Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society

By Bruno Latour

Book Overview

A foundational text of science and technology studies from the field's most celebrated theorist.

Science and technology have an immense impact on every aspect of society, but how exactly are scientific facts produced? In this lively and authoritative classic, Bruno Latour reveals that social context is as important as technical content when it comes to understanding how science works.

Latour's focus is not on what scientists say but on what they do, from the day-to-day practice of gathering data and writing technical papers to the travel and networking required to secure funding. Observing the scientific enterprise with the analytical distance of an ethnographer participating in a foreign culture, he argues that science is driven not by value-neutral discoveries of objective truths and natural laws but by the elaboration of longer and stronger networks encompassing both people and things. Only by mobilizing a wide range of human and nonhuman actors--fellow scientists, bureaucrats, specimens, instruments, calculation devices, texts, microbes--can "fact-builders" successfully accumulate the authority needed to convert a novel, tendentious claim into an accepted truth.

Setting a pioneering agenda for the social studies of science, Science in Action marshals a wealth of vivid examples to challenge conventional disciplinary boundaries and introduce readers to the disorienting conceptual universe of actor-network theory. Playful, irreverent, and unremittingly provocative, it remains among Latour's most significant works.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674792912
• ISBN13: 9780674792913
• Release Date: October 1988
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

like an explosion in my skull

In 20 years in higher ed. in the social sciences, I am hard pressed to think of a book that immediately and permanently transformed the way I understand the world more than this one. It opens up hundreds of questions and is a delight to read. Probably the best starting point for a newcomer to Latour's ouevre, too.

An Engineer's Opinion...

I'm an electrical and electronics engineer, working for a governmental R & D Institution. I also study on Science and Technology Policy Studies for an M.S. degree. I found the book quite useful, especially in its aspect of analyzing the scientist and engineer in his own time, his own context, his own psychology... It is a well organized, fluent, clear book. It may not be a complete guide or a definitive study, but it is a good point to start. Recommended...

Brilliant view on scientific truth as a network of strength

Latour today can be regarded as one of the leading philosophers of science and technology. After his first work with Steve Woolgar, "Laboratory life", this is his second major work in which he generalises on various topics that he only touched in a very preliminary way in the above work. Latour adopts a very original way of following scientists in their struggle to "produce" scientific truth. He studies them as if they were a tribe (Latour is originally an ethnographer).His conclusion is that scientific truth and the designing of succesful technological artefacts is not so much a "unveiling of some hidden truth behind things" or a logical construction, but a very heterogeneous project in which money, resources, statements, objects, people and numerous other things are linked in such a way that a strong chain is formed. Something is true if the chains is strong enough to withstand "trials of strength". Latour does away with metaphysical ideas of "The Truth" but insist in stead that truth is very much a stage in a process of negotiation between human and non-human actors. The idea that truth is the result of a logical process in which an abstract "reality" is discovered is, according to Latour, a story that is told afterwards to defend the theory itself and not something that is inherent in the forming of the theory itself.In a very easy-to-read way Latour guides his readers through the work of science and technology "in the making". A must for any student in science and technology as well as for any scholar in social sciences and philosophy.