On the Genesis of Technoscience: A Case Study of German Agricultural Education

Abstract

Though many are agreed that "technoscience" is a signiªcant phenomenon, little systematic attention has yet been paid to the circumstances under which it has emerged. Technoscience is conceptualized here as the outcome of a process of convergence in which technological knowledge acquires many of the characteristics of scientiªc knowledge while the latter shifts in the opposite direction. The analytical problem is then a matter of understanding why such "drift" has occurred at particular times and places. The drift of higher technical education toward science has been observed in a variety of domains including engineering and medicine, but in this paper I identify such a trend in late nineteenth and early twentieth century agricultural education, with particular reference to Bavaria. The process is interpreted using a model of institutional dynamics loosely based upon Bourdieu's concept of the academic "ªeld."The contributors to this volume are agreed that technoscience is a signiªcant phenomenon deserving analysis. For historians one of the most interesting questions is necessarily: under what circumstances has technoscience emerged? Few answers have as yet been proposed to this question, and they have necessarily been brief and quite general. In this paper I will offer a more systematic explanation based on a book-length study of the evolution of German higher agricultural education from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War (Harwood 2005).The central problem in the book is to account for the fact that the curriculum and research conducted at some agricultural colleges was more tightly tied to "practice" while at others the approach to problem-solving was more heavily science-based. Moreover, over time there was a tendencyOf several contributors to this volume who offered helpful comments on a draft of this paper, I would especially like to thank Ursula Klein and John Dettloff. Thanks, too, go to Skali Sigurdssou for extensive feedback.

The Agriculture Diploma in Queen's College, Belfast, 1845–1863, and Science Education in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

“…At the end of the century Germany had a diverse system of higher agricultural education with a spectrum of models involving more or less theoretical science. 73 In Ireland, however, scientific agriculture was deemed too scientific to be useful and yet insufficiently scientific to qualify as a university subject. Ireland had additional social circumstances: while the devastation wrought by the Famine made agricultural education seem even more necessary, it also made it more difficult to apply.…”

Humanos y máquinas: aspectos epistemológicos de su relación en el debate humanismo-poshumanismo

“…Asimismo, autores como Bloor (1999;, Barnes (2005b) y Harwood (2005) coincidieron en que los principios metodológicos de la teoría del actor red operaban como "encantamientos" que convertían al análisis en una suma de relaciones vacías de sentido. Dese esta perspectiva señalaron que la indisociabilidad "ciencia-sociedad" que habían postulado autores como Latour (1987) pretendía haber trascendido el alcance explicativo del Programa Fuerte cuando en realidad tan sólo había sustituido el tratamiento de "lo social" y "lo natural" en términos de causas eficientes por su consideración en tanto efectos.…”