Untangling Context: Understanding a University Laboratory in the Commercial World

Abstract

The past twenty years have been an incredibly productive period in science studies. Still, because recent work in science studies puts a spotlight on agency and enabling situations, many practitioners in the field ignore, underplay, or dismiss the possibility that historically established, structurally stable attributes of the world may systemically shape practice at the laboratory level. This article questions this general position. Drawing on data from a participant observation study of a university biology laboratory, it describes five features of the institutional landscape that shape this laboratory's practice.The past twenty years have been an incredibly productive period in science and technology studies. Most fundamentally, recent research has helped challenge idealized images of science as a distinctive asocial realm in which strict adherence to formal rules allows scientists to &dquo;read&dquo; nature to explain the operation of physical and biological systems. Such an idealized image has been replaced by a picture of science-as-craft in which practical reasoners act in local contexts in often highly contingent ways.

Why Did Universities Start Patenting?

“…48 Finally, beyond its usefulness in this specific case, this approach to studying institution-building may have the potential to speak to STS more generally. In recent years a number of scholars have been arguing that STS should pay closer attention to the effects of political-economic and organizational factors (Kleinman, 1998, power and resources (Klein & Kleinman, 2002;Goven, 2006), formal organizations (Vaughan, 1999), institutions, networks, and power (Frickel & Moore, 2006), and political economy (Mirowski & Sent, 2007) on science and technology. We might call these approaches broadly 'structural', in their emphasis on the way that social conditions external to the individual affect both what individuals can do and what they choose to do.…”

“…The study of institution-building fits with such a trend. Empirical studies written from such a perspective are still fairly few in number, and to date most have focused on the impact of structural conditions on science; that is, how factors like organizations, politics, and economics shape the practice of science (Kleinman, 1998Vaughan, 1999;Hyysalo, 2006;Parthasarathy, 2005). But this paper, which tries to understand the creation of a practice external to the laboratory that shapes what happens within it, focuses on a slightly different piece of the puzzle: how one of those structures itself is produced.…”

Global Mental Health and Adolescent Anxiety: Kin, Care and Struggle in New Mexico

“…Attention to the primacy of subjective experience is an epistemic imperative (Kleinman 1998(Kleinman , 2007Jenkins 2015a) for the illumination of what matters most: people's own experience defined in their own terms as irreducible source of knowledge in the social and health sciences, including medical humanities. In the present instance, critical questions concern these youths' subjective experiences and meanings of anxiety.…”

Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence

“…There is plenty of good research in the field of STS that shows the myriad ways capitalism's insistence on imposing factory-like efficiencies impact knowledge production and circulation. For example, Daniel Kleinman (1998) has shown that the standardization of lab equipment and commercially available chemicals (in Kleinman's case a pesticide) can have a direct effect on the direction of research and the definition of a successful experiment.…”