policy-based decision rules have been imposed on ‘scientific’ matters such as low-dose/effect functions. She also notes how expert advisory committees manage nevertheless to create space for informal discretionary flexibility behind such formal arrangements. See Sheila Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisors as Policymakers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
71. Whether these materially ‘exist’, or are imagined, is part of the subtlety of the mutual construction process, as is the question of whether the scientific models ‘work’. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2nd edn 1991).
72. Ulrich Beck has said similar things about modern scientific institutions and their paradoxical combination of assertions of control with denials of responsibility: U. Beck, Risk Society (London: Sage, 1992).
73. See also Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk (London: Polity, 1995), especially Chapter 3
74. B. Wynne, Risk Management and Hazardous Wastes: Implementation and the Dialectics of Credibility (London & Berlin: Springer, 1987), Chapter 1.
75. Simon Shackley and B. Wynne, ‘Integrating Knowledge for Climate Change: Pyramids, Nets and Uncertainties’, Global Environmental Change, Vol. 5, No. 2 (April 1995), 113–26
76. Shackley and Wynne, ‘Global Climate Change: The Mutual Construction of an Emergent Science-Policy Domain’, Science and Public Policy, Vol. 22, No. 4 (August 1995), 218–30.
77. The 1995 IPCC assessment indicates a return to a more bullish view of the GWP concept: see Houghton et al. (eds), Climate Change 1994: Radiative Forcing of Climate Change and an Evaluation of IPCC is 92 Emissions Scenarios (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Chapter 5, ‘Trace-Gas Radiative Forcing Indices’, 205–31.
78. This confusion of future-oriented hopes and expectations with present-based claims and commitments has been noted before in modelling. See B. Wynne, ‘The Institutional Context of Science, Models and Policy: The II AS A Energy Study’, Policy Sciences, Vol. 17 (1984), 277–320
79. B. Wynne and S. Shackley, ‘Global Models — Truth-Machines or Heuristics?’, The Globe (Swindon, Wilts.: United Kingdom Research Councils, Global Environmental Research Office, September 1994), 4–6
80. Marjolein van Asselt and Jan Rotmans, ‘Uncertainty in Global Modelling: A Cultural Perspective-Based Approach’, Report No. 461502009 (Bilthoven, The Netherlands: RIVM, 1995).
81. Hence the critiques of the instrumental economistic framing of ‘solutions’ to environmental problems which involve treating the environment as a commodity which can be priced and exchanged in markets; such an approach reinforces the same inappropriate conceptions of the human which many see as responsible for the environmental problem in the first place. See Juan Martinez-Alier, Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment and Society (Oxford & Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1987)
82. John Foster (ed.), Valuing the Environment: Critical and Constructive Perspectives (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
83. For a more substantial discussion of alternatives and their policy correspondences, see Ron Brunner, ‘Policy and Global Change Research: A Modest Proposal’, Climatic Change. Vol. 28 (1996), forthcoming; and also the editorial by Paul Edwards in the same volume.