Mangle Of Practice Research Articles

The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science

Some difficult but important issues have arisen in recent social studies of science concerning temporally emergent phenomena and the decetering of the human subject in scientific practice. This essay seeks a constructive clarification of the issues, and links them together, by delineating and exemplifying a view of science as a field of emergent human and material agency reciprocally engaged by means of a dialectic of resistence and accommodation-the mangle.