Simulating Difference: Ethnography and the Relations of Intellectual Production

Abstract

It has been widely claimed that knowledge production in contemporary western societies is undergoing some kind of fundamental change : these claims form the background for this paper. It focuses on relations between different intellectual, and other, communities, the problematization of 'traditional' disciplinary boundaries and divisions and, in particular, the significance of such issues for sociology. Drawing on an ethnographic study of the work of computer scientists, it looks both at their communications with increasingly heterogeneous audiences, and at ethnographic relations between researcher and researched. It is argued that processes of 'simulation' can be discerned : firstly, the simulation of certain forms of order in computer scientists' representations of their own work in communications across boundaries; secondly, the simulation of a separate ethnographic object of study by the social scientist. It is suggested that since certain well established conceptions of social science inquiry rely implicitly on just such senses of order and separation, their problematization raises questions about the conceptualization, status and practice of sociological inquiry in the light of apparent transformations to relations of intellectual production and exchange