Research in Science and Technology Studies (STS) tends to presume that intellectual and political radicalism go hand in hand. One would therefore expect that the most intellectually radical movement in the field relates critically to its social conditions. However, this is not the case, as demonstrated by the trajectory of the Parisian School of STS spearheaded by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. Their position, “actor-network theory,” turns out to be little more than a strategic adaptation to the democratization of expertise and the decline of the strong nation-state in France over the past 25 years. This article provides a prehistory of this client-driven, contract-based research culture in U.S. sociology of the 1960s, followed by specific features of French philosophical and political culture that have bred the distinctive tenets of actor-network theory. Insofar as actor-network theory has become the main paradigm for contemporary STS research, it reflects a field that dodges normative commitments in order to maintain a user-friendly presence.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Ashmore, Malcolm, and Stella Harding, eds. 1994. Humans and others: The concept of agency and its attribution [Special issue]. American Behavioral Scientist37:731-856.
2.
Becker, Howard. 1967. Whose side are we on?Social Problems14:239-247.
Bourdieu, Pierre. [1989] 1996. The state nobility. Reprint, Cambridge: Polity Press.
5.
Callon, Michel. 1986. Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen. In Power, action, and belief, edited by J. Law, 196-229. London: Routledge.
6.
Callon, Michel. 1987. Society in the making. In The social construction of technological systems, edited by W. Bijker, T. Hughes, and T. Pinch, 83-106. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
7.
Callon, Michel, and Bruno Latour. 1981. Unscrewing the Big Leviathan. In Advances in social theory and methodology, edited by K. Knorr-Cetina and A. Cicourel, 277-303. London: Routledge.
8.
Callon, Michel, John Law, and Arie Rip. 1986. Mapping the dynamics of science and technology. London: Macmillan.
9.
Castells, Manuel. 1996-98. The information age. 3 vols. Oxford: Blackwell.
10.
Collins, Harry, and Steven Yearley. 1992. Epistemological chicken. In Science as practice and culture, edited by A. Pickering, 301-327. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
11.
Crawford, Hugh. 1993. An interview with Bruno Latour. Configurations2:247-269.
12.
Fuller, Steve. 1988. Social epistemology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
13.
Fuller, Steve. 1992. Social epistemology and the research agenda of science studies. In Science as practice and culture, edited by A. Pickering, 390-428. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
14.
Fuller, Steve. 1993. Philosophy, rhetoric and the end of knowledge. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
15.
Fuller, Steve. 1996. Talking metaphysical turkey about epistemological chicken. In The disunity of science, edited by P. Galison and D. Stump, 170-188, 468-471. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
16.
Fuller, Steve. 1999a. The governance of science: Ideology and the future of the open society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
17.
Fuller, Steve. 1999b. Making the university fit for critical intellectuals: Recovering from the ravages of the postmodern condition. British Education Research Journal25:583-596.
18.
Fuller, Steve. 1999c. Review of Castells (1996-8). Science, Technology & Human Values24:159-166.
19.
Fuller, Steve. 2000. Thomas Kuhn: A philosophical history for our times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
20.
Gibbons, Michael, C. Limoges, H. Nowotny, S. Schwartzman, P. Scott, and M. Trow. 1994. The new production of knowledge. London: Sage.
21.
Gildea, Robert. 1996. France since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
22.
Glaser, Barney, and Anselm Strauss. 1967. The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research practice. Chicago: Aldine.
23.
Golinski, Jan. 1998. Making natural knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
24.
Gouldner, Alvin. 1968. The sociologist as partisan: Sociology and the welfare state. American Sociologist3:103-116.
25.
Grint, Keith, and Steve Woolgar. 1995. On some failures of nerve in constructivist and feminist analyses of technology. Science, Technology & Human Values20:286-310.
26.
Hughes, Thomas. 1987. The evolution of large technological systems. In The social construction of technological systems, edited by W. Bijker, T. Hughes, and T. Pinch, 51-82. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
27.
Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1999. Epistemic cultures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
28.
Krause, Elliott. 1996. Death of the guilds: Professions, states, and the advance of capitalism, 1930 to the present. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
29.
Labinger, Jay. 1995. Out of the petri dish endlessly rocking. Social Studies of Science25:341-348.
30.
Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in action. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
31.
Latour, Bruno. 1988. The pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
32.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
33.
Latour, Bruno. 1995. Mixing humans and non-humans together: The sociology of the door-closer. In Ecologies of knowledge: Work and politics in science and technology, edited by S. L. Star, 257-289. Albany: State University of New York Press.
34.
Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
35.
Latour, Bruno. 1997. A few steps toward an anthropology of the iconoclastic gesture. Science in Context10:63-83.
36.
Latour, Bruno, and Michel Callon. 1992. Don’t throw the baby out with the Bath School! In Science as practice and culture, edited by A. Pickering, 343-368. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
37.
Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory life: The social construction of scientific facts. London: Sage.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. [1979] 1983. The postmodern condition. Reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
40.
MacKenzie, Donald. 1995. Knowing machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
41.
Rouse, Joseph. 1996. Engaging science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
42.
Schmitt, Carl. [1932] 1996. The concept of the political. Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
43.
Serres, Michel. 1980. La parasite. Paris: Grasset.
44.
Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal liberation. New York: Random House.
45.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1995. Introduction. In Ecologies of knowledge: Work and politics in science and technology, edited by S. L. Star. Albany: State University of New York Press.
46.
Turney, Jon, ed. 1984. Sci-tech report: Everything you need to know about science and technology in the 80s. New York: Pantheon.
