(Un)Boxing the Monster

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 323-356

  Richards, Evelleen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992897554     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631296026002006     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. Spalding Gray, Monster in a Box (London, Sydney & Auckland: Pan Books, 1991), 3, 5.
2. Susan Leigh Star, ‘Power, Technologies and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions’, in John Law (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters (London & New York: Routledge, 1991), 26–56, quote at 29.
3. Donna Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’, in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies (New York & London: Routledge, 1992), 295–337, quotes at 304, 306.
4. D. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 111, 183–201.
5. Michel Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986), 81–85.
6. Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 145.
7. It is interesting to note that in their response to reviewers' criticism of their choice of case studies, Collins and Pinch argue that citizens need understand only controversial science, and that for this purpose The Golem ‘represents science properly’: ‘Representativeness and Expertise: A Response from Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch’, Public Understanding of Science, Vol. 3 (1994), 331–37, quote at 332–33. If controversiality was the touchstone for case-study inclusion, Collins and Pinch would have done better to have included some of those scientific debates that do address issues of gender and race, such as the IQ or the sociobiology debate.
8. Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago, IL & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1979).
9. John Farley and Gerald L. Geison, ‘Science, Politics and Spontaneous Generation in Nineteenth-Century France: The Pasteur-Pouchet Debate’, Bulletin for the History of Medicine, Vol. 48 (1974), 161–98.
10. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, with Ineductions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
11. H.M. Collins and Steven Yearley, ‘Epistemological Chicken’, in Andrew Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, IL & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 301–26
12. Pam Scott, Evelleen Richards and Brian 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.
13. H.M. Collins, ‘Captives and Victims: Comment on Scott, Richards and Martin’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring 1991), 294–251.
14. See also H.M. Collins, Changing Order (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1992), 183.
15. E. Richards, ‘Putting SSK to Work, or, How I Lost my Neutrality and Learned to Loathe the Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, MTT, Cambridge, MA, 15–17 November 1991.
16. See, for example, William T. Lynch and Ellsworth R. Fuhrman, ‘Recovering and Expanding the Normative: Marx and the New Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring 1991), 233–48
17. One of the advantages of SSK (and especially the Bath version) is that it allows analytical engagement with the contents and dynamics of contested knowledge claims in a way no other approach can equal. It is also, as Winner acknowledges, a user-friendly approach that can be readily taught to and used by students (Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought, 366). For some interesting comments on the emergence and potential of a more explicitly normative sociology of science, see David Edge, ‘Reinventing the Wheel’, in S. Jasanoff, G.E. Markle, J.C. Petersen, and T.J. Pinch (eds), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA, London, & New Delhi: Sage, 1995), 3–23.
18. Cf. Malcolm Ashmore, The Reflexive Thesis: Wrighting Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), especially Chapter 4. Ashmore is both more and less critical than I am of Collins' consistent, indeed unshakeable, inconsistency.
19. This appears to be the consensus on the 1982 debate between Collins and Larry Laudan, where Collins successfully defended his position against Laudan's criticism of self-contradiction. Laudan's mistake was to assume that identical positions must be taken on both the meta and ground levels. See L. Laudan, ‘A Note on Collins's Blend of Relativism and Empiricism’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 12, No. 1 (February 1982), 131–32
20. See Ingemar Bohlin's interesting comments on this dispute, and on the differences between the approaches of Collins and Robert Young: I. Bohlin, ‘Robert M. Young and Darwin Historiography’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 21 (1991), 579–648, at 600–03, 641, note 9.
21. Though how many scientists would reject Collins' professions of love and esteem on behalf of SSKers with the same disdain as does Lewis Wolpert in their recent exchanges, is a moot question: see H.M. Collins, ‘Review of The Unnatural Nature of Science by Lewis Wolpert’, Public Understanding of Science, Vol. 2 (1993), 261–64
22. See David Turnbull, ‘Relativism, Reflexivity and Sociology of Knowledge’, Metascience, Vol. 1/2 (1984), 47–60, at 56.
23. So Bob Young, for all his enthusiasm for Haraway's work and his consequent, and somewhat premature, announcement of the death of ideology, expresses some residual disquiet about the political pragmatics of Haraway's approach: see R.M. Young, ‘Science, Ideology and Donna Haraway’, Science as Culture, No. 3 (1992), 165–207, at 199.
24. These criticisms mesh with Turnbull's emphasis on the need to recognize the importance of maintaining the dialectical tensions between the local and the global, if we are to understand ‘and hence establish the conditions for the possibility of directing the circulation and structure of power in knowledge systems’: David Turnbull, ‘Local Knowledge and Comparative Scientific Traditions’, Knowledge and Policy, Vol. 6 (1993–1994), 29–54, quote at 34.
25. Donald Mackenzie and Graham Spinardi, ‘The Shaping of Nuclear Weapon System Technology: US Fleet Ballistic Missile Guidance and Navigation: I: From Polaris to Poseidon’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 18, No. 3 (August 1988), 419–63
26. I am grateful to David Mercer for this example. See also the related discussion in D. Mercer, The NIEMR-EMF Controversy: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge and Science Policy in the Gibbs Powerline Energy Enquiry, 1990–91 (unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Wollongong, NSW, 1994), 180–205.
27. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
28. For some doubt about the adequacy of Shapin and Schaffer's analysis, see Dick Pels, ‘The Politics of Symmetry’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 26, No. 2 (May 1996), 277–304, this issue.
29. For an accessible account of the social construction of Darwin's theory of evolution, see Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (London: Michael Joseph, 1991).
30. On the social contingency of sexual selection and its deployment in Victorian society, see E. Richards, ‘Darwin and the Descent of Woman’, in David Oldroyd and Ian Langham (eds), The Wider Domain of Evolutionary Thought (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), 57–111.
31. James Donnelly, ‘Review of H.M. Collins and T.J. Pinch, The Golem’, Public Understanding of Science, Vol. 3 (1994), 325–26.
32. Brian Wynne, ‘Public Uptake of Science: A Case for Institutional Reflexivity’, Public Understanding of Science, Vol. 2 (1993), 321–37, quotes at 324, 334.
33. H.M. Collins, ‘Public Experiments and Displays of Virtuosity: The Core-Set Revisited’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 18, No. 4 (November 1988), 725–48
34. See also Alan Irwin, ‘Science and its Publics: Continuity and Change in the Risk Society’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 24, No. 1 (February 1994), 168–84.
35. Sheila Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)
36. Stephen Hilgartner, ‘The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 20, No. 3 August 1990), 519–39
37. Cozzens and Gieryn advocate a methodological agnosticism in relation to the definition of the boundaries of science and society; see Susan E. Cozzens and T.F. Gieryn, ‘Introduction: Putting Science Back into Society’, in Cozzens and Gieryn (eds), Theories of Science in Society (Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 1–14.
38. For a critique and extension of Collins' conception of the core-set, see Mike Michael and Lynda Birke, ‘Enrolling the Core-set: The Case of the Animal Experimentation Controversy’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 24, No. 1 (February 1994), 81–95.
39. See Marc Berg and Monica J. Casper, ‘Constructivist Perspectives on Medical Work: Medical Practices and Science and Technology Studies’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Autumn 1995), 395–407
40. Stefan Hirschauer, ‘The Manufacture of Bodies in Surgery’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 21, No. 2 (May 1991), 279–319
41. Michael Lynch, ‘Collins, Hirschauer and Winch: Ethnography, Exoticism, Surgery, Antisepsis and Dehorsification’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 24, No. 2 (May 1994), 354–69, at 365.
42. See, for instance, Steven Epstein's analysis of the problems and pitfalls of this stratagem, as adopted by AIDS activists to achieve credibility in contesting the design and interpretation of clinical trials: S. Epstein, ‘The Construction of Lay Expertise: AIDS Activism and the Forging of Credibility in the Reform of Clinical Trials’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Autumn 1995), 408–37
43. Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1993).
44. T. Pinch, ‘Generations of SSK’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 23, No. 2 (May 1993), 363–73, quote at 370.
45. T. Pinch, Even more interestingly, Collins' other co-author, Steven Yearley, has commended my work as offering ‘a fine model of the way policy-relevant work on the social construction of medical knowledge should be done’: S. Yearley, ‘Review of E. Richards, Vitamin C and Cancer: Medicine or Politics?’, Social History of Medicine, Vol. 6 (1993), 299–300, quote at 300.
46. T. Pinch, ‘Opening Black Boxes: Science, Technology and Society’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 22, No. 3 (August 1992), 487–510
47. My approach here does not appear incompatible with that advocated elsewhere by Wynne: ‘We need new institutional processes that open up internal scientific processes to progressive dialectical interaction with external expressions of social values. This is emphatically not to argue that science should be subjected to democratic referenda. It is more that a new style of regulatory scientific knowledge needs to be developed, which is inherently more provisional and expressly incomplete, leaving room for external input negotiated in from other frames of social experience’: Brian Wynne, Risk Management and Hazardous Waste: Implementation and the Dialectics of Credibility (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, London, Paris & Tokyo: Springer-Verlag, 1987), 432.
48. Adele Clarke and Theresa Montini, ‘The Many Faces of RU486: Tales of Situated Knowledges and Technical Contestations’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter 1993), 42–78, at 68.
49. ‘The Politics of Therapeutic Evaluation’ is advertised as a ‘top article by an Australian sociologist of science that reveals the politics behind the testing of vitamin C\ I have not seen this version, but it has evidently been heavily cut, being listed as 13 pages against the 48 pages of the original: People Against Cancer, Catalogue (Winter 1990–1991), 4.
50. The original article is: E. Richards, ‘The Politics of Therapeutic Evaluation: The Vitamin C and Cancer Controversy’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 18, No. 4 (November 1988), 653–701.
51. Townsend Letter for Doctors, No. 106 (May 1992), 365–74.
52. The Townsend Letter is published from 911 Tyler Street, Port Townsend, WA 98368–6541, USA.
53. Journal of Nutritional Medicine, Vol. 4 (1994), 215–46.
54. B. Lynes, ‘An Atom Bomb of Scientific Originality’, raum & zeit, Vol. 1 (1990), 43–45, quote at 43.
55. John Galloway, ‘Crusades and Rackets’, Nature, Vol. 353 (12 September 1991), 125.
56. Andrew Herxheimer, ‘Challenge for Clinical Trialists’, British Medical Journal, Vol. 303 (26 October 1991), 1076.
57. Ullica Segerstrale, ‘Beleaguering the Cancer Establishment’, Science, Vol. 255 (31 January 1992), 613–15.
58. H.M. Collins, ‘In Praise of Futile Gestures’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 26, No. 2 (May 1996), 229–44, this issue.
59. Malcolm Ashmore, ‘Ending Up On the Wrong Side’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 26, No. 2 (May 1996), 305–22, this issue. A case, of course, could be made that the tobacco lobby, pharmaceutical industry, and the like are ‘underdogs’ in the sense that, at this point in time, they have less scientific and social credibility than their opponents, as indeed Ashmore points out.
60. The same presumption pervades Steve Fuller's recommendation that S&TS analysts make themselves essential to the resolution of conflicts involving science and technology: see S. Fuller, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 312–16.
61. See Chris Lawrence's review of my work, in which he suggests that if a case study which concretely demonstrates the importance of the sociology of scientific knowledge is ever to reach the scientific community, ‘this might be it’. However, given the ‘occasional failure to be dispassionate’ in my rhetoric, Lawrence fears that my book may suffer the fate I have ‘analyzed only too well… as yet another loony claim that vitamin C has not had a fair trial’: C. Lawrence, ‘Review of Evelleen Richards, Vitamin C and Cancer’, British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 25 (1992), 499–500, quotes at 500.
62. D. Haraway, Primate Visions (New York & London: Routledge, 1989), 378.