The development of an instrument is often analysed in a rather heroic fashion, as though it had single-handedly brought about the evolution of a whole scientific field. But instruments can also be regrouped within a wider instrumentation, in which they may be regularly reconstructed and rearticulated in such a way as to serve many different scientific purposes. This flexibility has a cost, which is on one hand the task of reconstruction, and on the other the monitoring systems that must be designed in order to discover scientific perspectives with the greatest potential, and the instrumental set-ups to develop in order to implement them. This article analyses a rare and complex instrumentation – a synchrotron – to determine links between instruments, and types of organization behind the functioning and evolution of these links.
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