Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society / Edition 1

by Bruno Latour

Overview

A foundational text of science and technology studies from the field’s most celebrated theorist.

Science and technology have an immense impact on every aspect of society, but how exactly are scientific facts produced? In this lively and authoritative classic, Bruno Latour reveals that social context is as important as technical content when it comes to understanding how science works.

Latour’s focus is not on what scientists say but on what they do, from the day-to-day practice of gathering data and writing technical papers to the travel and networking required to secure funding. Observing the scientific enterprise with the analytical distance of an ethnographer participating in a foreign culture, he argues that science is driven not by value-neutral discoveries of objective truths and natural laws but by the elaboration of longer and stronger networks encompassing both people and things. Only by mobilizing a wide range of human and nonhuman actors—fellow scientists, bureaucrats, specimens, instruments, calculation devices, texts, microbes—can “fact-builders” successfully accumulate the authority needed to convert a novel, tendentious claim into an accepted truth.

Setting a pioneering agenda for the social studies of science, Science in Action marshals a wealth of vivid examples to challenge conventional disciplinary boundaries and introduce readers to the disorienting conceptual universe of actor-network theory. Playful, irreverent, and unremittingly provocative, it remains among Latour’s most significant works.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674792913
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/15/1988
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 8.94(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Bruno Latour was Professor Emeritus at Sciences Po Paris. He was the 2021 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Arts and Philosophy and was awarded the 2013 Holberg International Memorial Prize.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction Opening Pandora's Black Box

PART I FROM WEARER TO STRONGER RHETORIC

Chapter I Literature

Part A: Controversies

Part B: When controversies flare up the literature becomes technical

Part C: Writing texts that withstand the assaults of a hostile environment

Conclusion: Numbers, more numbers

Chapter 2 Laboratories

Part A: From texts to things: A showdown

Part B: Building up counter-laboratories

Part C: Appealing (to) nature

PART II FROM WEAR POINTS TO STRONGHOLDS

Chapter 3 Machines

Introduction: The quandary of the fact-builder

Part A: Translating interests

Part B: Keeping the interested groups in line

Part C: The model of diffusion versus the model of translation

Chapter 4 Insiders Out

Part A: Interesting others in the laboratories

Part B: Counting allies and resources

PART III FROM SHORT TO LONGER NETWORKS

Chapter 5 Tribunals of Reason

Part A: The trials of rationality

Part B: Sociologics

Part C: Who needs hard facts?

Chapter 6 Centres of calculation

Prologue: The domestication of the savage mind

Part A: Action at a distance

Part B: Centres of calculation

Part C: Metrologies

Appendix 1

Editorial Reviews

There is a wealth of material and some titillating insight into discoveries beginning with the framed race to find the structure of DNA—the double helix—and in Latour’s hands, it becomes a true cliffhanger…This [book] will reward those who want to probe science and the modern world in depth.

Kirkus Reviews

There has never been a programme for research in the social studies of science that has been presented in such a systematic and integrated way…Latour’s book will receive, and it deserves to receive, the closest and most widespread attention…Some readers of a nervous disposition may feel uneasy about Latour’s dare-devil theorizing, squeamish about his book’s over-weening ambition and the cosmic scope of his schemata. This would be wrong: we need many more workers in our field who cast their nets as widely as Latour.

Social Studies of Science - Steven Shapin

If Kuhn hit the first home run, then Latour set new records for homers, with bases loaded. Latour’s image of a living science, constantly in motion and advancing through attack and counterattack, gripped the imagination of a generation of STS analysts. His playful encounters with the inanimate, mechanical, and written instruments of science remain eye-opening…His sprightly rules of method have acquired near-axiomatic status.

Social Studies of Science - Sheila Jasanoff

Bruno Latour delights some of us and infuriates others, but either way he has, for the past decade, been one of the most brilliant and original writers about science…[Science in Action] is an incredibly rich resource of examples put to creative uses…The book makes us think about all the bashful silences that so affect anglophone philosophy of science.

Philosophy of Science - Ian Hacking

Much as physicists reduced biology to the molecular level, Latour and his colleagues in the social constructivist school of science studies are attempting something even more audacious, the reduction of all scientific disciplines to the principles of rhetoric…Whether one accepts or rejects Latour’s perspective, Science in Action is an important book.

Science - Henry Etztkowitz

One cannot but be impressed by the scope of Latour’s work… This is no mere bricolage, but a coherent and powerful framework for research. I predict that Science in Action will have an impact comparable to Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions both as a provocation to philosophers and as an inspiration to sociologists and historians of science.

Times Literary Supplement - Nicholas Jardine

This account of science as composed of drifting, recombining networks is presented with considerable charm and humour. There are many brief case histories to enliven the text, and the book works very well as a guide through scientific reasoning.

Nature - Steven Yearly

Reading [Science in Action] was tantamount to a paradigm shift...Latour’s work didn’t correspond to anything I had studied before; it swept the ground from beneath my feet, creating as much discomfort as it did pleasure. I was forced to reassess everything that I thought I knew about science.

Social Studies of Science - Hélène Mialet

Latour’s Science in Action is a ‘must read’ for all sociologists, not just because the sociology of science is a dynamic and growing subdiscipline, but more importantly because Latour’s thesis challenges the notions that underlie sociologists’ efforts to distinguish our field as a ‘science’… Latour’s thesis is that science, including sociology, is collective action and that facticity is a consequence, not a cause, of collective action… An excellent and enjoyable introduction to the sociology of science.

Contemporary Sociology - Joan H. Fujimura

This book argues that science is a social activity… The message is important… The book is convincing and informative.

Science Books & Films - Kenneth P. Ruscio

This book argues that science is a social activity… The message is important… The book is convincing and informative.

Roy Porter

This account of science as composed of drifting, recombining networks is presented with considerable charm and humour. There are many brief case histories to enliven the text, and the book works very well as a guide through scientific reasoning.
— Steven Yearly

Nature

Latour's Science in Action is a "must read" for all sociologists, not just because the sociology of science is a dynamic and growing subdiscipline, but more importantly because Latour's thesis challenges the notions that underlie sociologists' efforts to distinguish our field as a "science"...Latour's thesis is that science, including sociology, is collective action and that facticity is a consequence, not a cause, of collective action...An excellent and enjoyable introduction to the sociology of science.
— Joan H. Fujimura

Contemporary Sociology

One cannot but be impressed by the scope of Latour's work...This is no mere bricolage, but a coherent and powerful framework for research. I predict that Science in Action will have an impact comparable to Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions both as a provocation to philosophers and as an inspiration to sociologists and historians of science.
— Nicholas Jardine

Times Literary Supplement