Object Construction and Networks in Research Work: The Case of Research on Cellulose-Degrading Enzymes

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 28, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 423-463

  Miettinen, Reijo ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI   (Finland)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84992892950     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631298028003003     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1979), revised and republished with the subtitle The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988)
2. Harold Garfinkel, Michael Lynch and Eric Livingston, ‘The Work of a Discovering Science Constructed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences,Vol. 11 (1981), 131–158
3. Andrew Pickering, ‘Living in the Material World: On Realism and Experimental Practice’, in David Gooding, Trevor Pinch and Simon Schaffer (eds), The Uses of Experiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 275–297
4. Harry Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (Chicago, IL & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985). All of this work contributes to some important aspects of the problem of fact construction. Latour and Woolgar illuminate the decisive significance of instruments (inscription devices); Garfinkel and his colleagues investigate the significance of situated discussions as part of a construction process; Pickering deals with the problem of resistance in scientific practice; and Collins looks at instrument construction from the point of view of replication and transferability. However, after a quarter-century epistemological crusade, I am inclined to agree with the opinion first presented by Jerry Ravetz in 1972. The vital problems of science are no longer primarily epistemological: they are related to the relationship between science and society.
5. See Jerome Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), Chapter 1.
6. In his study of goal-formation in science, Andrew Pickering analyzes goals in terms of constructed intersections between heterogeneous cultural elements: see A. Pickering, ‘Openness and Closure: On Goals of Scientific Practice’, in Homer E. Grand (ed.), Experimental Inquiries: Historical, Philosophical and Social Studies of Experimentation in Science (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), 215–39. The practice he analyzes is mainly individual practice, and the elements he analyzes are internal to culture of physics.
7. In the early 1990s, the notion of'practice’ was ever more emphatically raised as an alternative concept in science studies, and especially in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). In his introduction to a collection of papers entitled Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press 1992), 1–26
8. Andrew Pickering concludes that the concepts of culture and practice are mainly used on the level of common sense: ‘SSK simply does not offer us the conceptual apparatus needed to catch up the richness of the doing of science …’ (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press 1992, 5). The concept of ‘activity system’ is a theoretically elaborated concept, and hence a good candidate for being an important part of such an apparatus. See Aleksei Leontjev, Activity, Consciousness and Personality (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978)
9. Leontjev, Problems of the Development of Mind (Moscow: Progress, 1981)
10. Yrjö Engeström, Learning by Expanding (Helsinki: Orienta Konsultit, 1987)
11. Michael Cole and Engeström, ‘A Cultural-Historical Approach to Distributed Cognition’, in Gavriel Salomon (ed.), Distributed Cognition: Psychological and Educational Considerations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–46.
12. Peter Ruben, ‘Wissenschaft als Allgemeine Arbeit’, Chapter 1 of his Dialektik und Arbeit in Philosophic (Köln: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1979), 9–51.
13. Two schools in constructivist sociology of science have studied science as work. For symbolic interactionist studies of research work, see Susan Leigh Star and Elihu Gerson, ‘The Management and Dynamics of Anomalies in Scientific Work’, The Sociological Quarterly,Vol. 28 (1986), 147–169.
14. For a review of ethnomethodological studies of scientific work, see Michael Lynch, Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
15. Until recently, activity theory has mainly been applied in studies of individual learning. In the 1980s, especially in Scandinavia, it has been developed as an approach for studying collective work activities (see note 3). So far, only a few empirical studies of research work inspired by activity theory have been carried out: see Reijo Miettinen, ‘Laboratory Work in Changing Society: Neutron Activation Analysis in a Research Laboratory’, Science Studies (Helsinki & Tampere, Finland), Vol. 2 (1990), 35–52.
16. Another activity theorist, Vladislav Aleksandovic Lektorsky, uses the concept of ‘object hypothesis’, which emphasizes that the mediational means used in the construction of an image already carries knowledge of the properties of the object: see V. A. Lektorsky, Subject-Object Cognition (Moscow: Progress, 1981), 124.
17. George Herbert Mead and John Dewey used the concept ‘working hypothesis’: see G.H. Mead, ‘The Working Hypothesis in Social Reform’, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 5 (1899), 367–71, and
18. J. Dewey, ‘How We Think’ (1933), in Jo Ann Boudston (ed.), John Dewey: The LaterWorks, 1925–1953, Vol. 8 (Carbondale & Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 105–352, at 203.
19. Like activity theory, Dewey postulates that the problems of life activity, the interaction of a human with her environment, is the starting point of reflective thought and hypothesis construction. Therefore, for Dewey, the working hypothesis is also ‘a guiding idea’, ‘an operative idea’, or ‘an idea of a possible relevant solution’ to be tested in practice: Another pragmatist, Hans Joas, uses the concept of'horizon of possibilities’: see H. Joas, The Creativity of Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 133.
20. Joas underlines the open and creative nature of the images of future. In technology studies, John Law uses the concept of'scenarios’, imaginary sociotechnical worlds, that suggest how the world should be, and how this might be achieved: see J. Law, ‘The Anatomy of a Socio-Technical Struggle: The Design of TSR2’, in Brian Elliot (ed.), Technology and Social Process (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 44–69, at 66.
21. Yrjö Engeström, Learning, Working and Imagining: Twelve Studies in Activity Theory (Helsinki: Orienta Konsultit, 1990), 107.
22. Bruno Latour, ‘Ethnography of a “High Tech Case”: About Aramis’, in Pierre Lemonnier (ed.), Technological Choices: Transformation in Material Cultures since the Neolithic (London: Routledge, 1992), 372–398.
23. Though Latour does not accept the use of the concept ‘object’, his concept of the production of ‘hybrids’ or ‘nature/cultures’ has much in common with the concept of ‘object construction’ proposed by activity theory. An object is not a thing standing alone. It is a hybrid, a system of heterogeneous elements integrated into human activities. For a discussion on the concept of object, see the Special Symposium Issue of Mind, Culture, and Activity, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1996), in which Michael Lynch (246–51), Marc Berg (252–58) and Yrjö Engeström (259–65) comment on Latour's paper ‘On Interobjectivity’ (228–45).
24. The concept of ‘mediational means’ is used by James Wertsch in his Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), Chapter 2, to cover the two basic types of mediating artifacts in human activity suggested by Lev Vygotsky: signs and tools.
25. See L. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 54.
26. This concept differs from the concept of ‘mediator’ used by actor-network theorists: see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 77–78.
27. In Michel Callon's theory of techno-economic networks, mediators are symbolic, and material artifacts that are exchanged by human actors, ‘anything that passes from one actor to another’: see M. Callon, ‘Dynamics of Techno-economical Networks’, in Rod Coombs, Paolo Saviotti and Vivien Walsh (eds), Technological Change and Company Strategies (London: Academic Press, 1992), 72–102.
28. See also Evald Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic (Moscow: Progress, 1977), 260
29. In activity theory, the constitutive feature of human activity is not its intentionality: it is its object-orientedness and mediatedness. Dewey convincingly argues that goals that are not based on the knowledge of the conditions of activity (that is, object knowledge) tend to convert into compensatory dreams, into fantasy building: J. Dewey (1922), ‘Human Nature and Conduct’, in Jo Ann Boudston (ed.), John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924,Vol. 14 (Carbondale & Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 154–163.
30. Ludwik Fleck and Andrew Pickering use the concept of resistance largely in the same way - as something that forms a block or an obstacle in the path of some goal. See L. Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 101, and
31. A. Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 66. From an activity-theoretical point of view, to avoid dualism and subjectivism, the resistance should be interpreted through the structure of activity. The mediated structure of activity calls for studying the source of resistance between the historically-formed mediating artifacts and the new kinds of objects. As will be argued later, in the production of commodities (artifact construction under the conditions of capitalism - that is, the market economy) the tension between use- and exchange-value might be a good concept in concretely analyzing the complexity of resistance.
32. The data on the case comprises interviews, a research project and planning documentation, publications of the research groups, as well as observations of a few meetings of the VTT research group. In addition, key researchers at VTT BIO have given additional information in discussions, and in commenting on the drafts of earlier publications written on the case: Reijo Miettinen, Biotechnical Pulp Bleaching in a National Innovation Network (in Finnish), VTT BIO Research Notes (1995), No. 1643 (April)
33. Miettinen, From Research to Innovation: The Case of Biotechnical Pulp Bleaching (Espoo: VTT Publications 270, 1996); and
34. Miettinen, ‘Theories of Invention and an Industrial Innovation’, Science Studies (Finland), Vol. 9 (1996), 34–48.
35. Derek de Solla Price, ‘Notes Towards a Philosophy of the Science/Technology Interaction’, in Rachel Laudan (ed.), The Nature of Technological Knowledge: Are Models of Scientific Change Relevant? (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984), 105–114.
36. Marx Wartofsky, Models: Representation and Scientific Understanding (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), 202.
37. See, for example, Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating,’ “Going Monoclonal”: Art, Science, and Magic in the Day-to-Day Use of Hybridoma Technology’, Social Problems, Vol. 35, No. 3 (June 1988), 244–60, at 250–51.
38. Derek Price believes that method papers ‘act as surrogate for a particular instrumentality’: D.J. De S. Price, ‘The Science/ Technology Relationship, the Craft of Experimental Science, and the Policy for Improvement of the High Technology of Innovation’, Research Policy,Vol. 13, No. 1 (February 1984), 3–20, at 15.
39. Michael Lynch, ‘The Externalized Retina: Selection and Mathematization in the Visual Documentation of Objects in the Life Sciences’, in Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds), Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 153–86, at 164.
40. John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1916), 304 (emphasis in original). On the same page he characterizes an idea in the following way: ‘An idea is a draft drawn upon existing things, and intention to act so as to arrange them into a certain way’.
41. Roy D'Andrade and Claudia Strauss (eds), Human Motives and Cultural Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
42. Andrew Pickering proposes that it is sensible to understand interests in terms of modelling. He argues that models are a link between the existing culture and future states of activity. See A. Pickering, ‘Models in/of Scientific Practice’, Philosophy and Social Action, Vol. 13 (1987), 69–77, at 77. Wartofsky regards models essentially as a means of confronting the future, ‘technology of purpose’, ‘means for conceptual exploration leading to experimentation’.
43. Derek J. de Solla Price, ‘Of Sealing Wax and String’, Natural History, Vol. 93, No. 1 (January 1984), 48–56, at 51.
44. I. Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 265.) It could be added that the properties of theoretical entities are also used in the construction of industrial processes and devices. Evidently their work within these systems equally convinces us of their reality.
45. About the methodological significance of the object/tool distinction, see Yrjö Engeström and Virginia Escalante, ‘Mundane Tool or Object of Affection? The Rise and Fall of Postal Buddy’, in Bonnie Nardi (ed.), Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 325–373.
46. It was calculated in the 1970s that land plants alone produced 24 tons of cellulose a year for every inhabitant of the globe: see Matti Linko, ‘Energy and Protein from Cellulase’ (in Finnish), Kemia-Kemi, Vol. 2 (1975), 602–05, at 602.
47. Eeva Eklund, Marja Hatakka, Matti Linko, Annika Mustranta and Paula Nybergh, Cellulases and Their Utilization in the Treatment of Cellulolytic Wastes (in Finnish), VTT BIO Research Notes (1974), No. 6, 5.
48. Arthur Humphrey, ‘Economics and Utilization of Enzymatically Hydrolyzed Cellulose’, in Michael Bailey, Tor-Magnus Enari and Matti Linko (eds), Symposium on Enzymatic Hydrolysis of Cellulose, Aulanko, Finland, 12–14 March 1975 (Helsinki: The Finnish National Fund for Research and Development, 1975), 437–53, at 439.
49. Martti Nummi, Marja-Leena Niku-Paavola, Tor-Magnus Enari and Veijo Raunio, ‘Immunoelectrophoretic Detection of Cellulases’, FEBS Letters, Vol. 113, No. 2 (May 1980), 164–166
50. Nummi, Niku-Paavola, Arja Lappalainen, Enari and Raunio, ‘Cellobiohydrolase from Trichoderma reesei’, Biochemical Journal, Vol. 215, No. 3 (1983), 677–683
51. Liisa Viikari, Paula Nybergh and Matti Linko, ‘Hydrolysis of Cellulose by Trichoderma reesei Enzymes and the Simultaneous Production of Ethanol by Zymanomas mp’, in Proceedings of the 6th International Fermentation Symposium (London, Ontario, 20–25 July 1980), 137–142.
52. In the VTT BIO publications list, these Proceedings are cited as: Murray Moo-Young and Campbell W. Robinson (eds), Advances in Biotechnology, Vol. 2 (Pergamon Press, 1981).
53. Matti Linko, Marjatta Rättö, Liisa Viikari and Michael Bailey, ‘Organisms and Enzymes for the Hydrolysis of Cellulose and Xylan’, in H.E. Duckworth (ed.), International Symposium on Ethanol from Biomass, Winnipeg, 13–15 October 1982 (Ottawa: The Royal Society of Canada, 1983), 371–93, at 372.
54. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971), Chapter 1.
55. Tor-Magnus Enari, ‘New Horizons for Biotechnological Utilization of the Forest Resource’, Lecture given at the 1985 Marcus Wallenberg Symposium in Falun, Sweden on 12 September 1985, The Marcus Wallenberg Foundation Symposia Proceedings, Vol. 2 (1985), 54–68, at 66.
56. Anne Kantelinen, Jorma Sundquist, Matti Linko and Liisa Viikari, ‘The Role of Reprecipitated Xylan in the Enzymatic Bleaching of Kraft Pulp’, Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Wood and Pulping Chemistry (Melbourne, 1991), Vol. 1, 493–500. (I located my copy of this paper in the VTT Archives.) The researchers underlined that the model is a hypothesis to be further elaborated. It was not for instance clear what happened in the inner layers of cellulose substrate.
57. Jonathan Knowles, Päivi Lehtovaara and Tuula Teeri, ‘Cellulase Families and Their Genes’, Trends in Biotechnology, Vol. 5, No. 9 (September 1987), 255–61, at 259 (both figure and quotation). One of the VTT engineers, commenting on a draft of my paper, said that this model is just one possible characterization of enzyme research, a conceptualization of geneticists. The development of diverging subcultures of engineers, biochemists, geneticists and molecular biologists was taking place in the laboratory in 1987. The increasing heterogeneity of the research community makes the construction of a common agenda more difficult. The conceptualizations of each of the groups should be adjusted in a joint effort. My observations of a planning meeting of the VTT biotechnology researchers in 1992 convinced me that this task is difficult.
58. Jonathan Knowles, Päivi Lehtovaara, Tuula Teeri, Merja Penttilä, Irma Salovuori and Lars André, ‘The Application of Recombinant-DNA Technology to Cellulases and Lignocellulosic Wastes’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A, Vol. 321 (1987), 449–54, at 453. The researchers speak naturally about the construction of new organisms, and planning and production of new proteins. This neatly confirms the central theme of recent science studies: science is not only a process of representing nature ‘out there’; rather, it is a process of transforming it, and of constructing phenomena in the laboratory.
59. See Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Milton Keynes, Bucks.: Open University Press, 1987), 108–132.
60. An exposition of the methodological problems of the interest model of explanation can be found in Steve Woolgar, ‘Interests and Explanation in the Social Study of Science’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 11, No. 3 (August 1981), 365–94. Woolgar argues that ‘interest’ is something to be explained, rather than an explanatory concept.
61. Philip Shabecoff, ‘DioxinTraces Found in Range of Paper Products’, NezvYork Times (Thursday, 24 September 1987), 1.
62. (J. Rachel, ‘Acting and Passing, Actants and Passants, Action and Passion’, American Behavioral Scientist,Vol. 37 [1994], 809–23, at 810.)
63. For the principles of Machiavellism, see Michel Callon, John Law and Arie Rip, ‘How to Study the Force of Science’, in Callon, Law and Rip (eds), Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: Sociology of Science in the Real World (London: Macmillan, 1986), 3–18.
64. This can be seen in two authoritative analyses: John Law and Michel Callon, ‘The Life and Death of an Aircraft: A Network Analysis of Technical Change’, in Wiebe E. Bijker and Law (eds), Shaping Technology I Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 21–52, and
65. Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1996). In the story of the development of the aircraft TSR 2, the engine problem is mentioned and used in the analysis of network construction. In Latour's account of Aramis, the engineering work and problems are almost absent.
66. Actor-network theory postulates a special methodological site between object and subject, in which the production of nature/cultures takes place: ‘middle kingdom’, or ‘work of mediation’: see Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology note 11, 77. Latour also speaks about ‘collectives’, saying: ‘To view people and nonhumans as interacting within collectives … we need to know what a collective, an institution, and corporate body are’: see B. Latour, ‘On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy’, Common Knowledge, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Fall 1994), 29–64, at 49. Activity theory proposes that the concepts of the object-oriented activity system, and of a network of activity systems, are promising tools for the purpose. The construction of nature-societies happens through historically formed local human activities, research, production, design, engineering and user activities that interact with each other.
67. In this, activity theory agrees with Harry Collins' and Steven Yearley's well-known critique: see H.M. Collins and S. Yearley, ‘Epistemological Chicken’, in A. Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 301–26, at 316.
68. ‘If a criticism can be levelled at ANT it is … its complete indifference for providing a model of human competence. There is no model of [the human] actor in ANT …’: Bruno Latour, ‘On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications’ (Internet document, dated 1 May 1977), published by the Centre for Social Theory and Technology, Keele University, UK, at: http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/stt/stt/ant/latour.htm.
69. One of the founders of activity theory, Alexander Luria, expresses this as follows: ‘We needed, as it were, to step outside the organism to discover the specificity of human psychological activity’: A. Luria, The Making of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 43.
70. Karl Marx, in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 142, said
71. For distributed cognition, see Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995)
72. Charles Goodwin, ‘Seeing in Depth’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 25, No. 2 (May 1995), 237–74;.