A Hitchhiker’s Guide to STS

Abstract

A HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO STS Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. Edited by Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen, and Trevor Pinch. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995. Pp. xv + 820; notes, bibliography, index. $85.00. This is a monumental work. Not only do its 835 pages weigh in at close to 3 pounds, but, more important, its editors have compiled an extraordinarily rich and valuable guide to the current status of Sci­ ence and Technology Studies (STS) as a held of study. The Handbook editors and its sponsor, the Society for the Social Studies of Science, perceive the volume as a replacement for the earlier guide, Science, Technology and Society: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective, edited by Ina Spiegel-Rosing and Derek de Solla Price (Sage, 1977), which not only served to describe the state of the art but also helped to establish boundaries for the held for a large number of scholars for at least a decade following its publication. Interestingly, however, the editors make no mention of Paul Durbin’s important A Guide to the Culture of Science, Technology, and Medicine (New York: Free Press, 1980, 1984). The potentially crucial, held-shaping function of such guides is not taken lightly by the editors; indeed, they self-consciously adopt the metaphor of mapmaking in their introductory essay describing the genesis and construction of the Handbook. As cartographers, Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald Markle, James Petersen, and Trevor Pinch recognize STS as a “still emerging” held, and as such the editorial task was “like constructing a map of a half-seen world” (p. xi). Thus, while “want[ing] dehnitive road maps of the ter­ rain,” they wisely let contributors from the held itself assist in a “move­ ment toward self-definition.” After the geographic identihcation of major landmarks, the inevitable rehning of territorial boundaries, and the difficult choices of what to exclude due to scale, the result—as the cartographers had hoped—is “an unconventionalbut arresting atlas of the held at a particular moment in its history” (pp. xi—xiii). Setting out on a brief reconnoiter guided by this atlas, the voyager arrives first at a historical mapping of STS since the mid-1960s by David Edge, founding editor of Social Studies of Science. Edge traces several key strands in STS research: science as social system and the sociology of scientihc knowledge, concerns over the educational breadth of scientists and engineers, and issues revolving around the democratization of science and technology. Despite the “critical per­ spective” and challenge to science as “revealed and unambiguous truth” that has been offered by STS, the traditional positivist view of science continually resurfaces, and this at once threatens yet simulta­ neously reinvigorates the study of science, technology, and society. 1015 1016 Stephen H. Cutcliffe Next comes “Theory and Methods,” which lays out many of the theoretical issues in the volume. Here one encounters Michel Calion’s useful explication of four models of scientific development—science as rational knowledge, as competition, as sociocultural practice, and as extended translation of scientific statements. Admittedly, the four models do not cover all developments in STS, but most of the missing sites can be located elsewhere in the Handbook. Gary Bowden, like Edge, believes that “STS, as a scholarly enterprise, has come of age,” especially through “the emergence of contextualist approaches to technology and to scientific knowledge” (p. 64). Bowden does not deny the future possibility of an integrative interdisciplinary focus, but in his view STS is currently, and at least for the foreseeable future rightfully, a topically focused, multidisciplinary held in which disci­ plinary master narratives still dominate. He concludes by noting that, while having achieved adulthood, STS still seeks “a stable identity,” one which “will not emerge until discussions about method are in­ formed by a conscious consideration of the link between method and disciplinary identity” (p. 78). In a personalized reflection, Evelyn Fox Keller analyzes the theme of gender in science studies, calling for a disaggregation of “gender and science” into its component parts: “(a) women in science, (6) scien­ tific constructions of sexual difference, and (c) the use of gender in scientific constructions of subjects and objects” (p. 86), with particular emphasis on the last...