Social Studies of Science recent issues

Editorial

Lynch, M. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:50:19 PST

Entrepreneurial Science: The Rules of the Game

Jones, M. P. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:50:19 PST

Scholars across a range of academic fields continue to rely on Robert K. Merton’s scientific norms to frame analyses of the privatization of research in the life sciences. I revisit constructivist criticisms of the Mertonian approach and then develop an empirically grounded interpretation of academic entrepreneurship. Focusing on the case of an early biotech entrepreneur, I investigate how scientists and university administrators managed intellectual property issues and conflicts of interest and commitment during the ‘biotech revolution’ of the late 1970s and early 1980s. This story shows that many contemporary studies — both supportive and critical of privatization — misunderstand or misrepresent the ethical dimensions of faculty participation in commerce.

Confronting the Stigma of Eugenics: Genetics, Demography and the Problems of Population

Ramsden, E. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:50:19 PST

Building upon the work of Thomas Gieryn and Erving Goffman, this paper will explore how the concepts of stigma and boundary work can be usefully applied to history of population science. Having been closely aligned to eugenics in the early 20th century, from the 1930s both demographers and geneticists began to establish a boundary between their own disciplines and eugenic ideology. The eugenics movement responded to this process of stigmatization. Through strategies defined by Goffman as ‘disclosure’ and ‘concealment’, stigma was managed, and a limited space for eugenics was retained in science and policy. Yet by the 1960s, a revitalized eugenics movement was bringing leading social and biological scientists together through the study of the genetic demography of characteristics such as intelligence. The success of this programme of ‘stigma transformation’ resulted from its ability to allow geneticists and demographers to conceive of eugenic improvement in ways that seemed consistent with the ideals of individuality, diversity and liberty. In doing so, it provided them with an alternative, and a challenge, to more radical and controversial programmes to realize an optimal genotype and population. The processes of stigma attribution and management are, however, ongoing, and since the rise of the nature—nurture controversy in the 1970s, the use of eugenics as a ‘stigma symbol’ has prevailed.

The Intersection of Gender, Race and Cultural Boundaries, or Why is Computer Science in Malaysia Dominated by Women?

Mellstrom, U. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:50:19 PST

This paper reports an investigation on how and why computer science in Malaysia is dominated by women. Inspired by recent critical interventions in gender and technology studies, the paper aims to open up more culturally situated analyses of the gendering of technology or the technology of gendering, with the Malaysian case exemplifying the core of the argument. The paper argues along four different strands of critical thought: (1) a critique of the analytical asymmetry in the process of co-production in gender and technology studies; (2) a critique of a western bias in gender and technology studies, advocating more context sensitivity and focus on the cultural embeddedness of gender and technology relations; (3) a critique that pays more attention to spatial practices and body politics in regard to race, class and gender in relation to technology; and (4) a critique of ‘western’ positional notions of gender configurations that opens up for more fluid constructions of gender identity, including the many crossovers between relational and positional definitions of femininity and masculinity.

Origins of the Problem of Health-related Behaviours: A Genealogical Study

Armstrong, D. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:50:19 PST

In recent years a number of public health, prevention and disease management strategies have emerged that depend on changing health-related behaviours. The definition of those behaviours, indeed of the very idea of behaviour, remains unchallenged in these initiatives, as behaviour is a taken-for-granted concept. Yet the idea of a changeable behaviour is a relatively recent phenomenon and the aim of this paper is to map its emergence and transformation over the last century. Its origins are shown to lie in the first half of the 20th century when it was derived from the ideas of conduct and movement. From mid-century onwards, it has been increasingly construed as being underpinned by a sense of agency and as a legitimate target for healthcare interventions. Finally, in the 21st century it has become stabilized as a core dimension of health and illness.

Parents Who Influence Their Children to Become Scientists: Effects of Gender and Parental Education

Sonnert, G. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:50:19 PST

In this paper we report on testing the ‘role-model’ and ‘opportunity-structure’ hypotheses about the parents whom scientists mentioned as career influencers. According to the role-model hypothesis, the gender match between scientist and influencer is paramount (for example, women scientists would disproportionately often mention their mothers as career influencers). According to the opportunity-structure hypothesis, the parent’s educational level predicts his/her probability of being mentioned as a career influencer (that is, parents with higher educational levels would be more likely to be named). The examination of a sample of American scientists who had received prestigious postdoctoral fellowships resulted in rejecting the role-model hypothesis and corroborating the opportunity-structure hypothesis. There were a few additional findings. First, women scientists were more likely than men scientists to mention parental influencers. Second, fathers were more likely than mothers to be mentioned as influencers. Third, an interaction was found between the scientist’s gender and parental education when predicting a parent’s nomination as influencer.

Ghosts in the Machine: Comment on Sismondo

McHenry, L. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:50:19 PST

Ghosts in the Machine: Reply to McHenry (2009)

Sismondo, S. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:50:19 PST

Review: Health, Materiality, and the Politics of Office Work: Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics,Technoscience, andWomenWorkers (Duke University Press, 2006), x + 253 pp., {pound}15.99/$22.95 (pbk), {pound}58.00/$79.95 (hbk). ISBN 0-8223-3671-5 (pbk), 0-8223-3659-6 (hbk).

Epstein, S. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:50:19 PST

Obituary: Olga Amsterdamska Moore (1953--2009)

Blume, S. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:50:19 PST

Biomedical Conventions and Regulatory Objectivity: A Few Introductory Remarks

Cambrosio, A., Keating, P., Schlich, T., Weisz, G. — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:35:09 PDT

This special issue of Social Studies of Science centers on the topic of regulation in medicine and, in particular, on the notion of regulatory objectivity, defined as a new form of objectivity in biomedicine that generates conventions and norms through concerted programs of action based on the use of a variety of systems for the collective production of evidence. The papers in the special issue suggest ways in which the notion of regulatory objectivity can be tested, extended, revised, or superseded by more appropriate notions. They insist on the need to examine more closely clinical-therapeutic (and not just clinical-research) activities, and to pay more attention to the activities of regulatory agencies such as the US Food and Drug Administration and to standard-setting organizations. They call attention to the professional and organizational activities surrounding the mobilization of conventions for regulating clinical practices. Finally, they provide material that can help us to think about how analytical notions such as regulatory objectivity may or may not inform interventionist research projects.

Regulatory Objectivity in Action: Mild Cognitive Impairment and the Collective Production of Uncertainty

Moreira, T., May, C., Bond, J. — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:35:09 PDT

In this paper, we investigate recent changes in the definition and approach to Alzheimer’s disease brought about by growing clinical, therapeutic and regulatory interest in the prodromal or preclinical aspects of this condition. In the last decade, there has been an increased interest in the biomolecular and epidemiological characterization of pre-clinical dementia. It is argued that early diagnosis of dementia, and particularly of Alzheimer‘s disease, will facilitate the prevention of dementing processes and lower the prevalence of the condition in the general population. The search for a diagnostic category or biomarker that would serve this purpose is an ongoing but problematic endeavour for research and clinical communities in this area. In this paper, we explore how clinical and research actors, in collaboration with regulatory institutions and pharmaceutical companies, come to frame these domains as uncertainties and how they re-deploy uncertainty in the ‘collective production’ of new diagnostic conventions and bioclinical standards. While drawing as background on ethnographic, documentary and interview data, the paper proposes an in-depth, contextual analysis of the proceedings of an international meeting organized by the Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drug Advisory Committee of the US Food and Drug Administration to discuss whether or not a particular diagnostic convention — mild cognitive impairment — exists and how best it ought to be studied. Based on this analysis we argue that the deployment of uncertainty is reflexively implicated in bioclinical collectives’ search for rules and conventions, and furthermore that the collective production of uncertainty is central to the ‘knowledge machinery’ of regulatory objectivity.

Staging and Weighting Evidence in Biomedicine: Comparing Clinical Practices in Cancer Genetics and Psychiatric Genetics

Rabeharisoa, V., Bourret, P. — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:35:09 PDT

This paper seeks to make a contribution to the discussion on what clinical work consists of in biomedicine. It draws on the comparison between two clinical practices: (1) cancer genetics of breast/ovarian and colon cancers; and (2) psychiatric genetics of autism and its related syndromes. We argue that the clinic does not reflect genetic reductionism, nor does it entail a straightforward return to the previous clinical tradition. We show that the clinic is affected by three changes in the practices that we studied. The first change concerns clinical settings: clinical work is now performed by ‘bioclinical collectives’, gathering researchers and clinicians from various disciplines and activities, and conjointly searching biology and pathology. The second change concerns the content of clinical work that we propose to call ‘clinic of mutations’. This clinic involves the intense work of collecting and comparing multiple and heterogeneous data to document the biological nature and the clinical relevance of mutations, whose status is ambiguous and whose effects are uncertain. The third change concerns the dynamics of clinical work, which is now overlapping with research. As a consequence, the elaboration of a judgment and a medical decision is no longer a matter of simply making a diagnosis or prognosis. Rather it consists in accounting for nosographic domains and descriptive and interpretive models of diseases, into which mutations may plausibly play a role. We conclude with a discussion of the form of objectivity underlying clinical work in biomedicine. Our contention is that in the current post-genomic era, thinking of genetic markers as objective proofs of a disease or a risk of disease is definitely inappropriate. Rather, the clinic has to constantly produce the meaning and relevance of mutations and biomedical entities that tend to proliferate and regularly invade the clinical settings.

Pragmatic Objectivity and the Standardization of Engineered Tissues

Hogle, L. F. — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:35:09 PDT

This paper analyzes attempts to develop consensus standards, reference methods, and classification rubrics in the nascent field of tissue engineering. I examine the collective formal and informal processes that were employed to determine what would count as relevant, objective evidence in the regulation of engineered human tissue products. The paper underscores the way political—industrial assemblages participate in socially negotiated forms of objectivity and are inseparable from the way new technologies take shape. In the story of tissue engineering, one challenge was producing a form of objectivity that could meet the expectations of various audiences (regulators, producers, payers, users). I call this ‘pragmatic objectivity’, generated in the hope of meeting the multiple, sometimes conflicting goals of participants: getting new therapies to patients quickly, understanding the therapeutic effects of novel, hybrid products, establishing databases with which to link cell technology platforms, and downsizing and streamlining governmental oversight in response to pressure from the federal government. Meant to create order, attempts to standardize and classify ambiguous biohybrid products had unintended outcomes, including challenges to fundamental assumptions about bodily interactions with technologies and reconsiderations of the institutional forms through which medical therapies have long been evaluated.

What's Behind a Guideline?: Authority, Competition and Collaboration in the French Oncology Sector

Castel, P. — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:35:09 PDT

Taking the French oncology sector as a case study, this paper shows that guidelines are used strategically by individual physicians and groups of physicians. While some studies have made convincing arguments about the rise of guidelines as a manifestation of a new type of objectivity, this case study provides evidence that the proliferation of medical guidelines is also the result of an attempt by some physicians to improve their positions relative to competing groups. Guidelines could indeed be strategic resources used by professional actors at the expense of other professionals in order to (1) maintain a sufficient amount of activity and (2) increase control over therapeutic decisions. The study also points to other kinds of changes that guidelines may influence, beyond medical practices and coordination: the evolution of the structure of power relationships inside the medical profession. A perspective on the sociology of organizations, which places concrete exchange and bargaining relations at the core of its analysis and treats social control as being continually challenged and (re)produced, helps to identify other reasons why standardization does not prevent local specificities and may even enhance them.

Competition in the Wild: Reconfiguring Healthcare Markets

Zuiderent-Jerak, T. — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:35:09 PDT

Michel Callon’s work on ‘the performativity of economics’ raises interesting theoretical challenges for the social study of markets. Callon proposes that laws of markets do exist, but mainly because they are performed, shaped and formatted through the way economics develops ‘spaces of calculation’. The performativity thesis proposes that if markets are not natural entities, but are instead performed by economics, this may open up the reconfiguration of market practices to many previously excluded actors, including STS scholars. However, Callon’s focus on the role of materialities in performing spaces of calculation and the role of economics in creating these materialities, easily leads to over-enthusiasm for the potential of STS scholars to engage in reconfiguring markets. Based on an interventionist research project on performing healthcare markets as ‘value’-driven, rather than ‘cost-saving’driven, I argue that markets can ‘work’ despite the absence of well-functioning materialities. This problematizes the approach pursued by Callon, and I therefore propose to temper the ambitions of STS scholars involved in the reconfiguration of markets to direct them towards the analysis of historically grown prevailing market regimes and market practices as ‘forms of the probable’ for such reconfiguration. Analysing such probabilities may be fruitful for reflecting on the risks that such experimental interventions entail for reconfiguring markets.

Postscript to the Special Issue: Governing Life by Standards: A View from Engagements

Thevenot, L. — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:35:09 PDT

Standardization has been extended far beyond the industrial world. It participates in governing our lives and the lives of all living entities by producing public guarantees in the form of standards. Social studies of medicine have provided a precious contribution to advancing standardization as a topic of inquiry, most notably through investigations of the relationship between ‘regulation’ and ‘objectivity’, drawn together in the concept of the standard. This postscript discusses this contribution from the point of view of ‘regimes of engagement’, that is, a variety of ways in which humans are committed to their environment — from public stances to the closest forms of proximity — and in pursuit of a kind of ‘good’. These regimes are distinguished according to the good they promise, as well as the degree to which the guarantee being offered can be held in common. The discussion in this postscript extends the critique raised by scholarship on standards by taking into account the oppression and subjugation that standardization can engender.

Moving Android: On Social Robots and Body-in-Interaction

Alac, M. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:54:21 PDT

Social robotics studies embodied technologies designed for social interaction. This paper examines the implied idea of embodiment using as data a sequence in which practitioners of social robotics are involved in designing a robot's movement. The moments of learning and work in the laboratory enact the social body as material, dynamic, and multiparty: the body-in-interaction. In describing subject—object reconfigurations, the paper explores how the well-known ideas of extending the body with instruments can be applied to a technology designed to function as our surrogate.

Scientists in a Changed Institutional Environment: Subjective Adaptation and Social Responsibility Norms in Russia

Gerber, T. P., Yarsike Ball, D. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:54:21 PDT

How do scientists react when the institutional setting in which they conduct their work changes radically? How do long-standing norms regarding the social responsibility of scientists fare? What factors influence whether scientists embrace or reject the new institutions and norms? We examine these questions using data from a unique survey of 602 scientists in Russia, whose research institutions experienced a sustained crisis and sweeping changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union. We develop measures of how respondents view financing based on grants and other institutional changes in the Russian science system, as well as measures of two norms regarding scientists' social responsibility. We find that the majority of scientists have adapted, in the sense that they hold positive views of the new institutions, but a diversity of orientations remains. Social responsibility norms are common but far from universal among Russian scientists. The main correlates of adaptation are age and current success at negotiating the new institutions, though prospective success, work context, and ethnicity have some of the hypothesized associations. As for social responsibility norms, the main source of variation is age: younger scientists are more likely to embrace individualistic rather than socially oriented norms.

Drug Evaluation and the Permissive Principle: Continuities and Contradictions between Standards and Practices in Antidepressant Regulation

Abraham, J., Davis, C. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:54:21 PDT

Pharmaceuticals are not permitted on to the market unless they are granted regulatory approval. The regulatory process is, therefore, crucial in whether or not a drug is widely prescribed. Regulatory agencies have developed standards of performance that pharmaceuticals are supposed to meet before entering the market. Regulation of technologies is often discussed by reference to the precautionary principle. In contrast, this paper develops the concept of the `permissive principle' as a way of understanding the departure of regulators' practices from standards of drug efficacy to which regulatory agencies themselves subscribe. By taking a case study of antidepressant regulation in the UK and the USA, the mechanisms of permissive regulatory practices are examined. An STS methodology of both spatial (international) and temporal comparisons of regulatory practices with regulatory standards is employed to identify the nature and extent of the permissive regulation. It is found that the permissive principle was adopted by drug regulators in the UK and the USA, but more so by the former than the latter. Evidently, permissive regulation, which favours the commercial interests of the drug manufacturer, but is contrary to the interests of patients, may penetrate to the heart of regulatory science. On the other hand, permissive regulation of specific drugs should not be regarded as an inevitable result of marketing strategies and concomitant networks deployed by powerful pharmaceutical companies, because the extent of permissive regulation may vary according to the intra-institutional normative commitments of regulators to uphold their technical standards against the commercial interests of the manufacturer. Likely sociological factors that can account for such permissive regulatory practices are `corporate bias', secrecy and excessive regulatory trust in the pharmaceutical industry in the UK, political expediency and ideological capture in the USA, combined in both countries with some regulatory deference to the clinical autonomy of the psychiatry profession.

Active Compounds and Atoms of Society: Plants, Bodies, Minds and Cultures in the Work of Kenyan Ethnobotanical Knowledge

Wenzel Geissler, P., Prince, R. J. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:54:21 PDT

This paper examines a sequence of investigations in parasitology, botany, pharmacology, psychometrics and ethnopsychology focused on Kenyan village children's knowledge of medicinal herbs. We follow this work of making and ordering of knowledge, showing that the different disciplinary perspectives on bodies, medicines, knowledges, children and cultures produced by this research all sought the foundation of knowledge in reference to objective reality, and that they aimed to make the world known in the specific form of distinct and comparable entities with individual properties and capacities. Based on subsequent ethnographic observations of healing in the same village, we outline a different, contrasting modality of knowing, which places ontology above epistemology. Medicinal knowledge and its transformational capacity are here not located within entities but between them; not in objective reality but in effects; `to know' means `to come together' with the implication of having an effect on one another. We use this ethnographic sketch of a different form of knowing as a foil against which to contrast the imaginary that had shaped our previous research. Beyond the stark contrast between herbal village healing and pharmacological laboratory analysis, we expand our argument by moving from natural science to social science, from studies of plants and substances to those of humans, minds and cultures; from laboratories to ethno-psychological tests, cultural models, and eventually econometrics. We suggest that by reiterating a particular scientific imaginary, remaking humans (and non-human beings) as known things, a specific notion of man and a related political economy of knowledge is naturalized. Looking back at our involvement with this sequence of research, we realize that, contrary to our intentions, our inclusion as `social scientists' into a multidisciplinary scientific project may have exacerbated rather than mitigated its potentially problematic effects.

Review: How Packaged Software Conquers the Organization: Neil Pollock and Robin Williams, Software and Organizations: The Biography of the Packaged Enterprise System or How SAP Conquered the World (London: Routledge, 2008), 348 pp., {pound}65.00/87.99/$135.00. ISBN 978-0-415-40397-9 (hbk); ISBN 978-0-203-89194-0 (ebk)

Hyysalo, S. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:54:21 PDT

Erratum

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:54:21 PDT

Where are the Cyborgs in Cybernetics?

Kline, R. — Fri, 22 May 2009 06:48:05 PDT

Cyborgs — cybernetic organisms, hybrids of humans and machines — have pervaded everyday life, the military, popular culture, and the academic world since the advent of cyborg studies in the mid 1980s. They have been a recurrent theme in STS in recent decades, but there are surprisingly few cyborgs referred to in the early history of cybernetics in the USA and Britain. In this paper, I analyze the work of the early cyberneticians who researched and built cyborgs. I then use that history of cyborgs as a basis for reinterpreting the history of cybernetics by critiquing cyborg studies that give a teleological account of cybernetics, and histories of cybernetics that view it as a unitary discipline. I argue that cyborgs were a minor research area in cybernetics, usually classified under the heading of `medical cybernetics', in the USA and Britain from the publication of Wiener's Cybernetics in 1948 to the decline of cybernetics among mainstream scientists in the 1960s. During that period, cyberneticians held multiple interpretations of their field. Most of the research on cybernetics focused on the analogy between humans and machines — the main research method of cybernetics — not the fusion of humans and machines, the domain of cyborgs. Although many cyberneticians in the USA and Britain viewed cybernetics as a `universal discipline', they created contested, area-specific interpretations of their field under the metadiscourse of cybernetics.

Bringing Abundance into Environmental Politics: Constructing a Zionist Network of Water Abundance, Immigration, and Colonization

Alatout, S. — Fri, 22 May 2009 06:48:05 PDT

For more than five decades, resource scarcity has been the lead story in debates over environmental politics. More importantly, and whenever environmental politics implies conflict, resource scarcity is constructed as the culprit. Abundance of resources, if at all visited in the literature, holds less importance. Resource abundance is seen, at best, as the other side of scarcity — maybe the successful conclusion of multiple interventions that may turn scarcity into abundance. This paper reinstates abundance as a politico-environmental category in its own right. Rather than relegating abundance to a second-order environmental actor that matters only on occasion, this paper foregrounds it as a crucial element in modern environmental politics. On the substantive level, and using insights from science and technology studies, especially a slightly modified actor-network framework, I describe the emergence and consolidation of a Zionist network of abundance, immigration, and colonization in Palestine between 1918 and 1948. The essential argument here is that water abundance was constructed as fact, and became a political rallying point around which a techno-political network emerged that included a great number of elements. To name just a few, the following were enrolled in the service of such a network: geologists, geophysicists, Zionist settlement experts, Zionist organizations, political and technical categories of all sorts, Palestinians as the negated others, Palestinian revolts in search of political rights, the British Mandate authorities, the hydrological system of Palestine, and the absorptive capacity of Palestine, among others. The point was to successfully articulate these disparate elements into a network that seeks opening Palestine for Jewish immigration, redefining Palestinian geography and history through Judeo-Christian Biblical narratives, and, in the process, de-legitimizing political Palestinian presence in historic Palestine.

Pharmacovigilance and Post-Black Market Surveillance

Langlitz, N. — Fri, 22 May 2009 06:48:05 PDT

Pharmacovigilance can be defined as a set of practices aiming at the detection, understanding and assessment of risks related to the use of drugs in a population, and the prevention of consequential adverse effects. In a narrower sense, the term refers exclusively to postmarket surveillance. This paper briefly outlines how pharmacovigilance has come to play a central role in the regulation of novel pharmaceuticals. However, the focus of the text is on mechanisms emerging in an experimental drug scene that aim at dealing with the risks posed by `designer drugs' newly introduced to the black market. This discussion of pharmacovigilance and `post-black market surveillance' is situated in the broader context of the more recent dissemination of vigilance as a key element of government in a world too complex for legal and disciplinary measures alone.

Ethanol versus Gasoline: The Contestation and Closure of a Socio-technical System in the USA

Carolan, M. S. — Fri, 22 May 2009 06:48:05 PDT

A variety of forces aligned at the turn of the last century to make ethyl alcohol — what is today known as ethanol — inefficient and uneconomical as a fuel alternative. Rather than a case of inevitable technological unfolding, the transition from King Coal to Big Oil was a sociologically contingent event. As a controversy study, this paper seeks to avoid the reductionist tendencies of past historical analyses of fuel. The author also seeks to redress a fundamental gap within the STS literature on the subject of automobile/fuel socio-technical systems, where the story of ethyl alcohol remains conspicuously absent. Among studies that examine how/why the automobile became locked in, little is said about ethyl alcohol, even though, as this paper details, it remained part of the fuel landscape well into the 20th century. The paper begins with an overview of the landscape developments of fuel during the later decades of the 19th century. Attention then turns to examining the various factors that went into shaping the automobile/fuel socio-technical system within the US during the first half of the 20th century.

Theatre of Use: A Frame Analysis of Information Technology Demonstrations

Smith, W. — Fri, 22 May 2009 06:48:05 PDT

Demonstrations are a universal form of technical exchange in the world of information technology (IT), but they get almost no mention in its practical guides and theoretical accounts. To understand their structure, role and status better, an interview study was carried out with experienced practitioners focusing on commercial presentations of software to large organizations. Drawing on Goffman's frame analysis, the present-day IT demonstration is seen in relation to other members of a broader class of technoscientific displays, particularly those of pre-20th century science epitomized by the famous performances of Boyle, Faraday and others. The focus of the account here is on how demonstrations are experienced by participants and what this might reveal about the manner of knowledge production that they make possible. Following a dramaturgical metaphor, the IT demonstration is understood as a Theatre of Use in which a possible sociotechnical system is represented dramatically through the actions of the demonstrator interacting with the technology. What comes to be known through the performance is seen to be multiply-framed and to encompass various ways of knowing.

Review: The Dilemmas of Drug Testing

Geltzer, A. — Fri, 22 May 2009 06:48:05 PDT

Erratum

Fri, 22 May 2009 06:48:05 PDT