Science as Routine: Work and Labor in the Bureau of Science at Manila

Abstract

Abstract In the early twentieth-century Philippines, the Bureau of Science at Manila entrenched scientific knowledge production as a component of the American colonial government. This article examines the management and routinization of scientific activity in the bureau, looking at how scientists, acting as managers and bureaucrats, organized, categorized, and administered different kinds of scientific work and labor. In particular, the article discusses how the bureau's scientists grappled with “routine,” a category of work classified as important to the bureau's institutional identity but menial and perfunctory, an obstruction to research. As a result, research and routine characterized scientific work, involving technical, manual, and clerical labor along contiguous lines of investigation. Furthermore, the bureau offered a complex but integrated ecology where American and Filipino scientists, clerks, assistants, and other employees worked, forming professional networks and building scientific careers.