A long history of breakdowns: A historiographical review

Abstract

The introduction to this special issue argues that network breakdowns play an important and unacknowledged role in the shaping and emergence of scientific knowledge. It focuses on transnational scientific networks from the early modern Republic of Letters to 21st-century globalized science. It attempts to unite the disparate historiography of the early modern Republic of Letters, the literature on 20th-century globalization, and the scholarship on Actor-Network Theory. We can perceive two, seemingly contradictory, changes to scientific networks over the past four hundred years. At the level of individuals, networks have become increasing fragile, as developments in communication and transportation technologies, and the emergence of regimes of standardization and instrumentation, have made it easier both to create new constellations of people and materials, and to replace and rearrange them. But at the level of institutions, collaborations have become much more extensive and long-lived, with single projects routinely outlasting even the arc of a full scientific career. In the modern world, the strength of institutions and macro-networks often relies on ideological regimes of standardization and instrumentation that can flexibly replace elements and individuals at will.

When funding fails: Planetary exploration at NASA in an era of austerity, 1967–1976

“…Mukerji (1989) adopts a similar methodological approach, using budget cuts in oceanographic research in the 1980s, to understand how government funding creates webs of fiscal and technological dependency between scientists and the state. See also Margócsy (2017) for a related attempt to recast the history and sociology of science through a rupture lens. 5.…”

The Republic of Letters and the Origins of Scientific Knowledge Commons

“…That judgment is not to suggest that the Republic of Letters had an inertia of its own, independent of the energy of its citizens. Rather, the description of actors, norms, and practices elicited by the knowledge commons framework implies that it was a network of individuals comprising a collective or community, imprecisely defined (Strathern 1996;Margócsy 2017). Because of its relative openness, the Republic of Letters may be characterized institutionally as a community of practice (Brown and Duguid 1991;Wenger 2010).…”

The Networked Origins of Cartesian Philosophy and Science

“…Philosophers have told the story of Descartes and his supporters (Verbeek 1992;van Ruler 1995;Buning 2013;Ariew 2014;Douglas 2015;Schmaltz 2017;Gootjes 2018;Nadler et al 2019). Historians have highlighted the role of social networks in the creation and dissemination of knowledge (Harris 1996;Lux and Cook 1998;Latour 2005;Schaffer 2009;Huigen et al 2010;Margócsy 2017;Findlen 2018). Even scholars of complex systems have indirectly shed light on the spread of Cartesian philosophy and science by proving that all networks-from crickets chirping in unison to the World Wide Web-are governed by the same rules (Watts and Strogatz 1998;Barabási and Albert 1999;Albert and Barabási 2002;Newman 2010;Barabási 2014).…”