Conceptualizing the Politics of Science: A Response to Cambrosio, Limoges and Pronovost

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I read with interest the paper by Alberto Cambrosio and his colleagues on the politics of biotechnology policy-making in Quebec.' It was wonderful to see sociologists of science, working with the prevailing approaches, tackle the problem of policy-making. Ironically, however, despite addressing the realm that in our common-sense discourse we would call politics, the paper, like most recent sociology of science, fails adequately to conceptualize the political character of the object of study. Recent work in the sociology of science has successfully displaced the Mertonian contention that science is fundamentally distinct from other social realms.) The idea of a completely insulated meritocratic realm has been replaced by the idea that 'science is a field like any other. .'.' But while recognizing that science is fundamentally social, sociologists have generally paid insufficient attention to the political character of science the centrality of relations of power in science. Thus, while uncovering the social nature of knowledge or fact construction, constructivist work has typically failed to explain, for example, why one side in a struggle over fact, category, or knowledge construction wins and another loses. This is where one would hope that Cambrosio and his colleagues would make an advance, but their work suffers from the same defects.4 They seek to explain the establishment of the biotechnology dossier as a matter of Quebec government science policy. Theirs is really a study of category construction, a study of the process of classification. Following in a well-established tradition, they argue that the world is shaped by the process of categorization.5 They view this