Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice by H. M. Collins

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 983 priori by the researchers but should be analyzed as the result of the engineers’ work. In the final section, Latour uses the “network” con­ cept to analyze further the relations of facts, machines, and society. In so doing, he illuminates the role of scale models, mathematical formulae, and metrology. What does this book offer to the historian of technology? It does not present new historical case studies, nor does it provide a straight­ forward theory of technological development. It is, however, address­ ing one of the central concerns of the SHOT tradition—the relationship between technology and its context. Latour radically transcends the distinction between technology and its context by purging the reader’s mind of worn-out concepts and by developing a completely new vo­ cabulary to describe and analyze the seamless web of technology, sci­ ence, and society. He can do this only by building on the rich tradition of recent history of technology, using, for example, numerous articles from Technology and Culture. This is the kind of book that may, at the end of its story, leave you exasperated, perhaps even furious at the author who has been leading you to conclusions you never dreamed you would uphold. If you are infuriated, for example, by the merging of human and nonhuman factors or the elimination of nature, don’t throw the book against the wall—read it again. This is an important work for the history of technology, and for related disciplines such as the history and soci­ ology of science and business as well. Wiebe E. Bijker Dr. Bijker is assistant professor at the University of Limburg. He coedited, with Thomas P. Hughes and Trevor J. Pinch, The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987) and coedits, with Pinch and W. Bernard Carlson, an MIT Press monograph series on the integrated analysis of history and sociology of technology called Inside Technology. Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice. By H. M. Collins. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1985. Pp. viii-l-187; notes, bib­ liography, indexes. $25.00 (cloth); $12.50 (paper). Harry Collins has been one of the major European players in the “new” post-Mertonian sociology of science. He is one of the authors of its “radical programme of relativism,” and as such has long been concerned to show that science is both completely socially constructed and context dependent. His major means for doing so have been to demonstrate some vari­ ability in the conditions of production of science and to choose vari­ ability that could be explained only with reference to social factors. For Collins, the major focus has been on the Achilles heel of scientific positivism—replication. In demonstrating the impossibility of total replication, and in elucidating the conditions under which replicatory 984 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE standards vary, his work has been, and is, simply brilliant. An earlier work by Collins and Trevor Pinch, Frames ofMeaning: The Social Con­ struction ofExtraordinary Science (London: Routledge, 1982) examined the case of the differing standards scientists apply to parapsychology and “normal science” as exactly this sort of key variability, which they called relativism. The current book reviews much of this work, and includes as well a review of Collins’s concept of the scientific “core set”—that is, the community of actors who set standards of evaluation for a given problem or set of problems. In conjunction with his demonstration of the social construction of scientific knowledge, Collins relies on the concept of the “experimen­ ters’ regress,” which is the equivalent of an experimental hermeneutic circle. Experimenters’ regress means that one can never prove or disprove a concept but at best operationalize one that already exists. But while this may breach the taken-for-granted and reveal assump­ tions, it is an insufficient explanation for relativism. Neither novelty and surprise nor shared conventions suffice to explain the deeper problem indicated by the title of the book, Changing Order, as ethnomethodology has found to its sorrow. Like many ethnomethodologists , Collins’s concern with dismantling the taken-for-granted in science in fact relies on an underlying view of society which itself is taken for granted...