Visions of STS: Contextualizing Science, Technology, and Society Studies (Suny Series in Science, Technology, and Society)

Citation

Hunsinger, J. (2002), "Visions of STS: Contextualizing Science, Technology, and Society Studies (Suny Series in Science, Technology, and Society)", Information Technology & People, Vol. 15 No. 3, pp. 270-275. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.2002.15.3.270.2

In reviewing The Science Studies Reader, by Mario Biagioli, and Visions of STS, by Stephen H. Cutliffe and Carl Mitcham, one can find many useful insights for studying information technology. Science studies and the broader arena of STS, understood as either science and technology studies or science, technology, and society – are interdisciplinary studies growing increasingly more disciplinary with an encompassing set of issues surrounding the objects of their study – science and technology. As we will see in these books, studying science and technology is a fruitful endeavor because the expansive nature of the object of the study is nearly inexhaustible with its interest in understanding research and researchers. The intent of this review is to approach these works as viable material for a growing thread in the study of information technology and to provide bridges between that field and science and technology studies. Hopefully, this review will intrigue its readers enough to explore these books and approach their own research with additional perspectives.

Science and technology studies, as an interdisciplinary arena, is like studies of information technology. With the privileged construction of science in society paralleling the growing privilege of information technologies in society, likewise they share a comparable construction of elites, these fields have significant overlapping topics for research that make them lucrative fields for comparison and the sharing of ideas, methods, and practices.

The Science Studies Reader defines, fairly narrowly, the field of science studies as primarily a field of social studies of science; leaving out for the sake of size, leading essays in the related fields of history of science and philosophy of science. Likewise, technology which is represented in the volume to some extent, is not put forth as a primary concern. However, this volume provides within its covers a fairly comprehensive overview of many of the issues of science studies by the leading authors in the field. Authors such as Bourdieu and Latour, cover much of the theoretical foundations of the field, while other authors provide excellent introductions to a wide variety of methods and case studies within the field.

This book, through, its significant breadth of essays, is designed to introduce people to the field of science studies, which in this case causes it to lack a certain depth of coverage. Few of the articles are anything other than a brief introduction to the work of their authors. Only in two authors, Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, do we have more than one work included. This combined breadth and brevity generates a reading experience that may leave readers frequently looking for more.

More is easily found, thanks to the forethought of the editors and contributors. One of The Science Studies Reader’s most valuable assets is its various sets of bibliographies. The bibliographies not only provide notes for each article, but each author has provided separately a bibliography of their own works, and also contributed to another enlarged bibliography that covers the significant works in the field. While the content is without a doubt the major asset of any book, the bibliographic tools greatly enhance the merit of this book for the researcher. The ease of access to the major works in science studies delivered through these tools enable researchers in other fields to embrace The Science Studies Reader not only for its collection of papers, but also as a reference volume.

The majority of works in The Science Studies Reader follow the textual turn in analytical studies of society. They focus primarily on historical and interpretive analyses. This could pose a problem for some people looking for other traditions. For instance, the text leaves out analyses based on quantitative studies more often found in sociology. Those works though can be found in other readers, which are referenced in the book’s bibliography.

Some authors, like Latour and Callon, try to theorize themselves outside of the textual tradition by seeking a new grounding; a grounding that relates to the object of science, the “natural world”, which may well be a fictitious construction, but a useful one. Instead of looking at the textual understanding of the world or the texts of science, which are the output of science, they emphasize a change in perspective toward science studies as an examination of the examiners of the world. This is an interesting position to take because it foregrounds the interrelations between that which is examined and those who are examining. It reveals the communication, not as text, but sometimes even as the exchange of information between subjects, even though some of those subjects may not be human. This type of grounding outside of the textual world provides foundations for a growing area of research.

To be sure, some of the works in The Science Studies Reader are not for everyone. For some, the emphasis on philosophical aspects of science studies and to some extent the philosophy of social science from the social science perspective might be bothersome, but they can provide access to a way of thinking about ourselves as researchers that is significant in its reflexivity. By examining, for instance, Latour’s “Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world”, a researcher might start to wonder about the relationships between the physical location of research, the environments created there, how they are inhabited, and who is doing the laboratory work. Considering in kind those questions in the context of Shapin’s “The house of experiment in the seventeenth century England”, we can question how the backyard garage mystique of information technology is parallel to earlier forms of scientific creation. When reading Latour and Shapin’s essays together in relation to future work in information technology (IT), questions such as: “Just what part of information technology is produced outside of the rigorous laboratories?” and “How much is actually generated from a form of cottage industry?” arise and become interesting in different ways. Likewise, many of the other essays in this volume open up significant areas of research along several interesting lines such as these.

Science studies is a highly reflexive field that questions the relationship between researchers and the objects they study. Works such as Ian Hacking’s “Making up people”, gives the researcher access to the consideration that in constructing differences and categorizing them in an attempt to define our research projects we are in fact creating new typologies of people or reifying problematic typologies. These typologies have significant implications for how we construct people as research subjects. Once the typological label is assigned and known, the nature of the representation is irrevocably changed for the research subject and the researcher. In other words, the creation and attribution of typological categories in social research is a significant form of power which should not be ignored when performing research. Combining these insights with the insights one can gain from Theodore M. Porter’s “Quantification and the accounting ideal in science”, allows us to consider what we think of as the scientific practices in large studies that we see occurring around the world in relation to Internet and IT. The construction of objectivity through the mobilization of a sense of distance and alienation from the individuals being studied allows researchers to consider people as objects, constructing an identity fundamentally different from the one we assign to ourselves. The transformation of these objective assignments of value is also constituted in the public eye as knowledge. It is not that quantification, categorization, or objectification of people inherently causes ill effects, but that it does have effects, effects on public understanding of each other in ways that may not be entirely predictable. Social research is a form of social power. It transforms social relations by creating knowledge about them. As IT researchers perform studies on the Internet, we need to be aware of how we are reconstructing the field of study as we progress through it.

Theodore Porter’s contribution to The Science Studies Reader also interestingly delves into the conceptualization of replication in the natural sciences and the regimes of instrumentation which help develop its particular set of methods for the construction of knowledge. Instruments play a large part in the overall practice of science and, increasingly, those instruments are part of the IT infrastructure. While IT is not central to all of the papers presented, it is central to Sherry Turkle’s contribution to the reader. For those familiar with the work of Sherry Turkle, “What are we thinking about when we are thinking about computers”, will be somewhat familiar territory. Starting with a short description of the relationship between a young computer game player and a game, she expands to consider the relationship between humans and the computer in terms of identity and action/play. The question of identity formation tied to computers and software arenas is a growing area of study in a variety of disciplines, breaking away from the human‐computer interaction arena where it was bound for many years.

In each of the essays presented in Biagioli’s Science Studies Reader, there is something of merit, and to be negative about them would be contrary to the spirit of this review. Instead, I have provided the reader with some understanding of how the material in this book might be interesting. However, I have not been comprehensive in this review. The Science Studies Reader may present other material which is more useful for your work than that which I have presented.

Comparably, in reviewing Visions of STS, I will not be comprehensive. It too is a collection of essays. However, the subtitle is revealing, “Counterpoints in science, technology, and society studies”. The book is comprised of ten essays. These essays provide an informative read about the current position and possible futures of STS. The book recognizes some of the problems the field is currently attempting to resolve. In presenting these problems, the essays are attempting to provide the counterpoints of technology studies to the more normal science studies; demonstrating that technology studies adds significantly to resolving issues in STS, and possibly this book also could help resolve some problems in studying IT. The authors provide an introduction covering the basic history of STS and from there we proceed to a general introduction to the contents of the book. The editors also provide a bibliography of the major works in STS, in this case primarily the wide variety of readers available, but also some major works by individual authors. Unlike in The Science Studies Reader, this bibliography is annotated, but similarly it is an excellent resource for those interested in pursuing their interests in this inter‐discipline.

Beginning the volume, Langdon Winner’s essay on technological determinism leads the volume with a strong emphasis on the problems of thinking through technology and presents its implications for breaking the deterministic mindset which frequently inhabits researchers of technology. It is followed by what is perhaps one of the best synopses of the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) paradigm provided in print. Authored by SCOT originator, Wiebe Bijker, the comparison table of standard and SCOT views of technology breaks down the relationships between technology and society to its simplest terms, making this work easily accessible.

Following the applications of STS section which deals with policy and educational issues, the critiques sections, has some things to say about what STS, and if you extend the argument, IT studies, could be headed in the future. The three pieces in this section articulate three entirely different critiques. The first work questions why there are no public sciences and technologies, and what the political position of STS inside and outside of the academy. In questioning the current situation by theorizing a hypothetical world, Richard Sclove opens up the interrelationships between the object of study and the people studying it in a significantly different way than is pursued in The Science Studies Reader. It also opens up the questions of expertise and meritocracy in ways that in theory could enable people to pursue a public science or a public technology in which STS scholars could provide leadership and create avenues to pluralize the knowledge structures available to the public. Since IT is rapidly becoming what could be considered a public technology, it could be a fruitful place to start expanding this program, opening up systems of expertise and transforming science through the expansion use of this possible public technology.

Following Sclove, we have an examination of the role of gender in STS. The author, Eulalia Perez Sedeno, entitles her work “Gender: the missing factor in STS”, and while feminist studies of science and technology are a large area of research already, she argues that particular attention must be paid to technology and gender in order to ensure that gender constructions pervading cultures do not begin to delimit people’s participation in new technological fields, as we can see occurring in various parts of the world. While, the author leaves off there, the questions of how do we open up fields of technology, such as IT to everyone, remains to be answered. Some parts of the problem are being addressed in certain sectors of consumer electronics, where design starts to gender the product in interesting ways, some of which deserve critical attention. As they do not get as much notice now, it is possible to see how gender may be a missing factor in science and technology studies.

The final work in this volume is also significant in several respects. It argues for using a critical political economic approach to the study of technology. In this, I think everyone agrees, the study of STS is ripe for works generated by the field of political economy. In particular, “Postmodern production and STS studies, a field ignored”, by Wilhelm Fudpucker, calls for looking at the current state of research in STS, including, for him, expanding toward an understanding of the technologization of the world and the changes in society surrounding this technologization. In looking at the broader political economic contexts instead of perhaps the textual or philosophical aspects of technology, Fudpucker wants us to note not just where things change because of the technology, but also where they stay the same, because in the contrast between the two we will find new ways to understand the interrelation of humanity and technology within governments, markets, and society as a whole.

As Visions of STS, covers a different set of material by far than The Science Studies Reader, but they are complementary on several levels. While The Science Studies Reader is focused somewhat narrowly on one form of science studies, Visions of STS brings the rest of the field of STS to bear on the problems, especially focusing on the oft forgotten area of technology. As a contribution to the technology side of STS, this book fairs well; giving the reader a significant understanding of some of the materials and directions available in studying technologies. These two books, when taken together provide an even greater resource for those interested in Science and Technology in Society studies, or any of its variants, especially in arenas of study like that surrounding IT. The similarity and expansiveness of both fields encourage one to find new ways to understand and approach research among them. IT studies researchers thus can look to STS for some possible directions for future research and for some fundamental directions of enabling researchers to understand their own practices and what those practices mean to the subject of their study. This is a joint review with The Science Studies Reader.